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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Dean Koontz’s unique talent for writing terrifying thrillers with a heart and soul is nowhere more evident than in this latest suspense masterpiece that pits one man against the ultimate deadline. If there were speed limits for the sheer pulse-racing excitement allowed in one novel, *Velocity* would break them all. Get ready for the ride of your life.**Velocity**Bill Wile is an easygoing, hardworking guy who leads a quiet, ordinary life. But that is about to change. One evening, after his usual eight-hour bartending shift, he finds a typewritten note under the windshield wiper of his car. *If you don’t take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blond schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.*It seems like a sick joke, and Bill’s friend on the police force, Lanny Olson, thinks so too. His advice to Bill is to go home and forget about it.  Besides, what could they do even if they took the note seriously? No crime has actually been committed. But less than twenty-four hours later, a young blond schoolteacher is found murdered, and it’s Bill’s fault: he didn’t convince the police to get involved.  Now he’s got another note, another deadline, another ultimatum…and two new lives hanging in the balance.Suddenly Bill’s average, seemingly innocuous life takes on the dimensions and speed of an accelerating nightmare. Because the notes are coming faster, the deadlines growing tighter, and the killer becoming bolder and crueler with every communication—until Bill is isolated with the terrifying knowledge that he alone has the power of life and death over a psychopath’s innocent victims. Until the struggle between good and evil is intensely personal.  Until the most chilling words of all are: *The choice is yours*.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

***Get your "A" in gear!***They're today's most popular study guides-with everything you need to succeed in school. Written by Harvard students for students, since its inception *SparkNotes*™ has developed a loyal community of dedicated users and become a major education brand. Consumer demand has been so strong that the guides have expanded to over 150 titles.  *SparkNotes*'™ motto is *Smarter, Better, Faster* because:·   They feature the most current ideas and themes, written by experts.·   They're easier to understand, because the same people who use them have also written them.·   The clear writing style and edited content enables students to read through the material quickly, saving valuable time.And with everything covered--context; plot overview; character lists; themes, motifs, and symbols; summary and analysis, key facts; study questions and essay topics; and reviews and resources--you don't have to go anywhere else!


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Young wizard Harry Potter finds himself back at the miserable Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He doesn't realize the difficulty of the task that awaits him. Harry must pull out all the stops in order to find his missing friend. No Canadian Rights for the Harry Potter Series HARRY POTTER and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and (c) Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter publishing rights (c) J. K. Rowling. (s05)


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During his third year at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, Harry Potter must confront the devious and dangerous wizard responsible for his parents' deaths.


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The summer holidays are dragging on and Harry Potter can't wait for the start of the school year. It is his fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and there are spells to be learnt and (unluckily) Potions and Divination lessons to be attended. But Harry needs to be on his guard at all times - his worst enemy is preparing a terrible fate for him. With characteristic wit, fast-paced humour and marvellous emotional depth, J.K. Rowling has proved herself yet again to be a master storyteller.


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*I say to you all, once again--in the light of  

Lord Voldemort’s return, we are only as strong  

as we are united, as weak as we are divided.  

Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading discord and  

enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing  

an equally strong bond of friendship and trust.*    

So spoke Albus Dumbledore at the end of Harry Potter’s fourth  year at Hogwarts. But as Harry enters his fifth year at wizard school,  it seems those bonds have never been more sorely tested. Lord  Voldemort’s rise has opened a rift in the wizarding world between  those who believe the truth about his return, and those who prefer to  believe it’s all madness and lies--just more trouble from  Harry Potter.    

Add to this a host of other worries for Harry…

   • A Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher with a personality like poisoned honey

   • A venomous, disgruntled house-elf

   • Ron as keeper of the Gryffindor Quidditch team

   • And of course, what every student dreads: end-of-term Ordinary Wizarding Level exams    

…and you’d know what Harry faces during the day. But at  night it’s even worse, because then he dreams of a single door in a  silent corridor. And this door is somehow more terrifying than every  other nightmare combined.    

In the richest installment yet of J. K. Rowling’s seven-part  story, Harry Potter confronts the unreliability of the very government  of the magical world, and the impotence of the authorities at  Hogwarts.    

Despite this (or perhaps because of it) Harry finds depth and strength  in his friends, beyond what even he knew; boundless loyalty and  unbearable sacrifice.    

Though thick runs the plot (as well as the spine), readers will  race through these pages, and leave Hogwarts, like Harry, wishing only  for the next train back.


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'In a brief statement on Friday night, Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge confirmed that He Who Must Not Be Named has returned to this country and is once more active."It is with great regret that I must confirm that the wizard styling himself Lord - well, you know who I mean - is alive and among us again," said Fudge.These dramatic words appeared in the final pages of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.In the midst of this battle of good and evil, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince takes up the story of Harry Potter's sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, with Voldemort's power and followers increasing day by day . . .


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Harry Potter is preparing to leave the Dursleys and Privet Drive for the last time. But the future that awaits him is full of danger, not only for him, but for anyone close to him - and Harry has already lost so much. Only by destroying Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes can Harry free himself and overcome the Dark Lord's forces of evil. In this dramatic conclusion to the Harry Potter series, Harry must leave his most loyal friends behind, and in a final perilous journey find the strength and the will to face his terrifying destiny: a deadly confrontation that is his alone to fight. In this thrilling climax to the phenomenally bestselling series, J.K. Rowling reveals all to her eagerly waiting readers.


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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER On the morning that marks the end of the world they have known, Molly and Neil Sloan awaken to the drumbeat of rain on their roof. A luminous silvery downpour is drenching their small California mountain town. It has haunted their sleep, invaded their dreams, and now, in the moody purple dawn, the young couple cannot shake the sense of something terribly wrong. As the hours pass, Molly and Neil listen to disturbing news of extreme weather phenomena across the globe. By nightfall, their little town loses all contact with the outside world. A thick fog transforms the once-friendly village into a ghostly labyrinth. And soon the Sloans and their neighbors will be forced to draw on reserves of courage and humanity they never knew they had. For within the misty gloom they will encounter something that reveals in a shattering instant what is happening to their world-something that is hunting them with ruthless efficiency.


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Acknowledged as “America’s most popular suspense novelist”(Rolling Stone ) and as one of today’s most celebrated and successful writers, Dean Koontz has earned the devotion of millions of readers around the world and the praise of critics everywhere for tales of character, mystery, and adventure that strike to the core of what it means to be human. Now he delivers the page-turner of the season, an unforgettable journey to the heart of darkness and to the pinnacle of grace, at once chilling and wickedly funny, a brilliantly observed chronicle of good and evil in our time, of illusion and everlasting truth. He’s Hollywood’s most dazzling star, whose flawless countenance inspires the worship of millions and fires the hatred of one twisted soul. His perfectly ordered existence is under siege as a series of terrifying, enigmatic “messages” breaches the exquisitely calibrated security systems of his legendary Bel Air estate.The boxes arrive mysteriously, one by one, at Channing Manheim’s fortified compound. The threat implicit in their bizarre, disturbing contents seems to escalate with each new delivery. Manheim’s security chief, ex-cop Ethan Truman, is used to looking beneath the surface of things. But until he entered the orbit of a Hollywood icon, he had no idea just how slippery reality could be. Now this good man is all that stands in the way of an insidious killer—and forces that eclipse the most fevered fantasies of a city where dreams and nightmares are the stuff of daily life. As a seemingly endless and ominous rain falls over southern California, Ethan will test the limits of perception and endurance in a world where the truth is as thin as celluloid and answers can be found only in the illusory intersection of shadow and light.Enter a world of marvelous invention, enchantment, and implacable intent, populated by murderous actors and the walking dead, hit men and heroes, long-buried dreams and never-dying hope. Here a magnificent mansion is presided over by a Scottish force of nature known as Mrs. McBee, before whom all men tremble. A mad French chef concocts feasts for the mighty and the malicious. Ming du Lac, spiritual adviser to the stars, has a direct line to the dead. An aptly named cop called Hazard will become Ethan’s ally, an anarchist will sow discord and despair, and a young boy named Fric, imprisoned by celebrity and loneliness, will hear a voice telling him of the approach of something unimaginably evil. Traversing this extraordinary landscape, Ethan will face the secrets of his own tragic past and the unmistakable premonition of his impending violent death as he races against time to solve the macabre riddles of a modern-day beast.A riveting tour de force of suspense, mystery, and miraculous revelation, The Face is that rare novel that entertains, provokes, and uplifts at the same time. It will make you laugh. It will give you chills. It will fill you with hope.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Dean Koontz has surpassed his longtime reputation as “America’s most popular suspense novelist”(*Rolling Stone*) to become one of the most celebrated and successful writers of our time. Reviewers hail his boundless originality, his art, his unparalleled ability to create highly textured, riveting drama, at once viscerally familiar and utterly unique. Author of one *#1 New York Times* bestseller after another, Koontz is at the pinnacle of his powers, spinning mysteries and miracles, enthralling tales that speak directly to today’s readers, balm for the heart and fire for the mind. In this stunning new novel, he delivers a tour de force of dark suspense and brilliant revelation that has all the Koontz trademarks: adventure, chills, riddles, humor, heartbreak, an unforgettable cast of characters, and a climax that will leave you clamoring for more.Dylan O’Connor is a gifted young artist just trying to do the right thing in life. He’s on his way to an arts festival in Santa Fe when he stops to get a room for himself and his twenty-year-old autistic brother, Shep. But in a nightmarish instant, Dylan is attacked by a mysterious “doctor,” injected with a strange substance, and told that he is now a carrier of something that will either kill him...or transform his life in the most remarkable way. Then he is told that he must flee--before the doctor’s enemies hunt him down for the secret circulating through his body. No one can help him, the doctor says, not even the police.Stunned, disbelieving, Dylan is turned loose to run for his life...and straight into an adventure that will turn the next twenty-four hours into an odyssey of terror, mystery--and wondrous discovery. It is a journey that begins when Dylan and Shep’s path intersects with that of Jillian Jackson. Before that evening Jilly was a beautiful comedian whose biggest worry was whether she would ever find a decent man. Now she too is a carrier. And even as Dylan tries to convince her that they’ll be safer sticking together, cold-eyed men in a threatening pack of black Suburbans approach, only seconds before Jilly’s classic Coupe DeVille explodes into thin air. Now the three are on the run together, but with no idea whom they’re running from--or why. Meanwhile Shep has begun exhibiting increasingly disturbing behavior. And whatever it is that’s coursing through their bodies seems to have plunged them into one waking nightmare after another. Seized by sinister premonitions, they find themselves inexplicably drawn to crime scenes--just minutes before the crimes take place. What this unfathomable power is, how they can use it to stop the evil erupting all around them, and why they have been chosen are only parts of a puzzle that reaches back into the tragic past and the dark secrets they all share: secrets of madness, pain, and untimely death. Perhaps the answer lies in the eerie, enigmatic messages that Shep, with precious time running out, begins to repeat, about an entity who does his work “by the light of the moon.”**By the Light of the Moon** is a novel of heart-stopping suspense and transcendent beauty, of how evil can destroy us and love can redeem us--a masterwork of the imagination in which the surprises come page after page and the spell of sublime storytelling triumphs throughout.


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In his new novella, UR, King is at his unsettling best as he examines the future of the written word - for better or worse. Following a nasty break-up, lovelorn college English instructor Wesley Smith can't seem to get his ex-girlfriend's parting shot out of his head: "Why can't you just read off the computer like the rest of us?" Egged on by her question and piqued by a student's suggestion, Wesley places an order for Amazon.com's Kindle eReader. The [pink?] device that arrives in a box stamped with the smile logo -via one-day delivery that he hadn't requested - unlocks a literary world that even the most avid of book lovers could never imagine. But once the door is open, there are those things that one hopes we'll never read or live through. Firm, gripping, and deftly written by a craftsman at the top of his game, this is King at his crisp, clear, page-turning best.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Hailed as “America’s most popular suspense novelist” (*Rolling Stone*) Dean Koontz has entered a rich new phase of his writing career that is yielding his most imaginative, meaningful, and popular work yet.At the height of his powers as a literary craftsman, he has won the acclaim of critics as well as the allegiance of millions of fans the world over, transforming the greatest fears and hopes of our time into masterworks of dazzling originality and emotional resonance.Now, with the stunning depth and virtuosity of his storytelling, he brings to readers one of his most gripping and richly imagined novels to date—an intoxicating story of adventure and suspense, mystery and revelation, told with humor, heart, and high art. **One Door Away From Heaven**In a dusty trailer park on the far edge of the California dream, Michelina Bellsong contemplates the choices she has made. At twenty-eight, she wants to change the direction of her troubled life but can’t find her way—until a new family settles into the rental trailer next door and she meets the young girl who will lead her on a remarkable quest that will change Micky herself and everything she knows—or thinks she knows—forever. Despite the brace she must wear on her deformed left leg, and her withered left hand, nine-year-old Leilani Klonk radiates a buoyant and indomitable spirit that inspires Micky. Beneath Leilani’s effervescence, however, Micky comes to sense a quiet desperation that the girl dares not express.Leilani’s mother is little more than a child herself. And the girl’s stepfather, Preston Maddoc, is educated but threatening. He has moved the family from place to place as he fanatically investigates UFO sightings, striving to make contact, claiming to have had a vision that by Leilani’s tenth birthday aliens will either heal her or take her away to a better life on their world.Slowly, ever more troubling details emerge in Leilani’s conversations with Micky. Most chilling is Micky’s discovery that Leilani had an older brother, also disabled, who vanished after Maddoc took him into the woods one night and is now “gone to the stars.”Leilani’s tenth birthday is approaching. Micky is convinced the girl will be dead by that day. While the child-protection bureaucracy gives Micky the runaround, the Maddoc family slips away into the night. Micky sets out across America to track and find them, alone and afraid but for the first time living for something bigger than herself.She finds herself pitted against an adversary, Preston Maddoc, as fearsome as he is cunning. The passion and disregard for danger with which Micky pursues her quest bring to her side a burned-out detective who joins her on a journey of incredible peril and startling discoveries, a journey through terrible darkness to unexpected light. **One Door Away From Heaven** is an incandescent mix of suspense and humor, fear and wonder, a story of redemption and timeless wisdom that will have readers cheering. Filled with tragedy and joy, with terror and hope, it solidifies Dean Koontz’s reputation as one of the foremost storytellers of our time. This is Dean Koontz at his very best—and it doesn’t get any better than that.*From the Hardcover edition.*


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**His birth was marked by wonder and tragedy.He sees beauty and terror beyond our deepest dreams.His story will change the way you see the world.**On the heels of his #1 bestseller **False Memory**, Dean Koontz brings together his most compelling themes and an unforgettable cast of characters to create what is perhaps the most thrilling and emotionally powerful work of his critically acclaimed career. Bartholomew Lampion is born on a day of tragedy and terror that will mark his family forever. All agree that his unusual eyes are the most beautiful they have ever seen. On this same day, a thousand miles away, a ruthless man learns that he has a mortal enemy named Bartholomew. He embarks on a relentless search to find this enemy, a search that will consume his life. And a girl is born from a brutal rape, her destiny mysteriously linked to Barty and the man who stalks him. At the age of three, Barty Lampion is blinded when surgeons remove his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer. As he copes with his blindness and proves to be a prodigy, his mother counsels him that all things happen for a reason and that every person’s life has an effect on every other person’s, in often unknowable ways. At thirteen, Bartholomew regains his sight. How he regains it, why he regains it, and what happens as his amazing life unfolds and entwines with others results in a breathtaking journey of courage, heart-stopping suspense, and high adventure.


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The runaway bestseller about the ultimate reality show The year is 2025. The Running Man is America's favorite television game show. Ben Richards is the program's latest contestant-and the Hunters' latest target in a rigged game of death...


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There are no rules in the dark, no place to feel safe, no escape from the shadows. But to save the day, you must...Seize the Night.

At no time does Moonlight Bay look more beautiful than at night. Yet it is precisely then that the secluded little town reveals its menace. Now children are disappearing. From their homes. From the streets. And there's nothing their families can do about it. Because in Moonlight Bay, the police work their hardest to conceal crimes and silence victims. No matter what happens in the night, their job is to ensure that nothing disturbs the peace and quiet of Moonlight Bay....

Christopher Snow isn't afraid of the dark. Forced to live in the shadows because of a rare genetic disorder, he knows the night world better than anyone. He believes the lost children are still alive and that their disappearance is connected to the town's most carefully kept, most ominous secret—a secret only he can uncover, a secret that will force him to confront an adversary at one with the most dangerous darkness of all. The darkness inside the human heart.


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Kristen Kroiter was sixteen, a high-school sophomore injured in a car accident. Dr. Ted Cogan saved her life when he treated her in the ER six months ago -- but now the police are questioning Cogan about her. What's going on; What has she told them; The problem is Kristen didn't tell the cops anything. She's dead -- an apparent suicide. But her diary suggests that she and the good doctor were intimate -- which puts the good doctor in a heap of trouble. Tense and twisting, Knife Music is the story of a doctor struggling to clear his name after being accused of raping and causing the suicide of a young girl. Pitted against Cogan is handicapped veteran detective Hank Madden, who tries to suppress his prejudices while investigating the case of a 43-year-old self-described womanizer.


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It's a fear more paralyzing than falling. More terrifying than absolute darkness. More horrifying than anything you can imagine. It's the one fear you cannot escape, no matter where you run...no matter where you hide.  It's the fear of yourself.  It's real.  It can happen to you.  And facing it can be deadly.False MemoryFear for your mind.


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Christopher Snow is different from all the other residents of Moonlight Bay, different from anyone you've ever met. For Christopher Snow has made his peace with a very rare genetic disorder that leaves him dangerously vulnerable to light. His life is filled with the fascinating rituals of one who must embrace the dark. He knows the night as no one else can -- its mystery, its beauty, its terrors, and the eerie silken rhythms that seduce one into believing anything -- even freedom -- is possible.

Until the night Christopher Snow witnesses a series of disturbing incidents that sweep him into a violent mystery only he can solve, a mystery that will force him to rise above all fears and confront the many-layered secrets of Moonlight Bay and its strange inhabitants. A place, like all places, that looks a lot different after dark.


If you think you've got it tough, meet Christopher Snow, the hero of Dean Koontz's novel Fear Nothing. Not only did his parents die under mysterious circumstances, but he's also being stalked by shadowy characters who want Snow to stop trying to find out how they died--or else they'll bump off his remaining loved ones (his supersmart, beer-lapping dog Orson; his best surfing buddy Bobby; and his late-night deejay girlfriend Sasha). And as if being on the lam in his own hometown, Moonlight Bay, California, isn't bad enough, Snow has to outrun his pursuers without leaving town. He has XP--xeroderma pigmentosum--a rare genetic affliction that forces him to avoid light. Cumulative exposure to sun, fluorescent lights, and the like will give him cancer eventually, and he doesn't dare leave the place where he's skillfully "done the mambo with melanoma" for all of his 28 years. Koontz makes the night-town of Moonlight Bay come alive in this sometimes pulse-pounding, sometimes funny, but mostly rather lyrical thriller. Fans of Koontz's legendary 1986 novel Watchers will love this book's similar theme: our hero and a loveable super-dog deal with a genetic engineering laboratory run amok. Horror fans will savor the evil mutant rhesus "millennium monkeys" who hunt Snow, the few scenes of eloquent gore, and the plight of certain mutating townsfolk who are, as they put it, "becoming" something very creepy. 

Koontz gives Snow and Bobby a lingo that does for surfer talk what Austin Powers did for the Swinging '60s, and his metaphors are almost as madcap as Tom Robbins's: "As the chains of the swinging light fixture torqued, the links twisted against one another with enough friction to cause an eerie ringing, as if lizard-eyed altar boys in blood-soaked cassocks and surplices were ringing the unmelodious bells of a satanic mass." Sometimes Koontz's style goes over the top and wipes out, surfer-style, but for the most part, Fear Nothing will have readers bellowing "Cowabunga!" 


