Reeling from the sudden loss of his wife, his home, and his business, Alan Christoffersen, a once-successful advertising executive, has left everything he knew behind and set off on an extraordinary cross-country journey. Carrying only his backpack, he is walking from Seattle to Key West, the farthest destination on the map. Now almost halfway through his trek, Alan sets out to walk the nearly 1,000 miles between South Dakota and St. Louis, but it's the people he meets along the way who give the journey its true meaning: a mysterious woman who follow Alan's walk for close to a hundred miles, the ghost hunter searching graveyards for his wife, and the elderly Polish man who gives Alan a ride and shares a story that Alan will never forget.
Kate and Zoe met at nineteen when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling--a sport that demands intense focus, blinding exertion, and unwavering commitment. They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals, all of whom are fighting for the last one tenth of a second that separates triumph from despair. Now at thirty-two, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win the gold, and each has more than a medal to lose.
The woman is Talulla Demetriou. She's grieving for her werewolf lover, Jake, whose violent death has left her alone with her own sublime monstrousness. On the run, pursued by the hunters of WOCOP (World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena), she must find a place to give birth to Jake's child in secret. The birth, under a full moon at a remote Alaskan lodge, leaves Talulla ravaged, but with her infant son in her arms she believes the worst is over--until the windows crash in, and she discovers that the worst has only just begun.
