The New York Times bestselling author of Dark & Shallow Lies delivers another chilling supernatural thriller filled with murder, romance, and a decades long mystery that haunts a small Florida town.
ONE LAST BREATH
by Ginny Myers Sain
Razorbill/Penguin Random House, March 2024
(viaPark & Fine Literary and Media)
Mount Orange, Florida, is famous for two things: Cerulean freshwater springs, perfect for free divers who aren’t afraid of lurking gator, and the gruesome cold case murder of best friends, Bailey and Celeste, twenty years ago.
The spectre of Bailey and Celeste’s murders cast a permanent darkness over sunny Mount Orange. Tru has always lived in that shadow. Sometimes, it seems like she knows the long-dead Bailey, feels the dead girl in her bones. Now she’s supposed to head to FSU in the fall with her boyfriend, but those unsolved murders — and the death of her own sister — invade her every thought. It’s only in the shadowy deep, 100 feet below the surface of Hidden Glen Springs, that she can breathe.
When Rio, a strange girl, rolls into town, hell-bent on figuring out who killed Bailey and Celeste, Tru can’t resist entangling herself in the thrill of solving the decades old mystery any more than she can resist her familiar, aching attraction to Rio.
As the summer heat ignites, so does the spark between Tru and Rio…along with their other-worldy connection to Bailey and Celeste. But when someone begins stalking them, the girls become convinced the killer is back in town. And if they keep digging into the past, Tru and Rio know this time, it could be their blood that makes the springs run red.
Ginny Myers Sain lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and has spent the past twenty years working closely with teens as a director and acting instructor in a program designed for high school students seriously intent on pursuing a career in the professional theatre. Having grown up in deeply rural America, she is interested in telling stories about resilient kids who come of age in remote settings.
Sadie Grace is wanted for witchcraft, dead (or alive). And every hired gun in Kansas is out to collect the bounty on her head, including bona fide witch hunter Old Tom and his mysterious, mute ward, Rabbit. On the road to Burden County, they’re joined by two vagabond cowboys with a strong sense of adventure – but no sense of purpose – and a recently widowed schoolteacher with nothing left to lose. As their posse grows, so too does the danger. Racing along the drought-stricken plains in a stolen red stagecoach, they encounter monsters more wicked than witches lurking along the dusty trail. But the crew is determined to get that bounty, or die trying. Written with the devilish cadence of Stephen Graham Jones and the pulse-pounding brutality of Nick Cutter, Red Rabbit is a supernatural adventure of luck and misfortune.
Vivian Parry likes the dark. A former actress, she now works as the junior theater critic at a major Manhattan magazine. Her nights are spent beyond the lights, in a reserved seat, giving herself over to the shows she loves. By day, she savages them, with words sharper than a knife. Angling for a promotion, Vivian reluctantly agrees to give an interview in which the conversation, with a stranger who seems to know her work, reveals secrets she thought she had long since buried. When her interviewer disappears soon thereafter, she learns from his devastated fiancé that Vivian was the last person to have seen him alive. When the police refuse to investigate, Vivian assumes the role of amateur detective. . As she nears the final act of this investigative ruse, she finds that the boundaries between theater and the real world are more tenuous and more dangerous than even she could have believed. Gripping, propulsive, and shot through with menace and dark glamour, HERE IN THE DARK takes us behind the scenes of New York theater, lifting the curtain on the lies we tell ourselves and each other.
A leading scholar of artificial intelligence explores the ways in which AI is shaping contemporary culture: how it will change our lives, for better and for worse, and what it means to live in this crucial, watershed moment. The book will be structured around five parts, each centered on a basic ingredient of human creation: Words, Images, Sounds, Motion, and Systems. The chapters contend with how each element is transformed by AI systems, and how the industries that depend upon it are changing, Asking what does this mean for us, as individuals and as a society, Professor Crawford posits that the best way to understand the cultural metamorphosis underway is to start with how AI makes things for us, and what we are making of it. In this way, the book speaks to changes at the foundational level of human creation, as well as addressing a dramatic series of simultaneous industrial shifts.