K. Lofts

Thirty-nine was a fantastic year. I was married to the man I loved. I had a body that worked without creaking. My grandma, who raised me, was still healthy, and life was pretty damned good. But as they say, all good things come to an end. One year later, I’m a widow. My joints are starting to ache. Gram is in the nursing home, and dead people think my home is some kind of supernatural bed-and-breakfast. Gluing body parts onto semi-transparent people has become a side job - deceased people I’m not even sure are actually there.

Ford Maddox was running from his past when he came back to Blueberry Cove, Maine, where he'd tasted both heartache and comfort. With feisty Delia O'Reilly there to cheer him on, he couldn't have picked a better place to start over--even if he's determined to do it alone in his island tree house, working to save endangered seabirds...and himself. But when he finds Delia fighting to hold on to her local diner, and all that's best about their little seaside town, Ford has to lend a hand.

Newly arrived in New Fiddleham, New England, 1890, and in need of a job, Abigail Rook meets R. F. Jackaby, an investigator of the unexplained with a keen eye for the extraordinary - including the ability to see supernatural beings. Abigail has a gift for noticing ordinary but important details, which makes her perfect for the position of Jackaby’s assistant.

As soon as Lily opens her recently purchased trunk of old clothes, she feels strange vibrations emanating from a mysterious velvet cloak. When she tries it on, Lily sees awful visions from the past. And when the antiques dealer who sold her the cape is killed, Lily suspects a supernatural force might be behind his death. Then Lily's familiar, Oscar the potbellied pig, disappears. Lily will do anything to get him back - including battling the spirit of a powerful witch reaching out from the past.

Fantastic or conventional, chillingly suspenseful, or hauntingly nostalgic, each of these stories has that aura of the unexpected combined with the special ring of absolute rightness that is brilliantly, uniquely Bradbury.