YA-Christopher Snow understands the night. He, like the owl, is nocturnal, living on the mysterious darker edge of society. Snow is afflicted with xeroderma pigmentosum, a rare and often-fatal genetic disease that makes ultraviolet rays-even those from lamps and televisions-deadly. His condition makes him a pariah in the isolated small town of Moonlight Bay where the ignorant and insensitive fear what they do not know. As the action begins, Snow's father dies, leaving him with only a handful of offbeat but fiercely loyal friends to turn to for understanding. At the morgue, Snow accidentally witnesses his father's body being replaced with the mutilated corpse of a vagrant. Before he can find out what is behind this scandal, he receives a frantic summons from a friend who is brutally murdered before she can finish explaining a strange story about monkeys and a secret project at the government compound at the edge of town. What begins as a disturbing puzzle quickly becomes a sinister conspiracy as Snow uncovers evidence of uncanny intelligence in many of the local animals and inhumanely vicious tendencies in some of the human residents of the Bay. They are "becoming" he learns, but becoming what? Chilling chase scenes steadily increase the breakneck pace as Snow, assisted by his remarkable dog, is pursued through the night by unseen forces. Despite some clunky and unnecessary surfer slang, fans will go wild for this well-plotted thriller.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　Robin Deffendall, Prince William Public Library System, VA


Bantam brags that it is launching the biggest Koontz campaign ever with this thriller, whose protagonist lives by night (he has a genetic order that makes him highly sensitive to light) until he witnesses a murder.

  
length: (cm)17.8    　　　            　　　　　            　　　　　 width:(cm)10.7


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Throughout history, thinkers from mathematicians to theologians have pondered the mysterious relationship between numbers and the nature of reality. In this fascinating book, Mario Livio tells the tale of a number at the heart of that mystery: *phi*, or 1.6180339887...This curious mathematical relationship, widely known as "The Golden Ratio," was discovered by Euclid more than two thousand years ago because of its crucial role in the construction of the pentagram, to which magical properties had been attributed. Since then it has shown a propensity to appear in the most astonishing variety of places, from mollusk shells, sunflower florets, and rose petals to the shape of the galaxy. Psychological studies have investigated whether the Golden Ratio is the most aesthetically pleasing proportion extant, and it has been asserted that the creators of the Pyramids and the Parthenon employed it. It is believed to feature in works of art from Leonardo da Vinci's *Mona Lisa *to Salvador Dali's *The Sacrament of the Last Supper*, and poets and composers have used it in their works. It has even been found to be connected to the behavior of the stock market!*The Golden Ratio* is a captivating journey through art and architecture, botany and biology, physics and mathematics. It tells the human story of numerous phi-fixated individuals, including the followers of Pythagoras who believed that this proportion revealed the hand of God; astronomer Johannes Kepler, who saw phi as the greatest treasure of geometry; such Renaissance thinkers as mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa; and such masters of the modern world as Goethe, Cezanne, Bartok, and physicist Roger Penrose.  Wherever his quest for the meaning of phi takes him, Mario Livio reveals the world as a place where order, beauty, and eternal mystery will always coexist.*From the Hardcover edition.*


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**A rising star in theoretical physics offers his awesome vision of our universe and beyond, all beginning with a simple question: Why does time move forward?**



 Time moves forward, not backward-everyone knows you can't unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today's hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too. In *From Eternity to Here*, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions *before* the Big Bang itself-a period modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed. Increasingly, though, physicists are going out into realms that make the theory of relativity seem like child's play. Carroll's scenario is not only elegant, it's laid out in the same easy-to- understand language that has made his group blog, Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Net.



 *From Eternity to Here* uses ideas at the cutting edge of theoretical physics to explore how properties of spacetime before the Big Bang can explain the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family of universes in which many of our siblings experience an arrow of time running in the opposite direction. It's an ambitious, fascinating picture of the universe on an ultra-large scale, one that will captivate fans of popular physics blockbusters like *Elegant Universe* and *A Brief History of Time*.


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**Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact**



In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design," there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned-the *evidence*, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection. Even Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould, while extolling the beauty of evolution and examining case studies, have not focused on the evidence itself. Yet the proof is vast, varied, and magnificent, drawn from many different fields of science. Scientists are observing species splitting into two and are finding more and more fossils capturing change in the past-dinosaurs that have sprouted feathers, fish that have grown limbs.



 *Why Evolution Is True* weaves together the many threads of modern work in genetics, paleontology, geology, molecular biology, and anatomy that demonstrate the "indelible stamp" of the processes first proposed by Darwin. In crisp, lucid prose accessible to a wide audience, *Why Evolution Is True* dispels common misunderstandings and fears about evolution and clearly confirms that this amazing process of change has been firmly established as a scientific truth.


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**Bestselling author T. R. Reid guides a whirlwind tour of successful health care systems worldwide, revealing possible paths toward U.S. reform.**



 In *The Healing of America, New York Times* bestselling author T. R. Reid shows how all the other industrialized democracies have achieved something the United States can't seem to do: provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost.



 In his global quest to find a possible prescription, Reid visits wealthy, free market, industrialized democracies like our own-including France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and Canada-where he finds inspiration in example. Reid shares evidence from doctors, government officials, health care experts, and patients the world over, finding that foreign health care systems give everybody quality care at an affordable cost. And that dreaded monster "socialized medicine" turns out to be a myth. Many developed countries provide universal coverage with private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance.



 In addition to long-established systems, Reid also studies countries that have carried out major health care reform. The first question facing these countries-and the United States, for that matter-is an ethical issue: Is health care a human right? Most countries have already answered with a resolute yes, leaving the United States in the murky moral backwater with nations we typically think of as far less just than our own.



 *The Healing of America* lays bare the moral question at the heart of our troubled system, dissecting the misleading rhetoric surrounding the health care debate. Reid sees problems elsewhere, too: He finds poorly paid doctors in Japan, endless lines in Canada, mistreated patients in Britain, spartan facilities in France. Still, all the other rich countries operate at a lower cost, produce better health statistics, and cover everybody. In the end, *The Healing of America* is a good news book: It finds models around the world that Americans can borrow to guarantee health care for everybody who needs it.


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**An accessible look at the hottest topic in physics and the experiments that will transform our understanding of the universe**    

    The biggest news in science today is the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle-smasher, and the anticipation of finally discovering the Higgs boson particle. But what is the Higgs boson and why is it often referred to as the God Particle? Why are the Higgs and the LHC so important? Getting a handle on the science behind the LHC can be difficult for anyone without an advanced degree in particle physics, but you don't need to go back to school to learn about it. In *Collider*, award-winning physicist Paul Halpern provides you with the tools you need to understand what the LHC is and what it hopes to discover.            Comprehensive, accessible guide to the theory, history, and science behind experimental high-energy physics      Explains why particle physics could well be on the verge of some of its greatest breakthroughs, changing what we think we know about quarks, string theory, dark matter, dark energy, and the fundamentals of modern physics      Tells you why the theoretical Higgs boson is often referred to as the God particle and how its discovery could change our understanding of the universe      Clearly explains why fears that the LHC could create a miniature black hole that could swallow up the Earth amount to a tempest in a very tiny teapot      "Best of 2009 Sci-Tech Books (Physics)"*-Library Journal*      "Halpern makes the search for mysterious particles pertinent and exciting by explaining clearly what we don't know about the universe, and offering a hopeful outlook for future research."-*Publishers Weekly*      Includes a new author preface, "The Fate of the Large Hadron Collider and the Future of High-Energy Physics"          

    The world will not come to an end any time soon, but we may learn a lot more about it in the blink of an eye. Read *Collider* and find out what, when, and how.


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A catastrophic, unexplainable plane crash leaves three hundred and thirty dead -- no survivors. Among the victims are the wife and two daughters of Joe Carpenter, a Los Angeles Post crime reporter.A year after the crash, still gripped by an almost paralyzing grief, Joe encounters a woman named Rose, who claims to have survived the crash. She holds out the possibility of a secret that will bring Joe peace of mind. But before he can ask any questions, she slips away.Driven now by rage (have the authorities withheld information?) and a hope almost as unbearable as his grief (if there is one survivor, are there others?), Joe sets out to find the mysterious woman. His search immediately leads him into the path of a powerful and shadowy organization hell-bent on stopping Rose before she can reveal what she knows about the crash.Sole Survivor unfolds at a heart-stopping pace, as a desperate chase and a shattering emotional odyssey lead Joe to a truth that will force him to reassess everything he thought he knew about life and death -- a truth that, given the chance, will rock the world and redefine the destiny of humanity.From the Trade Paperback edition.


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**Now with a new afterword by the #1 *NEW YORK TIMES* BESTSELLING AUTHOR... And a brand-new package.**



 In the privacy of her own home, and against her will, Susan Harris will experience an inconceivable act of terror. She will become the object of the ultimate computer's consuming obsession: to learn everything there is to know about human flesh.


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Tommy Phan is a successful detective novelist, living the American Dream in southern California. One evening he comes home to find a small rag doll on his doorstep. It's a simple doll, covered entirely in white cloth, with crossed black stitches for the eyes and mouth, and another pair forming an X over the heart. Curious, he brings it inside.  That night, Tommy hears an odd popping sound and looks up to see the stitches breaking over the doll's heart. And in minutes the fabric of Tommy Phan's reality will be torn apart. Something terrifying emerges from the pristine white cloth, something that will follow Tommy wherever he goes. Something that he can't destroy. It wants Tommy's life and he doesn't know why. He has only one ally, a beautiful, strangely intuitive waitress he meets by chance--or by a design far beyond his comprehension. He has too many questions, no answers, and very little time. Because the vicious and demonically clever doll has left this warning on Tommy's computer screen: The deadline is dawn.**Ticktock**Time is running out.


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Garnering comparisons to Anne Rivers Siddons and Pat Conroy, Patti Callahan Henry has woven her lyrical Southern voice throughout the Lowcountry landscape. Now, as two women from opposite sides of the same sea meet, a tale unfolds that will draw readers into the heart's remembrances-and the tender awakenings of first love. 

 Though bogged down in the stress of planning her elaborate wedding to a professional golfer, twenty-seven-year-old Kara Larson still makes time to visit ninety-six-year-old Maeve Mahoney at her nursing home. And as Maeve recounts the rambling story of her first love back in Ireland, Kara is driven to remember her own first love: childhood neighbor Jack Sullivan.


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IN THE CHAOS-INFESTED Sabbat
Worlds, Imperial Commissar Gaunt
must lead his men through as mich
in-fighting amongst rival regiments as
against the heretical forces of Chaos.
First and Only is an epic saga of
planetary conquest, grand ambition,
treachery and honour.


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Past midnight, Chyna Shepherd, twenty- six, gazed out a moonlit window, unable to sleep on her first night in the Napa Valley home of her best friend's family.  Instinct proves reliable.  A murderous sociopath, Edgler Forman Vess, has entered the house, intent on killing everyone inside.  A self-proclaimed "homicidal adventure," Vess lives only to satisfy all appetites as they arise, to immense himself in sensation, to live without fear, remorse or limits, to live with intensity.  Chyna is trapped in his deadly orbit.

Chyna is a survivor, toughened by a lifelong struggle for safety and self-respect.  Now she will be tested as never before.  At first her sole aim is to get out alive-until, by chance, she learns the identity of Vess's next intended victim, a faraway innocent only she can save.  Driven by a newly discovered thirst for meaning beyond mere self-preservation, Chyna musters every inner resource she has to save an endangered girl—as moment by moment, the terrifying threat Edgler Foreman Vess intensifies.


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Tom Bissell is a prizewinning writer who published three widely acclaimed books before the age of thirty-four. He is also an obsessive gamer who has spent untold hours in front of his various video game consoles, playing titles such as *Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, BioShock, *and* Oblivion* for, literally, days. If you are reading this flap copy, the same thing can probably be said of you, or of someone you know. Until recently, Bissell was somewhat reluctant to admit to his passion for games. In this, he is not alone. Millions of adults spend hours every week playing video games, and the industry itself now reliably outearns Hollywood. But the wider culture seems to regard video games as, at best, well designed if mindless entertainment. *Extra Lives* is an impassioned defense of this assailed and misunderstood art form. Bissell argues that we are in a golden age of gaming—but he also believes games could be even better. He offers a fascinating and often hilarious critique of the ways video games dazzle and, just as often, frustrate. Along the way, we get firsthand portraits of some of the best minds (Jonathan Blow, Clint Hocking, Cliff Bleszinski, Peter Molyneux) at work in video game design today, as well as a shattering and deeply moving final chapter that describes, in searing detail, Bissell’s descent into the world of *Grand Theft Auto IV*, a game whose themes mirror his own increasingly self-destructive compulsions. Blending memoir, criticism, and first-rate reportage, *Extra Lives* is like no other book on the subject ever published. Whether you love video games, loathe video games, or are merely curious about why they are becoming the dominant popular art form of our time, *Extra Lives* is required reading.


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A riveting exploration of the most difficult and important part of what doctors do, by Yale School of Medicine physician Dr. Lisa Sanders, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column "Diagnosis," the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D. "The experience of being ill can be like waking up in a foreign country. Life, as you formerly knew it, is on hold while you travel through this other world as unknown as it is unexpected. When I see patients in the hospital or in my office who are suddenly, surprisingly ill, what they really want to know is, What is wrong with me? They want a road map that will help them manage their new surroundings. The ability to give this unnerving and unfamiliar place a name, to know it on some level, restores a measure of control, independent of whether or not that diagnosis comes attached to a cure. Because, even today, a diagnosis is frequently all a good doctor has to offer. A healthy young man suddenly loses his memory, making him unable to remember the events of each passing hour. Two patients diagnosed with Lyme disease improve after antibiotic treatment, only to have their symptoms mysteriously return. A young woman lies dying in the ICU, bleeding, jaundiced, incoherent, and none of her doctors know what is killing her. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of solving these and other diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis. Never in human history have doctors had the knowledge, the tools, and the skills that they have today to diagnose illness and disease. And yet mistakes are made, diagnoses missed, symptoms or tests misunderstood. In this high-tech world of modern medicine, Sanders shows us that knowledge, while essential, is not sufficient to unravel the complexities of illness. She presents an unflinching look inside the detective story that marks nearly every illness, the diagnosis, revealing the combination of uncertainty and intrigue that doctors face when confronting patients who are sick or dying. Through dramatic stories of patients with baffling symptoms, Sanders portrays the absolute necessity and surprising difficulties of getting the patient's story, the challenges of the physical exam, the pitfalls of doctor-to-doctor communication, the vagaries of tests, and the near calamity of diagnostic errors. In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Sanders chronicles the real-life drama of doctors solving these difficult medical mysteries that not only illustrate the art and science of diagnosis, but often save the patients' lives.


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One of the most popular and prolific writers of our time, Dean Koontz has penned many classic New York Times bestsellers, but nothing quite like this. STRANGE HIGHWAYS is Koontz's  spellbinding  collection of tales interconnected by the strange highways of human experience-the adventures, terrors, failures, and  triumphs encountered on the roads that are chosen, and on those detoured by fate. As profound as it is mesmerizing, STRANGE HIGHWAYS is a remarkable achievement.


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This collection of (surprise!) six stories was a trade paperback published in a limited number (1000) by King's own Philtrum Press. The stories are:
"Lunch at the Gotham Cafe"
"L.T.'s Theory of Pets" 
"Luckey Quarter"
"Autopsy Room Four" 
"Blind Willie" 
"The Man in the Black Suit"


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More than 100 pages of new, cutting-edge content. Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint. This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches: •How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week•How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want•How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs•How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist•How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”The new expanded edition of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek includes:•More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point•Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating e-mail, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than $8 a meal•How Lifestyle Design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times•The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either


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Pavek of Urik, templar of Hamanu and lower-level bureaucrat, has grown accustomed to the benefits of his station. Neither aggressive nor rebellious, he accepts his position, follows orders, and doesn't usually ask questions. Then one day he uncovers a far-reaching conspiracy that permeates all of Urik, even the ranks of his templar superiors, and now he is on the run. Forced to flee the comforts of his station, Pavek must take to the desert in search of a new way of life and a new system of beliefs, or meet death in the blood-soaked alleys of Urik at the hands of those he used to trust.


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ULLSAARD HAS CONQUERED THE KNOWN WORLD. 

All have fallen before his armies.

Now it's time to take the long journey home, back to the revered heart of the great Empire he had helped create for his distant masters. But when he returns to the capital, life there is so very different from what he had believed. Could it be that everything he has fought for, has conquered and killed for, has been a lie?


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A gripping new series combines Steampunk, spying, and a fantastic Victorian London.The mysterious Mr. Socrates rescues Modo, a child in a traveling freak show. Modo is a hunchback with an amazing ability to transform his appearance, and Mr. Socrates raises him in isolation as an agent for the Permanent Association, a spy agency behind Brittania’s efforts to rule the empire. At 14, Modo is left on the streets of London to fend for himself. When he encounters Octavia Milkweed, another Association agent, the two uncover a plot by the Clockword Guild behind the murders of important men. Furthermore, a mad scientist is turning orphan children into automatons to further the goals of the Guild. Modo and Octavia journey deep into the tunnels under London and discover a terrifying plot against the British government. It’s up to them to save their country.


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'You've never heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard?' said Ron incredulously. 'You're kidding, right?' (From Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)  Published by the charity Lumos in association with Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, The Tales of Beedle the Bard is the first new book from J. K. Rowling since the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The Tales of Beedle the Bard played a crucial role in assisting Harry, with his friends Ron and Hermione, to finally defeat Lord Voldemort. Fans will be thrilled to have this opportunity to read the tales in full. An exciting addition to the canon of Harry Potter, the tales reveal the wonderful versatility of the author, as she tackles with relish the structure and varying tones of a classic fairy tale. There are five tales: 'The Tale of the Three Brothers', recounted in Deathly Hallows, plus 'The Fountain of Fair Fortune', 'The Warlock's Hairy Heart', 'The Wizard and the Hopping Pot', and 'Babbitty Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump'. Each has its own magical character and will bring delight, laughter and the thrill of mortal peril.  Translated from the original runes by Hermione Granger, the tales are introduced and illustrated by J. K. Rowling. Also included are notes by Professor Albus Dumbledore, which appear by kind permission of the Hogwarts Headmasters' Archive.  Lumos is a charity founded by J. K. Rowling which aims to make life better for disadvantaged children.  Registered Charity Number: 1112575.


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Presents facsimile editions of two books from the world of Harry Potter--the text for Hogwarts' Care of Magical Creatures class and a book on the origins and development of the wizarding game of Quidditch.


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Bakha is a young man, proud and even attractive, yet none the less he is an outcast in India's caste system: an Untouchable. In deceptively simple prose this groundbreaking novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into - and comes to an unexpected conclusion. Mulk Raj Anand poured a vitality, fire and richness of detail into his controversial work, which led him to be acclaimed as his country's Charles Dickens and one of the twentieth century's most important Indian writers.


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Percentile is destiny in America.”So says Walter Kirn, a peerless observer and interpreter of American life, in this whip-smart memoir of his own long strange trip through American education. Working his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings, Kirn launched himself eastward from his rural Minnesota hometown to the ivy-covered campus of Princeton University. There he found himself not in a temple of higher learning so much as an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature classes was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and actual reading of the books under consideration was optional. Just on the other side of the “bell curve's leading edge” loomed a complete psychic collapse.LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY* *reckons up the costs of a system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American meritocracy. Every American who has spent years of his or her life there will experience many shocks of recognition while reading Walter Kirn’s sharp, rueful, and often funny book—and likely a sense of liberation at its end.


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**A remarkable portrait of American food before World War II, presented by the *New York Times*-bestselling author of *Cod* and *Salt*.**



 Award-winning *New York Times*-bestselling author Mark Kurlansky takes us back to the food and eating habits of a younger America: Before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities, the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it.



 In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers' Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called "America Eats," was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed.



 *The Food of a Younger Land* unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky's brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country's roots.



 From New York automats to Georgia Coca-Cola parties, from Arkansas possum-eating clubs to Puget Sound salmon feasts, from Choctaw funerals to South Carolina barbecues, the WPA writers found Americans in their regional niches and eating an enormous diversity of meals. From Mississippi chittlins to Indiana persimmon puddings, Maine lobsters, and Montana beavertails, they recorded the curiosities, commonalities, and communities of American food.


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Recording the adventures of Sherlock Holmes as he travelled in Tibet with Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, this novel follows Holmes's brush with the Great Game, with Colonel Creighton, Lurgan Sahib and the world of Kim.


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Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war -- and the protests against it -- had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts in Atlantis, King's newest fiction, is composed of five interconnected, sequential narratives, set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War.

