Unbeknownst to two teenagers—Ralph worried about a history exam he didn’t study for and Sarah having studied all weekend—a flu pandemic with apocalyptic proportions rages over the world. On Monday, they arrive at their high school besieged by men in hazmat suits, escorting infected teenagers to buses. Ralph is forced on one of these quarantine buses and Sarah, along with the remaining healthy student body, gets quarantined at school.

This flu however is worse than the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed a hundred million people—much worse. This flu turns its victims into the walking dead. The few not infected are left not only with the grief of their family and friends passing, but also with the horror of their families, friends, and neighbors trying to rip the flesh off them.

When it rains, it pours … and this amateur sleuth may be in over her head.

Graduate student Raina Sun is trying to keep her head above water as the bills roll in when her dashing college adviser cons her out of several months of rent. Her quest to retrieve the money sets in motion a streak of even worse luck.

First, she stumbles on her advisor’s dead body and becomes a suspect in his murder. Next, the only man she’s ever loved reappears as the lead detective to the case. Raina’s having trouble interpreting his signals–does he want to reignite their passion, or just stay close to his prime suspect?

Tanner Harlow is a talented landscape designer, quietly building a name and a solid future when he finds himself needing to be the temporary guardian to his eleven-year-old half-sister. Tanner loves her, but can’t see himself as a father figure or imagine how he’s going to build his business during his busiest season with a child in tow until his newest client—his high school crush who still makes his heart pound—has a proposition that will help them both as long as Tanner can resist the tempting lure of the girl next door.

Elementary school teacher Francie Tate moved back to Marietta to be close to her ailing father. She plans to settle in and fix up her little bungalow before the school year starts, but definitely needs help with the neglected yard. She’s shocked when the landscaper she hired turns out to be a class mate.

When Dave Trask ran for sheriff of Lake County Minnesota he thought the job would entail locating lost campers and catching poachers, and he didn’t really think he’d get elected. He was wrong on both counts.

Before he can be sworn in, two guests at a fishing lodge in the county are brutally murdered. The murders threaten to destroy the tourist business vital to the county, as well as ignite a war between lodge owners and the Native American population. As the murders continue, Dave is feeling the pressure from all sides, including the county board, to stop the killings.

Mitch Robertson was a Hollywood screenwriter with a problem…

“When his cell phone rang, Mitch Robertson was in Penny’s Coffee Shop in Toluca Lake trying to figure out what to do with the chopped up body parts. Gone were the days when you could just scatter the severed limbs and torso all over the city, now with DNA the body would be reassembled almost immediately. And after 9-11 you couldn’t just get the neighbor kid to do a “penmanship exercise” making address labels, get some other kid to lick the stamps, box up the parts and drop them in a bunch of random blue mail boxes all over town to ship them to the far corners of the world – now packages had to be under sixteen ounces or you had to mail them from the post office… where they asked you all kinds of questions about the contents.