Snake venom that digests human flesh. A building cleared of every living thing by a band of tiny spiders. An infant insect eating its living prey from within, saving the vital organs for last. These are among the deadly feats of natural engineering you'll witness in The Red Hourglass, prize-winning author Gordon Grice's masterful, poetic, often dryly funny exploration of predators he has encountered around his rural Oklahoma home. Grice is a witty and intrepid guide through a world where mating ends in cannibalism, where killers possess toxins so lethal as to defy our ideas of a benevolent God, where spider remains, scattered like "the cast-off coats of untidy children," tell a quiet story of violent self-extermination. It's a world you'll recognize despite its exotic strangeness--the world in which we live. Unabashedly stepping into the mix, Grice abandons his role as objective observer with beguiling dark humor--collecting spiders and other vermin, decorating a tarantula's terrarium with dollhouse furniture, or forcing a battle between captive insects because he deems one "too stupid to live." Kill. Eat. Mate. Die. Charting the simple brutality of the lives of these predators, Grice's starkly graceful essays guide us toward startling truths about our own predatory nature. The Red Hourglass brings us face to fanged face with the inadequacy of our distinctions between normal and abnormal, dead and alive, innocent and evil.

Midnight - the hour of new beginnings. I enter renewed welcoming time’s transition, unaware of what I’m ushering in. In the dark recesses of your mind lies a clock. Once the clock strikes midnight, it begins. What happens at 12 a.m.? Journey through The Red Hour with this first book in The Hourglass Collection.

When drug cartels begin vandalizing ancient Aztec sites throughout Mexico in search of the sacred obsidian knife of Aztec emperor Ahuitzotl, the Mexican government reaches out to the U.S. State Department for assistance. Dr. Jon Barrett, an archaeologist and pre-Columbian weapons expert, then journeys to Cuernavaca with his wife Susanna at the request of Eric Winwood, a high-ranking State Department official, to find and rescue the knife before the cartels can claim it. Locating the knife proves more challenging and dangerous than Dr. Barrett anticipated, and he and Susanna soon find themselves at the center of the cartels’ search. For Dr. Barrett and his wife to survive, he will be forced to apply his knowledge of ancient weapons in the face of an ancient power he never imagined. Editorial Reviews: “This fast-paced novella amps up the suspense with well-crafted dialogue and a Mexican drug cartel subplot. . . . M. C. Tuggle’s meticulous creation of a suspenseful, driving thriller makes Aztec Midnight very engaging.” – Foreword Clarion Reviews “A fun-size adventure tale that may not fill readers up but will taste just fine going down.” – Kirkus Reviews

THE STORY: Alex DelFlavio is an ambitious downtown artist who plans to include sexually explicit photographs in his uptown show to advance his career. Nan Bemiss, the wife of a Republican senator who is running for the presidency and a gallery boar

Selakhi is an adventure story. A coral island, castaways, ghosts, the treasures of Solomon. It is a wrestling with the angel of language.

TV host Eve Best is sitting pretty—a great talk show,amazing coworkers and soon she'll be waist-deep in lottocash. But when Mitch Hayes, a national network scout,comes strolling into her office, Eve forgets it all in asizzling urge to have her way with him. Repeatedly. And it's so not professional to drool.… Mitch needs to sign Eve's show for hisnetwork, or else. Fortunately, his bossdid say something about "romancing" Eve—and after a split-second glance at thecurvalicious woman, Mitch figures he mightjust have the best job ever. But can you get naughty with someone…without the naked truth gettingin your way?

Jaya’s 17, a transgender Gujarati outsider who detests wealth, secrets, and privilege, though he has them all. Only thing 16-year-old Rasa has is siblings, plus a mother who controls men like a black-widow spider. Neither one of them has ever known real love or family. Not until their chance meeting one sunny day on a mountain in Hau’ula.