In Part One, "Low Men in Yellow Coats," eleven-year-old Bobby Garfield discovers a world of predatory malice in his own neighborhood. He also discovers that adults are sometimes not rescuers but at the heart of the terror.

In the title story, a bunch of college kids get hooked on a card game, discover the possibility of protest...and confront their own collective heart of darkness, where laughter may be no more than the thinly disguised cry of the beast.

In "Blind Willie" and "Why We're in Vietnam," two men who grew up with Bobby in suburban Connecticut try to fill the emptiness of the post-Vietnam era in an America which sometimes seems as hollow -- and as haunted -- as their own lives.

And in "Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling," this remarkable book's denouement, Bobby returns to his hometown where one final secret, the hope of redemption, and his heart's desire may await him.

Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart, Stephen King's new book will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.


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**The extraordinary new Joe Pickett novel from the Edgar Award-winning author.**

"Box's series is the gold standard," wrote *Library Journal* about *Below Zero*, but never has he written a novel as harrowing as Nowhere to Run.

Joe Pickett's in his last week as the temporary game warden in the town of Baggs, Wyoming, but there have been strange things going on in the mountains, and his conscience won't let him leave without checking them out: reports of camps looted, tents slashed, elk butchered. And then there's the runner who simply vanished one day. Joe doesn't mind admitting that the farther he rides, the more he wishes he could just turn around and go home. And he is right to be concerned. Because what awaits him is like nothing he's ever dealt with, like something out of an old story, except this is all too real and too deadly. When he'd first saddled up, he'd thought of this as his last patrol. What he hadn't known was just how accurate that thought might turn out to be.


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Acclaimed authors Holly Black (Ironside)and Cecil Castellucci (Boy Proof) have united in geekdom to edit short stories from some of the best selling and most promising geeks in young adult literature: M.T. Anderson, Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, John Green, Tracy Lynn, Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith, David Levithan, Kelly Link, Barry Lyga, Wendy Mass, Garth Nix, Scott Westerfield, Lisa Yee, and Sara Zarr.With illustrated interstitials from comic book artists Hope Larson and Bryan Lee O'Malley, Geektastic covers all things geeky, from Klingons and Jedi Knights to fan fiction, theater geeks, and cosplayers. Whether you're a former, current, or future geek, or if you just want to get in touch with your inner geek, Geektastic will help you get your geek on!


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James Herbert transcends the horror medium with '48, a blistering tale of post-World War II London overrun with fear and blood. Delivering not only terrifying imagery, but pulse-pounding action and historical adventure, it is destined to become a classic.It is a London Too Terrifying to Imagine. Already crippled by the relentless Nazi bombing, this once-beautiful city has been depopulated by a hideous blood plague unleashed in the final convulsive collapse of the German regime. Now, human vampires wander the rubble-strewn streets, desperately searching for the only thing that can cure them...But not all survivors have been afflicted, and Hoke -- a lone hero accompanied only by his trusty dog and bitter memories -- is relentlessly pursued for the clean blood that courses through his veins. Yet his flight soon takes on a different meaning as he saves two women and a former German soldier. Banding together, they flee into the city's underground tunnels where an unexpected betrayal that delivers them right into the hands of their deadly adversaries prompts Hoke to take a stand against these monsters once and for all."With '48, James Herbert delivers another triumphant thriller that blends two-fisted action with the supernatural". -- Douglas E. Winter


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**"A superbly creepy, twisty thriller about obsessive love, psychological torture, and the darkest chambers of the human heart." 

 -*The Times* (UK) ** 



 Naomi Jenkins knows all about secrets: three years ago something so terrible happened to her that she's never told anyone about it. Now, Naomi has another secret: her relationship with the unhappily married Robert Haworth. When Robert vanishes without explanation, Naomi knows he must have come to harm. But the police are less convinced, particularly when Robert's wife insists he is not missing. In desperation, Naomi decides that if she can't persuade the detectives that Robert is in danger, she'll convince them that he is a danger to others. Naomi knows how to describe the actions of a psychopath; all she needs to do is dig up her own traumatic past.


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Sometimes it takes a leap of faith in order to soar . . .    

A gifted teacher, Lily Robinson adores her students, but fiercely guards her independent lifestyle. Deep inside, she is afraid of loving too deeply for fear of getting hurt. Only her best friend, Crystal, has ever been able to get close. Now an unthinkable tragedy has drawn Lily into the shattered lives of Crystal's family -- a family that suddenly needs her.    

Sean McGuire is a rolling stone used to living in the shadow of his famous brother, Derek. He's made his own way in life, playing by his own rules. Then one April night everything changes when a fatal car crash orphans Derek and Crystal's three children. In an instant, Sean finds himself in the role of guardian.    

Sean and Lily are brought together by tragedy, joined in their grief and their mutual love for these children. But raising three kids is a monumental job, and Sean realizes he's in over his head. And though Lily has been the unofficial aunt to these children since they were born, planting emotional roots means taking risks -- and Lily's not sure she can.    

The ups and downs of love and family life can be a roller-coaster ride -- thrilling, unpredictable and downright terrifying, yet filled with incredible delight. and Sean and Lily are about to discover the possibilities that make everything seem worthwhile -- a future filled with hope, happiness and the certainty that trusting love is the best choice of all.    

Susan Wiggs is the acclaimed, bestselling author of many poignant, unforgettable novels, including *Summer by the Sea*, *The Ocean Between Us* and *Home Before Dark*. she lives with her husband and daughter on an island in the Pacific Northwest, where she is currently at work on her next novel.


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It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.It begins with a murder.And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself.Lededje Y'breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture.Benevolent, enlightened and almost infinitely resourceful though it may be, the Culture can only do so much for any individual. With the assistance of one of its most powerful - and arguably deranged - warships, Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone not even sure which side the Culture is really on. A war - brutal, far-reaching - is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead, and it's about to erupt into reality.It started in the realm of the Real and that is where it will end. It will touch countless lives and affect entire civilizations, but at the center of it all is a young woman whose need for revenge masks another motive altogether. SURFACE DETAIL is Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel, a breathtaking achievement from a writer whose body of work is without parallel in the modern history of science fiction.


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The prizewinning author of The Outcast delivers the emotionally searing story of a marriage in crisis, an unflinching look at lives irrevocably altered by one of history's ""small wars."" Hal Treherne is a major in the British Army, a young and dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. When he is transferred to the British colony of Cyprus in 1956, Hal is joined by Clara, his beautiful and supportive wife, and their baby daughters. The Trehernes quickly learn that the Mediterranean is no ""sunshine posting,"" however, and soon Hal is caught up in the battle to defend the island against Cypriots seeking enosis, union with Greece. Leading his men in difficult and bloody skirmishes, after years of peaceful service, Hal at last tastes triumph. But his confidence and pride quickly fade: traumatized by the brutality he witnesses-and thwarted again in his attempts to do the right thing-Hal finds himself well trained in duty but ill equipped for moral battle. A seasoned army wife, Clara shares her husband's sense of obligation. She knows to settle in quickly, make no fuss, smile. But as she struggles to trust her own maternal instincts and resist the anxiety that surges with Hal's frequent absences, Clara grows fearful of her increasingly distant husband. When she needs him most, Clara finds the once-tender Hal a changed man-a betrayal that is only part of the shocking personal crisis to come. What place is there for honor amid cruelty, and what becomes of intimacy in the grinding gears of empire? A passionate and brilliantly researched novel about the effects of war on the men who wage it and the families they leave behind, Small Wars raises important questions that resonate for our own time.


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“CARRION COMFORT is one of the three greatest horror novels of the 20th century. Simple as that.” --**Stephen King**



"Epic in scale and scope but intimately disturbing, CARRION COMFORT spans the ages to rewrite history and tug at the very fabric of reality. A nightmarish chronicle of predator and prey that will shatter your world view forever.  A true classic." --**Guillermo del Toro**

"CARRION COMFORT* *is one of the scariest books ever written.  Whenever I get the question asked *Who's your favorite author? *my answer is always Dan Simmons." --**James Rollins**

"One of the few major reinventions of the vampire concept, on a par with Jack Finney’s *Invasion of the Body Snatchers*, Richard Matheson’s *I Am Legend*, and Stephen King’s *Salem’s Lot*. --**David Morrell**

THE PAST...  Caught behind the lines of Hitler’s Final Solution, Saul Laski is one of the multitudes destined to die in the notorious Chelmno extermination camp.  Until he rises to meet his fate and finds himself face to face with an evil far older, and far greater, than the Nazi’s themselves…

THE PRESENT...  Compelled by the encounter to survive at all costs, so begins a journey that for Saul will span decades and cross continents, plunging into the darkest corners of 20th century history to reveal a secret society of beings who may often exist behind the world's most horrible and violent events.  Killing from a distance, and by darkly manipulative proxy, they are people with the psychic ability to 'use' humans: read their minds, subjugate them to their wills, experience through their senses, feed off their emotions, force them to acts of unspeakable aggression.  Each year, three of the most powerful of this hidden order meet to discuss their ongoing campaign of induced bloodshed and deliberate destruction.  But this reunion, something will go terribly wrong. Saul’s quest is about to reach its elusive object, drawing hunter and hunted alike into a struggle that will plumb the depths of mankind’s attraction to violence, and determine the future of the world itself…


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Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north.  But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned to the majestic city of Sky.  There, to her shock, Yeine is named an heiress to the king.  But the throne of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is not easily won, and Yeine is thrust into a vicious power struggle with cousins she never knew she had.  As she fights for her life, she draws ever closer to the secrets of her mother's death and her family's bloody history.With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Yeine will learn how perilous it can be when love and hate - and gods and mortals - are bound inseparably together.


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When Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont’s back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won’t let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret–a story that leads her far from her old life, and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her. 

In a tale that travels between the Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century, between Jay Gatsby’s Long Island and rural New England, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian has written his most extraordinary novel yet.


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#1New York Timesbestselling author Vince Flynn returns with yet another explosive thriller, introducing the young Mitch Rapp, as he takes on his first assignment.Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terroristrs"s worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world . . . and then tragedy struck.Two decades of cutthroat, partisan politics has left the CIA and the country in an increasingly vulnerable position. Cold War veteran and CIA Operations Director Thomas Stansfield knows he must prepare his people for the next war. The rise of Islamic terrorism is coming, and it needs to be met abroad before it reaches America's shores. Stansfield directs his protEacute;Eacute;, Irene Kennedy, and his old Cold War colleague, Stan Hurley, to form a new group of clandestine operatives who will work outside the normal chain of command-men who do not exist. What type of man is willing to kill for his country without putting on a uniform? Kennedy finds him in the wake of the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack. Two-hundred and seventy souls perished that cold December night, and thousands of family and friends were left searching for comfort. Mitch Rapp was one of them, but he was not interested in comfort. He wanted retribution.Six months of intense training has prepared him to bring the war to the enemy's doorstep, and he does so with brutal efficiency. Rapp starts in Istanbul, where he assassinates the Turkish arms dealer who sold the explosives used in the Pan Am attack. Rapp then moves onto Hamburg with his team and across Europe, leaving a trail of bodies. All roads lead to Beirut, though, and what Rapp doesnrs"t know is that the enemy is aware of his existence and has prepared a trap. The hunter is about to become the hunted, and Rapp will need every ounce of skill and cunning if he is to survive the war-ravaged city and its various terrorist factions.As action-packed, fast-paced, and brutally realistic as it gets, Flynn's latest page-turner shows readers how it all began. Behind then; steely gazen of the nation's ultimate hero is a young man primed to become an American Assassin.


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Sara Douglass has won leagues of fans worldwide for her epic tales of sorcery, forbidden love, and heart-pounding action. She revealed her biggest story yet with the DarkGlass Mountain saga, and now, at last, the dramatic finale to the epic trilogy!  Tencendor is no more. The land is gone. But a few SunSoars still remain, and a new foe walks the world.  Ishbel Brunelle, priestess of the Serpent Coil, and Maximilian, the Lord of Elcho Falling, have raised the magic of Elcho Falling, and found new allies against the darkness in the mysterious Lealfast. And more crucially still, Axis SunSoar, former god and current hero, has rediscovered the magical Star Dance and revived his legendary Strike Force to push back the evil hordes commanded by the DarkGlass Mountain.  But their enemy grows stronger through blood and betrayal, the Lealfast have their own agenda, and when unexpected treachery threatens, Axis SunSoar must face a darkness greater than any he has ever known.


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SUMMARY:
A fantastical reimagining of the American West which draws its influence from steampunk, the American western tradition, and magical realismThe world is only half made. What exists has been carved out amidst a war between two rival factions: the Line, paving the world with industry and claiming its residents as slaves; and the Gun, a cult of terror and violence that cripples the population with fear. The only hope at stopping them has seemingly disappeared—the Red Republic that once battled the Gun and the Line, and almost won. Now they’re just a myth, a bedtime story parents tell their children, of hope. To the west lies a vast, uncharted world, inhabited only by the legends of the immortal and powerful Hill People, who live at one with the earth and its elements. Liv Alverhyusen, a doctor of the new science of psychology, travels to the edge of themade world to a spiritually protected mental institution in order to study the minds of those broken by the Gun and the Line. In its rooms lies an old general of the Red Republic, a man whose shattered mind just may hold the secret to stopping the Gun and the Line. And either side will do anything to understand how.


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SUMMARY:
For centuries, emperors, historians, and even the Vatican have tried to locate Ivan the Terrible’s magnificent Library of Gold — a long-missing archive containing gold-covered, bejeweled books dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks.  Now one of the volumes, The Book of Spies, has surfaced, and along with it the highly secret book club that owns the Library of Gold.  They form a cabal of the globe’s most powerful men – men who will do anything to achieve their aims and protect their interests.  When the CIA discovers a connection between the legendary library and a bank account linked to terrorists, they turn to rare books curator Eva Blake for help.  Soon an attempt is made on Eva’s life. Determined not only to survive but to uncover the truth, Eva turns to the only person she can trust—Judd Ryder, a former intelligence agent with his own agenda and a troubled past.  Together, Judd and Eva embark on an international adventure from London to Rome, Istanbul, and Athens.  Somehow they must do what no one else has been able to do – find the library and stay alive.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

**A car crashes in Wyoming:** A young mother is thrown clear of the devastating car crash. Dazed, she sees a figure pull her infant son from the flames. Or does she? The police believe it's a case of trauma playing cruel tricks on the mind, until the night the grief-stricken woman hears a voice through the phone: "Your baby is alive."

**A bomb explodes in a Rio de Janeiro café:** The heinous act kills ten people, including two journalists with the World Press Alliance news agency. Jack Gannon's first international assignment is to find out whether his colleagues were innocent victims or targets who got too close to a huge story.

**A Caribbean cruise ends in horror:** Doctors are desperate to identify the mysterious cause of a cruise ship passenger's agonizing death. They turn to the world's top scientists, who fear that someone has resurrected their long-buried secret research. Research that is now being used as a deadly weapon.

With millions of lives at stake, experts work frantically against time. And as an anguished mother searches for her child and Jack Gannon pursues the truth, an unstoppable force hurls them all into the panic zone.


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Tracy Waterhouse leads a quiet, ordered life as a retired police detective-a life that takes a surprising turn when she encounters Kelly Cross, a habitual offender, dragging a young child through town. Both appear miserable and better off without each other-or so decides Tracy, in a snap decision that surprises herself as much as Kelly. Suddenly burdened with a small child, Tracy soon learns her parental inexperience is actually the least of her problems, as much larger ones loom for her and her young charge. Meanwhile, Jackson Brodie, the beloved detective of novels such as Case Histories , is embarking on a different sort of rescue-that of an abused dog. Dog in tow, Jackson is about to learn, along with Tracy, that no good deed goes unpunished.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

***“Smart, scathing, and verbally inventive to an astonishing degree, David J. Schow is one of the most interesting writers of his generation.”—Peter Straub 



***“Inter-what?” When advertising executive Conrad Maddox returns from a redeye flight and finds a mysterious locker key waiting in his rental car, he discovers a briefcase loaded with guns and money. Several hours later, his entire life tumbles down a rabbit hole when he meets Dandine, owner of the case and former contract assassin for a shadowy organization called Norco, which is now out to nail both of them. 

“Internecine” means conflict, mutual destruction, and slaughter—or, as Dandine tells Conrad, they are now inadvertently at play in a field of “terrorism, counter-assassination, military coups, dirty tricks, Watergate, spy vs. spy, murky secret organizations, that sort of thing.” A world in which being innocent can’t save you, the police can’t help you, and your only hope of getting out alive is to risk unheard-of dangers against opponents with nearly unlimited power. To free themselves from the spider web of black ops, murder, madness and betrayal, Dandine and Conrad must delve ever-deeper into the spiraling, dangerous maze that is Norco, where everyone seems to be in on the most lethal of games…except you.


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You had better shove this in the stove," Mark Twain said at the top of an 1865 letter to his brother, "for I don't want any absurd 'literary remains' and 'unpublished letters of Mark Twain' published after I am planted." He was joking, of course. But when Mark Twain died in 1910, he left behind the largest collection of personal papers created by any nineteenth-century American author.   Here, for the first time in book form, are twenty-four remarkable pieces by the American master—pieces that have been handpicked by Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. In "Jane Austen," Twain wonders if Austen's goal is to "make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters." "The Privilege of the Grave" offers a powerful statement about the freedom of speech while "Happy Memories of the Dental Chair" will make you appreciate modern dentistry. In "Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture" Twain plasters the city with ads to promote his talk at the Cooper Union (he is terrified no one will attend). Later that day, Twain encounters two men gazing at one of his ads. One man says to the other: "Who is Mark Twain?" The other responds: "God knows—I don't."   Wickedly funny and disarmingly relevant, Who Is Mark Twain? shines a new light on one of America's most beloved literary icons—a man who was well ahead of his time.


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Before Kendi learned to use his talent of navigating the plane of mental existence known as the Dream, he had to escape his physical existence as a slave.


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The Dream......is a plateau of mental existence where people are able to communicate by the power of their thoughts alone.The Silent...These people -- known as the Silent -- find that the Dream is threatened by a powerful Silent capable of seizing control of other people's bodies against their will...and may be causing tremors within the Dream itself.The Risk...And if the "normals" learn of this, they will do anything to capture the Silent for use as a weapon -- and the Dream itself may be shattered forever...


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The third novel in Steven Harper's critically-acclaimed science fiction saga continues ... The telepathic communications net, known as "The Dream; ' has been shattered. And the majority of the Silent who used it are unable to reenter. But Kendi Weaver has more pressing concerns: finding the family that slavers tore from him more than a decade before...


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The Dream was a telepathic place of existence where a psychic race known as the Silent could twist the laws of reality. But a madman's lust for power has torn the Dream asunder. Now, only a handful of the Silent can enter it. Kendi Weaver is one of them. And it is up to him to protect it as political and personal enemies line up against him.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

**The perfect title for the perfect beach read from the *New York Times* bestselling Author**



Jane Green is one of the preeminent authors of women’s fiction today, and with each new novel, her audience grows. Green’s avid and loyal fans follow her because she writes about the true-to-life dilemmas of women—and *The Beach House* will not disappoint.



 Known in Nantucket as the crazy woman who lives in the rambling house atop the bluff, Nan doesn’t care what people think. At sixty-five-years old, her husband died twenty years ago, her beauty has faded, and her family has flown. If her neighbors are away, why shouldn’t she skinny dip in their swimming pools and help herself to their flowers? But when she discovers the money she thought would last forever is dwindling and she could lose her beloved house, Nan knows she has to make drastic changes.



