INCOMING

• Kate Daniel, Baby-sitter's Nightmare.  YA thriller.  "Alice Fleming is trapped in a nightmare.  someone's been breaking into houses all over town, stealing and wrecking furniture.  The victims all had one thing in common:  Alice baby-sat their kids.  The p[olice re ready to lock Alice up, and even her friends are wondering if Alice has a dark side they never knew...The one night Alice cancels a baby-sitting job, and the substitute sitter is murdered. Alice is desperate to find the real killer.  Bur as she follows the killer's trail, is she walking into a dealy trap set just for her?"  Sounds kind of blah, but it only cost me ten cents.
• "J. V. Lewton" (Stephen Gresham), Just Pretend.  YA horror.  "Sixteen-year-old Clay Brannon has the ability to see things.  Some call it a gift, but Clay calls it a curse.  Especially when he hear's a little girl's voice on a call-ion radio show:  "I pretended a bad man...and he's going to kill me."  Although the phone call is dismissed as a prank, Clay knows what he heard is true.  In his mind he can visualize a little girl at the mercy of a madman who has killed before and will kill again -- unless Clay can find him and stop him in time.  It won't be easy...because Clay has just seen an image of someone else's death.  his own."  The pseudonym is a nod to classic film director Val Lewton.
• Nnedi Okorafor, Akata Witch.  YA fantasy.  Sunny looks like a West African, but she's an albino and doesn't seem to fit in anywhere.  "Her classmate Orlu and his friend Chichi reveal that they have magical abilities -- and so does she.  Sunny is a 'free agent,' overflowing with latent power.  And she has a lot of catching up to do.  Soon, Sunny's taking a crash course in magical history, spells, juju, shapechanging, and dimensional travel.  Her new world is a secret to hwer family, but it's well worth all the exhaustion and sneaking around.  But...there is a dark side.  Just as she's finding her footing, Sunny, with Orlu, Chichi, and their American friend Sasha, is asked by the magical authorities to help track down a criminal.  Not just a run-of-the-mill bad guy.  A real-life, hard-core serial killer -- with abilities stronger than theirs."
• Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief.  SF novel, the first in a series featuring Jean le Flambeur, who has had many lives and who has been a thief, confidence man, posthuman mind-burglar, and more.  From ISFDb:  "A breathtaking ride through the solar system several centuries hence, a world of marching cities, ubiquitous public-key encryption, people who communicate vis shared memory, and a race of hyper-advanced humans who originated as an MMORPG guild."  This book placed third in both the 2011 Locus Best First Novel catagory and the 2011 Campbell Memorial Best Science Fiction Novel catagory, as well as being nominated below the cutoff for the 2011 and 2012 Hugo Best Novel Awards.  (The reason for two Hugo nominations lies in the fact that it was first published in England and the following year in the U.S.)