Important Note: This post is dated Thursday, March 29, 2012, and the titles mentioned here may remain free only until midnight PST tonight.

When unseen forces cause a building to implode around a typical college-aged teen working in a fast-food joint, multiple lives intertwine to unearth the source of the evil.

Billy Hitchings: An ordinary kid with everyday dreams. He has a good life with his Grandmother in Myrtle Beach, only a few blocks from the Atlantic. He even enjoys his job at the local burger joint… most of the time.

John Reeves: A marine who lost his path overseas working as a mercenary in war-torn countries across the Middle East. He works as a bodyguard in New York, never quite able to get away from the action.

Dr. Amfar Ditpra: An archaeologist from India recently graduated from the University of Michigan. He and a co-worker have orders from their self-centered boss to safely deliver a trunk full of ancient artifacts to Myrtle Beach for additional research.

Coincidence and his own curiosity push Billy into a tangled mess of dark questions with darker answers, at the heart of which are rumors of an ancient legend and a not-so-ancient artifact. Will his new friends help him find the answers he seeks? Or will they betray him to their own needs?

Originally published in Canada in 2003 (but never distributed in the U.S.), this moving story features Sarah Richardson, whose family moves from the Montana countryside to Vancouver Island just as she’s about to enter sixth grade. Sarah soon finds that island life suits her perfectly–thanks, especially, to her new best friend, Goldie, whose Native American heritage Sarah finds fascinating, especially the wisdom passed to the girls from Goldie’s grandmother, Nana. Sarah is also intrigued to learn that her marine-biologist father shares a passion with her new Indian friends: killer whales, which the natives revere and her father studies. Life isn’t all native spirituality, however, as Sarah must confront a family tragedy that will change her life forever. Though overly melodramatic in places, Tardif’s story has that perennially crowd-pleasing combination of sweet and sad that so often propels popular commercial fiction, especially coming-of-age stories. Tardif, already a big hit in Canada, may soon be a name to reckon with south of the border.

Civilization as we know it ended more than fifteen years ago, leaving as it’s legacy barren wastelands called the Deadland and a new terror for the humans who survived- hordes of undead Biters.

Fifteen year-old Alice has spent her entire life in the Deadland, her education consisting of how best to use guns and knives in the ongoing war for survival against the Biters. One day, Alice spots a Biter disappearing into a hole in the ground and follows it, in search of fabled underground Biter bases.

What Alice discovers there propels her into an action-packed adventure that changes her life and that of all humans in the Deadland forever. An adventure where she learns the terrible conspiracy behind the ruin of humanity, the truth behind the origin of the Biters, and the prophecy the mysterious Biter Queen believes Alice is destined to fulfill.

A prophecy based on the charred remains of the last book in the Deadland- a book called Alice in Wonderland.