BODIES is a quirky new murder-mystery series that's equal parts HBO's "Big Love" and "NCIS."You’ve seen cop shows. Now imagine three members of the same investigative team get into a threesome and decide to keep it going as a long-term three-way relationship. Throw in a bioterror threat and a quirky family drama, and you’ve got BODIES, the hottest new murder-mystery series of the summer! ~BRIEF~ Diseased corpse at 5-star hotel? Check. Bioterror connection and radical Islamist YouTube videos? Check. Potential outbreak, citywide lockdown, and CDC race to find a treatment? Check. Three members of the same investigative team getting into a threesome and deciding to turn it into an ongoing relationship? Um…....check!BODIES is an oddball murder-mystery series with a sexy twist. Equal parts “NCIS” and HBO’s “Big Love,” the story focuses on an eccentric family, the Callahans. Larkin and Tigh, the matriarch and patriarch, respectively, head up the C.D.C.’s Crisis Response Team. But when a bioterror attack in their hometown forces them to team up with a Homeland Security agent named Corban Banks, sparks begin to fly! In more ways than one!Find out how it all started today in BODIES: Book #1: Staged Fright!

Stories include:Finder's Weepers: Leonard gets caught up in his own web of lies.Remain Calm: The insane never question their own sanity.Punctilious: Being on time just may be a matter of life and deathAssailant: A strange increase in burglaries occur ahead of a warm front.Laugh Like a Baby: A story of mixed up emotions--Literally!

Thomas believes in myths and mythological creatures, and when he reads that a mermaid's kiss has the power to heal, he thinks of his bedridden Grandpa. Thomas sets out to catch a mermaid to heal his Grandpa - if they really exist.

"When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.... When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out." Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up. Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their understanding. During the trial, the town exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of counterbalance as well--in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up for what he knows is right; and finally in Scout's hard-won understanding that most people are essentially kind "when you really see them." By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill a Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new generations, and deserves to be reread often. --Alix Wilber