 So Nan takes out an ad: *Rooms to rent for the summer in a beautiful old Nantucket home with water views and direct access to the beach*. Slowly, people start moving into the house, filling it with noise, with laughter, and with tears. As the house comes alive again, Nan finds her family expanding. Her son comes home for the summer, and then an unexpected visitor turns all their lives upside-down.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Dear Readers,    

There are at   least five good reasons to Tip It! right now.          My daughter Kathy put out *   her*    memoir last year, which was real nice except for the controversial parts. And     it got to be a #1 *    New York     Times* bestseller. Congratulations,     Kathleen! But now it's my turn. I've written my own book. I have things to     say, too, without having to be all controversial like you were. Tip it!        People recognize me on the street a lot now     and come over, nicely, and say "Maggie, you remind me of my own mother." And     they say "Maggie, I love your show"--referring to *Kathy Griffin: My Life on     the D-List *as *    my     *show. Sometimes I correct them, I say,     "Oh, it's not     my     show." But sometimes . . . I don't correct     them. It's kind of fun being a star, isn't it? Tip it!        If you want to know a few things about my     daughter Kathleen that only a mother could know (How the heck did she get this     way? Did she always swear so much, for Chrissake?), you have come to the right     book. Tip it!         You know how a box of wine is never empty just     because the spigot seems to have run dry? (There's always a little more if you     just tip it!) This book is like that. There's so much in     it--never-before-published Griffin family photos!, a love story (me and my dear     departed husband Johnny), a whole guide to good living (including how to     survive on what's in your purse), and a lot of funny business in this book     from Kathleen (she made comments in this book; readers, I was not able to stop     her!). So take this book and Tip It!         And be sure to get the last drop out of     living. Isn't it nice that "Tip It" acts as a toast? I'm 90 years old, and I     think "Tip It!" even works pretty well as a motto for living to the fullest.     So, Tip It! today.      

Yours,    

Maggie Griffin    

A funny thing happened on the   way to Kathy Griffin's skyrocketing stardom. The more she told stories about her   mother, Maggie, in her stand-up act and on her Emmy-winning television show, *  Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,* the more popular her mother became.   (At the mere mention of Maggie, a stadium full of fans will cheer, "Tip It! Tip   It!")    

Shocked by Kathy,   exasperated by Kathy, grudgingly amused by Kathy, and at the end of the day,   always a loving mother to Kathy, Maggie Griffin has become the darling Gracie to   Kathy's George Burns, the wry Cher to Kathy's Sonny Bono, the spry, sweet   Roadrunner to Kathy's Wile E. Coyote.     

Maggie Griffin   grew up in Chicago, the youngest of sixteen children born to Irish immigrant   parents. She met Johnny, the love of her life, in Chicago, started dating him   after high school (while working at the Form Fit Bra factory in the returns   department), and they fell in love and married during the War. Together they   raised five children, the youngest a cutie named Kathleen, who never gave them a   moment's trouble throughout her childhood--though it's been payback time ever   since.     

As Kathy's comedy   career took off, more and more stories of Maggie magically worked their way into   Kathy's routines. And as a regular on *Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,*   Maggie takes more guff from her daughter than any other mom on national   television. Well, after having her life put on comic display by the loudmouthed   redhead she fed, clothed, and cared for well into the comedian's adulthood,   Maggie finally has the floor, and she has some business to share with you.    

So get out your Franzia, stir up some Hamburger Helper, and dive into the world according to   Maggie.


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SUMMARY:
"An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility."-- Time

"A brilliant fable." -- Maureen Howard, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Doris Lessing again presents herself as one of the most intelligent of all modern novelists." -- Philadelphia Bulletin

"The most fluid and suggestive of all her books."

-- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A short, easily read novel...part science fiction and part 19th-century realism, its effect is profoundly affecting and mystical... especially moving for those who have responded to Lessing's previous work." -- Houston Chronicle

"A major work, one that well proves her vigor, originality and importance as a novelist." -- Cleveland Free Press -- Review   

      
  "One of her profoundest visionary excursions." --Gail Godwin, Chicago Tribune Book World

"An extraordinary and compelling meditation about the enduring need for loyalty, love and responsibility." --Time

"A brilliant fable." --Maureen Howard, front page, The New York Times Book Review

"Doris Lessing again presents herself as one of the most intelligent of all modern novelists." --Philadelphia Bulletin

"The most fluid and suggestive of all her books." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A short, easily read novel...part science fiction and part 19th-century realism, its effect is profoundly affecting and mystical... especially moving for those who have responded to Lessing's previous work." --Houston Chronicle

"A major work, one that well proves her vigor, originality and importance as a novelist." --Cleveland Free Press


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SUMMARY:
'He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one...' Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. >Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. The Finkler Questionis a scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

A covert airdrop lands Mack Bolan inside the brutal northern Pakistan border territory. From deep within a terrorist cell an informant has leaked crucial information to Stony Man Farm. He knows the location of two of the highest-ranking members of al Qaeda. They are the most wanted men in the world, and they've spent years dodging American troops and plotting further attacks worldwide.

Now Bolan is in hostile territory on a mission to eliminate men who will stop at nothing in pursuit of vengeance. And he faces government troops determined to protect the terrorists. With time running out and the enemy closing in, the Executioner must do what no one else has--settle the score.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Federal authorities thought they were about to shut down the American activities of the lethal MS-13 gang for good. But when the star witness and the prosecuting attorney are murdered, the trial of the gang's leaders is in shambles. With legal avenues exhausted and an undercover agent missing deep within the deadly organization, the situation is critical.

Mack Bolan is called in to fight fire with fire. But MS-13's leaders have a plan to terrorize suburban America. In order to stop them, Bolan will have to follow their trail deep into the Salvadoran jungle, moving fast and striking hard. Using warrior skills honed in another distant land, the Executioner will show no mercy.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Infiltrating a Dutch human trafficking organization turns deadly when two undercover agents are tortured and shot. Protected by a complex infrastructure and ruthless lawyers, the businessmen behind the crime are untouchable under international law. But Mack Bolan isn't about to play by their rules.

Entering Holland alone, Bolan heads to Rotterdam where he is prepared to seek out his target and destroy the corrupt organization piece by piece. The leaders of the group think they are invincible, but with the lives of women and children at stake, they are about to learn what it's like to be hunted by the Executioner.


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What do you do if you're a failed music fanzine writer in your early thirties with a dead-end job, and the best moment of your life occurred when you went to your first Thieving Magpies gig as a teenager and suddenly you "belonged" in a way you never had before, and the worst moment of your life occurred about six years later when Lance Webster, the Magpies' lead singer, self-destructed on stage before your eyes--basically taking you with him--and just today you've discovered that Lance lives down the street from you? If you're Clive Beresford--the haplessly obsessed guy at the center of Tim Thornton's wildly comic and energetic debut novel--you get remarkably drunk and write and deliver a note to your idol (the contents of which you can't remember the next morning), which causes two very large bouncer types to appear at your door warning you to back off, which, in turn, causes you to hide your true identity when you do finally meet Lance, totally by accident (he's come a long way since the Magpies, but he is still LANCE F**CKING WEBSTER!) . . . none of which deters you from believing--really believing--that he could still save your life if only you could get that "earth-shattering exclusive" interview with him. With the story shifting between Clive's life-changing Magpies past and his frantic present, we get a headlong, boisterous coming-of-age (if-not-quite-growing-up) romp and a warmhearted, hilarious view of friendship, hero worship, and the full-blast power of music to help us become, at the very least, who we would like to think we are.


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Newly divorced, Andrew Stratton lives in his head and not with his heart. He teaches architectural theory but has never built a building. He writes about “The Anatomy of Livable Places”– communities where form and material are in harmony–but has no sense of where he belongs. He is capable of deep, tender emotions but is unable to express them. When his wife leaves him for another man and excoriates his cautious nature in the process, Andrew is like a house shaken off a faulty foundation. Sifting through the rubble, he must figure out what should be salvaged and what should be scrapped. Escaping from the predictable routine of his university life in Philadelphia, Andrew travels to England and channels his pain into a weeklong course on building stone walls. In the village of Boscastle, he discovers a magical landscape of dizzying cliffs, jagged coastline, lush valleys, and hills lined with stone hedges that have stood the test of time. At the Stone Academy, Andrew immerses himself in the grueling task of piecing together rock into intricate walls. Under the tutelage of his weathered instructor, he learns there is more to laying stone than hard labor. And he soon falls under the spell of Boscastle’s rhythms and quirks, which include a weekly sing-along, a museum devoted to witchcraft, and a colorful group of residents ranging from a precocious nine-year-old girl who communes with nature to an offbeat reverend who has been known to give referrals to the town witch.Moved by the warmth and connectedness of the village, Andrew begins to shed his sheltered self. But his willingness to open his heart is tested when he falls for Nicola Rhys-Jones, an American expatriate seeking to escape a history of abuse. Thorny, sarcastic, and sexy, Nicola is an artist who paints tranquility panels for hospitals. But her life before Boscastle has been anything but peaceful. As their verbal sparring veers into darker territory, Andrew grapples with his status in Boscastle. Is he just a tourist on holiday or does he now have a stake in the village that has welcomed him? Readers new to Will North’s work as well as fans of The Long Walk Home will be swept away by this bittersweet novel about love, loss, and the power of nature to alter our lives.From the Hardcover edition.


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Elizabeth has a new job at an unusual libraryA- a lending library of objects, not books. In a secret room in the basement lies the Grimm Collection. ThatA's where the librarians lock away powerful items straight out of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales: seven-league boots, a table that produces a feast at the blink of an eye, Snow WhiteA's stepmotherA's sinister mirror that talks in riddles. When the magical objects start to disappear, Elizabeth embarks on a dangerous quest to catch the thief before she can be accused of the crimeA-or captured by the thief. Polly Shulman has created a contemporary fantasy with a fascinating setting and premise, starring an ordinary girl whose after-school job is far from ordinaryA- and leads to a world of excitement, romance and magical intrigue.


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Special Agent Kylie Donovan knows the evil that men do.  After her sister’s murder went unsolved, she decided to work undercover for the FBI. Now, posing as a college student, she hopes to track down an Internet predator who is murdering teenage girls.  Using herself as bait, Kylie is sure she can lure the killer out of the shadows…until her fascination with a drop-dead gorgeous cop threatens to blow her whole case.With a rock hard body and seductive smile, Lieutenant Perry Flynn is a hard man to ignore.  He makes it very clear that Kylie’s fierce attraction is mutual.  But Kylie can’t afford to let Perry cloud her judgment, especially when she begins to suspect that his dark obsession with the case runs deeper than it should.  Then, when disturbing new evidence points to a cop, Kylie wonders if her sinful thoughts about Perry have thrust her into the strong, sleek arms of a killer…


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Monique Vicknair has a secret-- she's a medium, dedicated to helping spirits cross to the other side. Unfortunately, she's been so busy, she hasn't taken care of her "own" earthly needs. And it's been a long, "long" time. So when she meets recently deceased-but oh-so-sexy-Ryan Chappelle, she's more than ready for a fling. Even if it is with a ghost! Ryan is no stranger to the pleasures of a woman's body, and his death hasn't changed that. But he's never wanted anyone the way he wants Monique. So he's refusing to leave this world until he makes love to her. And if he has to break all the laws of heaven and earth to do it, he will. "Again and again and again... ."


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Police officer Eden Rutherford has only one weakness-- bad boy Ben Wilder. With just one wicked glance, he could make her lose control, lose her heart... and lose her panties. Too bad he took all three with him when he hightailed it out of town three years ago. Now Ben's back, and Eden's bracing herself. First, for his assault on her libido. And second, for his reaction to BennettWildersucks.com, the Web site she and Ben's other ex-girlfriends put together to humiliate him. Only, one woman's going too far... . Now Eden has to deal with a stalker and her overwhelming lust. She needs to get Ben out of her system, for good this time! And offering Ben her protection might just be the way to do it... .


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SUMMARY:
Working in Hollywood is always about getting to the top. Or "on" top, as feisty producer Claudia Dostis prefers. But when she contends with her outrageously sexy adversary, Leandro Mandalor, the stakes change. Her charming opponent is definitely up to Claudia's challenge. He convinces her they must come together-- in the office "and" in the bedroom. Suddenly getting on top has a whole new meaning... and leads to a new level of sensual satisfaction. But can Claudia let go of her need to succeed long enough to allow someone else to win?


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

**Sex didn't scare her** 

Despite the success of her sultry Red Choo sex blog, it would take serious buzz to put Mercedes Brooks's first book of erotic fantasies on the bestseller list. And that meant agreeing to another showdown with her nemesis, the super-sexy TV pundit Sam Porter. 

**This thing beyond seduction did.** 

This time, though, the on-air innuendos were just a dress rehearsal. What happened later between the sheets was actually the main event. If the tabloids got wind of their night together, Sam's career would self-destruct. But the real shocker was that even with a prime-time scandal hanging over their heads, one night was not enough!


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Fern is glaring thirty in the face and can't ignore the love lies any longer. Life with Adam was amazing once - although these days swinging from the chandeliers means D.I.Y not S.E.X. She believes a romantic wedding should be the next step but Adam just won't go down on one knee.
Then a chance meeting with Scottie Taylor - the UK's sexiest pop star - lights fireworks in Fern that won't stop exploding. It's mind-expanding love at first sight for them both so when he proposes in front of a sell-out crowd at Wembley Stadium, there's only one answer. Yes, yes, yes!
Before you know it, Fern is living the celebrity dream in LA and a wedding planner is arranging designer shoe fittings. But isn't it all happening a little too fast? Why is this modern day Cinderella homesick for a rented two-bedroom flat in Clapham?
How do you know whether love is telling the truth? Fern must choose which version of this fairy tale is hers ?


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Kate Stanislaski Kimball came home to begin a new life. The only thing more perfect than the beautiful, dilapidated building she'd bought for her new dance school is Brody O'Connell, the frustrating and fascinating contractor she's hired for the renovation. Brody knows Kate is the daughter of Natasha Stanislaski: pampered, perfect, and not at all the right woman for him. But he longs to make her his.


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SUMMARY:
Babette Robinson changes careers and lovers as easily as she changes hairstyles. But after losing her last job, she's beginning to see that her feather-to-the-wind mentality can be unsatisfying in the long run. She's been helping a string of friends solve their relationship problems, and when one pal points out to Babette that she could make a career out of curing people's romantic ills, she decides to dub herself "The Love Doctor" -- a match-mender-for-hire. Living in Birmingham, Alabama, with its elite class of wealthy women, Babette has access to the ideal clientele, including the well-known Birmingham socialite Kitty Carelle. Having unceremoniously dumped her lover, Kitty now regrets her hasty decision and wants him back. Trouble is, the man Kitty seeks to recapture is none other than Jeff Eubanks -- Babette's ex! The carefree Babette of three years ago had written him off with a shrug, yet now she can't help remembering that he did give her the absolute best sex of her life...not to mention his charm, good looks, and brains. To save her newfound career and prove she can stick with something--if not someone--Babette is determined to mend Kitty and Jeff's broken relationship, but Jeff has other plans. He was crazy about Babette when she suddenly bailed on their relationship, and after Kitty did the same he became convinced that no woman can ever commit. To prove his point, Jeff issues Babette a challenge: no flirting for a week, and he'll talk to Kitty. That is, if, after seven tempting nights on the beach with Jeff, it's still with Kitty that she wants him to reconcile.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

When a spirit from beyond begs Gage Vicknair to rescue a stranger named Makayla, he never expects that stranger to be the same sensuous woman he's been enjoying so thoroughly in his nightly fantasies. But Makayla is very real and she's living a nightmare.  

A vengeful murderer is determined to get her. And Gage is equally determined to save her.  

Because the only way he and Makayla can have the love they've dreamed of is if they're still around to live it....


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Monique Vicknair has a secret -- she's a medium, dedicated to helping spirits cross  to the other side. Unfortunately, she's been so busy, she hasn't taken care of  her own earthly needs. And it's been a long, *long* time. So when she meets  recently deceased-but oh-so-sexy-Ryan Chappelle, she's more than ready for a  fling. Even if it is with a ghost!  

Ryan is no stranger to the pleasures of a woman's body, and his death hasn't  changed that. But he's never wanted anyone the way he wants Monique. So he's  refusing to leave this world until he makes love to her. And if he has to break  all the laws of heaven and earth to do it, he will. *Again and again and  again...*


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She's not alive. She's not dead. She's somewhere in between And medium Dax Vicknair wants her desperately! When Dax first met and fell madly in love with teacher Celeste Beauchamp, he knew the attraction was hopeless. But his connection with Celeste was so intense so sexually charged, he couldn't resist. Their relationship was short, sweet and temporary. Or so he thought...  

Now Celeste is suddenly back and she's doing everything she can to stay with Dax as long as possible. She's waited for him, for his touch, her whole life. And nothing, not even her supposed death, is going to stop her from having him. Repeatedly. 

But Celeste and Dax are living -- and loving -- on borrowed time.  

And it might cost them their future...


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Single thirty-something Marissa, though beautiful and talented, is becoming increasingly skeptical about romance because every man in her life has been a cheater. She creates a website dedicated to exposing serial cheaters, but instead her website ushers back into her life her first boyfriend from adolescence, and he is determined to show her that a man can be true.


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At OCD the losers are tormented.At Alpha Academy, they're sent home.Skye Hamilton has scored an invitation to the ultra-exclusive Alphas-only boarding school where beta is spelled LBR . What happens when the country's best, brightest, and hawtest begin clawing and scratching their way to the top?


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**The unforgettable story of the 1973 U.S. Open-and the unknown young golfer who astonished the world... ** 



 In 1973, a Who's Who of golf's greats gathered at the Oakmont Country Club for the U.S. Open. Among those favored to win were Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. Instead, Johnny Miller-a 26-year-old one­time phenom from San Francisco-astonished the golfing world by edging out the legends and crafting a record-setting 63 to win by a single stroke. 



 Featuring extensive archival and video research and candid interviews with leading golfers of the era, *Chasing Greatness* beautifully captures one of the unlikeliest victories and dramatic sports triumphs of the past half century. Authors Adam Lazarus and Steve Schlossman also chronicle the careers and the lives of six extraordinary figures during golf's modern-day golden era: Miller, Palmer, Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Tom Weiskopf, and John Schlee.


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In his first collection of short stories John Grisham takes us back to Ford County, Mississippi, the setting of his first novel, *A Time to Kill*.Wheelchair-bound Inez Graney and her two older sons, Leon and Butch, take a bizarre road trip through the Mississippi Delta to visit the youngest Graney brother, Raymond, who's been locked away on death row for eleven years. It could well be their last visit.Mack Stafford, a hard-drinking and low-grossing run-of-the-mill divorce lawyer gets a miracle phone call with a completely unexpected offer to settle some old, forgotten cases for more money than he has ever seen. Mack is suddenly bored with the law, fed up with his wife and his life, and makes drastic plans to finally escape.Quiet, dull Sidney, a data collector for an insurance company, perfects his blackjack skills in hopes of bringing down the casino empire of Clanton's most ambitious hustler, Bobby Carl Leach, who, among other crimes, has stolen Sidney's wife.Three good ol' boys from rural Ford County begin a journey to the big city of Memphis to give blood to a grievously injured friend. However, they are unable to drive past a beer store as the trip takes longer and longer. The journey comes to an abrupt end when they make a fateful stop at a Memphis strip club.The Quiet Haven Retirement Home is the final stop for the elderly of Clanton. It's a sad, languid place with little controversy, until Gilbert arrives. Posing as a lowly paid bedpan boy, he is in reality a brilliant stalker with an uncanny ability to sniff out the assets of those "seniors" he professes to love.One of the hazards of litigating against people in a small town is that one day, long after the trial, you will probably come face-to-face with someone you've beaten in a lawsuit. Lawyer Stanley Wade bumps into an old adversary, a man with a long memory, and the encounter becomes a violent ordeal.Clanton is rocked with the rumor that the gay son of a prominent family has finally come home, to die. Of AIDS. Fear permeates the town as gossip runs unabated. But in Lowtown, the colored section of Clanton, the young man finds a soul mate in his final days.Featuring a cast of characters you'll never forget, these stories bring Ford County to vivid and colorful life. Often hilarious, frequently moving, and always entertaining, this collection makes it abundantly clear why John Grisham is our most popular storyteller.


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Doug Lee is undead quite by accident—attacked by a desperate vampire, he finds himself cursed with being fat and fifteen forever. When he has no luck finding some goth chick with a vampire fetish, he resorts to sucking the blood of cows under cover of the night. But it's just not the same.  

 Then he meets the new Indian exchange student and falls for her—hard. Yeah, he wants to bite her, but he also wants to prove himself to her. But like the laws of life, love, and high school, the laws of vampire existence are complicated—it's not as easy as studying *Dracula*. Especially when the star of *Vampire Hunters* is hot on your trail in an attempt to boost ratings. . . .  

 Searing, hilarious, and always unexpected, *Fat Vampire* is a satirical tour de force from one of the most original writers of fiction today.


