Showing results by publisher "Black Rose Writing" in All Categories

With all his family and friends gone, one-hundred-year-old Murray McBride is looking for a reason to live. He finds it in Jason Cashman, a ten-year-old boy with a terminal heart defect and a list of five things he wants to do before he dies. Together, they race against the limited time each has left, ticking off wishes one by one. Along the way, Murray remembers what it's like to be young, and Jason fights for the opportunity to grow old. But when tragedy strikes, their worlds are turned upside-down, and an unexpected gift is the only thing that can make Jason's final wish come true.

Hapless Nate Hester yearns for the safety and affection of a group. He sets off on a hitchhiking trip to escape bad parenting and the Vietnam draft. Nate soon longs to be off the road. A drug dealer befriends him and introduces him to the Hells Angels. The Angels introduce him to the wonders of drug use and free sex, but the effects wane, and Nate leaps from mania to depression.

In 1877, the Paris art scene is very competitive for men but nearly impossible for thirty-three-year-old Mary Cassatt, an American woman. Bored by traditional methods of painting, she admires the work of avant-garde painters, especially Edgar Degas. So, when Edgar visits Mary's studio to view her paintings, she is exhilarated by his invitation to join him, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and other Impressionists in the collective.

Detective Kim Brady must find the killer of Mariano Avila, beloved community activist and immigration lawyer in Brooklyn. The only eyewitness, Amara, a fifteen-year-old undocumented escapee from a human trafficking ring, has described the killer as wearing a police uniform. Kim discovers the details of the murder match those of a cold case from several months earlier. Saddled with a partner who is an unqualified rookie cop forced on her unit by a local state senator with mayoral aspirations, Kim's investigation is micromanaged from above.

MATT. ALEXANDRA. OLIVIA. CHARLIE. The only survivors when two gunmen opened fire in a Chicago coffee shop, leaving fourteen people dead. Matt, Alexandra, and Olivia are the "lucky" ones—spared when the gunmen forced hostages to count off, releasing only those marked with the number six. Charlie isn’t as fortunate, miraculously surviving a bullet to her spine, which leaves her in a coma.

When medical intern Harry Lindmark’s patient gruesomely dies, he fears an Angel of Death is loose in his hospital. Soon, however, Harry falls under suspicion when unexpected deaths mount. His desperate investigation to clear his name reveals a nightmarish conspiracy—hungering souls of those long-dead are killing his patients, led by the vengeful soul of former physician Sylvester Morrow, as heartless in death as he was in life.

Meet Harriet. But don't be surprised if she isn't interested in meeting you. Harriet has life all figured out, and she doesn't hesitate to inform others of their shortcomings. Though her attempts to become president of the homeowner's association failed, that doesn't stop her from berating "off-leash-dog-man" or reporting the neighbor who had the audacity to leave their Easter decorations up an entire week past the holiday. The problem is, unbeknownst to her, Harriet's rigid rules and judgmental opinions are not her own.

Olivia is taken from the sidewalk near her college and thrown into a van. Her captors, who she soon discovers are vile, sadistic monsters, abuse her immediately, both mentally and physically. Then she is taken into a house, into a locked room, where everything is cotton candy pink. The pink furniture is designed with rounded edges and corners bolted to the floor, and the seams at the bolts melted. This is where the nightmare begins. She is now a part of their collection.

1924, Oregon: Put to work as a fortune teller by her cruel mother, reluctant psychic Primrose communes with the souls of the lost and lonely. She believes she's destined to die on the eve of her twenty-second birthday, but that evening passes, and she finds herself alive but unable to tolerate one more day of the fortune teller life. Desperate to do good with her painful visions, she discovers a sanitorium where psychics gather, and she journeys across Oregon to find more of her kind. She meets a host of new friends who teach her to accept her gifts.

Hertell Daggett isn't what he used to be—he'd once been married, he'd once been a physicist, and he'd once been shot in the head. The doctors got the bullet out, but a few tiny specks of copper stayed behind, floating inside his brain, connecting parts that aren't connected in the rest of us, filaments of species memory going back to the beginning of time.

Small-town police chief Emmett Hardy sets out with a simple goal—find the family of a young woman who died years earlier at the hands of one of his officers. But when a friend helping with the search is murdered, Emmett’s task grows deadly. As he digs to find both the young woman’s family and the killer of his friend, he uncovers a twisted family saga rife with incest, abuse, and political corruption—a legacy of generational sin with roots reaching deep into the prairie soil.

Warned that a planet-killing asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, acquaintances Kat and Ryan join forces in an effort to survive. Mere hours before impact, they race toward the safety of Ryan's inherited South Dakota bunker, encountering chaos. A last-ditch effort to nuke the asteroid only manages to fragment it into chunks causing multiple strikes.

Taylor is being hunted. A sinister shadow trails him, playing a game of hide and seek. If Taylor is caught, a cruel death awaits him. There are rules for this game. To break them would mean dire consequences for Taylor and anyone close to him. Taylor must outwit and outlast the fiend for 48 hours.

Early in the French Revolutionary War, a young British naval officer, Lieutenant Joseph Duncan, finds himself unexpectedly in charge of a powerful frigate. Sailing alone in the Caribbean Sea with no one to ask for advice, he makes a fateful decision to engage a superior enemy force.

Edited by the award-winning author, Niamh McAnally, Stories of Place will take you on a whirlwind journey across the globe courtesy of nine international writers whose tales span the genres of thriller, adventure, mystery, coming-of-age, LGBTQ+, young adult, and literary fiction, as well as the vast spectrum of the human experience. Each story is titled using the innovative geocode system What3Words, which uses three words to identify a precise location on Earth.

Robin dreamed of attending Yale and using her brain. Kory lived on the streets of Seattle and relied on his brawn. Without the asteroid, they never would have met. For three years, Robin and her grandfather have been hiding, trusting no one. When a biker gang moves into town, Robin can no longer scrounge or tend her garden. Because her grandfather is dying, he urges her to join her extended family—800 miles away in a bunker city in South Dakota, but she doesn't want to leave.

Lara McAllister was adored by everyone in the small town of Grants Pass until one rainy day last year when she vanished without a trace. Some believe she simply ran away. Others believe something sinister happened. In a close-knit community where everyone knows everyone's business, is it possible that nobody saw anything?

In the winter of 1942, an army vanishes into the icefields of the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1945, a massacre in small-town Italy makes international headlines. Today, an ordinary man is about to stumble onto a horrifying secret. Alex Lago is a jaded journalist whose family, marriage, and career are fading fast. So, when the accidental discovery of an aged photo from World War II offers him a last gasp at bonding with his dying father, Alex can't help but scratch at the scabs of a mystery seventy years in the making.

Piran Chegwin had known since he was just a boy that he wanted to be a priest—to bring comfort and care to ordinary folk in a little parish church. So when his father manages to scrape together the money for him to study theology at Oxford, it seems his future is set. That is, until he encounters Martin de Villiers, an ambitious, self-important fellow student who takes an instant dislike to Piran. Piran's only offense? Having been born a Cornishman. But to Martin's eyes, it's an offense that must be set right.

Oklahoma, 1965. Emmett Hardy is focused on drinking his failures away. And despite his general enthusiasm for the social reforms sweeping the country, the disillusioned police chief isn't surprised by his community's ongoing casual racism. But he's still shocked when he discovers the body of a Black woman with a slashed throat dumped by the railroad tracks.