Cherie Priest

"Seventeen-year-old Denise Farber, her mom, and her stepfather are moving back to New Orleans, into the Argonne house, which is over 150 years old, and really showing its age, but which her mother plans to turn into a bed-and-breakfast -- but old houses have histories, and sometimes ghosts, and a mysterious old comic book that Denise finds in the attic may hold the answer to a crime and the terrifying things that keep happening in what she thinks...

Young ex-slave Gideon Bardsley is a brilliant inventor, but the job is less glamorous than one might think, especially since the assassination attempts started. Worse yet, they're trying to destroy his greatest achievement: a calculating engine called Fiddlehead, which provides undeniable proof of something awful enough to destroy the world. Both man and machine are at risk from forces conspiring to keep the Civil War going and the money flowing. Bardsley...

Inventor Leviticus Blue creates a machine that accidentally decimates Seattle's banking district and uncovers a vein of Blight Gas that turns everyone who breathes it into the living dead. Sixteen years later Briar, Blue's widow, lives in the poor neighborhood outside the wall that's been built around the uninhabitable city. Life is tough with a ruined reputation, but she and her teenage son Ezekiel are surviving--until Zeke impetuously decides that...

George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards multi-author shared-world universe has been thrilling readers for over 25 years. Now, in addition to overseeing the ongoing publication of new Wild Cards books (like 2011's Fort Freak), Martin is also commissioning and editing new Wild Cards stories for publication on Tor.com. In Cherie Priest's "The Button Man and the Murder Tree," it's Chicago in 1971, and Raul is a button man, a professional ender of lives that...

"I can't fathom them, and neither can you." The ageless water witch Arahab has been scheming for eons, gathering the means to awaken the great Leviathan. She aims to bring him and the old gods back to their former glory, caring little that their ascendance will also mean an end to the human race. However, awakening the Leviathan is no small feat. In fact, Arahab can't complete the ritual without human aid. Arahab's first choice is José Gaspar,...

"Inconsistent psychic Leda Foley and Seattle detective Grady Merritt return to solve the case of a missing couple in this sequel to the "delightful" (The New York Times Book Review) mystery Grave Reservations"-- When psychic travel agent Leda Foley is approached by a man searching for his sister, she agrees to help. The woman disappeared with a vintage orange car, a fat sack of her employer's cash, and a grudge against her philandering husband --...

Dahlia Dutton's father is thrilled when the aged and esteemed Augusta Winthrow appears in his office and makes a deal for his company, Music City Salvage, to take over and liquidate her massive family estate in Chattanooga. He gives the job to Dahlia, who gathers a crew and a couple of trucks and heads for the estate -- an ancient house, a barn, a carriage house, and a small, overgrown cemetery that Augusta Winthrow left out of the paperwork. She...

State Road 177 runs along the Suwannee River, between Fargo, Georgia, and the Okefenokee Swamp. Drive that route from east to west, and you'll cross six bridges. Take it from west to east, and you might find seven. But you'd better hope not. Titus and Davina Bell leave their hotel in Fargo for a second honeymoon canoeing the Okefenokee Swamp. But shortly before they reach their destination, they draw up to a halt at the edge of a rickety bridge with...

The air pirate Andan Cly is going straight. Well, straighter. Although he's happy to run alcohol guns wherever the money's good, he doesn't think the world needs more sap, or its increasingly ugly side-effects. But becoming legit is easier said than done, and Cly's first legal giga supply run for the Seattle Underground will be paid for by sap money. New Orleans is not Cly's first pick for a shopping run. He loved the Big Easy once, back when he also...

Stonewall Jackson survived Chancellorsville. England broke the Union's naval blockade, and formally recognized the Confederate States of America. Atlanta never burned. It is 1880. The American Civil War has raged for nearly two decades, driving technology in strange and terrible directions. Combat dirigibles skulk across the sky and armored vehicles crawl along the land. Military scientists twist the laws of man and nature, and barter their souls...