As often as possible high school senior Reiko Smith-Mori drives to the nearby California desert to escape from the increasingly claustrophobic life at home and her parents' expectations. There she meets Seth Rogers, a boy from school who shares her love of the desert but also wants a closer relationship with Reiko, which is just adding to her problems. Because Reiko has a secret: in her mind her older sister, Mika, who died years ago, is always with...

Savannah attends a birthday bash for her veterinarian friend Dr. Carolyn's husband. She's astonished to find that her no-frills acquaintance resides in a pristine hilltop mansion with Dr. Stephen Erling, a jet-setter brain surgeon boasting throngs of A-list patients around the globe. When Dr. Stephen has one too many champagne toasts and drops dead, a poisonous residue is found inside his glass. Motivated to set things right for a devastated Dr. Carolyn,...

"Renowned Hollywood screenwriter Daniel Pyne returns with three inter-connected novellas of nasty crimes and nastier cops in Southern California. Dan Pyne returns with a collection of three novellas about SoCal's police underworld, each set in a different decade. Together, Pyne's novellas reflect the changing mores of California, illuminating the different crimes but unchanging human frailties of different times"--

L.A. County sheriff's deputy Charlie Hood is working undercover on the iron river that flows across the U.S.-Mexican border. Bradley Jones, sheriff's deputy and employee of the Baja Cartel, is the son of the love of Charlie's life, dead L.A. outlaw Suzanne Jones. While Charlie decides what he'll do with all the information he has on Bradley, his obsession remains the existence of Mike Finnegan, the diminutive devil who flits in and out of both men's...

"AVALON follows Bran, a high school graduate in California who is raised by her 'common-law-stepfather' in a rowdy home following her mother's death. After graduating from high school, Bran stays in town and is introduced to Peter, a college student who is engaged, and the two begin an intense relationship revolving around philosophy, literature, and their attraction for one another. Encouraged by Peter, Bran begins writing scripts for their friend,...

"For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother's considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother's demise, followed by a cryptic...

"A hilarious, tough, and tender story collection pressurized by grief, sexual longing, the spectrum of gender, and girls with muscle."--

"Savannah is shaken to the core when coroner Dr. Jennifer Liu appears on her doorstep late one night with a disturbing confession. In a potentially career-ruining move, a remorseful Dr. Liu admits to fudging an autopsy report to keep her friend Brianne's suicide a secret--fulfilling a final promise made before the terminally ill woman administered a lethal drug cocktail. But after Dr. Liu finds the same unique mixture in a second body, she fears the...

"Ismet Prcic's brilliant, provocative, and propulsively energetic debut is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving behind his family behind, he must 'write everything.' The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions:...

The elder Zorro comes out of retirement to train a new Zorro to fight the enemy Montero.