Decimated by drought, Nevada and Arizona skirmish over dwindling shares of the Colorado River, while California watches, waiting. Into the fray steps Las Vegas water knife Angel Velasquez, who "cuts" water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority and its boss, Catherine Case, ensuring that her lush, luxurious arcology developments can bloom in the desert and that anyone who challenges her is left in the gutted-suburban dust. He becomes a pawn in a...

When a drought tests the commitment of a mail-order bride from Maine to her new home on the prairie, her stepchildren hope they will be able to remain a family.

"After a two-year drought, the Kerrigan ranch is dry as a bone and as dusty as a honky-tonk bible. On the brink of ruin, Kate Kerrigan hires the rainmaker Professor Somerset Lazarus, who promises salvation--in the form of a deluge. Kate is desperate enough to try anything. But when four angry gunmen show up, ready to lynch the phony rainmaker for swindling them out of their money, the Kerrigans have to choose sides fast--before the bullets start to...

Taking advantage of a severe drought and the long-standing distrust between two tribes, the demonic Saint Dane attempts to take over Loor's home planet of Zadaa, opposed once again by the teenaged Pendragon and other Travelers.

Marc Royce stares out of the helicopter, a sense of foreboding rising with the volcanic cloud. Below,the Rift Valley slashes across Africa like a scar. Decades of conflicts, droughts, and natural disasters have left their mark. Dispatched to audit a relief organization, Royce is thrust into the squalor and chaos of Kenyan refugee camps. But his true mission focuses on the area's reserves of once-obscure metals now indispensable to high-tech industries....

"In the Pennywort [farm], there is a garden of edible flowers, a garden meant for touching, and one in which the flowers only bloom at night ... Since her mother's death 5 years ago, Olivia has been carrying on her legacy, caring for Pennywort Gardens and running an informal program that provides safe haven to women in exchange for their help with the lush gardens. The townspeople hate having what they call a 'halfway house' around, and Olivia's neighbors...

"They were fire and terror to the Western world, while in the East the dragons brought life-giving rain. Now, no longer hailed as gods and struggling in the overheated pollution of Beijing, only the Eastern species survives. As drought plagues the aquatic dragons, a mysterious disease -- shaolong, or "burnt lung" -- afflicts the city's human inhabitants. Jaded college student Xiang Kaifei scours Beijing streets for abandoned dragons, distracting himself...

"In the vein of The Dry and Before the Fall, a town's dark secrets come to light in the aftermath of a young priest's unthinkable last act in this arresting and searing debut thriller. In Riversend, an isolated rural community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest does the unthinkable, killing five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, accompanied by his own demons from war-time reporting, journalist Martin Scarsden...