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.

Escape isn’t the hardest challenge for a slave – it’s staying free afterwards. Siblings Thomas and Mia find themselves fleeing across a desolate land, hounded by the monstrous sand-hog, a steam-powered war machine bent on recapturing them at all costs. Thomas fears the worst. He knows the tyrannical King Williams seeks Mia and her mysterious powers of foresight, but it seems even her gift cannot save the day when the sand-hog corners them. It isn’t until they cross paths with a group of rebels and stumble across rumours of a lost airship that Thomas begins to wonder if there isn’t hope of escape after all... A steampunk adventure set in a slowly dying land where magic clashes with steam and alchemy.

A POWERFUL, MYSTERIOUS woman finds a homeless girl in a New York subway and adopts her. Janet swears loyalty to the White family and they train her at their Academy as a secret agent. Before long, her transformation into the Red Hourglass-an assassin-is complete. She is ready to start her missions in service of the White Queen. In order to learn the whereabouts of her real mother from the White Queen, the Red Hourglass must stop the planned expansion of Wilmar Enterprises. She goes undercover to infiltrate Wilmar, and she is hired as the executive secretary to the Chief of Security, Conan Casey. Janet works diligently to uncover all Wilmar's secrets. She soon learns that Conan Casey, her target, is heir to the billion dollar Wilmar organization. She falls prey to his dark seductions and twisted secrets ... and they leave her gasping for more. She unwittingly bets her stakes on a dangerous game of love. Where do her loyalties lie? Will she betray Conan for the White Queen, or fall in love with him and give up all hope of finding her real mother? And will they get out alive? ..... The first in the Hourglass series - a dark coming of age romance thriller novel about finding one's identity with dominance and submission romance scenes against the backdrop of capitalism, undercover agents, poker and tango.

"Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning--a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become."

Like On a Pale Horse, this second, complete-in-itself novel of the Incarnations of Immortality is a richly imagined and always fascinating story. And again, Piers Anthony adds to his gripping plot a serious, though-provoking study of good and evil. When life seemed pointless to Norton, he accepted the position as the Incarnation of Time, even though it meant living backward from present to past. The other seemily all-powerful Incarnates of Immortality—Death, Fate, War, and Nature—made him welcome. Even Satan greeted him with gifts. But he soon discovered that the gifts were cunning traps. While he had been distracted, he had become enmeshed in a complex scheme of the Evil One to destroy all that was good. In the end, armed with only the Hourglass, Norton was forced to confront the immense power of Satan directly. And though Satan banished him to Hell, he was resolved to fight on.

Amid the drama of the suffragette movement in Edwardian London, the disappearance of a famous trapeze artist in the middle of her act leads a young Fleet Street reporter to an underworld of circus performers, fetishists, and society columnists. London, 1912. The suffragette movement is reaching a fever pitch, and Inspector Frederick Primrose is hunting a murderer on his beat. Across town, Fleet Street reporter Frances “Frankie” George is chasing an interview with trapeze artist Ebony Diamond. Frankie finds herself fascinated by the tightly-laced acrobat and follows her to a Bond Street corset shop that seems to be hiding secrets of its own. When Ebony Diamond mysteriously disappears in the middle of a performance, Frankie and Primrose are both drawn into the shadowy world of a secret society with ties to both London's criminal underworld and its glittering socialites. How did Ebony vanish, who was she afraid of, and what goes on behind the doors of the mysterious Hourglass Factory? From newsrooms to the drawing rooms of high society, the investigation leads Frankie and Primrose to a murderous villain with a plot more deadly than anyone could have imagined.

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.

A BEAUTIFUL UNDERCOVER AGENT, Jessica, codename Purple Python, is sent to Singapore under the White Queen's orders to prevent the expansion plans of Wilmar Enterprises in Asia. Jessica identifies the chief financial officer of an equity fund, Garrett, as her key target. Garrett is interested in investing in Wilmar's Asia Fund, and Jessica is tasked with derailing his plans. As Jessica works on getting close to Garrett, she finds herself becoming interested in Garrett. Jessica engages in an internal tug-of-war as her feelings for Garrett deepen and she begins to question her loyalties. Will she betray the woman who saved her from the streets, or will she sacrifice her chance at a soul mate? Purple Python is a standalone full-length novel in the HOURGLASS series of corporate espionage undercover femme fatale agents. The series explores finding one's identity in the backdrop of capitalism with dominance and submission themes, romance, love, and betrayal entwined with undercover spies on a mission to serve the greater good.