Reader’s Digest Select Editions, Volume 254: Running Blind / Dream Country / Shattered / A Certain Slant of Light

Contains 4 stories:

1. Lee Child – Running Blind

People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Suppose you knew the winning numbers in the lottery? What would you do? You would run to the store. You would mark the numbers on the play card. And you would win. Same for the stock market. Same for basketball or the horses or anything. Same for killing people.

Women are dying. Women who have nothing in common except the fact that they once worked for the military. And they knew Jack Reacher. How and why these women are in danger completely baffles the elite FBI team working the case. There is no trace evidence. There are no links between victims. Their bodies have no fatal wounds. And the killer entered their homes and exited again like a summer breeze. Are these perfect crimes? There is only one certainty: there is a new kind of killer out there, one so calm, cautious, and careful that even the brilliant Reacher is left running blind.

2. Luanne Rice – Dream Country

Daisy had gone to the Wyoming wilderness in search of inspiration for her art. She found rancher James Tucker, a man with the wilderness inside him. Their life together was close to paradise – until their three-year-old son Jake disappeared and was never found. Her marriage in tatters, Daisy returned home to Connecticut, taking with her from Wyoming two things: her daughter, Jake’s twin, and her livelihood, the jewelry she etches with symbols of Indian legend. Thirteen years later, Wyoming wants more. Sage, now sixteen, has run away, and Daisy fears that Sage’s thirst to see the land and father of her dreams is driving her westward on freight trains and farm roads. Terrified, her mother flies out to where James Tucker rides the range with a heart turned to stone, still scouring the canyons for Jake. Wary of each other, Daisy and James wait and pray for the safe arrival of their one remaining child. And they’ll need all the strength and wisdom they can find, to learn that you cannot close the door on the past. In fact, sometimes, if you’re willing to step through it, that door to the past can lead you home.

3. Dick Francis – Shattered

When jockey Martin Stukely dies after a fall at Cheltenham, he accidentally embroils his friend Gerard Logan in a perilous search for a stolen videotape. Logan is a glassblower on the verge of widespread acclaim. Long accustomed to the frightful dangers inherent in molten glass and in maintaining a glassmaking furnace at never less than 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, Logan is suddenly faced with terrifying threats to his business, his courage, and his life.

4. Cynthia Thayer – A Certain Slant of Light

Peter lost his wife and children in a fire years ago, yet the wounds are still as fresh as if it happened yesterday. He’s turned into something of a hermit in a cabin on the coast of Maine, shearing sheep and gardening to live, an old Passamaquoddy woman his only friend. Elaine is eight months pregnant and on the run from her husband, a hard man more interested in control than love. Fear is simply a part of her life, fear for herself and her unborn child.

When Elaine turns up outside Peter’s cabin during one of Maine’s worst winter storms in years, Peter can’t turn her away into the ice. Holed up together in his one-room home, the two troubled, lonely adults clash, then slowly discover that friendship, support, and healing can come in the most unlikely places.