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After saving Olympus from the evil Titan lord, Kronos, Percy and friends have rebuilt their beloved Camp Half-Blood, where the next generation of demigods must now prepare for a chilling prophecy of their own: Seven half-bloods shall answer the call, To storm or fire the world must fall. An oath to keep with a final breath, And foes bear arms to the Doors of Death. Now, in a brand-new series from blockbuster best-selling author Rick Riordan, fans return to the world of Camp Half-Blood. Here, a new group of heroes will inherit a quest. But to survive the journey, they#x2019;ll need the help of some familiar demigods.


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From Lisi Harrison, the New York Times bestselling author of The Clique and Alphas, comes a new series with a fresh twist on high school, romance, and the horrors of trying to fit in. They prefer to call themselves RADs, but some call them monsters. So far, the "monster" community has kept a low profile in Salem, Oregon, but this year two new girls enroll at Merston High School, and the town will never be the same.Created just fifteen days ago, Frankie Stein is psyched to trade her father's lonely formaldehyde-smelling basement lab for parties and friends. But with a student body totally freaked out by rumors of monsters stalking the halls, Frankie finds that life in the "normi" world can be rough for a chic freak like her. She thinks she finds a friend in fellow new student Melody Carver--but can a normi be trusted with her big secret?


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When a young journalist named Bernardo Blanco is killed in the fictional Mexican port city of Paracuán, investigation into his murder reveals missing links in a disturbing multiple homicide case from twenty years earlier. As police officer Ramón “el Macetón” Cabrera discovers, Blanco had been writing a book about a 1970s case dealing with the murder of several young schoolgirls in Paracuán by a man known as el Chacal. Cabrera realizes that whoever killed Blanco wanted to keep the truth about el Chacal from being revealed, and he becomes determined to discover that truth. The Black Minutes chronicles both Cabrera’s investigation into Blanco’s murder and goes back in time to follow detective Vicente Rangel’s investigation of the original el Chacal case. Both narratives expose worlds of corruption, from cops who are content to close the door on a case without true justice to powerful politicians who can pay their way out of their families’ crimes. Full of dark twists and turns, and populated by a cast of captivating—and mostly corrupt—characters, The Black Minutes is an electrifying novel from a brilliant new voice.


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Murder in the twelfth century is no different from murder today. There is still a dead body, though this time with an arrow through the heart instead of a bullet. There is still a need to bury the dead, to comfort the living - and to catch the murderer. When Brother Cadfael comes to a village in the Welsh hills, he finds himself doing all three of those things. And there is nothing simple about this death. The murdered man's daughter needs Cadfael's help in more ways than one. There are questions about the arrow. And the burial is the strangest thing of all ...


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Sam was an android.

His flesh was the ultimate miracle of science, artificially created and completely self sustaining. And he had the unusual power to heal others. In fact, Sam was too good to live."


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Writer's Digest Hardcover, 1974 2nd printing with 232 pgs., size: 8 3/4" x 5 3/4 approx. - Fan of popular fiction, professional writer, new writer looking for markets-whoever you are, you'll enjoy this book. It takes you behind the publishing scene and shows you how popular novels-science fiction, mysteries, suspense thrillers, Gothic-romances, adult fantasy, Westerns, and erotica are created and how you can write them too. This book offers you, whatever you write, the chance to perfect your craft while earning income, building your reputation, and experiencing the encouragement of seeing your work in print. Dean Koontz has sold since 1967, over twenty-four (copyright of this book 1974) popular novels. Before becoming a full-time free-lance writer, he worked as a supermarket check out clerk, a drummer in a rock band, a foredt ranger, a tutor for underprivileged children with the Appalachian Poverty Program, and as a suburban school English teacher, among other things.


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On an impulse, schoolteacher Jim Ironheart flies to Portland, Oregon without understanding why. There he saves a boy from being killed by a drunk driver and is observed by Holly Thorne.  

She tracks Jim to California, and their lives intertwine on one of Jim's lifesaving missions. Surviving a plane crash, terrifying monsters that materialize from Holly's nightmares, and an uncannily powerful adversary, they search for the source of Jim's psychic power.


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He was clinically dead after the accident--but was miraculously revived. Now Hatch Harrison and his wife approach each day with a new appreciation for life.  But something has come back with Hatch from the other side. A terrible presence that links his mind to a psychotic s， so that a force of murderous rage courses through him.


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Dean Koontz is in league with the future.

Follow him as he leads you down the gnarled paths of night descending into the ever-present and terror-filled tomorrow. Come trod the byways to hell and to hope when you journey with:

Mutilated, mutant by-products of America's "Artificial Wombs" created by attempts at producing human weapons . . .

An American team of doctors sent to China to combat the runaway ultimate in biological warfare . . .

The genetically mutated daughter of LSD users, hiding her powers in order to survive society . . .

And Gabe, the vital, young man mistakenly locked in an antiseptic old-age ward . . .


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A frantic mother, who has been separated from her nine-year-old daughter, Melanie, for six years, strives to rescue her from the people who have been subjecting her to terrifying psychological experiments.


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A haunting nightmare is the key to one woman's mysterious past in the spine-tingling novel from #1 New York Timesbestselling author Dean Koontz.


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#1 New York Times bestselling authorÂ—now in trade paperback for the first time. On his thirty-sixth birthday, Travis Cornell hikes into the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains. But his path is soon blocked by a bedraggled Golden Retriever, who will let him go no further into the dark woods. That morning, Travis had been desperate to find some happiness in his lonely, seemingly cursed life. What he finds is a friendÂ—a dog of alarming intelligenceÂ—and a threat that could only have come from the darkest corners of manÂ's imaginationÂ…


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People - ordinary people - were afraid of Baker St. Cyr. Patiently the cyberdetective would explain that the computer half of his investigatory symbiosis did not "take over" when his human half joined with it. "A cyberdetective is part man and part computer, meshed as completely as the two can ever be. The highly microminiaturized components of the bio-computer remember and relate things in a perfectly mathematical manner that a human mind could never easily grasp, while the human half of the symbiote gives a perception of emotions and emotional motivations that the bio-computer could never comprehend. Together we make a precise and thorough detective unit."


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Blessed shalt though be in the city, and blessed shalt though be in the field.

Thou shalt be blessed above all . . . 

Our holy empire of the Alliance of mankind has fulfilled our destiny. Remember the many heroic humans who have died in conquering the stars for you. Therefore, do not let misguided sympathy toward inferior and conquered animals deter you from your inherent title of divine rulers of the universe. Do not lose this birthright by succumbing to the "attractions" of any alien creature. Remember the penalties imposed by the Supremacy of Man party for this transgression.

Our blessings be with you as you follow in the paths of your brothers and sisters. We have faith in mankind and we have faith in you. But, however, should you falter from the paths of righteousness, we have many willing hands eager to show you the error of your ways . . .


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From the New York Times bestselling author of The House of Thunder and Hideaway. She appeared out of nowhere. And Paul and Carol were drawn to her immediately--the child they had never had. It was a dream come true--until the young girl's mask fell away to reveal the face of terrifying evil.


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Mutants from the atomic bomb ridden Earth meet Mankind from the stars who escaped just before the destruction. The mutants won't give up and let space-man rule Earth once again.


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The citizens of Moonlight Cove, California, are changing. Some are losing touch with their deepest emotions. Others are surrendering to their wildest urges. And the few who remain unchanged are absolutely terrified--if not brutally murdered in the dead of night...


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Aided through many crises by the near miraculous intervention of   a stranger， Laura Shane finally learns the nature of her incredible   destiny when， on her thirtieth birthday， the stranger requests her   help. Reissue.


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Tina Evans dreams that her son Danny is still alive. And when she wakes, she finds a message scrawled on Danny's chalkboard: not dead. Tina searches for the truth and learns that there are some things worse than death. Includes a new Afterword by the author. Reissue.


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Deepest night, Montana. An eerie light proclaims the arrival of a mysterious watcher in the woods. And one solitary man begins a desperate battle against something unknown -- and unknowable.Broad daylight, Los Angeles. An ordinary morning erupts in cataclysmic violence. A young family is shattered in a heartbeat.Fate will lead this family to an isolated Montana ranch, but their sanctuary will become their worst nightmare. For there they will face a chillingly ruthless enemy, from which no one -- living or dead -- is safe.


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Mankind has forgotten their past glories and only legends remain. Some believed in the legends that men posses sed marvels that conquered the skies and space itself. This is their journey back.


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Telepath verses alien." Mr. Mullion," one of the triplets said, looming 20 feet away as Pete followed the smooth railing. He stopped, his heart racing, but he felt a break in the rail as he did so. He edged forward a foot or two and felt around with his boot until he discovered a step. In a moment, blood pounding in his temples, he was halfway down toward the lower level, taking 2 risers at a time, no matter what the danger of a fall. He heard the mechanical man start after him as he set foot on the cement floor. Putney=144 pages. A battleground for 2 empires." I opened the glove compartment and took out my papers. They identified me--with a discription, pictures, letters of reference. fingerprints, and voice-prints--as an Arcturian lady of means, a newcomber to Berbidron and something of a hermit back home on Arcturus Ceta lV. "Is this the identity I'd have if I went to live in the city?" "I think so. Don't worry about the authenticity. There really was a Lady Evors Dalant." "Was?" "Well, yes, we killed her as soon as she landed on Berbidron.."


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Years after leaving the carnival， her hated first husband， and   the child she could never love， Ellen has a new life， a new husband，   and two beautiful children， but now the carnival is coming back to   town， and Ellen is going to have to pay for her sins. Reprint.


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A Black Bat Mystery. A "caper book", the second in a suspense series featuring Mike Tucker, art dealer, heir to a large fortune and professional thief. An early Koontz mystery using one of his pseudonyms.


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With his bestselling blend of nail-biting intensity, daring artistry, and storytelling magic, Dean Koontz returns with an emotional roller coaster of a tale filled with enough twists, turns, shocks, and surprises for ten ordinary novels. Here is the story of five days in the life of an ordinary man born to an extraordinary legacy—a story that will challenge the way you look at good and evil, life and death, and everything in between.

Jimmy Tock comes into the world on the very night his grandfather leaves it. As a violent storm rages outside the hospital, Rudy Tock spends long hours walking the corridors between the expectant fathers' waiting room and his dying father's bedside. It's a strange vigil made all the stranger when, at the very height of the storm's fury, Josef Tock suddenly sits up in bed and speaks coherently for the frist and last time since his stroke.

What he says before he dies is that there will be five dark days in the life of his grandson—five dates whose terrible events Jimmy will have to prepare himself to face. The first is to occur in his twentieth year; the second in his twent-third year; the third in his twenty-eighth; the fourth in his twenty-ninth; the fifth in his thirtieth.

Rudy is all too ready to discount his father's last words as a dying man's delusional rambling. But then he discovers that Josef also predicted the time of his grandson's birth to the minute, as well as his exact height and weight, and the fact that Jimmy would be born with syndactyly—the unexplained anomal of fused digits—on his left foot. Suddenly the old man's predictions take on a chilling significance.

What terrifying events await Jimmy on these five dark days? What nightmares will he face? What challenges must he survive? As the novel unfolds, picking up Jimmy's story at each of these crisis points, the path he must follow will defy every expectation. And with each crisis he faces, he will move closer to a fate he could never have imagined. For who Jimmy Tock is and what he must accomplish on the five days when his world turns is a mystery as dangerous as it is wondrous—a struggle against an evil so dark and pervasive, only the most extraordinary of human spirits can shine through.


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Do you dare step through the red door?
Spencer Grant had no idea what drew him to the bar with the red door. He thought he would just sit down, have a slow beer or two, and talk to a stranger. He couldn't know that it would lead to a narrow escape from a bungalow targeted by a SWAT team. Or that it would leave him a wanted man. Now he is on the run from mysterious and ruthless men. He is in love with a woman he knows next to nothing about. And he is hiding from a past he can't fully remember. On his trail is a shadowy security agency that answers to no one--including the U.S. government--and a man who considers himself a compassionate Angel of Death. But worst of all, Spencer Grant is on a collision course with inner demons he thought he'd buried years ago--inner demons that could destroy him if his enemies don't first.


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Now repackaged with new cover art, this classic features a new Afterword by Koontz. Mystery writer Marty Stillwater's idyllic life is shattered when a stranger breaks into his house claiming to be the real Martin Stillwater and begins a terrifying campaign to eliminate Marty. Reissue.


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For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”

Now Pulitzer Prize&#8211;winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.

Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times. 

The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.


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A historical novel of the legendary Eleanor of Aquitaine and the one person she loved more than power-her rival for the throne.  At only nine, Princess Alais of France is sent to live in England until she is of age to wed Prince Richard, son of King Henry II and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Alais is an innocent pawn on the chessboard of dynastic marriage, her betrothal intended to broker an uneasy truce between the nations.  Estranged from her husband, Eleanor sees a kindred spirit in this determined young girl. She embraces Alais as a daughter, teaching the princess what it takes to be a woman of power in a world of men. But as Alais grows to maturity and develops ambitions of her own, Eleanor begins to see her as a threat-and their love for each other becomes overshadowed by their bitter rivalry, dark betrayals, conflicting passions, and a battle for revenge over the throne of England itself.


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At first the police thought they were dealing with a psychopath or a vicious gangland war. Then, they heard the eerie sounds in the ventilation system and saw the silver eyes in the night. In a city paralyzed by a blizzard, something watches--something whose ultimate victims are young and innocent.


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Rachael Leben's request for a quick and clean divorce left her successful husband, Eric, enraged and humiliated. Seething with anger, he stormed off, straight into the path of an oncoming vehicle. 



 Eric is pronounced dead at the scene, but Rachael knows the secrets he's left behind. And when his body disappears from the morgue, she knows that her turbulent marriage is far from over...


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Welcome to your next chance.   Chaz Dominguez is a professional Babysitter in New Orleans, helping to integrate the recently deceased into their new and improved lives. Though Fresh Start has always been the only game in town, resurrection isn't all it's cracked up to be. Nine lives are all a person can get—and a powerful group of desperate, high-level Nine-Timers will stop at nothing to possess the keys to true immortality.   Now the only hope for Chaz and his family—and the human race—lies in the secrets locked away in the mind of Angelique, the beautiful, mysterious Newbie he must protect . . .


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"The perfect combination for a paranormal investigation."  David Wells, Most Haunted  A unique collection of episodes from the case files of the New England Ghost Project Journey into a world of the unexplained and the unknown, a world where what you can't see captivates all your attention. A trance medium and a paranormal scientist team up in this spellbinding collection of 17 supernatural mysteries, a mere sampling of the spooky episodes in their vast ghost hunting case files. Former skeptic Ron Kolek, with his infrared camera and EMF meter, and fifth-generation psychic Maureen Wood, with her sixth sense and pendulum, have become experts in investigating ghosts, whether they're helping the descendant of an accused witch, checking out the spirits of Lizzie Borden's slain parents, or assisting a monk with an exorcism. Their unique partnership adds a new dimension, and their adventures will test the senses and challenge everyday thinking...and just might make you believe in the paranormal.


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A village in Tuscany is the setting for this joyous debut--a novel that defies all our expectations as it puts a fresh, clever, captivating spin on the age-old tale of forbidden love. Rich in literary delights, filled with spectacular wordplay, and rife with the bawdy humor of Shakespeare's comedies, Tomato Rhapsody is the almost-true tale of how the tomato came to Italy--at once a brilliantly inventive fable of love, lust, and longing, and a dazzling feast for the imagination. This is a story born from love--a forbidden love--between Davido, an "Ebreo" tomato farmer, and Mari, a beautiful Catholic girl....But it's not only Davido and Mari who have secrets of the heart. Everyone around them yearns for something--from Davido's grandfather, who tenderly cultivates the tomato plant he stole on his voyages with Columbus, to Mari's villainous stepfather, whose eye is trained on his stepdaughter's virginity and his neighbor's land. Caught in the midst of these passions and machinations is a village full of eccentrics who speak in rhyme, celebrate the Feast of the Drunken Saint, and live a life untouched by the passage of time. The schemes and dreams of these men and women are about to change as what is forbidden becomes too delicious to resist. Tradition, religion, and good taste collide unforgettably in a story about the courage to pursue love and tomato sauce at all costs.


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The story of a woman’s search for her brother’s lost son, orphaned in the wake of his sudden death, drives Scott Lasser’s riveting new novel—a work of stunning economy and momentum about a woman’s quest and a family’s longing for wholeness and completion.Cat is a single mother living in Detroit when her brother is killed in New York, and she sets off in search of his child. Her search is still under way when she gets a call from her father. Sam is eighty and carrying the weight of a secret he has kept from her all her life. He asks Cat to visit him in California, intending to make his peace.Cat’s journey—toward her father, and her brother’s infant son—and Sam’s journey toward his daughter, his lost son, and a new relationship to both his future and his past are woven into this superbly realized novel about families and the mysteries and ambiguities that inhere in our most primal relations. The result is a deeply stirring work that explores the complexities of home and heritage, and the bonds that even death is powerless to diminish.


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M*A*S*H* meets CATCH-22 in the most riotous, ribald, WW II military madhouse ever!  It all began when Major Kelly's Army engineers were dropped into Nazi-occupied France and ordered to keep a bridge open until the Allies arrived.  Except the mission was a secret and nobody knew they were there--nobody except the Luftwaffe, which kept bombing the bridge ... which meant the GI's kept rebuilding it ... which meant the Luftwaffe kept bombing it... which meant the tension was doing funny things to Major Kelly's men's minds ... which mean anything could happen.


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One hundred thousand years in the future, after man has been fatally humbled by his exploration of the stars and discovery of far more intelligent beings, civilization is struggling to return to the planet's surface.  After man fled the stars, he tried to explore his own genetic frontier, creating horrible races of deformed beings - some scaled, some furred, tiny, winged and huge. Now Jask, a Pure who retains the original human genetic code, and Tedesco, a great bear with a human brain, are thrown together by their one shared and fatal trait - telepath. Hunted like animals by the fearful populace, they go in search of The Black Presence - which may be the key to mankind's place in the cosmos.


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As Alex and Colin speed toward their new home in San Francisco where Courtney awaits them， they are pursued by a madman who is also eager to see Courtney.


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In Los Angeles, a hot Hollywood director, high on PCP, turns a city street into a fiery apocalypse. Five die. Heroic LAPD officer Jack McGarvey is badly wounded and lands in the hospital for months, uncertain he'll walk again. While he's out of commission, his wife and young son are left to defend themselves against both the criminals that control an increasingly violent city and the dead director's cult fanatic fans.

In a lonely corner of Montana, Eduardo Fernandez, the father of McGarvey's murdered partner, witnesses a strange nocturnal sight. The stand of pines outside his house suddenly glows with eerie amber light, and Fernandez senses a watcher in the winter woods. As the seasons change, the very creatures of the forest seem in league with a mysterious presence. Fernandez is caught up in a series of chilling incidents that escalate toward a confrontation that could rob him of his sanity or his life - or both.

As events careen out of control, the McGarvey family is drawn to Fernandez's Montana ranch. In that isolated place they discover their destiny in a terrifying and fiercely suspenseful encounter with a hostile, utterly ruthless, and enigmatic enemy, from which neither the living nor the dead are safe.


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Superman - or Supermonster? Although he was the first successful product of the Artificial Creation laboratory - the government workshop for the production of new talents by tampering with the genes of the unborn - Simeon Kelly would work for them only under compulsion. And the compulsion the generals applied to get him to probe the mind of the thing called Child had to be the greatest. Because Child was anything but that. In that incredibly monstrous infant appeared to be the potential for whole oceans of inventions and an entire cosmos of total creativity. But Child was vicious, insane, and short-lived.


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A handful of people from different backgrounds, living in  different towns and cities across America, they had nothing in  common--except fear.What dark secret bound them together?  Deep in the heart of a sprawling desert, a dark memory called  out to them, drawing them to the Tranquility Motel--where the  terrifying truth was waiting..."This is a book with a capital  B."--John D. MacDonald* A *New York Times* bestseller


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A tale of an abandoned town and the unimaginable truth behind its silence...  Now with a new afterword， Dean Koontz explains the impact Phantoms had on his career.


