Ancient Suspense

Come take a dive. From sirens, mermaids, selkies, and more, these tales of the deep will tug at your heartstrings. Love can warm the iciest waters, but revenge is best served cold. Watery graves await for those who push boundaries or stray too far. Features stories by J.M. Rhineheart, Emma K. Leadley, K. Parr, Andria Kennedy, Fred Phillips, Barend Nieuwstraten III, Claire Davon, Nicholas Nethery, A.D. Watts, Toni Mobley, D.L. Lewellyn, Rienne French, Seth Taylor, Derek Kho, Anwen Redlake, and D.R. Birdsall.

Three months after the battle of Zabor, the five friends who came together to defeat her have been separated. Burdened with the Calamity Stone she acquired in Scion of the Fox, Roan has gone to Scotland to retrace her grandmother’s steps in an attempt to stop further evil from entering the world. Meanwhile, a wicked monster called Seela has risen from the ashy Bloodlands and is wreaking havoc on the world while children in Edinburgh are afflicted by a strange plague.

A scroll is discovered, buried among the ancient papyri of the Dead Sea. Father Leo Newman, a priest from Rome, discovers that the text appears to be a fifth gospel. If the scroll is authentic - and if the radical, incendiary story it tells is true - all of Christianity itself will be open to a complete reinterpretation...

Athens, 460 B.C. Life's tough for Nicolaos, sole investigating agent in Athens. His girlfriend's left him and his boss wants to fire him. But when an Athenian official is murdered, Pericles has no choice but to put Nico on the job. The case takes Nico, with a beautiful slave girl, to the land of Ionia within the Persian Empire. The Persians will execute him on the spot if they think he's a spy.

Calypso Violante—Cal to her friends—is living her best life. Sort of. Sure, she lives in a dump of an apartment, but hey, she’s a federal agent, and isn’t that cool? Not just any federal agent, she’s part of the squad that deals with supernatural crimes. That’s supernatural as in paranormal. As in vampires, shifters, witches, and all kinds of weird shi— You get the drift. A night of undercover surveillance while her team hunts for an elusive fire mage suspected of several killings should have ended with her sliding into the sheets in her super posh mattress in her dump of an ...

Sword dancer Li Feng is used to living life on the edge of the law - a woman alone in the dangerous world of the Tang Dynasty has only her whirlwind reflexes to trust. She will discover the truth about her past, even if that means outwitting the most feared thief-catcher of them all....

Charlotte never thought she’d find love — let alone while she is the prime suspect for stealing ancient artifacts... In the heart of New York City, museum curator Charlotte Bray’s world is turned upside down when her prized artifacts are stolen and she's framed for the crime. Facing professional ruin and targeted by dangerous criminals who believe she holds the key to an ancient treasure, Charlotte must flee to Egypt in search of answers and redemption. Enter Jack Stone, a rugged archaeologist with a knack for unearthing secrets and a past as mysterious as the artifacts he uncovers. ...

In 1998, a 16-year-old girl is found dead. She’s posed on a swing on her boarding school’s property, dressed all in white, with no known cause of death. Whispers and rumors swirl, with no answers. But there are a few who know what happened; there is one girl who will never forget. One year earlier: a new student, Violet, steps on the campus of Elm Hollow Academy, an all-girl’s boarding school on the outskirts of a sleepy coastal town. This is her fresh start, her chance to begin again in the wake of tragedy, leave her demons behind.

When several people involved in bidding for an oil refinery are murdered, the situation becomes far more than a billion-dollar business deal. A self-made woman in the oil industry, Lynn Dayton fights to save lives when escalating attacks reveal a hired assassin’s plan to disrupt energy trade, wreck world economies, and draw another global power into dangerous confrontation with the United States. Are the killers rogue civil servants challenging the Cherokees’ financial independence, Sansei operatives again wreaking violence, or sinister investors swapping the bidding war for a real one?...

