Pale As The Dead

Struggling to find the roots of her own heritage, genealogist Natasha Blake discovers a strange connection between a missing model and a pre-Raphaelite artist in this acclaimed debut mystery. Martin's Press.

A string of mysterious, gruesome deaths in the Shiprock area has attracted the attention of FBI agent Diane Lopez, who is stunned to learn that one of the victims was a childhood friend. To Diane, the killer is unmistakably a vampire—but the only vampire she knows of is Lee Nez, a State Police officer who prefers his blood chilled in the refrigerator, not hot from someone's neck. Supernatural explanations for the deaths abound—some believe they are the work of the "goatsucker" spirit, others that the killer is an extraterrestrial. Lee Nez, assigned to the case at Diane's request, privately agrees with her that there's a vampire on the loose, but announces that they are looking for a serial killer. Lee and Diane discover that the victims all worked for a secret government lab that was studying a captured vampire, Stewart Tanner. Half-insane from being experimented on, Tanner broke free and took revenge on the doctors and technicians who had been torturing him. Desperate to remain free, Tanner threatens to continue killing federal employees unless the US government agrees to leave him alone. In a violent confrontation, Tanner discovers that Lee is a vampire. Believing Lee is colluding with the government, Tanner vows to kill him. Complicating matters, forensic specialist Dr. Victor Wayne, who began the case as a skeptic—believing Tanner had a rare blood disorder—has begun to believe in vampires. And has turned his attention on Lee . . . . Trying to turn Dr. Wayne back into a skeptic while protecting federal workers, tracking down Tanner, and staying alive—or at least undead—taxes all of Lee Nez's abilities, natural and supernatural. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The American poet John Shade is dead. His last poem, 'Pale Fire', is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he should be. Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.

15 BYTES BOOK AWARD WINNER "A deeply moving and intellectually profound novel built on the iconic myth of the American West." —KIRKUS REVIEWS, starred review Jack Selvedge works a dying trade in a dead town. When Rebekah Rainsford returns on the run from her father, her dark history consumes him, and she becomes the potential for his salvation, the only thing that might dredge him up from his crisis of indifference. As betrayal and tragedy change Jack's life forever, he discovers a new if nascent hope amid the harshly beautiful western landscape that shaped him. A deeply written and deeply felt story of love, depravity, and shattered ideals, Pale Harvest examines the loss of beauty, purity, and simplicity within the mindset of the rural American West. BRADEN HEPNER graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2009 and now lives in Idaho with his wife and son. Pale Harvest is his first novel.

USA Todaybestselling author Anne frasier has kept her readers on the edge of their seats... Now she delivers a tale that will have them looking over their shoulders. In her new novel, Anne Frasier flirts with the paranormal when a town's horrific legacy gives rise to shadows of fear and suspicion.

In late medieval Catholicism, mourners employed an array of practices to maintain connection with the deceased—most crucially, the belief in purgatory, a middle place between heaven and hell where souls could be helped by the actions of the living. In the early sixteenth century, the Reformation abolished purgatory, as its leaders did not want attention to the dead diminishing people's devotion to God. But while the Reformation was supposed to end communication between the living and dead, it turns out the result was in fact more complicated than historians have realized. In the three centuries after the Reformation, Protestants imagined continuing relationships with the dead, and the desire for these relations came to form an important—and since neglected—aspect of Protestant belief and practice. In Speaking with the Dead in Early America, historian Erik R. Seeman undertakes a 300-year history of Protestant communication with the dead. Seeman chronicles the story of Protestants' relationships with the deceased from Elizabethan England to puritan New England and then on through the American Enlightenment into the middle of the nineteenth century with the explosion of interest in Spiritualism. He brings together a wide range of sources to uncover the beliefs and practices of both ordinary people, especially women, and religious leaders. This prodigious research reveals how sermons, elegies, and epitaphs portrayed the dead as speaking or being spoken to, how ghost stories and Gothic fiction depicted a permeable boundary between this world and the next, and how parlor songs and funeral hymns encouraged singers to imagine communication with the dead. Speaking with the Dead in Early America thus boldly reinterprets Protestantism as a religion in which the dead played a central role.