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From the managing editor of the *Washington Post*, a news-breaking account of the CIA's involvement in the covert wars in Afghanistan that fueled Islamic militancy and gave rise to bin Laden's al Qaeda.    For nearly the past quarter century, while most Americans were unaware, Afghanistan has been the playing field for intense covert operations by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies-invisible wars which sowed the seeds of the September 11 attacks and which provide its context. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 through the summer of 2001, the CIA, KGB, Pakistan's ISI, and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Department all operated directly and secretly in Afghanistan. They primed Afghan factions with cash and weapons, secretly trained guerrilla forces, funded propaganda, and manipulated politics. In the midst of these struggles bin Laden conceived and then built his global organization.    Comprehensively and for the first time, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Coll tells the secret history of the CIA's role in Afghanistan, from its covert program against Soviet troops from 1979 to 1989, to the rise of the Taliban and the emergence of bin Laden, to the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan after 1998. Based on extensive firsthand accounts, *Ghost Wars*ok  is the inside story that goes well beyond anything previously published on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. It chronicles the roles of midlevel CIA officers, their Afghan allies, and top spy masters such as Bill Casey, Saudi Arabia's Prince Turki al Faisal, and George Tenet. And it describes heated debates within the American government and the often poisonous, mistrustful relations between the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies.    *Ghost Wars* answers the questions so many have asked since the horrors of September 11: To what extent did America's best intelligence analysts grasp the rising threat of Islamist radicalism? Who tried to stop bin Laden and why did they fail?


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Nina, Meredith and Annie have been friends for a long, long time. Like most old friends, they can't quite remember, any more, what initially drew them together. Elegant Meredith, motherly Nina and the determinedly single Annie are as unlikely companions as you could find. But like a matched set of 1950's kitchen canisters of Flour, Sugar and Tea, they always seem to end up together. Now each are facing the various trials of middle age: divorces, less than satisfactory marriages, teenage kids, careers going nowhere and unexpected bouts of tears. One night, over one too many Flaming Sambuccas during a reunion dinner, they somehow find themselves agreeing to take a road trip to Byron Bay in a RoadMaster Royale mobile home, to attend Meredith's daughter's wedding. Fights and friendship, tears and laughter - not to mention the possibility of finding Mr Right in a caravan park in Ulladulla - this trip might tear them apart or it might just save their lives.An effervescent, uproarious story of female friendship, Byron or Bustis the hugely appealing new novel from Australia's favourite comedienne, Wendy Harmer. as warm and light and as welcome as a doona.' The Agea racy read chick lit meets stand-up.' The Weekend Australian


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What if you found your soulmate... and then discovered you couldn't lose him?When Lucy meets Nate aged 18, it is love at first sight. As far as she's concerned, he's The One. Caught up in the whirlwind of first love, they kiss under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice at sunset and according to the legend are tied together indefinitely. But ten years later, they ve almost forgotten about each other. That is, until fate starts to bring them together. Again. And again. And again. It doesn't seem as wonderful as it had before, but if Nate's not The One then why on earth is it proving so hard to break up with him?A funny and magical romantic comedy about what happens when every girl's dream of finding her dream man comes very true indeed...


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Life sucks, then you die. Period.  

 Unless you're James Stark, a hitman in Hell for eleven years before escaping back up to Hell-on-earth L.A.—looking for revenge, absolution . . . love, maybe.  

 But Hell's not through with Stark.Heaven's not either.


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Four years ago, assassin Court Gentry was betrayed by his handlers in the CIA. Now, an old comrade returns to haunt him-and to force him on a mission against his will. 



 With his ruthless employers on one side, his former friends on the other and a doomed mission ahead, Court Gentry would kill to get out of this one alive.


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It is November 25, 1960, and the bodies of three beautiful, convent-educated sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. El Caribe, the official newspaper, reports their deaths as an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Raphael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everyone knows of Las Mariposas - "The Butterflies." Now, three decades later, Julia Alvarez, also a daughter of the Dominican Republic and long haunted by these sisters, immerses us in a tangled and dangerous moment in Hispanic Caribbean history to tell their story in the only way it can truly be understood - through fiction. In this brilliantly characterized novel, the voices of all four sisters - Minerva, Patria, Maria Teresa, and Dede - speak across the decades, to tell their own stories - from hair ribbons to gunrunning to prison torture - and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo's rule. The Butterflies were extraordinary women. Minerva, once the object of the dictator's desire, had dared to publicly slap his face. Devout Patria found her calling to the uprising through the church. Alluring - and vain - Maria Teresa joined in pursuit of romance. Only Dede, the practical one, the most diligent in her duty to family and tradition, kept apart. And only she survived to see that their names were remembered. Now, through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again. And Dede joins them as a heroine of equal courage.


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What if Mary Shelley had not invented Frankenstein's monster but had met him when she was a girl of eight, sitting by her mother's grave, and he came to her unbidden? What if their secret bond left her forever changed, obsessed with the strange being whom she had discovered at a time of need? What if he were still alive in the twenty-first century? This bold, genre-defying book brings us the "monster" in his own words. He recalls how he was "made" and how Victor Frankenstein abandoned him. He ponders the tragic tale of the Shelleys and the intertwining of his life with that of Mary (whose fictionalized letters salt the narrative, along with those of her nineteenth-century intimates) in this riveting mix of fact and poetic license. He takes notes on all aspects of human striving--from the music of John Cage to robotics to the Northern explorers whose lonely quest mirrors his own--as he tries to understand the strange race that made yet shuns him, and to find his own freedom of mind. In the course of the monster's musings, we also see Mary Shelley's life from her childhood through her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley, her writing of "Frankenstein, " the births and deaths of her children, Shelley's famous drowning, her widowhood, her subsequent travels and life's work, and finally her death from a brain tumor at age fifty-four. The monster's fierce bond with Mary and the tale of how he ended up in her fiction is a haunted, intense love story, a story of two beings who can never forget each other. "A Monster's Notes" is Sheck's most thrilling work to date, a luminous meditation on creativity and technology, on alienation and otherness, on ugliness and beauty, and on our need to be understood.


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"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away--to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography." Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan" for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion--to "talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment"--meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for 100 years meant that when they came out, he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent," and that he was therefore free to speak his "whole frank mind." The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain's death. In celebration of this important milestone and in honor of the cherished tradition of publishing Mark Twain's works, UC Press is proud to offer for the first time Mark Twain's uncensored autobiography in its entirety and exactly as he left it. This major literary event brings to readers, admirers, and scholars the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain's authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave as he intended.


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This book recountsthe horror of World War II on the eastern front, as seen through the eyes of a teenaged German soldier. At first an exciting adventure, young Guy Sajer's war becomes, as the German invasion falters in the icy vastness of the Ukraine, a simple, desperate struggle for survival against cold, hunger, and above all the terrifying Soviet artillery. As a member of the elite Gross Deutschland Division, he fought in all the great battles from Kursk to Kharkov. His German footsoldier's perspective makes The Forgotten Soldiera unique war memoir, the book that the Christian Science Monitorsaid "may well be the book about World War II which has been so long awaited." Now it has been handsomely republished as a hardcover containing fifty rare German combat photos of life and death at the eastern front. The photos of troops battling through snow, mud, burned villages, and rubble-strewn cities depict the hardships and destructiveness of war. Many are originally from the private collections of German soldiers and have never been published before. This volume is a deluxe edition of a true classic.


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In a work that beautifully demonstrates the rewards of closely observing nature, Elisabeth Bailey shares an inspiring and intimate story of her uncommon encounter with a *Neohelix albolabris* —a common woodland snail. While an illness keeps her bedridden, Bailey watches a wild snail that has taken up residence on her nightstand. As a result, she discovers the solace and sense of wonder that this mysterious creature brings and comes to a greater under standing of her own confined place in the world. Intrigued by the snail’s molluscan anatomy, cryptic defenses, clear decision making, hydraulic locomotion, and mysterious courtship activities, Bailey becomes an astute and amused observer, providing a candid and engaging look into the curious life of this underappreciated small animal.  Told with wit and grace, *The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating* is a remarkable journey of survival and resilience, showing us how a small part of the natural world illuminates our own human existence and provides an appreciation of what it means to be fully alive.


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From the front lines of the battle against Islamic fundamentalism, a searing, unforgettable book that captures the human essence of the greatest conflict of our time. Through the eyes of Dexter Filkins, the prizewinningNew York Timescorrespondent whose work was hailed by David Halberstam as "reporting of the highest quality imaginable," we witness the remarkable chain of events that began with the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s, continued with the attacks of 9/11, and moved on to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins's narrative moves across a vast and various landscape of amazing characters and astonishing scenes: deserts, mountains, and streets of carnage; a public amputation performed by Taliban; children frolicking in minefields; skies streaked white by the contrails of B-52s; a night's sleep in the rubble of Ground Zero. We embark on a foot patrol through the shadowy streets of Ramadi, venture into a torture chamber run by Saddam Hussein. We go into the homes of suicide bombers and into street-to-street fighting with a battalion of marines. We meet Iraqi insurgents, an American captain who loses a quarter of his men in eight days, and a young soldier from Georgia on a rooftop at midnight reminiscing about his girlfriend back home. A car bomb explodes, bullets fly, and a mother cradles her blinded son. Like no other book,The Forever Warallows us a visceral understanding of today's battlefields and of the experiences of the people on the ground, warriors and innocents alike. It is a brilliant, fearless work, not just about America's wars after 9/11, but ultimately about the nature of war itself.


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A satirical joyride in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, First Contact introduces us to the hyper-intelligent Rigelians, who admire Woody Allen movies and Bundt cake, and who urge the people of Earth to mend their ways to avoid destruction of their planet. But the president of the United States, a God-fearing, science-doubting fitness fanatic, is skeptical of the evidence presented to him and sets in motion a chain of events that will change the lives of his young attach, an alien scam artist, several raccoons, and a scientist who has predicted the end of the universe. Parrot sketch excluded.


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Harry Bosch investigates the drug-trafficking underworlds of inner city Los Angeles and the wastelands of Mexico. When a body is found in a hotel room, the press soon pick up on the case: it appears to be the body of a missing LAPD narcotics officer, apparently gone to the bad. The rumours were that he had been selling a new drug called Black Ice that had been infiltrating Los Angeles from Mexico. The LAPD are quick to declare the death as a suicide, but Harry Bosch is not so sure. There are odd, unexplained details from the crime scene which just don't add up. Fighting an attraction to the cop's widow, Bosh starts his own maverick investigation, which soon leads him over the borders, and into a dangerous world of shifting identities and deadly corruption...


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**FROM TRUE-CRIME LEGEND ANN RULE comes this riveting story of a young woman whose life ended too soon—and a determined mother’s eleven-year crusade to clear her daughter’s name. 

**It was nine days before Christmas 1998, and thirty-two-year-old Ronda Reynolds was getting ready to travel from Seattle to Spokane to visit her mother and brother and grandmother before the holidays. Ronda’s second marriage was dissolving after less than a year, her career as a pioneering female Washington State Trooper had ended, but she was optimistic about starting over again. "I’m actually looking forward to getting on with my life," she told her mother earlier the night before. "I just need a few days with you guys." Barb Thompson, Ronda’s mother, who had met her daughter’s second husband only once before, was just happy that Ronda was coming home. 

At 6:20 that morning, Ron Reynolds called 911 and told the dispatcher his wife was dead. She had committed suicide, he said, although he hadn’t heard the gunshot and he didn’t know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coroner’s deputy arrived, and a postmortem was conducted. Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson, who neither visited the death scene nor attended the autopsy, declared the manner of Ronda’s death as "undetermined." Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death from "undetermined" to "suicide," back to "undetermined"—and then back to "suicide" again. 

But Barb Thompson never for one moment believed her daughter committed suicide. Neither did Detective Jerry Berry or ballistics expert Marty Hayes or attorney Royce Ferguson or dozens of Ronda’s friends. For eleven grueling years, through the ups and downs of the legal system and its endless delays, these people and others helped Barb Thompson fight to strike that painful word from her daughter’s death certificate. 

On November 9, 2009, a precedent-setting hearing was held to determine whether Coroner Wilson’s office had been derelict in its duty in investigating the death of Ronda Reynolds. Veteran true-crime writer Ann Rule was present at that hearing, hoping to unbraid the tangled strands of conflicting statements and mishandled evidence and present all sides of this haunting case and to determine, perhaps, what happened to Ronda Reynolds, in the chill still of that tragic December night.


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**In 2008, a Gallup poll showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. In a Pew Forum poll in the same year, 42 percent believed that all life on earth has existed in its present form since the beginning of time.**  

 In 1859 Charles Darwin's masterpiece, *On the Origin of Species*, shook society to its core. Darwin was only too aware of the storm his theory of evolution would provoke. But he surely would have raised an incredulous eyebrow at the controversy still raging a century and a half later. Evolution is accepted as scientific fact by all reputable scientists and indeed theologians, yet millions of people continue to question its veracity. Now the author of the iconic work *The God Delusion* takes them to task.  

 *The Greatest Show on Earth* is a stunning counterattack on advocates of "Intelligent Design," explaining the evidence for evolution while exposing the absurdities of the creationist "argument." Dawkins sifts through rich layers of scientific evidence: from living examples of natural selection to clues in the fossil record; from natural clocks that mark the vast epochs wherein evolution ran its course to the intricacies of developing embryos; from plate tectonics to molecular genetics. Combining these elements and many more, he makes the airtight case that "we find ourselves perched on one tiny twig in the midst of a blossoming and flourishing tree of life and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random selection."  

 *The Greatest Show on Earth* comes at a critical time: systematic opposition to the fact of evolution is menacing as never before. In American schools, and in schools around the world, insidious attempts are made to undermine the status of science in the classroom. Dawkins wields a devastating argument against this ignorance, but his unjaded passion for the natural world turns what might have been a negative argument into a positive offering to the reader: nothing less than a master's vision of life, in all its splendor.


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New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts deftly blends the perfect formula of romance and suspense in this addictively compelling novel of a woman whose career, marriage, and very life may depend on her never learning the truth about her past. . . . Emma McAvoy may have grown up in the limelight, but some secrets are hidden in a darkness no light can reach. Now on the verge of a successful career, and having fallen in love with the man of her dreams, Emma is looking to the future. Yet it's the past that is about to catch her from behind. For Emma, her childhood had been almost like a rags-to-riches fairy tale - until the tragic night that changed her family forever. But what Emma thinks she knows about that terrible night and the man she's about to marry is only half the truth. The other half is locked away in the last place she'd ever think to look: her own memories. It's a mystery a handsome and relentlessly driven homicide detective needs to solve in a case that's haunted him for years . . . and a secret someone will kill to keep.


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*About three things I was absolutely positive:First, Edward was a vampire.Second, there was a part of him–and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be–that thirsted for my blood.And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.*“I’D NEVER GIVEN MUCH THOUGHT TO HOW I WOULD DIE– I’d had reason enough in the last few months –but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this. . . . Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of something else, someone I loved. Noble, even. That ought to count for something.”When Isabella Swan moves to the gloomy town of Forks and meets the mysterious, alluring Edward Cullen, her life takes a thrilling and terrifying turn. With his porcelain skin, golden eyes, mesmerizing voice, and supernatural gifts, Edward is both irresistible and impenetrable. Up until now, he has managed to keep his true identity hidden, but Bella is determined to uncover his dark secret. What Bella doesn’t realize is the closer she gets to him, the more she is putting herself and those around her at risk. And, it might be too late to turn back. . . .Deeply seductive and extraordinarily suspenseful, *Twilight* will have readers riveted right until the very last page is turned.


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The #1 New York Times bestseller is available for the first time in a mass market paperback edition, featuring a striking movie tie-in cover. In New Moon, Stephenie Meyer delivers another irresistible combination of romance and suspense with a supernatural twist. The "star-crossed" lovers theme continues as Bella and Edward find themselves facing new obstacles, including a devastating separation, the mysterious appearance of dangerous wolves roaming the forest in Forks, a terrifying threat of revenge from a female vampire and a deliciously sinister encounter with Italy's reigning royal family of vampires, the Volturi. Passionate, riveting, and full of surprising twists and turns, this vampire love saga captures the struggle between defying our instincts and satisfying our desires. This is a love story with bite.


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Bella? Edward s soft voice came from behind me. I turned to see him spring lightly up the porch steps, his hair windblown from running. He pulled me into his arms at once, and kissed me again. His kiss frightened me. There was too much tension, too strong an edge to the way his lips crushed mine - like he was afraid we had only so much time left to us. As Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge, Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob - knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the ageless struggle between vampire and werewolf. With her graduation approaching, Bella has one more decision to make: life or death. But which is which? Following the international bestsellers Twilight and New Moon, Eclipse is the much-anticipated third book in Stephenie Meyer s captivating saga of vampire romance.


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When you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options. How could you run, how could you fight, when doing so would hurt that beloved one? If your life was all you had to give, how could you not give it? If it was someone you truly loved?  To be irrevocably in love with a vampire is both fantasy and nightmare woven into a dangerously heightened reality for Bella Swan. Pulled in one direction by her intense passion for Edward Cullen, and in another by her profound connection to werewolf Jacob Black, a tumultuous year of temptation, loss, and strife have led her to the ultimate turning point. Her imminent choice to either join the dark but seductive world of immortals or to pursue a fully human life has become the thread from which the fates of two tribes hangs. Now that Bella has made her decision, a startling chain of unprecedented events is about to unfold with potentially devastating, and unfathomable, consequences. Just when the frayed strands of Bella's life-first discovered in "Twilight," then scattered and torn in "New Moon" and "Eclipse"-seem ready to heal and knit together, could they be destroyed... forever? The astonishing, breathlessly anticipated conclusion to the Twilight Saga, "Breaking Dawn" illuminates the secrets and mysteries of this spellbinding romantic epic that has entranced millions.


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On an autumn morning the body of a sixteen - year - old girl is found buried in the garden of a country house in Shropshire. She is Natalie Martello and she has been missing for a quarter of a century. The Memory Game is a highly sophisticated psychological thriller based around the controversial theme of recovered memory syndrome. It provides a deeply disturbing and original portrayal of how family secrets can tear the most successful lives apart. It is a thriller of rare power.


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The New World is a prequel to the award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy, setting the stage for the world we discover in The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, and Monsters of Men. The story was written while the author served as writer in residence for the Booktrust an independent UK-wide charity dedicated to encouraging people of all ages and cultures to enjoy books. The New World tells of Viola’s journey to the New World, brilliantly capturing the hope and fear of settlers in search of a new life. Patrick Ness told Amazon exclusively that he wrote it “as a huge and deeply-felt thank you to readers. I’ve had so many questions about Viola and what her life was like before that I couldn’t resist the opportunity to reveal just a little bit extra. I knew these things – they’re vitally important to her as a character, even if they’re not directly in the novels – so it felt like a secret trip I could take readers on. The challenge was to make it work on its own, too, so anyone could read it. That was really, really good fun, and I hope the final result is an exciting one.” The New World can be read before or after the trilogy – and some readers may choose to do both. The story works as a standalone piece, but readers already familiar with The Knife of Never Letting Go will learn more about Viola’s life and the events leading to her arrival and first encounter with Todd, while newcomers to the trilogy will discover a white-knuckle ride of an introduction to the series. Whether you’re a new or faithful reader, though, it’s a welcome chance to immerse yourself in the world of Chaos Walking.


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With the same dazzling imagination and love of language that have made Salman Rushdie one of the great storytellers of our time, *Luka and the Fire of Life* revisits the magic-infused, intricate world he first brought to life in the modern classic *Haroun and the Sea of Stories.* This breathtaking new novel centers on Luka, Haroun’s younger brother, who must save his father from certain doom.  For Rashid Khalifa, the legendary storyteller of Kahani, has fallen into deep sleep from which no one can wake him. To keep his father from slipping away entirely, Luka must travel to the Magic World and steal the ever-burning Fire of Life. Thus begins a quest replete with unlikely creatures, strange alliances, and seemingly insurmountable challenges as Luka and an assortment of enchanted companions race through peril after peril, pass through the land of the Badly Behaved Gods, and reach the Fire itself, where Luka’s fate, and that of his father, will be decided.  Filled with mischievous wordplay and delving into themes as universal as the power of filial love and the meaning of mortality,* Luka and the Fire of Life* is a book of wonders for all ages.


