Something is wrong in Niceville. . . A boy literally disappears from Main Street. A security camera captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing. An audacious bank robbery goes seriously wrong: four cops are gunned down; a TV news helicopter is shot and spins crazily out of the sky, triggering a disastrous cascade of events that ricochet across twenty different lives over the course of just thirty-six hours. Nick Kavanaugh, a cop with a dark side, investigates. Soon he and his wife, Kate, a distinguished lawyer from an old Niceville family, find themselves struggling to make sense not only of the disappearance and the robbery but also of a shadow world, where time has a different rhythm and where justice is elusive. . . .Something is wrong in Niceville, where evil lives far longer than men do. Compulsively readable, and populated with characters who leap off the page, Niceville will draw you in, excite you, amaze you, horrify you, and, when it finally lets you go, make you sorry you have to leave. Read the first thirty-five pages. Find out why Harlan Coben calls Carsten Stroud the master of “the nerve-jangling thrill ride.” Now with an excerpt from Carsten Stroud’s next book, The Homecoming.

Located just north of Florida's Gulf Coast, the twin cities of Niceville and Valparaiso nestle side by side along the shores of Boggy Bayou. Although they are now dynamic modern communities, the land they occupy remained a wilderness long after the rest of Florida was settled. After the Civil War, early homesteaders carved out a meager existence by making turpentine, sawing lumber from the pine forests, and harvesting fish from the waterways. In the 1920s, word spread that this region was an unspoiled paradise, so Chicago investors purchased land for development. Photographs taken at the time show the first hard road to Crestview, an early-20th-century bathhouse and waterslide, and formal get togethers at the Valparaiso Hotel. Today the nearby towns of Destin and Fort Walton Beach host millions of tourists, but just across the bridge, Niceville and Valparaiso hold on to their small-town charm.

In Niceville, a pleasant Southern town where evil lurks just beneath the surface, two back-to-back airplane crashes set off a spellbinding chain reaction of murder, inadvertent kidnapping, and double-dealing. Detective Nick Kavanaugh must balance his investigation into the accidents with family concerns and a long-buried mystery. He and his wife Kate, a family lawyer, have taken in Kate’s sister and her two children, escaping their abusive father Byron Deitz. The Kavanaughs are also caring for the orphaned Rainey Teague, who recently survived a strange kidnapping and has come back a very different child. Rainey was not the last person to vanish from a Niceville street; most recently, an administrator from Rainey’s school, and—even worse—Kate’s father, a local historian, have gone missing. Using her father’s files, Kate and Nick start to unearth their town’s bloodstained past, trying to discover the truth behind generations of disappearances. But a sinister someone—or something—stands in their way.

The astonishing final installment in the page-turning trilogy that Stephen King calls “an authentic work of American genius.” Niceville has an almost unearthly beauty when the sun tops the ancient nearby mountain called Tallulah’s Wall and bathes it in soft Southern light. But there’s a reason Native American tribes avoided the place: An absence that inhabits the air and the depthless “sink” atop Tallulah’s Wall. This “Nothing” has long bent time and the desires of a chosen few to her shadowy ends. As THE RECKONING begins, Detective Nick Kavanaugh and his wife, family lawyer Kate, have accepted that reality in Niceville is not normal. Seemingly, they’ve fought Nothing to a draw. But now a buzzing emerges in the heads of some perfectly normal folks. Nothing isn’t finished. Come to Niceville and sink into Carsten Stroud’s inimitable blend of crime and supernatural thriller, as characters you’ll love throw in with bad guys you’ll like way more than you should as they battle evil.

Original publication and copyright date: 2009.

I had a bad August. A very bad August. As bad as pickle juice on a cookie. Eleanor’s beloved babysitter, Bibi, is moving away. Suddenly, the things she used to enjoy aren’t fun anymore—everything reminds her of Bibi. To make matters worse, Eleanor has a new babysitter, who just isn’t the same. But as the new school year looms ahead, so do new beginnings. And Eleanor is about to learn some special things about herself, friendship, and the bittersweet process of growing up.

Three bestselling authors—E. Lockhart, Sarah Mlynowski, and Lauren Myracle—bring you on the road trip of a lifetime in this dynamic novel packed with fun, friendship, and feminism. Jesse, Vicks, and Mel each has her own reason for wanting to get away from their nowheresville Florida town. Add in a hot (and harmless) hitchhiker, an impending hurricane, and a close encounter of the gator kind, and the result is one sizzling road trip where the journey is far more important than the destination. Now in a fresh new package, YA fans will love going along with these three powerhouse storytellers on the ride of a lifetime.

“A first-rate police thriller.”—Jonathan Kellerman Detective Frank Keogh. He’s a man who trades on nerve and luck—and a cop who’s about to become an executioner’s target. Detective Frank Keogh has a rare gift—for killing. He picked it up in the jungles of Vietnam and perfected it on New York’s mean streets. It’s a talent that comes in handy when you’re a sniper for the NYPD. But over the years his calling has produced a numbness that has his partner worries: Is Frank finding it too easy to pull the trigger now? Then, on a steamy August night in the South Bronx, a cop connected to Frank is found bizarrely murdered. No one really believes that Keogh is capable of such a brutal act . . . until a second savagely mutilated body is found, and the MO echoes a famous case solved by Frank’s father, a retired detective. Suddenly, Frank Keogh is a fugitive, dodging cops and meeting violence as he takes off on a cross-country chase to the Southwest desert . . . desperately searching for the man who framed him—and the father who could be his last, best hope of staying alive. “An epic police thriller . . . crackling with narrative energy . . . and a deep-grained savvy about cop ways and mores.”—Kirkus Reviews