Natty Bee

When retired police detective Joe Heller is called in to investigate what might be Antarctica's first murder, he quickly discovers that winter at McMurdo Station comes with a unique set of challenges: darkness, isolation, and the eccentric behavior of the research facility's 157 inhabitants. But a difficult investigation turns much tougher when all communication with the outside world is suddenly cut off.

Finally heading home to the ranch he inherited, Brendon McMahon has a lot on his mind. He's tortured because he needs to tell complete stranger, Allison Hartley, that he was the one responsible for her husband's death. As he is heading home, he saves a starving dog at a lonely rest stop. It's a pivotal decision that will change not only his life, but the lives others. Allison Hartley has finally made peace with the past, living through her own tragic events. When she meets Brendon, her fluttering heart tells her he could be the one.

Tooth and Claw follows Walt and Henry up to Alaska as they look for work after they both returned from serving in Vietnam. While working for an oil company in the bitter cold of winter, they soon encounter a ferocious polar bear who seems hell-bent on their destruction. But it's not too long until they realize the danger does not lurk outside in the frozen Alaskan tundra, but with their co-workers who are after priceless treasure and will stop at nothing to get it.

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles.

A mummified corpse, over half a century old, is found in the cellar of an abandoned building in a remote New Mexico ghost town. Corrie Swanson is assigned what seems to her a throwaway case: to ID the body and determine cause of death. She brings archaeologist Nora Kelly to excavate the body and lend her expertise to the investigation, and together they uncover something unexpected and shocking: the deceased apparently died in agony, in a fetal position, skin coming off in sheets, with a rictus of horror frozen on his face. Hidden on the corpse lies a 16th-century Spanish gold cross.

With his signature insight and gift for storytelling, Jon Katz here shares 16 stories about one of life’s most unique relationships. In the title story, a housekeeper loses her job, but discovers her four-legged “children” have some toe-tapping talents that just may get the whole family back on its feet.

Never knowing his parents, eleven-year-old Stewie Little and his brother have been raised on a farm by their older sister. Stewie steadfastly tends the chickens left by his beloved late grandmother. And every day Stewie goes door to door selling fresh eggs from his wagon—a routine with a surprise just around the corner. It’s his new customer, Marilyn. She’s prickly and guarded, yet comfortably familiar—she reminds the grieving Stewie so much of the grandmother he misses more than he can express.

When Cara felt her teenaged children slipping away and saw an empty nest on the horizon, she decided the best way to fill that void was with dogs - lots of them - and so her foster journey began. In 2015, her Pennsylvania farm became a haven for Operation Paws for Homes. There were the nine puppies at once, which arrived with less than a day's notice; a heart-worm positive dog; a deeply traumatized stray pup from Iraq; and countless others who just needed a gentle touch and a warm place to sleep.

In 1969, Natalie Kusz and her family abandoned the city, packed up the car, and headed to Alaska. They ended up a hundred miles from Fairbanks in a dilapidated house surrounded by 258 acres of spruce, birch and willow - and no road. When the first winter came - with Mr. Kusz working in Prudhoe Bay, money running out, and temperatures 60 below - the Kusz family was living so close to disaster that the question was not when it would strike but whom.

When US Fish & Wildlife Ranger Nick Drake gets a beautiful and impetuous new supervisor, he quickly becomes pulled into a physical and emotional cauldron after she orders him to guide her down a dangerous and deadly river. As rapids roar and passions roil, Nick must battle waterfalls and whirlpools, an unearthly predator killing anything that ventures into its realm, and doubts about his frayed marriage following the adoption of a psychologically scarred boy.