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SUMMARY: The Devil is known by many names: Serpent, Tempter, Beast, Adversary, Wanderer, Dragon, Rebel. His traps and machinations are the stuff of legends. His faces are legion. No matter what face the devil wears, Sympathy for the Devil has them all. Edited by Tim Pratt, Sympathy for the Devil collects the best Satanic short stories by Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, Stephen King, Kage Baker, Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Kelly Link, China Mieville, Michael Chabon, and many others, revealing His Grand Infernal Majesty, in all his forms. Thirty-five stories, from classics to the cutting edge, exploring the many sides of Satan, Lucifer, the Lord of the Flies, the Father of Lies, the Prince of the Powers of the Air and Darkness, the First of the Fallen... and a Man of Wealth and Taste. Sit down and spend a little time with the Devil.


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Britain's most respected sportswriter takes on the greatest football manager of all time. The true biography of Sir Alex Ferguson has yet to be written. Until now. Alex Ferguson is the most fascinating and controversial figure in football today. He is also the most successful. His twenty-five-year tenure of the Manchester United dugout has seen him win everything there is to be won in football, many times over. His reign as manager has led to the rise of Manchester United to become the biggest football club in the world. This book, written by the award-winning and critically acclaimed Patrick Barclay, will fill in the gaps left by Ferguson's own book,Managing My Life. Everyone who bought that book will want Barclay's comprehensive, objective analysis of Ferguson, the good and the bad, and the occasionally ugly and it will also appeal hugely to those outside the Manchester United extended family for whom Ferguson has often acted as a red rag. Having known Ferguson for a quarter of a century, Barclay believes him to be generous-spirited as well as ruthless and relentlessly competitive; in such an almost larger-than-life character, there is room for countless facets. And it is these facets that Barclay seeks to explore and explain. Leaving no stone unturned, Barclay has spoken with everyone who knows Ferguson best; former players, fellow managers, friends and foes. The result is'Football - Bloody Hell!', the definitive, objective account of this fascinating man.


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 A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night, taking one of the spectators along with it . . . 

 In a novella set two years after the events of American Gods, Shadow pays a visit to an ancient Scottish mansion, and finds himself trapped in a game of murder and monsters . . .

 In a Hugo Award-winning short story set in a strangely altered Victorian England, the great detective Sherlock Holmes must solve a most unsettling royal murder . . .

 Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams-;and nightmares . . .

 In a Locus Award-winning tale, the members of an excusive epicurean club lament that they've eaten everything that can be eaten, with the exception of a legendary, rare, and exceedingly dangerous Egyptian bird . . . 

 Such marvelous creations and more-;including a short story set in the world of The Matrix, and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children's fiction-;can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman's storytelling brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time.


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Stories to delight, enchant, and surprise you.  

 Bestselling author and master storyteller Neil Gaiman here presents a breathtaking collection of tales that may chill or amuse readers—but always embrace the unexpected:   A teenage boy who has trouble talking to girls finds himself at a rather unusual party. A sinister jack-in-the-box haunts the lives of the children who owned it. A boy raised in a graveyard makes a discovery and confronts the much more troubling world of the living. A stray cat fights a nightly battle to protect his adopted family from a terrible evil.  

 These eleven stories illuminate the real and the fantastic, and will be welcomed with great joy by Neil Gaiman's many fans as well as by readers coming to his work for the first time.


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The day after they moved in,  Coraline went exploring....  

In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close.

The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.

Only it's different.

At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to *change* her and never let her go.

Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself.

Critically acclaimed and award-winning author Neil Gaiman will delight readers with his first novel for all ages.


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Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy.  

 He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a sprawling graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor of the dead.  

 There are dangers and adventures in the graveyard for a boy-an ancient Indigo Man beneath the hill, a gateway to a desert leading to an abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer.  

 But if Bod leaves the graveyard, then he will come under attack from the man Jack—who has already killed Bod's family. . . .  

 Beloved master storyteller Neil Gaiman returns with a luminous new novel for the audience that embraced his *New York Times* bestselling modern classic *Coraline*. Magical, terrifying, and filled with breathtaking adventures, the graveyard book is sure to enthrall readers of all ages.


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Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her--and the life he knows vanishes like smoke.
Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won't stop for him, his hundred rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals andabandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.
For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family's slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door's entourage in their determined--and possibly fatal--quest.
For the dread journey ever-downward--through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time--is Richard's final hope, his last road back to a "real" world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.
If Tim Burton reimagined The Phantom of the Opera, if Jack Finney let his dark side take over, if you rolled the best work of Clive Barker, Peter Straub and Caleb Carr into one, you still would have something that fell far short of Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE. It is a masterful debut novel of darkly hypnotic power, and one of the most absorbing reads to come along in years.


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Catch a fallen star . . .  Tristran thorn promised to bring back a fallen star. So he sets out on a journey to fulfill the request of his beloved, the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester--and stumbles into the enchanted realm that lies beyond the wall of his English country town. Rich with adventure and magic, Stardust is one of master storyteller Neil Gaiman's most beloved tales, and the inspiration for the hit movie.


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Fat Charlie Nancy is not having a good week. It all hit the proverbial fan when his rotter of an estranged father dropped dead at a karaoke night and Charlie discovered that his dad was in fact Anansi the spider god. Then he found out that he has a brother (called Spider) who is also a god. And that said brother is hell bent on taking over his life, flat and fiance, and, just to add insult to injury, doing a much better job of being him. Desperate to reclaim his life, Charlie enlists the help of four loco old ladies and their unique brand of voodoo and unleashes a bitter and twisted force to get rid of Spider. But as darkness descends and badness begins is Fat Charlie Nancy going to get his life back in one piece or is he about to enter a whole netherworld of pain?


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Shadow is a man with a past. But now he wants nothing more than to live a quiet life with his wife and stay out of trouble. Until he learns that she's been killed in a terrible accident.Flying home for the funeral, as a violent storm rocks the plane, a strange man in the seat next to him introduces himself. The man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he knows more about Shadow than is possible.He warns Shadow that a far bigger storm is coming. And from that moment on, nothing will ever he the same...


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SUMMARY:
On the runway of life, Tim Gunn is the perfect life coach.  You’ve watched him mentor talented designers on the hit television show Project Runway. Now the inimitable Tim Gunn shares his personal secrets for “making it work”—in your career, relationships, and life. Filled with delightfully dishy stories of fashion’s greatest divas, behind-the-scenes glimpses of Runway’s biggest drama queens, and never-before-revealed insights into Tim’s private life, Gunn’s Golden Rules is like no other how-to book you’ve ever read. In the world according to Tim, there are no shortcuts to success. Hard work, creativity, and skill are just the beginning. By following eighteen tried-and-true principles, you can apply Tim’s rules to anything you set your mind to. You’ll learn why Tim frowns on displays of bad behavior, like the vitriolic outburst by Martha Stewart’s daughter about her mother’s name-brand merchandise. You’ll discover the downfalls of divadom as he describes Vogue’s André Leon Talley being hand-fed grapes and Anna Wintour being carried downstairs by her bodyguards. And you’ll get Tim’s view on the backstabbing by one designer on Project Runway and how it brilliantly backfired. Then there are his down-to-earth guidelines for making life better—for yourself and others—in small and large ways, especially in an age that favors comfort over politeness, ease over style. Texting at the dinner table? Wearing shorts to the theater? Not in Tim’s book. Living a well-mannered life of integrity and character is hard work, he admits, but the rewards are many: being a good friend, being glamorous and attractive, and being a success— much like Tim himself! He is never one to mince words. But Tim Gunn is always warm, witty, wise, and wonderfully supportive— just the mentor you need to design a happy, creative, and fulfilling life that will never go out of style.


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SUMMARY:
The new race-against-time bestseller from the British Harlan Coben. When ex-police officer John Cone is found lying wounded in a room full of dead bodies, he has a terrifying story to tell. Three days earlier he was hired by a mysterious client to snatch a suspected serial killer, Andrew Kent (aka the Penthouse Predator) from custody while he's being transferred between prisons. Kent is snatched, but then things immediately go wrong. People start dying, Kent goes missing, and Cone begins to realize that the case against him is not what he was led to believe. Sharing that suspicion is newly promoted DI Tina Boyd, one of the murder squad team who arrested Kent several months earlier. But now Kent's disappeared, and Tina has to find him. And find him fast, because it's clear some very high-powered people want to silence him. "From the Trade Paperback edition."


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SUMMARY:
'Some of our ideas are not of the most orthodox nature. They would be frowned upon in anbsp;more traditional scientific environment, perhaps even laughed at.' London, 1857 - the Lazarus Club. Some of the finest, most unconventional minds in Victorian Britain - including Charles Darwin, Joseph Bazalgette, Charles Babage and Isambard Kingdom Brunel - are members. Meetings take place behind closed doors: their discussions are revolutionary and their conclusions are sometimes forbidden... Knowing nothing of this secret society, Dr George Phillips, a young and ambitious surgeon, is intrigued to encounter Brunel over a well-used cadaver in the gory pit of his dissection theatre. It soon becomes apparent that the great engineer has mysterious plans for the good doctor. And so Phillips becomes emboiled in the enigmatic machinations of the Lazarus Club, and in its midst encounters a dark conspiracy. Not only is his own life in jeopardy, but as the first mutilated body is washed up on the banks of the Thames so the very foundations of Victorian society are set to be rocked to their core.


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SUMMARY:
April 2003: As his nation descends into chaos, an Iraqi boy loots an ancient clay tablet from a long-forgotten vault in the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities--unaware that his actions could ignite the war to end all wars.  Years later, on the eve of a historic Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, bodyguards for Israel's prime minister gun down a possible assassin--and discover a blood-stained note clutched in the dead man's hand.  With Middle Eastern tensions rapidly reaching the boiling point--in the wake of a frightening wave of seemingly random revenge killings--Maggie Costello is sent by Washington to try to keep the peace. A government negotiator with old sins to atone for, she immediately comes face-to-face with ancient secrets, extremist violence, and sudden, inexplicable death. For Maggie seems to hold the key to the last unsolved riddle of the Bible--a shocking revelation that could end the world's most bitter conflict . . . or leave the earth in ruins.


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SUMMARY:
A high concept conspiracy thriller that delivers every step of the way. It may be Christmas in New York, but for ex-soldier turned eacute;lite bodyguard Ryan Lock it's business as usual: his mission is to protect one of America's most ruthless businessmen. Suddenly gunshots ring out. People run for cover. Innocent people are mown down. Amid the chaos, Lock's hunt for the killers turns into an explosive game of cat and mouse. Lock's search for the truth takes him from the rooftops of a New York skyscraper to a heavily fortified warehouse on the Hudson where he confronts one of the world's most dangerous women. As the clock ticks towards midnight on New Year's Eve, all routes into and out of Manhattan are sealed, and Lock realises that not only is his own life in terrible danger but so are the lives of millions of others.


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SUMMARY:
The medicine man from The Manitou has returned for his ultimate revenge on the white race, who decimated his people: People across the country are suddenly struck blind, leaving them helpless against the spirit warriors who have risen to slaughter their oppressors.


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SUMMARY:
The acclaimed author of Vinegar Hill returns with a story of two unlikely romances—one historical, the other modern-day—separated by thousands of miles and well over a century.   Battling feelings of loss and apathy in the wake of a painful divorce, novelist Jeanette struggles to complete a book about the long-term relationship between Clara Schumann, a celebrated pianist and the wife of the composer Robert Schumann, and her husband's protÉgÉ, the handsome young composer Johannes Brahms. Although this legendary love triangle has been studied exhaustively, Jeanette—herself a gifted pianist—wonders about the enduring nature of Clara and Johannes's lifelong attachment. Were they just "best friends," as both steadfastly claimed? Or was the relationship complicated by desires that may or may not have been consummated?   Through a chance encounter, Jeanette meets Hart, a mysterious, worldly entrepreneur who is a native of Clara's birthplace, Leipzig, Germany. Hart's casual help with translations quickly blossoms into something more. There are things about men and women, he insists, that do not change. The two embark on a whirlwind emotional journey that leads Jeanette across Germany and Switzerland to a crossroads similar to that faced by Clara Schumann—also a mother, also an artist—more than a century earlier.   Accompanied by photographs, sketches, and notes from past and present, A. Manette Ansay's original blend of fiction and history captures the timeless nature of love and friendship between women and men.


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SUMMARY:
In his sensational international bestseller, the preeminent scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins delivers a hard-hitting, impassioned, but humorous rebuttal of religious belief. With rigor and wit, Dawkins eviscerates the arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of the existence of a supreme being. He makes a compelling case that faith is not just irrational, but potentially deadly. In a preface written for the paperback edition, Dawkins responds to some of the controversies the book has incited. This brilliantly argued, provocative book challenges all of us to test our beliefs, no matter what beliefs we hold.


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Compilation of stories:

Stories of Your Life and Others (2002) (short story collection):
-Tower of Babel
-Understand
-Division by Zero
-Story of Your Life
-Seventy-Two Letters
-The Evolution of Human Science
-Hell is the Absence of God
-Liking What You See: A Documentary
What's Expected of Us (2006) (short story)
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate (2007) (novelette)
Exhalation (2008) (short story)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010) (novella)


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SUMMARY:
A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions on how to live. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely beautiful process for reconciling science, religion, and humanism. Resonant with the confusions of existence, this classic is a touching and transcendent book of life. This new edition contains an interview with Pirsig and letters and documents detailing how this extraordinary book came to be.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.


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SUMMARY:
An astounding tale of adventure, danger, magic, science, friendship, spaceships, and, oh yeah, the battle to save all the people in all the worlds in all possible dimensions.   Joey Harker isn't a hero.   In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house.   But one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension.   Joey's walk between worlds makes him prey to armies of magic and science, both determined to harness Joey's power to travel between the dimensions. The only thing standing in their way is Joey—or, more precisely, an army of Joeys, all from different dimensions and all determined to save the worlds.   Now Joey must make a choice: return to the life he knows or join the battle to the end.


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SUMMARY:
Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat's Cradle is one of the twentieth century's most important works--and Vonnegut at his very best. "From the Trade Paperback edition."


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SUMMARY:
#1New York Timesbestselling master of suspense Dean Koontz delivers a mesmerizing new thriller that explores the razor-thin line between the best and worst of human natureand the anarchy simmering just beneath society's surfaceas a likeable, successful family man is drawn into a confrontation with a foe of unimaginable malice.... Bestselling novelist Cullen "Cubby" Greenwich is a lucky man and he knows it. He makes a handsome living doing what he enjoys. His wife, Penny, a children's book author and illustrator, is the love of his life. Together they have a brilliant six-year-old, Milo, affectionately dubbed "Spooky," and a non-collie named Lassie, who's all but part of the family. So Cubby knows he shouldn't let one bad review of his otherwise triumphant new book get to himeven if it does appear in the nation's premier newspaper and is penned by the much-feared, seldom-seen critic, Shearman Waxx. Cubby knows the best thing to do is ignore the gratuitously vicious, insulting, and inaccurate comments. Penny knows it, even little Milo knows it. If Lassie could talk, she'd tell Cubby to ignore them, too. Ignore Shearman Waxx and his poison pen is just what Cubby intends to do. Until he happens to learn where the great man is taking his lunch. Cubby just wants to get a look at the mysterious recluse whose mere opinion can make or break a careeror a life. But Shearman Waxx isn't what Cubby expects; and neither is the escalating terror that follows what seemed to be an innocent encounter. For Waxx gives criticism; he doesn't take it. He has ways of dealing with those who cross him that Cubby is only beginning to fathom. Soon Cubby finds himself in a desperate struggle with a relentless sociopath, facing an inexorable assault on far more than his life. Fearless, funny, utterly compelling,Relentlessis Dean Koontz at his riveting best, an unforgettable tale of the fragile bonds that hold together all that we most cherishand of those who would tear those bonds asunder. From the Hardcover edition.


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SUMMARY:
One of the world's leading neuroscientists explores how best to understand the human condition by examining the biological, psychological, and highly social nature of our species within the social context of our lives.  What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his widely accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga looks to a broad range of studies to pinpoint the change that made us thinking, sentient humans, different from our predecessors.  Neuroscience has been fixated on the life of the psychological self for the past fifty years, focusing on the brain systems underlying language, memory, emotion, and perception. What it has not done is consider the stark reality that most of the time we humans are thinking about social processes, comparing ourselves to and estimating the intentions of others. In "Human," Gazzaniga explores a number of related issues, including what makes human brains unique, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

In the small village of Hawkins Hollow, three best friends who share the same birthday sneak off into the woods for a sleepover the evening before turning 10. But a night of pre-pubescent celebration turns into a night of horror as their blood brother oath unleashes a three-hundred year curse.    

Twenty-one years later, Cal Hawkins and his friends have seen their town plagued by a week of unexplainable evil events two more times - every seven years. With the clock winding down on the third set of seven years, someone else has taken an interest in the town's folklore. Quinn is a well known scholar of local legends, and despite Cal's protests, insists on delving in the mystery. But when the first signs of evil appear months early, it's not only the town Cal tries to protect, but also his heart.


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SUMMARY:
From The #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Of Blood Brothers And The Hollow The Conclusion To The Electrifying Trilogy Of Three Men And Three Women Who Join Forces And Hearts To Battle The Ultimate Evil.


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SUMMARY:
A Mass Market Paperback OriginalThe New York Times bestselling author of Blood Brothers continues the thrilling trilogy of a town plagued by evil—and the three men and three women brought together by fate to fight it.


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SUMMARY:
Since their mother's death, Carter and Sadie have become near strangers. Sadie lived with her grandparents in London while her brother traveled the world with their father, Egyptologist Dr. Julius Kane. One night, Dr. Kane brings the siblings together for a "research experiment" at the British Museum, where he hopes to set things right with his family. Instead, he unleashes the Egyptian god Set, who banishes him to oblivion and forces the children to flee for their lives.


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SUMMARY:
Alternate history explores the many possible directions our world could follow if certain key events didn't occur at all or were changed in some crucial way. Is our Earth the only Earth, our reality the only one that exists? Or are there many parallel worlds and societies, some very similar to ours, some barely recognizable? What if Lincoln had never become president, and the Civil War had never taken place? What if Columbus never discovered America, and the Inca developed a massive, technologically advanced empire? What if magic was real and a half-faery queen ruled England? What if Hitler and Germany won the war because America never got involved? What if many of the world's religions were totally commercialized, their temples run like casinos, religions designed purely for profit? What if an author discovered a book written by an alternate version of himself? These are just some of the possible pathways the reader can take to explore the 'Other Earths' that may be waiting just one event away.


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SUMMARY:
In a garden surrounded by a tall fence, tucked away behind a small, quiet house in an even smaller town, is an apple tree that is rumored to bear a very special sort of fruit. In this luminous debut novel, Sarah Addison Allen tells the story of that enchanted tree, and the extraordinary people who tend it.…The Waverleys have always been a curious family, endowed with peculiar gifts that make them outsiders even in their hometown of Bascom, North Carolina. Even their garden has a reputation, famous for its feisty apple tree that bears prophetic fruit, and its edible flowers, imbued with special powers. Generations of Waverleys tended this garden. Their history was in the soil. But so were their futures.A successful caterer, Claire Waverley prepares dishes made with her mystical plants—from the nasturtiums that aid in keeping secrets and the pansies that make children thoughtful, to the snapdragons intended to discourage the attentions of her amorous neighbor. Meanwhile, her elderly cousin, Evanelle, is known for distributing unexpected gifts whose uses become uncannily clear. They are the last of the Waverleys—except for Claire’s rebellious sister, Sydney, who fled Bascom the moment she could, abandoning Claire, as their own mother had years before.When Sydney suddenly returns home with a young daughter of her own, Claire’s quiet life is turned upside down—along with the protective boundary she has so carefully constructed around her heart. Together again in the house they grew up in, Sydney takes stock of all she left behind, as Claire struggles to heal the wounds of the past. And soon the sisters realize they must deal with their common legacy—if they are ever to feel at home in Bascom—or with each other. Enchanting and heartfelt, this captivating novel is sure to cast a spell with a style all its own….From the Hardcover edition.


