Gail

Pre-med student Coral is on vacation in Idaho when something terrible happens. The black cloud is followed by a wildfire and searing heat that lasts for days. She survives deep in a cave but emerges days later to find the world transformed, with blackened trees, an ash-filled sky, and no living creatures stirring - except for her. So begins her desperate journey to find water and food and other survivors...and the answer to the mystery of what happened.

The ruins on the border of New Mexico and Mexico were once the bustling town of New Dominion. But in 1933, most of its population was massacred - and no one was ever arrested for the brutal crime. Now, the land once known as New Dominion is the site of more recent murders. Former police detective Annie O’Brien, blessed-or cursed-with a heightened sense of empathy, is conducting the investigation. Staying alone in an old house near the desolate remains of the town, she finds herself haunted by the tragedies that occurred there....

Billy Byrne is a low class American born in Chicago's ghetto. He grows up a thief and a mugger. "Billy was a mucker, a hoodlum, a gangster, a thug, a tough." He is not chivalrous nor kind, and has only meager ethics - never giving evidence against a friend or leaving someone behind. When falsely accused of murder, he flees to San Francisco and is shanghaied aboard a ship. The ship's secret mission is soon enacted - the hijacking of a specific yacht to take a millionaire's daughter, Barbara Harding, for ransom.

Amelia and Emerson leave the calm of Victorian England in search of an estranged father's son and a lost kingdom buried deep in Sudan.