Fantasy

A ruined king sells his fifteen-year-old daughter for seven roasted chickens. They had agreed on ten, but the buyer brings them hot in a basket, and the smell does the rest of the bargaining for him.

A newly turned vampire corners a bleeding hunter in a locked guest room, and the fight ends when somebody in the doorway throws a wooden clock through his chest. Then he asks her whether she gets it. Killer aim.

Two hundred years before the game begins, a vampire lord offers his six enslaved spawn a contest: bring back the rarest blood in the world and one of you will finally be made free. Kingfisher gives Astarion a lawyer's brain and a paladin to break.

A Memphis psychic dynasty is down to one condemned mansion, one eviction notice, and one granddaughter born without the family mark. Reviving the Halloween show is the only way to keep the roof on, and the only way to wake what killed her parents.

A woman steals electricity from the last grid in a collapsed city, and an old physicist in a museum basement wants her to steal all of it at once. Hernan Diaz follows Trust with a novel about power in both senses of the word.