Bradford Morrow

Several children start to build a tree house but change their minds when they come across a family of birds that already lives in the tree.

Best friends, Kip Calder and Brice McCarthy are born on the same day in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the most secret place on earth. Sons of men who work on the Manhattan Project, they play macabre games, tempting the fate that looms over their closed community. One night, runaways, they make a crazy pilgrimage to the desert chapel of Chimayo to eat the holy dirt and atone for the legacy that haunts their families and themselves. Their two lives spiral apart after this joyous, terrifying moment: in the sixties, as Brice becomes an antiwar activist, Kip disappears into Vietnam and ultimately into the covert war in Laos, leaving Brice to marry Jessica Rankin, the woman they both love. Then, twenty-five years later, Kip returns, a ghost soldier perhaps come to reclaim what was lost, and so threatens to shatter everything his old friend has built.

This collection of gothic short stories from the author of Trinity Fields features tales of a young man who becomes obsessed with his brother's girlfriend and a blind motivational speaker who regains his sight and discovers he was better off before.

Imagine a scene of rural serenity, a night scene. Above the mountains surrounding this faraway place, the stars are a menagerie of silver flickering motes. Imagine a solitary ranch, a man and a woman asleep. It would be hard to fathom a purer vision of people at peace in the natural world. Who could foresee that this tranquility would be so brutally shattered by the night visitors? When Grant hears of the campaign of malice being waged against his only living relatives, he abandons Rome and a crumbling marriage to do what he can to help them. His brash confidence is quickly bruised as the night visits escalate in violence, and the death of Giovanni Trentas, a dear family friend found mutilated in a gorge above the ranch, takes on new meaning. When his aunt presents him with Giovanni's legacy - an old cigar box filled with letters, photos, and seemingly random knick-knacks - Grant finds himself in possession of a puzzle that might hold the answers to much more than Giovanni's death. Grant's unfolding passion for Giovanni's daughter, Helen, forces him to choose between loyalty and love as the night terrors come to their catastrophic end.

The murderer of Adam Diehl, a reclusive rare-book collector, begins to stalk Adam's sister's lover Will -- a convicted literary forger -- under the guise of letters from long-dead authors, and soon Will realizes that this killer threatens everything he holds dear. "The rare book world is stunned when a reclusive collector, Adam Diehl, is found on the floor of his Montauk home: hands severed, surrounded by valuable inscribed books and original manuscripts that have been vandalized beyond repair. Adam's sister, Meghan, and her lover, Will-- a convicted if unrepentant literary forger-- struggle to come to terms with the seemingly incomprehensible murder. But when Will begins receiving threatening handwritten letters, seemingly penned by long-dead authors, but really from someone who knows secrets about Adam's death and Will's past, he understands his own life is also on the line--and attempts to forge a new beginning for himself and Meg. In The Forgers, Morrow reveals the passion that drives collectors to the razor-sharp edge of morality, brilliantly confronting the hubris and mortal danger of rewriting history with a fraudulent pen."--Amazon.com