Books with author PAUL ZINDEL

Deep in the Amazon jungle, members of an elite scientific team are disappearing. Jake gets word his dad is in grave danger. So Jake makes the journey into the remote jungle where he finds the lost crew’s mutilated bodies. He discovers they’ve been slaughtered by a bat-like winged beast that’s now stalking him and the remaining survivors. In a battle to the death, can Jake possibly defeat this bloodthirsty predator?

Chris is fifteen, which isn’t easy for anyone, and it’s particularly tough when your father isn’t around and your mother is a flaky nurse with a light shoplifting problem. Things might be simpler if they had a regular apartment, but Chris’s mom is a live-in nurse which means Chris has to live wherever she works, and things are about to get even tougher.The reason is Lloyd, a brutish drunk, who has just become Chris’s roommate. As the walls close in and the tension rises, Chris can’t be sure if Lloyd is torturing him, or trying to teach him how to be a man.

Seventeen-year-old PC can't resist his uncle Cliff's frantic call and is soon aboard a plane to Australia. Within hours of arriving, PC realizes that his uncle has gotten himself into an even more bizarre predicament than usual, and that Cliff is counting on him to unravel the threads of a mystery linking: a missing scuba diver, presumed dead; Maruul, a beautiful Aboriginal girl suffering from amnesia; a strange map based on a legend of a sacred treasure; an erie, seemly deserted ship; and a huge, horrible creature that lurks in the depths beneath the reef. Trying to help the shaken young girl, PC and Cliff return to the reef where Maruul's brother vanished and take up the search for the Aboriginal treasure that will save the people of Maruul's tribe. But someone else is looking for the treasure too -- and when the two groups collide, a lethal game of hide-and-seek is played out beneath the deep and bloody water of the reef.

On June 26, Eugene Dingman threw a wooden spoon at his mother, and before he knew it, he’d been packed off to a summer waiting tables at the Lake Henry Hotel, where New York’s wealthiest come to bake their skin a nice leathery brown. Sustained only by his diary and a burning desire to be a famous writer, Eugene settles in for three months of torment. And then he meets Della, and everything changes. The problem is, Della hardly notices Eugene exists and a local bully is intent to humiliate Eugene, whenever Della is around. To add to his Eugene’s misery, his absent dad won’t respond to his letters, and his mom may be romantically involved with a mafia hit man. What doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger. The Lake Henry Hotel may do both.

Bobby Perkins knew the minute he sawMr. Hulka, his sinister new neighbor, that the man was evil. Then one morning, while spying on the man, who works as an undertaker, Bobby thinks he witnesses a violent crime. Bobby is determined to expose Mr. Hulka, and he asks his best friend, Lauri, to help him. The two sleuths discover much more than they bargained for. Can Bobby and Lauri stop the evil Hulka before he claims his next victims?

Beatrice was a mother . . . and the embittered ringmaster of the circus Hunsdorfer featuring three generations of crazy ladies living under the sloppiest big top on earth. Nanny was no problem. She sat and stared and stayed silent as a venerable vegetable should. Ruth was half-mad and easily bought with an occasional cigarette. But how is the world would Beatrice control Tillie--keeper of rabbits, dreamer of atoms, true believer in life, hope, and the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds . . .