Full AspenCat Catalog

"A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. By day's end, when the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town will be rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder. Adam Merkel left a university professorship in Reno to teach middle school in Lovelock seven months before...

Escaping her ritzy Florida life and her cheating pornographer husband, Portia Kane returns to the South Jersey home of her youth and resolves to save herself by assisting a beloved English teacher who has retired after a traumatic incident.

"Unbeknownst to her many fans, Quin Archer, the revenge-loving queen of the reality-TV show "Payback," was once an angry teen named Heidi--and her true story may be known only to Agnes, who was her art teacher at a private New England girls' school in the 1970s. Then a young woman herself, Agnes saw a spark of originality in the brooding Heidi. But when she suggests Heidi visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the girl returns with a disastrous...

"Archaeologist Riley Smith has been obsessed with Helen of Troy since she was a small girl, trailing her professor father all over the world in search of the tomb of the world's most beautiful woman. Professor Smith set out to prove that, instead of a myth, Helen had been a living, breathing queen who inspired Homer to write The Iliad. Forensic sculptor Eve Duncan has the unusual skills needed to recreate the face that launched a thousand ships--revealing...

"When Corie Geller asked her parents to move from their apartment into the suburban McMansion she shares with her husband and teenage daughter, she assumed they'd fit right in with the placid life she'd opted for when she left the Joint Terrorism Task Force of the FBI. But then her dad gets a call from genial and slightly nerdy film professor, April Brown--one of the victims of the case he was never able to solve. When April was five years old, she'd...

Six-year-old Ramona tries to cope with an unsympathetic first-grade teacher. In this touching and funny story, the ebullient Ramona, feeling brave and grown-up, enters first grade. Quickly she finds that her new teacher, Mrs. Griggs, appears perplexed by pupils who like to be different. Since Ramona cannot help being different, clearly the two are incompatible. Nevertheless, Ramona can be counted on to keep things lively. Enraged when Susan copies...

At twelve years old, Cornelius, the son of an Italian-American woman and an older black man from Mississippi named Herman, secretly takes over his father's job at a silent film theater in New York's East Village. Five years later, as Herman lives out his last days, he shares his wisdom with his son, explaining that the person who controls the narrative of history controls their own fate. After his father dies and his mother disappears, Cornelius sets...