Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Pickens" in All Categories

Buried secrets only spread. Erin's brother Bryan has been missing for five years. It was as if he simply walked into the forests of the Pacific Northwest and vanished. Determined to uncover the truth, Erin heads to the foothills of Mt. Hood where Bryan was last seen alive. He isn’t the first hiker to go missing in this area, and their cases go unsolved. When she discovers the corpse of a local woman in a creek, Erin unknowingly puts herself in the crosshairs of very powerful forces—from this world and beyond—hell-bent on keeping their secrets buried.

In Turn Up the Sun, Hazard, the eccentric drug dealer from Criterium, is horrified to discover he has a doppelganger who appears at the scene of a grisly murder. In Stridor, a pediatrician is not only haunted by her mistakes, but stalked by them. In Sidewinder, a young musician receives a custom, otherworldly guitar pedal.

It's 1979, and fourteen-year-old Suzanne, who should be enjoying her first year at Denver East High, is instead reckoning with the aftermath of her mother Alex's shooting death during a robbery at Alex's store, Zoe's Records. A clairvoyant since childhood, Suzanne is unsurprised when Alex's ghost appears. But when Alex raises alarm bells about Suzanne's father's new girlfriend, what Suzanne can't foresee is the lifelong repercussions as she heeds Alex's warning.

The oldest mystery specialty bookstore in the world, The Mysterious Bookshop, has for most of its forty-five-year history commissioned an original short story as a holiday gift for its customers. Written exclusively for the store, the stories were given as a holiday gift to its customers as a thank you for their business, handed out or mailed between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day.

Want to be part of the 50 percent who complete their doctoral program? In just seven steps, you’ll learn tools and techniques to help you start strong, stay the course, and finish on time. Each step contains action items so you can apply the information for immediate results. You’ll learn how to position yourself for success, manage overwhelming emotions, build a supportive network, work smarter, and more. Informed by 20 years of work with hundreds of students and faculty, The Happy Doc Student Handbook demystifies the process so you can successfully navigate your program.

Set over the course of a fateful week, Vivienne deftly weaves surreal prose with a Greek chorus of internet comments and text messages, to ask the questions: what is the cost of vision, what is the price of art? What connects creation and procreation, a life and an afterlife?

Single mom Cynthia Pace has her hands full with her uniquely gifted child. She has no idea how or why Maddie does the things she does, and neither does her daughter. But there is an answer, discovered by mother and child only after tragedy strikes.

Harley Granger has a gift for seeing things that others miss. He wasn't much of a novelist, but his work as a true crime author and podcaster has earned him fame and wealth—and some serious criticism for his various unethical practices. Still, visiting Little Valley to be closer to his dying father has caused him to look into a case that many people think is closed—and some want reopened.

Kathryn Walker enjoys an enviable life. Her husband is an accomplished doctor, her children are bright and successful, and she devotes herself to charity work that uplifts her Suburban Colorado community. Settling into a new year, her life couldn’t be better. . . Until April.

In this chilling novella from Tyler Jones, author of Midas, Heavy Oceans, Criterium, and Burn the Plans (one of Esquire Magazine's Best Horror Books of 2022), a pediatrician finds herself not only haunted, but stalked by her mistakes. A dark and terrifying exploration of guilt, and the ways in which regrets and secrets can define our lives in unexpected and horrifying ways.

In a small, secluded town that thrives on gossip and superstition, Dottie offers plenty of both when the scandal breaks about a missing girl, a ghost, and the affair that started it all. Having suffered a history of miscarriages, reclusive Dottie develops a strange motherly interest in her fifteen-year-old neighbor, Magdalena. Somewhere between fantasy and reality, Dottie finds new life in her relationship with the mysterious girl.

Mary floated across the room, shaking her hands in frustration. Finally, she turned back to Mike. “When will the men in my life realize that no one is responsible for watching over me?” she asked sadly. “I am a grown woman. I am a former police officer. I am not some hot-house flower that can’t handle my own life and my own safety.” Victoria sighed loudly and rolled her eyes.

Biography of a Body is a lyrical meander through the development of a messy, flawed, imperfect human and what it means to live in a society that both pulls a person into itself and fiercely pushes back. In personal essays and snippets of verse that shift back and forth through time and place, Lizz Schumer fidgets with the puzzle pieces of a life that are at once starkly unique and glaringly obvious. This is less a narrative than a trail of breadcrumbs through an experience, where strange things whisper from the shadows and draw the listener into the dappled darkness.

Theatrical gender-bending, also called drag, is a popular form of entertainment and a subject of scholarly study. However, most drag studies do not question the standard words and ideas used to convey this performance genre. Drawing on a rich body of archival and ethnographic research, Meredith Heller illuminates diverse examples of theatrical gender-bending.

Trying to accept her mother's belief that the women of the Towne family are blessed, not cursed, with supernatural abilities, twenty-seven-year old Alice leaves a disapproving Boston husband to housesit for the summer in tiny Hawthorne, a historic village famous in the 1800s for its peppermint farms and the large, herbal-essence distilleries that flourished around the Massachusetts township. She settles into a beautiful old home with a tragic reputation.

Every state has an urban legend that evokes fear and curiosity in equal parts, and we've chronicled all of these logic-defying horrors here in the Haunted States of America anthology. From the Jersey Devil to La Llorona, each story included introduces a new chill inducing, stomach churning monster, specter, or poltergeist certain to keep you up at night. A broad ranging collection of authors, including seasoned veterans and some first timers making a fright-tastic debut, have all united to unearth the scariest lore from each state in the US, as well as D.C. and Puerto Rico.

Becca's life is turned upside down when she finds Jenn dead in the bathtub. Soon she begins to unspool the secrets Jenn kept in life, including a troubled marriage to Rick and two dead wives in his past. The more Becca learns, the more determined she becomes to get justice for Jenn, even if the clues surrounding her death aren't quite adding up . . . Over a year before her death, Jenn begins to notice her husband acting strangely. Using her skills as a librarian, she digs into Rick's past—and falls down a rabbit hole far deeper and darker than she bargained for.

The Herbarium, an enchanted sacred text written by the ancients, is safely hidden in a monastery outside of Chartres, or is it? In present day California, thirty-something Paige Delaney is struggling to cope. Since the death of her husband, she's felt lost, aimless, and frustrated. At the urging of her best friend, she accepts an invitation to join a Wiccan ceremony. And it's a night that changes everything. Haunted by the vivid apparition she sees in the bonfire, Paige is sent reeling when her mother reveals a long-kept family secret: that Paige is a descendant of a powerful line of witches

Owen falls ill with food poisoning, leaving Julie to attend a neighborhood holiday party alone. When she wakes up, half-naked in her neighbor's bathtub, Julie doesn't know how to tell Owen, the police, her friends—anyone—that she has been sexually assaulted. So she keeps it secret until she realizes that she's pregnant with her assailant's baby.

Diane Williams, "godmother of flash fiction" (The Paris Review), returns with thirty-three brilliant short stories. In Williams's stories, life is newly alive and dangerous; whether she is writing about an affair, a request for money, an afternoon in a garden, or the simple act of carrying a cake from one room to the next, she offers us beautiful and unsettling new ways of seeing everyday life.