Books published by publisher Meridith Press

As featured on Bustle.com After her soldier brother is horribly wounded in Afghanistan, Gabriela must honor the vow she made: If anything ever happened to him, she would walk the Camino de Santiago through Spain, making a pilgrimage in his name. The worst part is that the promise stipulates that she must travel with her brother's best friend--a boy she has despised all her life. Her brother is in a coma, and Gabi feels that she has no time to waste, but she is unsure. Will she hesitate too long, or risk her own happiness to keep a promise? An up-close look at the lives of the children of military families, Beneath Wandering Stars takes readers on a journey of love, danger, laughter, and friendship, against all odds.

A famous case. A missing girl. If they find her, will they be heroes? Or dead?Bored out of her mind during a summer with her police detective father in Las Vegas, Jessica (aka "Jex") Malone starts doing what she does best--snooping. When she meets three new friends who share her passion for crime, from the geek to the fashionista, suddenly, the stifling desert days don't seem so long.Her dad is never around, just like when her parents were married. But Jex's crew, the Drew-Ids, take the pledge of eternal secrecy and then get down to the good stuff--digging through the cold-case files in Dad's home office.One of them, the thirteen-year-old case of Patty Matthews, is still a mystery. Finding Patty, who vanished into thin air, became such an obsession for Jex's father that it destroyed the Malones' marriage. So not only is this a big deal, it's personal.Jex is determined to find out what really happened, and her excitement is contagious. Soon her friends are all on board and so is the missing girl's brother, the hunky Cooper Matthews.But as they dig up more and more troubling information--more than the cops ever did--they also get the clear message that someone out there wants to prevent the truth from coming out. That somebody is also prepared to do anything, absolutely anything, to prevent it.Jex isn't afraid; after all, she's a cop's daughter. But maybe she should be.Laced with humor, toughness, and real CSI investigation techniques, Jex Malone could be the Nancy Drew for a new generation--but with a chilling twist. These wannabe detectives are on the brink of finding out the fate of poor missing Patty. But will they disappear without a trace, too?

It all starts with a mysterious phone call from Louisa's decorative antique phone. And that wouldn't be so strange, except that the phone is unplugged, and has been for years. Frightened by the call and its message--and questioning her own sanity--Louisa listens as a somehow-familiar voice describes a lost family secret about Louisa's grandfather and his daring involvement in resisting the Nazi scourge in his native Sweden during World War II. Piecing together each clue she can find, Louisa begins to see how her grandfather's guilt and shame continues to haunt her own father, and the rest of her family, decades later, planting seeds of doubt that threaten to tear them all apart.Now desperate to know the full truth, despite the charming distractions of a boy with secrets of his own, Louisa becomes consumed with her discoveries, which she passes off to her parents as a school history project. Digging through old family albums and letters, she at last begins to see that the phone call was only the beginning, and that she is the one meant to be the messenger who can bring the truth of the past to light--before it's too late for her family.

Jeremy's friend, Mackie Spence, seems different. She doesn't act like the same person he's grown up with all his life. And Jeremy would know. In the last year, he's paid close attention, as that funny little girl suddenly turned into a knockout. But now something is beyond weird. He didn't see much of Mackie during the summer that followed her near-drowning incident. But it's September, she's back at school, and Jeremy can't explain the changes in her. After all, he's a jock who understands science and math, not girls like Mackie. Still, when both of them volunteer at the wild animal shelter, he sees how huge, wounded birds calm to her touch. And that's just the beginning. When Jeremy, who's falling hard for Mackie, starts to feel protective of her, keeping an eye on her as she makes her way through the woods and coves of the small Puget Sound island where both of them grew up, he sees things he finds hard to believe. Mackie is still Mackie, but she's also someone beyond normal human experience. So who is she? Or...what is she? How can Jeremy protect Mackie from her fate? Should he even try, or is he interfering in something so big and so ancient that it doesn't even have a name? And while he may love Mackie, is he going where mere mortals are forbidden? To save the girl he loves, Jeremy must solve puzzles that will not only change his future, but the way he understands life, forever.

After a mistake with big financial consequences topples her throne, former "it girl" Miranda Prospero is bitter: she finds herself stranded in a crazed new world, holding court among geeks and misfits at a mall Hot Dog Kabob stand. Then, she gets her chance for revenge. When the storm of the decade snows in the mall workers and last-minute shopaholics for a long winter's night, Miranda sets out to get back at the catty clique who was behind her exile. But there's a complication. She somehow gets handcuffed to sullen loner Caleb. With him (literally) bound to her side, Miranda learns more in one night about her own heart, and human nature, than she ever did as prep royalty. With this twisted take on Shakespeare's The Tempest, authors Kim Askew and Amy Helmes prove again that, from Juliet's grief to Cordelia's rage, no one knew about teen angst better than the Bard. His wisdom holds up nearly half a millennium later.