Billy Halleck, a lawyer cursed to lose weight without stopping after he killed an old Romani woman in a car accident and escaped punishment, gets the curse transferred into a strawberry pie, meant for his wife Heidi, whom he blames.

Charlie McGee, an eight-year-old girl with the power to start fires with her mind, escapes the secret government agency known as the Shop after her father Andy is killed.

Scientists at the secret Wildfire lab race to understand a deadly microorganism from space that killed nearly everyone in Piedmont, Arizona.

Johnny Smith, who woke from a five-year coma with psychic visions, foresees that politician Greg Stillson will become president and start a nuclear war.

Reading historical fiction can make the past memorable, build empathy for people in other eras and encourage curiosity, though research also warns that readers can absorb errors from fiction.

Retired detective Bill Hodges stops Brady Hartsfield, the “Mercedes Killer” who drove a car into a crowd of job-seekers, from bombing a boy-band concert.

Astronaut Mark Watney, stranded alone on Mars after his crew thought he was dead, survives by growing potatoes and hacking equipment.

College student Devin Jones, working at a North Carolina amusement park in 1973, unmasks the serial killer who murdered Linda Gray in the park’s Horror House: Lane Hardy, a friendly ride operator.

Detective Ralph Anderson and private investigator Holly Gibney track the shape-shifting creature that framed Little League coach Terry Maitland for a child’s murder to a cave in Texas.

Robert Grainier, a laborer in the early twentieth-century American West, lives alone for decades after a forest fire kills his wife Gladys and baby daughter Kate.