CamCat Books

Eight-grader Penny Preston thought she knew how to handle the Bodach, the spirits from the 5th dimension. But suddenly something is attacking the structure of the multiverse. Left unchecked, the attack will tear the fabric separating the dimensions and destroy the universe in a cataclysmic cosmic crunch. As the stress on the fabric grows, higher-dimensional energy escapes into Piper Falls, NY, re-energizing the Bodach. Emboldened, they use their regained powers to wreak havoc on the small town.   The extra energy draws several new higher-dimensional entities to Piper Falls. One of them, a former Bodach commander, seeks to rally her followers and avenge her defeat at the hands of King Arthur more than 1,600 years ago by re-establishing her rule. The energy also attracts an especially destructive ethereal Celtic spirit, which has a special taste for ancient artifacts and exotic nuclear particles. The last of the new arrivals is a mysterious and conflicted shape-shifter? a spy known as Newiddyn. The interactions of the newcomers and their empowered brethren with the town's residents results in chaos and brings paranormal researcher Darin Kolchak back to town. Teamed with the Deputy Sheriff, their high technology investigation leads them to the local lab conducting state of the art nuclear fusion experiments. The same lab where Penny's parents work. Penny and her friends must again dodge detection, as they sort out the capabilities and intentions of these powerful entities. One bad choice or wrong step risks unleashing the apocalypse of the Darkest Day.

As crown princess of Marghazar, Durkhanai Miangul will do anything to protect her people and her land. When her grandfather, the Badshah, is blamed for a deadly assault on the summit of neighboring leaders, the tribes call for his head. To assuage cries for war, the Badshah opens Marghazar’s gates to foreigners for the first time in centuries, in a sign of good faith. Enter Ambassador Asfandyar Afridi, a wry foreigner who admits outright that he is a spy. And yet, Durkhanai has to make him her ally to expose those truly responsible for the attack. When a mysterious illness spreads through the village and the imperialists push hard on her borders, she must sort through the ever shifting loyalties at court and her growing feelings for Asfandyar. Will she be able to leave the antics of a spoiled princess behind and become what her people need—a queen?

When Penny solves the riddle of an unbreakable knot in time, she unwittingly releases two time-travelers from the distant past into Piper Falls. The town is plagued by a series of baffling events related to the appearance of a strange elf-like creature. Penny's science teacher and mentor, Mr. Myrdin, recognizes him as the Coch Coblyn. An evil spirit from Celtic myth with a penchant for igniting city destroying fires.Compounding the mystery is the discovery of a prehistoric scepter, made of impossibly pure silver that's intertwined with Seneca creation myth and Master Poe's past.  The silver scepter draws the sole survivor from the ancient civilization that created it to Piper Falls.  After traveling forward thousands of years in time, he plans to take the scepter back to his own time and save his people from the cataclysm that destroyed them.Stumped by the escalating pranks of the Coch Coblyn, the Deputy Sheriff contacts his good friend, Darin Kolchak, a paranormal investigator.  Kolchak answers the call by bringing the latest in ghost-hunting technology to town in his refurbished U-haul.  Kolchak's methods may not be conventional, but they lead him dangerously close to the truth. Penny and her friends race to unravel the secrets of the artifact, dodge detection, and prevent either of the new arrivals from using it to return to power.

Milo is dead. And Nellie Bly has to write his obituary. Not exactly what she was hoping for when she left her post as the local weather girl in Kansas for a posh Southern California beach side community. But as more and more upstanding citizens of La Joya turn up dead in ghastly ways, Nellie and her pals at the Coastal Crier join forces with Detective Wendy Nakamura to follow the murderous trail of a ruthless cartel that traffics in endangered wildlife. When Nellie’s eccentric landlady, former B-movie actress, Dame Catherine Cavendish, begins to drop hints that threaten to bring to light the dark secrets of the village, unsettling incidents begin happening at the Cavendish estate, endangering the motley crew of scribes. Greed, betrayal, vengeance, gangsters and old Hollywood glamour make for great copy – if Nellie can stay alive long enough to meet her deadline.  Dead on My Feet is a quirky tongue-in-cheek adventure that will leave you breathless.

Suffering from writer's block, Michael Schatten books himself into a remote beachside cabin to find inspiration. Exploring the nearby town, he stumbles upon an antique shop, purchases a quaint typewriter, and begins to type a short story. On a walk on the beach the next day, he stumbles upon a dilapidated house just like the one he described in his story. And at lunch in a diner he overhears other patrons talk, using the very lines he composed the night before. What is going on? Has he entered the twilight zone? Gone mad? Or purchased a magic typewriter? Soon he realizes that his typewriter is a secret Cold War weapon and connects to a powerful computer capable of converting fiction to reality. Trouble is, there are others. Schatten must pit his writing skills against those of an acclaimed Russian author bent on subjugating the world, and he has only seven days to foil the plot.

