Two-year-old Abigail is fast asleep in the back of the car, clutching her little red lion. Tony, her father, steps out onto the pavement. The man he’s meeting punches him in the face, knocking him to the ground. Before it all goes black, Tony sees his car speed away — with his little girl inside.

When he finally gets home after the worst day of his life, the house is empty. His wife is gone too. The place is ransacked and the kitchen is streaked with blood.

Someone out there has Tony’s little girl. And his wife may already be dead.

Detective April Fisher must race against time to find little Abi alive.

Ever since being given a name no one can pronounce, Scharlette’s been stuck in a bit of a rut. She hates her job in airport security, owns a small apartment with large repayments, and drinks bargain bin red on a couch that swallows gym memberships. Every day she watches people fly away to exotic locations she can only dream of – after she makes them take their belts off, of course.

Scharlette fears she might live her whole life without doing anything or mattering to anyone. Still, it comes as quite a surprise when a handsome time traveller arrives from the future and tells her she’s correct – that, according to his records, she doesn’t matter at all.

Scharlette doesn’t think this news is too wonderful, but as she soon learns, having no impact on the timeline whatsoever means she’s free to blast off into space, and have amazing adventures with heedless abandon.

In this journey through time, archaeologist David Preston comes into possession of a baseball supposedly signed by the legendary Ty Cobb in 1908, thanks to Ariyl Moro and her mysterious companion, Jon Ludlo. Except the ball tests out to be an impossible paradox. It was signed with a ballpoint pen (not invented until 1938) using ink that’s several centuries older. But then, Ariyl and Ludlo aren’t who they claim to be either.

Ariyl, a voluptuous 6-foot-3 beauty, turns out to be a tourist from a 22nd century paradise where time travel is the latest craze. Unbeknownst to her, however, her traveling companion, Ludlo, is a psychopath whose thefts are starting to alter history. In a world were even small changes in the timeline can cause catastrophic consequences, Ludlo’s actions may completely destroy the future.

It’s that time of the month.

Bills. Bills. Bills. They’re piled up on the counter, and I don’t earn enough to make ends meet, not when I have student loans and I’m responsible for the payments for my mother’s treatment. If she knew how much her illness put me out…she never would have forgiven herself. A mother’s love is unconditional…but so is a daughter’s. I can’t survive like this much longer, not if I want to eat and sleep in a bed instead of a cardboard box on the street.

So I do the unthinkable…and contact the Cherry Popper. I don’t know the guy, but I know his reputation from whispers on the street. He’ll pay top dollar to be a woman’s first—and I’m so desperate for money that I’ve lost all my dignity. I submit an application to be considered and feel equally relieved and sick when he selects me.

When I see Slate for the first time I’m speechless—because he’s gorgeous. So gorgeous that I would sleep with him for free. Our eyes would meet across the bar, and I’d be the one buying him a drink instead of the other way around.

Detective Madeline Wimsey tends to stand out with her wild red hair, pentacle amulets, and offbeat methods, but she has a tool few other cops use: magic.

Maddy knows the universe wants to balance itself out, so she isn’t above tossing around a spell or two whenever a killer’s karma needs a little nudge in the right direction. As a member of a practicing coven, she’s used to strange looks, hushed whispers, and rolled eyes, but couldn’t care less what people think of her.

And after a man turns up dead in a grisly satanic rite, her fellow detectives are quick to crack jokes. Since they can’t tell a pentacle from a pentagram, Maddy’s happy to get the case.

Immediately, she suspects the ritual to be the work of amateurs, a theory that pans out when they track down the pack of clueless high school students who made the shrine in the woods.