He stood upon the lip of a dark ocean and looked to the end of night. What do you do when you wish you'd never got away with murder? Shelley was the forbidden love of Paul's childhood. Now she has turned his life upside down. She has become his lover, and he has committed a murder. How can he possibly reconcile who he was with what he has become? And why does he keep talking about the legendary golden statue of Sumerian courtesan Ah-le-tari? Paul Cane's daughter desperately needs answers. And is it really him talking to her on the phone? "An ambitious work." - Peter Preston Note: Greek ...

After a career with a shadowy security firm with interests on both sides of the law, Dante has come home to put all that behind him and has gone to work for a private investigator. A call alerts him early one morning that Bill Owens, a fellow P.I., has been charged with a notorious 30-year-old killing. Bill was involved in a political group in the late 60s, which among other pranks and small-time crimes, held up a bank....

March, AD 80. In Rome, the Emperor Titus has announced that there will be 100 days of games to open the new Flavian amphitheatre (now known as the Colosseum). Suspecting that their friend Jonathan is not dead, as they had thought, Flavia, Nubia, and Lupus organize an invitation to Rome on the pretense of witnessing this historic event.

When acclaimed literary critic Dr Eleanor Croft finds herself framed for the murder of a celebrated, arrogant poet, her meticulously ordered world shatters. With a relentless detective's deadline ticking down, Eleanor must embark on a perilous intellectual scavenger hunt through Cambridge's ancient secrets. The victim's cryptic clues, hidden within forgotten manuscripts and centuries-old mechanisms, lead her to the heart of the shadowy Pelican Society – a clandestine organization with a terrifying legacy of influence and a ruthless willingness to silence those who threaten its power. As ...

Victory is in sight for Kivilaz and his Batavi army. The Roman army clings desperately to its remaining fortresses along the Rhine, its legions riven by dissent and mutiny, and once-loyal allies of Rome are beginning to imagine the unimaginable: freedom from the rulers who have dominated them since the time of Caesar. The four centurions - two Batavi and two Roman, men who were once comrades in arms - must find their destiny in a maze of loyalties and threats, as the blood tide of war ebbs and flows across Germania and Gaul.

Beyond the Sands of Chaos! The darkness they thought they'd buried is rising again... When a vampiric bat interrupts an ambassador's Christmas celebration, sibling archaeologists Lillian and Jack Stiller know their nightmare is far from over. The creature's origins lead them back to the tomb of Dina, the ancient Egyptian goddess they thought they'd defeated. As they brave the unforgiving desert and unravel the tomb's secrets, they're met with a sinister new threat: the Germans, driven by an insatiable hunger for dark magic. The Stillers, joined by Roy Sawyer, must save themselves before the...

After the death of her beloved husband Billy, Daisy Majesty falls into a deep depression. Everyone, from her family to her late husband's best friend, Sam Rotondo, worry about her. She's too depressed to eat and only mopes around the house.

A desperate quest begins in the Romano-Egyptian port of Alexandria - site of the great lighthouse, the library, and the tomb of Alexander the Great. Codes, riddles, anagrams, and hieroglyphics lead the search parties down the Nile to pyramids and sphinxes, temples and tombs, crocodiles and hippos. But what lies at the end of the journey? Treasure? Or death?

For a millennium, Jerusalem's Temple Mount has been at the center of war and death. Theres never been a time when blood wasnt spilled upon this ancient, sacred site. Flash forward to present-day Jerusalem, where 35-year-old Israeli counterterrorism agent Sam Deker has just thwarted the most recent act of violence, an attempt by radical Palestinians to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque and pin the blame on right-wing Orthodox Jews.

In Roman times, the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World held a deep fascination. Two of them were in Egypt: the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. Marcus Didius Falco's wife Helena Justina is determined to see them before her next confinement. Conveniently, he has an uncle with a house in Alexandria. For this innocent reason (he says) they sail to Egypt. As soon as they arrive in Alexandria, a suspicious death occurs at the famous Great Library.

It is the Roman holiday of Saturnalia. The days are short, the nights are for wild parties. A general has captured a famous enemy of Rome, and brings her home to adorn his Triumph as a ritual sacrifice. But the logistics go wrong.