A girl of the desert and a jinni born long ago by the sea, both enslaved to the Salt King—but with this capricious magic, only one can be set free. As a daughter of the Salt King, Emel ought to be among the most powerful women in the desert. Instead, she and her sisters have less freedom than even her father's slaves ... for the Salt King uses his own daughters to seduce visiting noblemen into becoming powerful allies by marriage. Escape from her father’s court seems impossible, and Emel dreams of a life where she can choose her fate. When members of a secret rebellion attack, Emel stumbles upon an alluring escape route: her father’s best-kept secret—a wish-granting jinni, Saalim. But in the land of the Salt King, wishes are never what they seem. Saalim’s magic is volatile. Emel could lose everything with a wish for her freedom as the rebellion intensifies around her. She soon finds herself playing a dangerous game that pits dreams against responsibility and love against the promise of freedom. As she finds herself drawn to the jinni for more than his magic, captivated by both him and the world he shows her outside her desert village, she has to decide if freedom is worth the loss of her family, her home and Saalim, the only man she’s ever loved.

Justice Kasric's world is turned upside down when her father forcibly bundles the entire family into carriages in the middle of the night and carts them off to a strange mansion on the outskirts of London. The Faerie are invading-and the Kasric siblings don't even have a chance to stay neutral, because different members of their family are working for opposite sides. But Justice isn't your average fifteen-year-old girl growing up in Victorian London. She's an irrepressible scoundrel, and she always has a plan. These qualities have ostracized her from the rest of the family before now, but even her older siblings look to her to help them escape. Justice certainly isn't going to stay locked up once she discovers the world of Faerie, especially once she and her siblings discover magical talents they never knew they had.

Rachel Drake is on the run from the man who killed her husband. She never leaves her safe haven in an anonymous doorman building, until one night a phone call sends her running. On her way to the garage, she is murdered in the elevator. But her story doesn’t end there.  She finds herself in the afterlife, tethered to her death spot, her reach tied to the adjacent apartments. As she rides the elevator up and down, the lives of the residents intertwine. Every one of them has a dark secret. An aging trophy wife whose husband strays. A surgeon guarding a locked room. A TV medium who may be a fraud. An ordinary man with a mysterious hobby. Compelled to spend eternity observing her neighbors, she realizes that any one of them could be her killer.  And then, her best friend shows up to investigate her murder.

When Shadow-monsters attack in the cafeteria, eighth-grader Penny Preston panics, starts a food fight and unknowingly creates a trans-dimensional rift. Summoned to the counselor’s office, she expects suspension, but instead discovers that she is misaligned and exists in more than three dimensions. Unless she immediately begins training to learn to handle her powerful abilities, she risks losing her sanity. She agrees to secretly train with her counselor and his friend Master Poe, an exile from the seventh dimension trapped in a raven’s body, to keep her home town, Piper Falls, safe from higher-dimensional beings seeking to gain god-like powers in our dimension.Together with Simon, her telepathic multi-dimensional cat, Penny struggles to save her relationship with her best friend, protect her universe, and uncover her connection to Arthurian myth.

Andrew Richard Barnes is known as the man who flew the very first shipment of cocaine for the Medellín Cartel into the United States. A young pilot with a family at home, and little money to spare, he was easily coerced by promises of wealth to make these dangerous excursions. After his first trip, he realized there was no going back and continued the dangerous flight for over a decade.William Norris sits down with Barnes as he recounts his experience smuggling drugs for the Columbian cartel. As a pilot himself, Norris includes anecdotes of aircrafts and flying intertwined with Barnes’s captivating drug smuggling adventures. Barnes survived crashes, gunfire, treachery, and betrayal and still lived to tell the tale. Snowbird explores the heinous crimes and dangerous expeditions of Andrew Richard Barnes and the Medellín Cartel.

The beautiful, mountainous, and isolated island of Eveloce is the only home Telep has ever known. As a thriving young rock climber, Telep’s goal is to reach the top societal rank of his community. But after a tragic climbing accident pushes his loved ones from their home, everything he had been working toward changes in a single instant. Telep embarks on a journey to find his friends but ends up finding much more—a world he never knew existed.While traveling to the Mainland, Telep comes across a massive project in dire need of his climbing abilities, and he becomes inspired to see what else his world has to offer. He meets others whose values of humankind contradict everything he was taught. He becomes conflicted about what he should believe in—the values of human progress Eveloce instilled in him or his newfound understanding of what it means to be a human.

