The Award-nominated author of The Antithesis Progression and Down From Ten brings you a genre-spanning collection in the American Gothic tradition of Flannery O'Connor, Ray Bradbury, and Ambrose Bierce. Bedtime stories aren't just for children anymore. Contains: Lilith Angels Unawares The Coffee Service We Create Worlds Control Room The Man In The Rain Train Time Six new poems and a new introduction for every story

"Down From Ten is a brilliant, sometimes creepy take on a bohemian cozy with surreal underpinnings and an irrepressibly touching ending." -Gail Carriger, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Parasol Protectorate series In early January, a group of friends gather for an annual retreat: eight artists, scientists, and authors cloistered together in a mansion in California's high country for ten days of games, conversation, exhibition, and hedonism while isolated from the outside world. The biggest Sierra snowstorm in over twenty years, however, is not part of their plans. When the house is...

When it comes to raw-deal Christmas presents, you can't beat being thrown in an out-of-state jail on a trumped up charge-but detective Clarke Lantham can't resist a morbid challenge. So when he calls up his brother for help with bail, he steels himself for the ordeal of spending a holiday weekend with relatives who put the "strange" back in "estranged."
That was his first mistake. But with only two days to clear his name before he gets thrown back in the slammer-and an old client gumming up the works, a ten-year-old niece with a ghost problem, and the occasional murder competing for his...

When ten-year-old Teddy Stride wanted to impress the professional snoop down the street, he opened his own detective agency. But when Teddy's father goes off the rails, and his precocious investigative prowess fails him, he turns to the only firm he knows who might be able to find out what's wrong before it's too late: Clarke Lantham Investigations. Clarke Lantham hates family squabbles, but something about Teddy makes it impossible to say no. Lantham had no way to know that taking the case would send him straight to the heart of the biggest academic scandal in state history, and set him on a...

An early morning phone call from law enforcement? Never a good sign in Clarke Lantham's world-but for a private detective desperate to make ends meet, a government paycheck for a measly three hour delivery job couldn't come at a better time. Playing postman might be a little beneath a PI's pay grade, but only an idiot says "no" to five hundred dollars for an early morning coffee-and-cake run. But when a Jeep runs him off the road and gunmen descend upon the accident, Lantham finds himself the unintentional custodian of the other driver and his business partner: two hapless geeks with a doomed...