Established in 2011 and becoming a premier crime and noir fiction website, Shotgun Honey has brought together 29 authors from around the world to produce our first anthology, Shotgun Honey Presents: Both Barrels. Featuring stories from: Patti Abbott, Peter Farris, Trey R. Barker, Hector Acosta, Cameron Ashley, Ray Banks, Frank Bill, Nigel Bird, Jen Conley, Paul D. Brazill, Thomas Pluck, Garnett Elliott, Matthew C. Funk, Chris F. Holm, Glenn Gray, Naomi Johnson, Nik Korpon, Kieran Shea, Julia Madeleine, Joe Myers, Andrew Nette, Mike Oliveri, Dan O'Shea, Tom Pitts, Keith Rawson, Holley West, Frank Wheeler Jr., Jim Wilsky and Steve Weddle.

London, 1679 Isabel, Lady Wilde, mistress of King Charles II, has made a good living disguised as fortune teller Mistress Ruby, counseling London's elite. But after the murder of one of her customers, business has taken a downturn, and Isabel is on the verge of accepting the king's offer to move into the palace. Isabel's plans are interrupted when a beggar girl named Susanna shows up at her home, claiming to be her niece. Isabel always believed that her older brother, Adam, died alone during the plague. When Susanna reveals that Adam was actually murdered, Isabel is compelled to take up an impossible task: discover the truth about her brother's death, twelve years after it happened. Isabel's investigation leads her through the gamut of London society, from bear-baiting matches and brothels to the realm of wealthy bankers. But as she uncovers her brother's dark secrets, Isabel begins to wonder whether the past is better left buried—especially when uncovering the truth could lead to her own funeral. 79,000 words

Edgar Award–winning editor Otto Penzler's latest anthology takes its inspiration from the historical enigma whose name has become synonymous with fear: Jack the Ripper. Of the real-life serial killers whose gruesome acts have been splashed across headlines, none has reached the mythical status of Jack the Ripper. In the Ripper's wake, terror swept through the streets of London’s East End in the fall of 1888. As quickly as his nightmarish reign came, Saucy Jack vanished without a trace—leaving future generations to speculate upon his identity and whereabouts. He was diabolical in a way never seen before—a killer who taunted the police, came up with his own legendary monikers, and, ultimately, got away with his heinous crimes. More than a century later, the man “from hell” continues to live on in the imaginations of readers everywhere—and in some of the most spec­tacularly unnerving stories, both fiction and nonfiction, ever written. The Big Book of Jack the Ripper immerses you in the utterly chilling world of Red Jack’s London, where his unprecedented evil still lurks. Including: · Legendary stories by Marie Belloc Lowndes, Robert Bloch, and Ellery Queen · Captivating essays from George Bernard Shaw, Stephen Hunter, and Peter Underwood · Riveting new stories by contemporary masters Jeffrey Deaver, Loren D. Estleman, Lyndsay Faye, and many more · Astonishing theories from the world’s foremost Ripperologists From the Ripper Vault: · Demonic letters from Jack himself · Gruesome postmortem exams documenting all the bits and pieces of the cases · Harrowing witness statements taken on those hellish nights · Breaking newspaper accounts of the East End hysteria

Chesapeake Crimes: Storm Warning is the latest installment of the Agatha- and Anthony-award-winning Chesapeake Crimes series. This volume features tales by: Donna Andrews Timothy Bentler-Jungr Shaun Taylor Bevins Carla Coupe Maddi Davidson Linda Ensign Barb Goffman Kim Kash Adam Meyer Alan Orloff KM Rockwood Lauren R. Silberman Marianne Wilski Strong Art Taylor Robin Templeton "The diabolical sisters of the Chesapeake Chapter of Sisters in Crime have raised the stakes: not only asking their astute members to offer up a gem of a short story, but to add a degree of difficulty. It has to be about the weather.... Rain, snowstorms, hurricanes. The glare of the sun. The shrouding fog. Clouds, mist, hail, and icy roads. The Chessies have used their writerly talent to embrace the weather, to relish it, and to provide us with a raft of meteorological (and deadly) delights." -- Hank Phillippi Ryan, bestselling author of the Jane Ryland series

Darkly comic and wickedly incisive, Kieran Shea’s The Americana Psychorama is an assemblage of stories portraying a delightfully bleak but all-too-familiar America. A suburban man stumbles into more than he bargained for when he steals a neighboring teenager’s drug stash. A teenage boy acts out when his widower father brings home a much younger clone of his mother. A thief discovers that karma can be both swift and random. And more than one couple finds their interpersonal conflict suddenly overshadowed by the malevolent outside forces they face. In settings that run the gamut from the historical west to a near-future post-apocalypse, the characters of these stories—whether felons or lovers, dockhands or diplomats, vigilantes or frauds, monsters or artificial life forms, con men or survivors, fathers or sons—are all, in some way, blindsided by the easy corruptions and outlandish hostilities of everyday life. Mixing styles, genres, and lengths, The Americana Psychorama presents Kieran Shea’s short-story writing at its best. Unique, brash, and wholly original. Praise for THE AMERICANA PSYCHORAMA: “These short, sharp stabs of the knife showcase a writer intent on showing us life in the cracks of the American dream. There are crimes, gallows humor, and the type of characters you wouldn’t want to pick up hitchhiking. Shea will give you a shot of 100 proof, served in a dirty ashtray and lit on fire. And you’ll love it.” —Eric Beetner, author of All The Way Down “Shea puts more heart and guts into a single story than most writers do a novel.” —Nik Korpon, author of Wear Your Home Like a Scar

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Cambodia, 1996, the long-running Khmer Rouge insurgency is fragmenting, competing factions of the unstable government scrambling to gain the upper hand. Missing in the chaos is businessmen Charles Avery. Hired to find him is Vietnamese Australian ex-cop Max Quinlan. But Avery has made dangerous enemies and Quinlan is not the only one looking. Teaming up a Cambodian journalist, Quinlan's search takes him from the freewheeling capital Phnom Penh to the battle scarred western borderlands. As the political temperature soars, he is slowly drawn into a mystery that plunges him into the heart of Cambodia's bloody past. Ghost Money is a crime novel, but it's also about Cambodia in the mid-nineties, a broken country, what happens to those trapped between two periods of history, the choices theymake, what they do to survive."

What makes a good story or a screenplay great? The vast majority of writers begin the storytelling process with only a partial understanding where to begin. Some labor their entire lives without ever learning that successful stories are as dependent upon good engineering as they are artistry. But the truth is, unless you are master of the form, function and criteria of successful storytelling, sitting down and pounding out a first draft without planning is an ineffective way to begin. Story Engineering starts with the criteria and the architecture of storytelling, the engineering and design of a story--and uses it as the basis for narrative. The greatest potential of any story is found in the way six specific aspects of storytelling combine and empower each other on the page. When rendered artfully, they become a sum in excess of their parts. You'll learn to wrap your head around the big pictures of storytelling at a professional level through a new approach that shows how to combine these six core competencies which include: • Four elemental competencies of concept, character, theme, and story structure (plot) • Two executional competencies of scene construction and writing voice The true magic of storytelling happens when these six core competencies work together in perfect harmony. And the best part? Anyone can do it!

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.