Penny feels guilty after taking a beautiful blue marble that she sees in Mrs. Goodwin's grass, but gets a pleasant surprise when she goes to return it the next day.

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt...

A discussion of how adherence to the qualities of character, courage, and conscience can help people prevent personal and interpersonal problems and dilemmas, with examples from the author's radio talk show that illustrate how to repay and restore human spirit, relationships, and life.

In the early twentieth century, young orphan Maud Flynn hopes to finally be loved when she is adopted by the elderly Hawthorne sisters, but she is instead roped into the family's crooked séance business.

"Nate and Annie Forester are faced with every parent's worst nightmare when their three-year-old daughter, Penelope, is hit by a car right before their eyes. In the aftermath of her death, the distance between them grows. Nate just wants to move on and return to some version of normal, while Annie finds herself stuck in the quicksand of her grief" --

Forty years after becoming the Blue Fairy, Chiara Belmagio defies the rules of magic to help her old friend Geppetto, and when her sister--now the heartless Scarlet Fairy--discovers the transgression, they decide to settle things with a wager, with the lives of Geppetto and Pinocchio hanging in the balance.

When a Chameleon named Leon uses an old pair of underpants he finds in the woods in place of toilet paper, his decision eats away at his conscience until he is persuaded to clean the underpants and put them back where he found them.

Obsessed with violating the laws of nature and of life and death, scientist Victor Frankenstein constructs a creature from the limbs of the dead. Once jolted into life, the creature proves to be even more human than his creator. He is knowledgeable, wise and also possessed with a conscience. Unable to inspire love, he chooses to inspire fear and vows to avenge the man who created and then abandoned him.

When a deep-seated memory suddenly surfaces, Elizabeth Burns becomes obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of her childhood friend April Cassidy. Driven to investigate, Elizabeth discovers a thirty-five-year-old newspaper article revealing the details that had been hidden from her as a child-shocking revelations about April's mother, Adele. Elizabeth, now herself a mother, seeks out anyone who might help piece together the final months, days,...