WELCOME TO OUR third annual Mystery Times anthology. This year we offer up ten tales of murder, mystery, and suspense. Written by both new and established authors alike, they were selected from more than two hundred entries. There's something here for every mystery fan, from hard-boiled to paranormal. You'll want to bring along your sense of humor, because this year's collection has its tongue firmly planted in one cheek. Each story is a small bite of mystery that will satisfy and delight even the most discerning of readers. So find a comfortable chair, fill your glass or mug, and get ready to be entertained by this year's winners. We guarantee you won't be able to stop at just one

From an astonishing blue jay to a lone humpback whale, from the back roads of her hometown to the streets of Jerusalem and the Tower of London, debut author Faye Rapoport DesPres examines a modern life marked by a passion for the natural world, unexpected love, and shocking loss, and her search for a place she can finally call home in this beautifully crafted memoir-in-essays. Three weeks before DesPres's fortieth birthday, nothing about her life fit the usual mold. She is single, living in a rented house in Boulder, Colorado, fitting dance classes and nature hikes between workdays at a software start-up that soon won't exist. While contemplating a sky still hazy from summer wildfires, she decides to take stock of her nomadic life and find the real reasons she never "settled down." The choices she makes from that moment on lead her to retrace her steps-in the States and abroad-as she attempts to understand her life. But instead of going back, she finds herself moving forward to new love, horrible loss, and finally, in a way that she never expected, to a place she can almost call home. Readers who love the memoirs and personal essays of rising contemporary writers such as Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman will appreciate Faye's observational eye, her passion for the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it, and her search for the surprising truths behind the events of our daily lives.

In The Art of Touch: Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, the unique voices of 39 of some of the most creative thinkers of our times have been brought together to consider the impact of one of our six main senses: touch. Psychologists, healers, massage therapists, academics, creative writers and others reflect on or tell personal stories about what it means to be able to touch, or to have to go without it—as so many did and still do because of the pandemic; how transmissions such as texting may impede opportunities for touch while those like Zoom may make it possible for people who otherwise might be left behind to be "in touch." From the experience of touching beloved animals, to the lifechanging ways in which books and performances can touch us, virtually all aspects of touch are acknowledged in these pages.