Pete Hautman

"For Annie's tenth birthday, her papa gives her a pad of paper, some colored pencils, and the Klimas family secret. It's called the nuodeema burna, or eater of sins. Every time Annie misbehaves, she has to write down her transgression and stick the paper into a hidey-hole in the floor of their house. But Annie's inheritance has a dark side: with each paper fed to the burna, she feels less guilty about the mean things she says and does. As a plague...

A lottery jackpot winner decides to turn one of her millions into a bounty for the man who left her Barbaraannette is decorating a cake when the Powerball numbers come in. They sound suspiciously familiar, but she finishes the cake before checking her ticket, knowing that if she wins her hands will be too shaky to handle the icing. This quiet Midwesterner has just won nine million dollars-and nine million kinds of trouble to go with it.   Accepting...

Desperate for cash, small town cop Joe Crow takes a security job that could cost him his life Joe Crow celebrates his thirty-third birthday in his patrol car, watching for speeders and sniffing fat lines of cocaine. A depressed cop with a faltering marriage, a rotten stomach, and an increasingly expensive drug habit, Crow is just looking for a drink and a poker game when he steps into Birdy's. Instead, he meets a man who might be able to save his...

Jen and Wes do not "meet cute." They do not fall in love at first sight. They do not swoon with scorching desire. They do not believe that they are instant soul mates destined to be together forever. This is not that kind of love story. Instead, they just hang around in each other's orbits...until eventually they collide. And even after that happens, they're still not sure where it will go. Especially when Jen starts to pity-date one of Wes's friends,...

From National Book Award winner Pete Hautman, the story of a girl who acts out by stealing cars.Some girls act out by drinking or doing drugs. Some girls act out by sleeping with guys. Some girls act out by starving themselves or cutting themselves. Some girls act out by being a bitch to other girls. Not Kelleigh. Kelleigh steals cars.In How to Steal a Car, National Book Award winner Pete Hautman takes teen readers on a thrilling, scary ride...

After thirteen-year-old Tucker Feye's parents disappear, he suspects that the strange disks of shimmering air that he keeps seeing are somehow involved, and when he steps inside of one he is whisked on a time-twisting journey trailed by a shadowy sect ofpriests and haunted by ghostlike figures.

Tucker Feye and Lia are stranded at the top of a crumbling pyramid in the distant future while Tucker's uncle Kosh faces armed resistance to help a terrorized woman.

Doug and Andy are unlikely best friends--one a loner obsessed by his model trains, the other a popular student involved in football and theater--who grew up together and share a bond that nothing can sever.

When sixteen-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke begins to take on a power of its own.

People all over Flinkwater are losing their memories! In a town overflowing with eccentric scientists and engineers, this is nothing new, and Ginger Crump figures it's none of her business. She has her own problems. Like the strange cat that's been following her around-- a cat that seems to be able to read. And the report for school due Monday. And the fact that every digital book in Flinkwater has been vandalized by a fanatical censor, forcing Ginger...