The author's phone is rung constantly by animals calling about their problems.

Maine artist Clayton Riddell, elated after closing the deal for his first comic book, comes down to Earth quickly when a brain-zapping energy burst--The Pulse--strikes, reducing cell phone users to zombie-like creatures, and leaving Clayton desperate to find a way home from Boston to see if his wife and son have survived.

After accidentally intercepting some telephone messages for the previous tenant of his new apartment, a computer entrepreneur is drawn into a world of sexual escorts and murder.

Tilly is playing with her telephone until Mommy says it is bathtime.

In a telephone conversation--of which the reader at first only hears one side--two friends, one black and one white, have a disagreement and then make up.

Biologist Marion "Doc" Ford reluctantly agrees to check on a friend's reclusive brother, a hydrobiologist who has stopped answering his telephone,and arrives to find him being tortured by two Russians, the pursuit of whom leads Doc to a deadly plot by land developers to pollute the Texas water supply in order to drive down property values and allow them to snatch up the cheap land.

Helping in a case their father is working on, the Hardy brothers try to find an informer who has telephoned from a booth in their home town, and are hired by a carnival owner to spot pickpockets.

Brother gets in trouble when he allows television, his boom box, the telephone, and other distractions to keep him from doing his homework.

Seattle police detective Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews confront a challenging case. People are dying throughout Seattle--victims of a madman who is placing poisoned food in supermarkets. The criminal is intelligent: he writes the police letters faxed directly from a laptop computer over public telephone lines. How are they to stop a criminal when there is no crime scene to study?