LibraryAware Adventure Fiction June 2025

We're going on an adventure!

Hard Town
by Adam Plantinga

When a plea for help sends retired Detroit cop Kurt Argento to the small desert town of Fenton, Arizona things immediately don't appear to be as they seem, and he finds himself unraveling secrets that want to stay hidden and questioning his own moral compass. After having survived a deadly prison break, ex-Detroit cop Kurt Argento is ready for some quiet. Still working through his grief over the passing of his wife, Argento finds himself house-sitting for a friend with his loyal companion, Hudson, a Chow Chow-Shepard mix. It's a simple life, picking up odd jobs here and there, but it's one that Argento is content to live. Then Kristin Reed shows up with her young son, Ethan, and begs Argento to help find her missing husband... and Argento tells her he'd just be in the way. He's no investigator, not anymore. He's a handyman who fixes fences. But he's not one to ignore his gut feeling when something is wrong. After an attempt to talk with Kristin more, he finds her and her son missing as well. Argento starts to notice that Fenton, Arizona is more than meets the eye. First there's the large, overly equipped public safety team, complete with specialized tactics and sophisticated weaponry. Then there's the unusual financial boosting of failing small businesses by the U.S. government. And finally, there's one man with no name who seems to have control over this town in an unprecedented way. Argento finds himself unraveling not just the truth behind the disappearance of a family, but a conspiracy that's taken a whole town to cover up. But Fenton, Arizona is going to push him further than he's ever had to go. And along the way, he may just lose a part of himself as well. Because justice isn't as black and white as Argento would like to believe.

The Gravedigger's Almanac
by Oliver Potzsch

Vienna, 1893. Gravedigger Augustin Rothmayer, an educated oddball, finds solace among the dead and writing his almanac. His peace is disturbed when Inspector Leopold von Herzfeldt arrives, needing help from an expert in death. A superstitious killer is on the loose, staking maids using an ancient ritual. Rothmayer and Herzfeldt journey into the city's underworld to find the monster. They receive unexpected help from telephone operator Julia Wolf, who impresses them with her insight while battling personal demons.

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
by Matt Dinniman

A pantheon of forgotten gods. An old grudge between a talk show host, an heiress, and the man they shattered along the way. A rapidly deteriorating AI system. An inconvenient tiara upon the head of a friend. It is bedlam on the eighth floor. As management reels from the unexpected conclusion of the seventh level, the surviving crawlers stumble onto the eighth and find themselves scattered. It's a map based on Earth's final days before the collapse, where ethereal, intangible ghosts of humanity go about their lives, oblivious of the impending doom. Living amongst these ghosts are monsters based in Earth lore. "Legendary" creatures tied to the geographical location they inhabit. Each team of crawlers is given a task: find and capture six of these beasts. The captured monsters will be turned into cards. Cards that can be summoned into battle again and again. The stronger, the deadlier, the better. At the end of the floor, the bad guys will also have decks, and they will have some of the most powerful cards available. So it's crucial to assemble the toughest squad possible. But, like always, there is a catch. There's always a catch.

The Glass Garden : A Novella
by Jessica Lévai

Dr. Therese Blake is an archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. When her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets. Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who needs to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. But Therese insists on careful academic procedure. She can't figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation, or a living organism? As the anomaly's mystery draws the sisters into an obsessive orbit, it turns out neither greed nor science can offer protection from its relentless gravity.

Portalmania : Stories
by Debbie Urbanski

If you could go anywhere, where would you go? And what happens to the people you leave behind? From the author of After World comes a genre-busting collection of stories that reveal our lives in a startling new light.

The Vengeance
by Emma Newman

A swashbuckling adventure set in a version of Alexandre Dumas's world haunted by vampires.

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