Edgar Award finalist: When the strange new bus driver passes the last stop, the five teens on board know something’s wrong: “[A] gripping thriller.” —Publishers Weekly
Valley Gardens is the last stop on the bus route after school. The neighborhood is known for its wealthy families, perhaps the richest in town. Marianne, Bruce, Glenn, Dexter, and Jesse live in Valley Gardens, and have no trouble guiding the...

Kestra Dallisor has spent the last three years in exile, but that does not stop her from being drawn back into the web of her father's dangerous politics. He's second-in-command to the despotic and seemingly immortal king, Lord Endrick. With his arsenal of Ironheart soldiers and vicious condors, Endrick rules the land of Antora with a cruel and bloody fist. Her father's position makes Kestra a valuable bargaining chip, which a group of rebels understands...

Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful--and attempts a nail-biting escape.

A brilliant criminal known only as the Mastermind orchestrates a series of bank robberies that are notable for their very precise demands--and their explosive violence when the demands are not met. Alex Cross takes on the case and as he gets close to identifying a suspect, the Mastermind pulls off the most outrageous kidnapping scheme in U.S. history--and walks away with the largest ransom ever.

While still adjusting to the reality of having two families, her birth family and the family into which she was kidnapped as a small child, seventeen-year-old Janie makes a shocking discovery about her long-gone kidnapper.

"For the first time, ten years after her abduction from her Salt Lake City bedroom, Elizabeth Smart reveals how she survived and the secret to forging a new life in the wake of a brutal crime On June 5, 2002, fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, the daughter of a close-knit Mormon family, was taken from her home in the middle of the night by religious fanatic, Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. She was kept chained, dressed in disguise,...

NUMA director Dirk Pitt searches for the connections among newly discovered Roman artifacts, the rise of a fundamentalist movement, and the existence of a mysterious long-lost "manifest," which, if discovered again, may change the history of the world.

Carl Strople was covertly recruited to Black Ops and given the most brutal kind of training any man or woman could endure. Now he belongs to The X Group. But why do they call him "Saint"? An assassin. The most effective killer in the world. And yet . . . Carl Strople struggles to retain fleeting memories that betray an even more ominous reality. He's been told part of the truth--but not all of it. Invasive techniques have stripped him of his identity...

A teenage girl is kidnapped, but when freed, is accused of masterminding the scheme to extort money from her wealthy grandmother.

In 2194 in Zimbabwe, General Matsika's three children are kidnapped and put to work in a plastic mine, while three mutant detectives use their special powers to search for them. Newbery honor book: 1995.