Meet Edgar and Allan Poe — twelve-year-old identical twins, the great-great-great-great-grandnephews of Edgar Allan Poe. They look and act so much alike that they're almost one mischievous, prank-playing boy in two bodies. When their beloved black cat, Roderick Usher, is kidnapped and transported to the Midwest, Edgar and Allan convince their guardians that it's time for a road trip. Along the way, mayhem and mystery ensue, as well as deeper questions: What is the boys' telepathic connection? Is Edgar Allan Poe himself reaching out to them from the Great Beyond? And why has a mad scientist been spying on the Poe family for years?With a mix of literary humor, mystery, a little quantum physics, and fun extras like fortune cookie messages, letters in code, license plate clues — and playful illustrations thoughout — this series opener is a perfect choice for smart, funny tweens who love the Time Warp Trio, Roald Dahl, and Lemony Snicket.

This meta-fiction tale centered on Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle, but also involving several famous physicists of the 1920s, challenges Holmes with a case of crime, conspiracy, and espionage.A retired Sherlock Holmes, now in his seventies and disguised as a Cambridge professor, is dramatically disturbed one day when a modestly successful author in his late-sixties named Arthur Conan Doyle comes to call. This Conan Doyle, notable only for his historical romances, science fiction, and a three-volume history of the Boer War (but no detective tales), knows somehow of the false professor's true identity. To Holmes's surprise, he asks for help in solving a case that strains the limits of credulity by suggesting the existence of parallel worlds. Sherlock Holmes on one last adventure in 1920s' London...employed by the author Arthur Conan Doyle? We might ask ourselves how such a thing can be possible. This tale is discovered in a long-forgotten manuscript in 1940s'...

In The Tell-Tale Start, twins Edgar and Allan Poe foiled the nefarious Professor Perry, who wanted to use them in his deadly quantum entanglement experiment. In Once Upon a Midnight Eerie, they took on his equally evil mother and daughter. Now, in The Pet and the Pendulum, it's time for the real showdown, which takes place in an old mansion right outside Baltimore. As with the first two books, The Pet and the Pendulum is filled with codes, brain-teasers, smart (not snarky) humor, and cameos by the actual Edgar Allan Poe, who is watching over his great-great-great-nephews from the Great Beyond. Readers won't want to miss the Misaventures' end!

"Woman with a Blue Pencil is a brilliantly structured labyrinth of a novel—something of an enigma wrapped in a mystery, postmodernist in its experimental bravado and yet satisfyingly well-grounded in the Los Angeles of its World War II era. Gordon McAlpine has imagined a totally unique work of 'mystery' fiction—one that Kafka, Borges, and Nabokov, as well as Dashiell Hammett, would have appreciated." —JOYCE CAROL OATESWhat becomes of a character cut from a writer's working manuscript? On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Sam Sumida, a Japanese-American academic, has been thrust into the role of amateur P.I., investigating his wife's murder, which has been largely ignored by the LAPD. Grief stricken by her loss, disoriented by his ill-prepared change of occupation, the worst is yet to come, Sam discovers that, inexplicably, he has become not only unrecognizable to his former acquaintances but that all signs of his existence...