English teacher Jessica Harmon and one of her students, seventeen-year-old Riley Jenkins, hide in a classroom closet while a gunman rampages through their high school. They're the only people in the room because it was Jessica's planning period, and Riley stopped by with concerns about a debate assignment. When the gunman finds them in the closet, they figure they're as good as dead. Except Jessica and Riley survive, without injury, their harrowing, surreal conversation with the gunman. Their shared trauma and their guilt from failing to stop the gunman haunt Jessica and Riley and bring them...

Sixty-year-old Melody Thomas has a perfect life-or does she? Melody runs a fairly successful chain of superstores, and she and her husband have two incredible children, a daughter and a son. Melody has long come to terms with the fact that her life, her marriage, her everything, will lack passion. Then her daughter comes out as gay and soon after becomes engaged to a photographer named Joy. Joy may be Melody's undoing. From their first meeting, Joy consumes Melody's mind, her body, her soul, her spirit. They embark on an affair, and Melody has never felt more alive. She thinks she and Joy...

For Annie Hardesty, Zorro is a figure shrouded in the mists of fantasy. Whatever Annie does, from getting kidnapped on a cruise to adventuring in search of the Holy Grail, Zorro is in the picture. When Annie sees Zorro in the flesh at a Halloween party, she decides to make fantasy become reality. Except Zorro turns out to be a woman. Surprise doesn't stop Annie for long, and she sets up a sexual liaison at a cemetery. While Zorro, a.k.a. a lesbian named Hayden, is nervous as hell, she's game. The night doesn't go exactly as planned, but it's enough for Annie and Hayden to realize they have a...

Bestselling author Linn Laurent has been grappling with writer's block to the extent she imagines it as a distinct entity that crawls into bed after her some nights-with its sour, rotting breath. She's tried remedy after remedy to get rid of the dratted thing, and her latest attempt is a retreat to Green Cabin in the mountains of West Virginia. Maybe there she can finally make progress on her latest novel. Then she starts seeing and hearing a boy and girl. They claim they're ghosts. Linn claims nonsense. She thinks a tumor or something like that is messing with her brain, but the evidence for...