H. Jane

Fourteen-year-old Greg Dixon is living a nightmare. Attending boarding school outside of Boston, he is separated from his family when a pandemic strikes. His classmates and teachers are dead, rotting in a dormitory-turned-morgue steps from his room. The nights are getting colder, and his food has run out. The last message from his father is to get away from the city and to meet at his grandparents' town in remote New Hampshire.

No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies - before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.

Ten women, guests at the lesbian-owned Adelheid Inn, are stranded in the Cascade Mountains after a mudslide closes the only road out. One goes missing. One is killed. More than one is not who she pretends to be, and every one of them has a secret. When another woman is attacked, it becomes clear there's a killer in their midst, and it has to be one of them. Is it Beatrice, the judge, surly and sad after the death of her long-term partner?

Two women vow to bring a killer to justice. Deputy Andrea Sullivan had hoped to leave the horrors of Los Angeles behind her, but the serial murders of college students in peaceful, picturesque Sedona are her nightmare case to solve. The complexities stretch local resources to the limit, and the FBI joins the case with Agent Cameron Ross in the lead.

Jill Fryman (Friday to her friends) is a line supervisor at a truck manufacturing plant in a small southern Indiana town. Life on the assembly line is almost as predictable as her love life. When it comes to matters of the heart, Friday always seems to be making the wrong choices. Things go from bad to worse when El, a sultry labor organizer from the UAW, sweeps into town to unionize the plant right after it's been bought out by a Japanese firm.

Cate Delacy is glad she's a witch - and you can take that any ol' way you like. As a very mortal woman she has a target on her back, so she has no intention of following in her mother's footsteps as an enforcer for the Council of Supernatural Beings. She didn't ask to be a Guardian and she has to pay her bills. Opening the Darkmirror Agency is her solution. Her clients are mostly human and they pay on time. But one day it all goes to Hell, figuratively.