Caught between love and revenge, Jake has one chance to live up to the man his uncle was. Earth crashed into interstellar politics as a lightweight, lagging so far behind other planetary weapons systems everyone feared they wouldn't survive first contact with other worlds without quick action. By 2185, Earth had united itself into five geographic sectors and developed a defense system powerful enough to keep aggressors at bay-for now, at least. Jake Saunders became a Legion soldier to honor the memory of his war hero uncle, who was brutally murdered in front of him when he was still a young teen. Fast forward a few years, and Jake and his best friend Cal have been tasked with escorting Cal's older sister Diane to become Earth's ambassador on a far-off planet. It's the opportunity of Diane's career, very likely a lifetime post. But for Jake, that could mean a lifetime's heartbreak. He has loved Diane since they were kids, and every step closer to that ambassador assignment is a step closer to goodbye.But somebody is after more than Earth's defense, and Jake, Cal, and Diane are on a trajectory to crash headlong into that dangerous plot. Somebody wants to play Earth against its most immediate threat, Craton, and convince both to develop super weapons-and he's working with the person who killed Jake's uncle all those years ago. When he reappears on Jake, Cal, and Diane's journey to the ambassadorship, Jake is faced with difficult choices to look out for his friends and honor his uncle's memory.

Told against the fourth-century backdrop of the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, The Saint's Mistress breathes life into the previously untold story of Saint Augustine and his mistress.Defying social norms and traditions, Roman aristocrat Aurelius Augustinus falls in love with Leona, a North African peasant. Leona comes into conflict with Aurelius's mother Monnica, his powerful patron Urbanus, and the Empire itself, in her fight to keep her family together and win legitimacy for her son. When Monnica and Urbanus succeed in separating Leona from her son and securing a more suitable fiancée for Aurelius, Leona commits herself to the Church.When many years later Leona and Aurelius, now Bishop Augustine, meet again, old passions re-ignite, perennial feuds smolder, and the fate of the Roman Empire in North Africa hangs in the balance.""Ask any author-sinners are more interesting than saints."" -Michael Schmicker, investigative journalist and novelist

Ancient vampires residing within the Hollow Earth known as The Omniscients impose a strict conduct for all vampires-guidelines Razvan and Bianca Torok, commanders of The Realm, have followed for centuries. But not all immortals abide by these ancient laws. After failing to save the Crenshaws from an explosion and attack of renegade vampires, the Toroks adopt the couple's surviving twins, Celeste and Nick. Celeste and her twin brother Nick could not be more different. Celeste is a straight A student while Nick lives life on the edge, and she is as introverted as Nick is charismatic. When people ask if they really are twins she knows what they wonder is how one can be so perfect and the other be such a dud? There is one thing, though, they have in common: they are mortal. Their adoptive parents will make sure of that. When Nick's rebellious ways place Celeste in danger, she is forced to seek safety in the Midwest. As if the familial alienation isn't enough, she's tormented by her forbidden desire for Tristan, The Realm's supreme warrior. With her future uncertain and her past shattered, she follows in her biological father's footsteps and joins law enforcement.  As the lead investigator on several bizarre child abduction cases, Celeste soon discovers that bullets and modern weaponry will not stop these criminals, and that a war is brewing with the renegade vampires. Celeste joins Tristan, her parents, and the rest of The Realm to destroy the renegade vampires once and for all.

Charles Lindbergh was known for many things during his lifetime. He was a famous aviator, the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean, winner of the Orteig Prize, and a young American hero. But despite his honors and achievements, his name will forever be associated with the infamy of one of the Trials of the Century. The Lindbergh Kidnapping.On a dreary March night, Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son was abducted from his crib. The baby’s kidnapper left behind muddy footprints, a broken ladder, and a ransom note demanding $50,000. Weeks later, Charles Lindbergh Jr. was found … dead. Everyone was a suspect in this investigation, even the Lindberghs. After a six-week trial, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was named the ultimate culprit, but he claimed he was innocent even up to his execution day. For nearly 100 years, the Lindbergh Kidnapping still remains a major topic of controversy and fascination. A Talent to Deceive uses investigative journalism to dive into evidence ignored by previous investigators in search of the truth. Who really committed the crime? What really happened the night of March 1, 1932? What was the motive to kidnap and murder the Lindbergh baby?Follow Norris in this history-meets-mystery tale as he performs a thorough investigation to solve The Case That Will Never Die.

THE PIRATES ASKED FOR RANSOM. CHRIS BLACK MADE SURE THEY PAID THE PRICE.En route to the Galapagos Islands for a deep-sea diving trip with a group of international college students under his care, marine biologist Chris Black leaves his research vessel for a single night to enjoy dinner with friends. When he returns, the ship has vanished. With crew and passengers on board. Modern-day pirates hijacked the boat, hoping to collect a lucrative ransom. Amidst the storm of the century, indomitable Chris Black chases the pirates from island to island, - fighting back to save the students under his care in a battle royal aboard the pirates' mysterious flagship.In the Chris Black Adventures series, marine biologists armed with knowledge and physical prowess -fight crime on the open sea and deep under the ocean's surface. Dr. James Lindholm's - firsthand experience with the extreme survival conditions of underwater research missions informs all his stories. Look in the back of this book for a book club discussion guide.