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SUMMARY:
In this irresistible novel, Sarah Addison Allen, author of the New York Times bestselling debut, Garden Spells, tells the tale of a young woman whose family secrets—and secret passions—are about to change her life forever.
Josey Cirrini is sure of three things: winter is her favorite season, she’s a sorry excuse for a Southern belle, and sweets are best eaten in the privacy of her closet. For while Josey has settled into an uneventful life in her mother’s house, her one consolation is the stockpile of sugary treats and paperback romances she escapes to each night…. Until she finds her closet harboring Della Lee Baker, a local waitress who is one part nemesis—and two parts fairy godmother. With Della Lee’s tough love, Josey’s narrow existence quickly expands. She even bonds with Chloe Finley, a young woman who is hounded by books that inexplicably appear when she needs them—and who has a close connection to Josey’s longtime crush. Soon Josey is living in a world where the color red has startling powers, and passion can make eggs fry in their cartons. And that’s just for starters.
Brimming with warmth, wit, and a sprinkling of magic, here is a spellbinding tale of friendship, love—and the enchanting possibilities of every new day.


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SUMMARY:
Hugo Award-winning editor Gardner Dozois_ annual anthology has long been considered the standard by which other best-of-the-year SF collections are judged. After two decades_ worth of superlative science fiction, Dozois now presents a retrospective compilation culling from the last 20 years.Here under one banner is some of the finest work by the genre's leading authors, with a star-studded list of contributors that features among others: Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, William Gibson, Terry Bisson, Greg Egan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Reed, Robert Silverberg, Bruce Sterling , Charles Stross, Michael Swanwick, Gene Wolfe.A number of the selections are now considered classics. Some notable stories include:_Blood Music_, Greg Bear's Hugo-winning exploration of nanotechnology._Bears Discover Fire_, Terry Bisson's tongue-in-cheek consideration of future ursine evolution._The Left Hand of Darkness_, Ursula K. Le Guin_s coming-of-age SF tale._The Winter Market_, in which William Gibson returns to the subject that made him a cultural icon, cyberpunk.With work spanning two decades, this is the most significant science fiction short story anthology published in years.


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SUMMARY:
As the apocalyptic leaders of Iran call for the annihilation of Israel and the U.S., CIA operative David Shirazi is sent into Tehran with one objective: use all means necessary to disrupt Iran's nuclear weapons program, without leaving American fingerprints, and without triggering a regional war. At extreme personal risk, Shirazi executes his plan. A native Farsi speaker whose family escaped from Iran in 1979, he couldn't be better prepared for the mission. But none of his training has prepared Shirazi for what will happen next. An obscure religious cleric is suddenly hailed throughout the region as the Islamic messiah known as the Mahdi or the Twelfth Imam. News of his miracles, healings, signs, and wonders spread like wildfire, as do rumors of a new and horrific war. With the prophecy of the Twelfth Imam seemingly fulfilled, Iran's military prepares to strike Israel and bring about the End of Days. Shirazi must take action to save his country and the world, but the clock is ticking. And then, a dark secret from his past comes to light and changes the course of his life forever.


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SUMMARY:
The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. Dashing young Edmond Dantès has everything. He is engaged to a beautiful woman, is about to become the captain of a ship, and is well liked by almost everyone. But his perfect life is shattered when he is framed by a jealous rival and thrown into a dark prison cell for 14 years.The greatest tale of betrayal, adventure, and revenge ever written, The Count of Monte Cristo continues to dazzle readers with its thrilling and memorable scenes, including Dantès’s miraculous escape from prison, his amazing discovery of a vast hidden treasure, and his transformation into the mysterious and wealthy Count of Monte Cristo—a man whose astonishing thirst for vengeance is as cruel as it is just.Luc Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.


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SUMMARY:
There was a time when admirers of Stephen King would seek out every scrap from the Master&#146;s work bench, and it was a cause for celebration when it was discovered that the writer Richard Bachman was, in fact, a pseudonym for King. There were more King novels available than we had all thought! And it was even more an occasion for celebration when it was discovered just how good these Bachman books were.
With Blaze (issued here with a new foreword by Stephen King), we have one of the most adroit entries in the series. King had written the book in 1973 and it had subsequently vanished from his personal radar as he busied himself writing Carrie and Salem's Lot, two of the books that were to both make his fortune and establish him as the greatest modern master of horror fiction. When Blaze turned up among his papers in the library of the University of Maine, he looked at it again, and (fortunately for King aficionados) sanctioned its publication.
Clay Blaisdell is a hulking 6' 7'' petty criminal who encounters another lowlife with large ambitions: George Rackley has a fund of criminal schemes, but his Big Idea is to kidnap the children of rich parents and hold them to ransom. What ensues is shot through with the masterly orchestration of tension that is Stephen King's m&#233;tier. If there are some undigested influences here (the two protagonists -- one massive and powerful, the other the brains of the duo -- owe more than a little to George and Lenny in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men), the personality that comes through (leaving aside the Richard Bachman nom-de-plume) is Stephen King, and followers of his work will need no persuasion to pick up this one. --Barry Forshaw   

      
  'BLAZE feels like an essential missing piece in King's oeuvre...compelling'  -- Independent on Sunday   'King's brilliance is in making his readers root for the kidnapper rather than the authorities'  -- Daily Telegraph   'Tightly written and compelling'  -- Daily Express  'Storytelling - the ability to make the listener or the reader need to know, demand to know, what happens next - is a gift. Stephen King, like Charles Dickens before him, has this gift in spades' -- The Times on CELL   'Thrilling, genuinely terrifying, beautifully textured and full of wonderful invention'  -- Daily Mail on LISEY'S STORY   'A consummate and compassionate novel -- one of King's very best'  -- Guardian on LISEY'S STORY   

      
  
'BLAZE feels like an essential missing piece in King's oeuvre...compelling'
 (Independent on Sunday )


'King's brilliance is in making his readers root for the kidnapper rather than the authorities'
 (Daily Telegraph )


'Tightly written and compelling'
 (Daily Express )

'Storytelling - the ability to make the listener or the reader need to know, demand to know, what happens next - is a gift. Stephen King, like Charles Dickens before him, has this gift in spades' (The Times on CELL )


&#x2018;Thrilling, genuinely terrifying, beautifully textured and full of wonderful invention&#x2019;
 (Daily Mail on LISEY'S STORY )


'A consummate and compassionate novel &#x2013; one of King&#x2019;s very best'
 (Guardian on LISEY'S STORY )


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SUMMARY:
On the surface, Lena Spencer appears to have it all. She and her wealthy husband Randall have two wonderful children, and they live a life of luxury. In reality, however, Lena finds that happiness is elusive. Randall is emotionally distant, her son has developed a drug habit, and her daughter is disgusted by her mother's "overbearing behavior." When Randall decides that he's had enough of marriage counseling, he offers his wife an ultimatum: "Be grateful for all I've done for you or leave." Lena, realizing that money can't solve her problems and that her husband is no longer the man she married, decides to choose the latter. Drawing strength from Tina Turner's life story, SEARCHING FOR TINA TURNER is Lena's struggle to find herself after 25 years of being a wife and mother.


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SUMMARY:
Iris is ready for another hot, routine summer in her small Louisiana town, hanging around the Red Stripe grocery with her best friend, Collette, and traipsing through the cemetery telling each other spooky stories and pretending to cast spells. Except this summer, Iris doesn’t have to make up a story. This summer, one falls right in her lap.Years ago, before Iris was born, a local boy named Elijah Landry disappeared. All that remained of him were whispers and hushed gossip in the church pews. Until this summer. A ghost begins to haunt Iris, and she’s certain it’s the ghost of Elijah. What really happened to him? And why, of all people, has he chosen Iris to come back to?


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SUMMARY: First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Hunter S. Thompson's savagely comic account of what happened to this country in the 1960s. It is told through the writer's account of an assignment he undertook with his attorney to visit Las Vegas and "check it out." The book stands as the final word on the highs and lows of that decade, one of the defining works of our time, and a stylistic and journalistic tour de force. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times, it has "a kind of mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman Mailer's An American Dream left off and explores what Tom Wolfe left out." This twenty-fifth-anniversary Modern Library edition features Ralph Steadman's original drawings and three companion pieces selected by Dr. Thompson: "Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," and "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

SUMMARY:
First published in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is Hunter S. Thompson's savagely comic account of what happened to this country in the 1960s. It is told through the writer's account of an assignment he undertook with his attorney to visit Las Vegas and "check it out." The book stands as the final word on the highs and lows of that decade, one of the defining works of our time, and a stylistic and journalistic tour de force. As Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times, it has "a kind of mad, corrosive prose poetry that picks up where Norman Mailer's An American Dream left off and explores what Tom Wolfe left out."    This twenty-fifth-anniversary Modern Library edition features Ralph Steadman's original drawings and three companion pieces selected by Dr. Thompson: "Jacket Copy for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan," and "The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved." The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.


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SUMMARY:
The story starts out simply enough: Jess Aarons wants to be the fastest boy in the fifth grade--he wants it so bad he can taste it. He's been practicing all summer, running in the fields around his farmhouse until he collapses in a sweat. Then a tomboy named Leslie Burke moves into the farmhouse next door and changes his life forever. Not only does Leslie not look or act like any girls Jess knows, but she also turns out to be the fastest runner in the fifth grade. After getting over the shock and humiliation of being beaten by a girl, Jess begins to think Leslie might be okay. Despite their superficial differences, it's clear that Jess and Leslie are soul mates. The two create a secret kingdom in the woods named Terabithia, where the only way to get into the castle is by swinging out over a gully on an enchanted rope. Here they reign as king and queen, fighting off imaginary giants and the walking dead, sharing stories and dreams, and plotting against the schoolmates who tease them. Jess and Leslie find solace in the sanctuary of Terabithia until a tragedy strikes and the two are separated forever. In a style that is both plain and powerful, Katherine Paterson's characters will stir your heart and put a lump in your throat.


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SUMMARY:
Amid the screams of adulation for bandanna-clad wunderkind David Foster  Wallace, you might hear a small peep. It is the cry for some restraint. On  occasion the reader is left in the dust wondering where the story went, as  the author, literary turbochargers on full-blast, suddenly accelerates into  the wild-blue-footnoted yonder in pursuit of some obscure metafictional  fancy. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace's latest  collection, is at least in part a response to the distress signal put out  by the many readers who want to ride along with him, if he'd only  slow down for a second.
    The intellectual gymnastics and ceaseless rumination endure (if you don't  have a tolerance for that kind of thing, your nose doesn't belong in this  book), but they are for the most part couched in simpler, less frenzied  narratives. The book's four-piece namesake takes the form of interview  transcripts, in which the conniving horror that is the male gender is  revealed in all of its licentious glory. In the short, two-part "The Devil  Is a Busy Man," Wallace strolls through the Hall of Mirrors that is human  motivation. (Is it possible to completely rid an act of generosity of any  self-serving benefits? And why is it easier to sell a couch for five  dollars than it is to give it away for free?) The even shorter glimpse into  modern-day social ritual, "A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial  Life," stretches the seams of its total of seven lines with scathing  economy: "She laughed extremely hard, hoping to be liked. Then each drove  home alone, staring straight ahead, with the very same twist to their  faces." Wallace also imbues his extreme observational skills with a  haunting poetic sensibility. Witness what he does to a diving board and the  two darkened patches at the end of it in "Forever Overhead":    It's going to send you someplace which its own  length keeps you from seeing, which seems wrong to submit to without  even  thinking.... They are skin abraded from feet by the violence of the disappearance of  people with real weight.    Of course, not every piece is an absolute winner. "The Depressed Person"  slips from purposefully clinical to unintentionally boring. "Tri-Stan: I  Sold Sissee Nar to Ecko" reimagines an Arthurian tale in MTV terms and  holds your attention for about as long as you'd imagine from such a  description. Ultimately, however, even these failed experiments are a  testament to Mr. Wallace's endless if unbridled talent. Once he gets the  reins completely around that sucker, it's going to be quite a ride.  --Bob Michaels  --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 

      
  Some of the 23 stories in Wallace's bold, uneven, bitterly satirical second collection seem bound for best-of-the-year anthologies; a few others will leave even devoted Wallace fans befuddled. The rest of the stories fall between perplexing and brilliant, but what is most striking about this volume as a whole are the gloomy moral obsessions at the heart of Wallace's new work. Like his recent essays, these stories (many of which have been serialized in Harper's, Esquire and the Paris Review) are largely an attack on the sexual heroics of mainstream postwar fiction, an almost religious attempt to rescue (when not exposing as a fraud) the idea of romantic love. In the "interviews," that make up the title story, one man after anotherAspeaking to a woman whose voice we never hearAreveals the pathetic creepiness of his romantic conquests and fantasies. These hideous men aren't the collection's only monsters of isolation. In "Adult World," Wallace writes of a young wife obsessed with fears that her husband is secretly, compulsively masturbating; in "The Depressed Person," one of Wallace's (rare) female narcissists whines that she is a "solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum"Athis, to a dying friend. If MacArthur Fellowship-winner Wallace's rendition of our verbal tics and trash is less astonishing now than in earlier work (Infinite Jest; A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again), that is because it has already become the way we hear ourselves talk. Wallace seems to have stripped down his prose in order to more pointedly probe distinct structures (i.e., footnoted psychotherapy journal, a pop quiz format). Yet these stories, at their best, show an erotic savagery and intellectual depth that will confound, fascinate and disturb the most unsuspecting reader as well as devoted fans of this talented writer. Author tour. 
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.  --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 

      
  Following the success of his massive, much-acclaimed novel, Infinite Jest (LJ 1/96), Wallace returns to fiction with a similarly dense, cerebral, and self-reflexive set of short works. Wallace's characters are psychological grotesques, emotionally detached and sometimes, as with the na?ve young wife in "Adult World," finding an odd freedom in their distance. While the inauthenticity of male/female relations is a recurrent motif, the central theme is the nature of narrative itself, as in "Octet," where the author turns self-reflexiveness on itself, creating something that might be termed meta-meta-fiction. Fans of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme will find comparable challenges here. For libraries where Infinite Jest was popular.ALawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA 
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.  --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 

      
  The structure of the short story intrigues and piques Wallace, prompting him to subvert it. He imitates academic writing by attaching substantial footnotes to "The Depressed Person," thus creating a contrapuntal story within the story. "Datum Centurio" is a set of definitions of the word date, purportedly found in Leckie & Webster's Connotationally Gender-Specific Lexicon of Contemporary Usage, copyright 2076. The title story, appearing in four installments, consists of a string of monologues in which men talk about women. Sex in its more disturbing modes is the collection's underlying theme. A man listens intently as a woman describes being raped. Another man goes into explicit detail in his rant against men's sexual selfishness, and a woman worries that her husband doesn't enjoy their lovemaking. Like Stephen Dixon, Wallace is adept at generating streams of consciousness, rendering mental states in almost psychedelic detail. And he practices this art to perfection in "Forever Overhead," in which a 13-year-old boy is nearly overwhelmed by sensory overload while awaiting his turn at the high dive.  Donna Seaman  --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 

      
  A stimulating, if intermittently opaque, collection of discursive stories and even less fully fictionalized humorous pieces from the savvy-surrealistic author of Infinite Jest (1996), etc. Though few of the tales here contain conventionally developed characters or narrative situations, most feature instantly recognizable generic figures. Embattled parents and siblings dominate such eerie concoctions as ``Signifying Nothing,'' in which a primal scene perhaps expressing male dominance has a lasting effect on a son's relationship with his father; and a powerfully imaginative torrent of Oedipal rivalry spoken ``On his Deathbed . . . [by] the Acclaimed New Young Off-Broadway Playwright's Father . . . ,'' The Depressed Person'' blandly skewers the culture of self-absorption and psychotherapy (while neatly mocking the latter's passion for clinical precision), and ``Datum Centurio'' gets impressive comic mileage out of its brief parody of an etymological dictionary entry. Sex rears its comely, come-hither head in the chronicling (in Forever Overhead) of the perplexing sensations of adolescence in full eruption, and particularly in ``Adult World,'' a deliriously expanding Robert Cooverlike fantasy spun from a young wife's fretful confusion about pleasing-vs.- offending her docile husband. Most interesting are the title ``stories,'' divided into four installments scattered throughout, and variously delineating men's alienation from, and misunderstanding of, women: the amputee who considers his mutilated arm a ``Sexual Asset''; the self-consciousness of a hotel men's-room attendant (wreathed in ``The ghastly metastasized odors of continental breakfasts and business dinners''); the loves of Tristan and Isolde and Narcissus and Echo reshaped for the cable-TV audience by network executive ``Agon M. Nar.'' Postadolescent whimsy mingled with postmodernist horseplay: this isn't a book that can be consumed in sizable chunks. Still, Wallace is a witty guide to the fragmented, paranoid Way We Live Now, someone perhaps poised to become the 21st-century's Robert Benchley or James Thurberboth a frightening and a beguiling prospect.  -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.  --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 

      
  ...a mixed bag of 23 essays and short stories that display a  range of intellect and talent that is unseemly for any one writer to  have, let alone show off.  -- Time, R.Z. Sheppard

...in his wild hits and misses, his eccentric obsessions and  his sinister experiments, he is beginning to resemble another mad  scientist of American literature: Edgar Allan Poe. -- The New York Times Book Review, Adam Goodheart

In this book he demonstrates his strengths as a stylist,  humorist and thinker.... None of these stories is easy, but all  display an intelligence and a swagger that make them hard to put down. -- The Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg  --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


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SUMMARY:
In a sprawling, wild, super-hyped magnum opus, David Foster  Wallace fulfills the promise of his precocious novel   The  Broom of the System.  Equal parts philosophical quest and  screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction,  features a huge cast and multilevel narrative, and questions essential  elements of American culture - our entertainments, our addictions, our  relationships, our pleasures, our abilities to define ourselves.  --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 

      
  With its baroque subplots, zany political satire, morbid, cerebral humor and astonishing range of cultural references, Wallace's brilliant but somewhat bloated dirigible of a second novel (after The Broom in the System) will appeal to steadfast readers of Pynchon and Gaddis. But few others will have the stamina for it. Set in an absurd yet uncanny near-future, with a cast of hundreds and close to 400 footnotes, Wallace's story weaves between two surprisingly similar locales: Ennet House, a halfway-house in the Boston Suburbs, and the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy. It is the "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" (each calendar year is now subsidized by retail advertising); the U.S. and Canada have been subsumed by the Organization of North American Nations, unleashing a torrent of anti-O.N.A.N.ist terrorism by Quebecois separatists; drug problems are widespread; the Northeastern continent is a giant toxic waste dump; and CD-like "entertainment cartridges" are the prevalent leisure activity. The novel hinges on the dysfunctional family of E.T.A.'s founder, optical-scientist-turned-cult-filmmaker Dr. James Incandenza (aka Himself), who took his life shortly after producing a mysterious film called Infinite Jest, which is supposedly so addictively entertaining as to bring about a total neural meltdown in its viewer. As Himself's estranged sons?professional football punter Orin, introverted tennis star Hal and deformed naif Mario?come to terms with his suicide and legacy, they and the residents of Ennet House become enmeshed in the machinations of the wheelchair-bound leader of a Quebecois separatist faction, who hopes to disseminate cartridges of Infinite Jest and thus shred the social fabric of O.N.A.N. With its hilarious riffs on themes like addiction, 12-step programs, technology and waste management (in all its scatological implications), this tome is highly engrossing?in small doses. Yet the nebulous, resolutionless ending serves to underscore Wallace's underlying failure to find a suitable novelistic shape for his ingenious and often outrageously funny material. 
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.  --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 

      
  Wallace's second novel is not for the faint-hearted or the weak-wristed. Wallace (The Girl with Curious Hair, LJ 7/89) throws everything he knows-and he knows plenty-into this river of stories. If you can stand the extreme length, ignore the footnotes, and have a bed-desk to rest this tome on, this book can be fun. Wallace sandwiches more than you'd ever want to know about a private tennis boarding school, Quebec separatists, a drug-and-alcohol addict's halfway house, potheads, and other topics-both trendy and not-in between E-mail messages, admissions reports, headlines, and other real-life documents, or pseudo-documents. Too much happens here even to begin to summarize, but the author has a wicked sense of humor and a wonderful eye for capturing the odd juxtapositions of modern life. Besides his lack of conciseness, Wallace's other main weakness is dialog: nobody talks as cleverly as most of his characters do. Distinct, idiomatic, wild, and crazy, this book is destined to have a cult following. Recommended for most fiction collections.
Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.  --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 

      
  Wallace offers huge entertainment...only Gaddis and Pynchon  have this range.  So brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it  has a heart as well as a brain.  Infinite Jest is both a vast,  comic epic and a profound study of the post-modern condition. -- Review of Contemporary Fiction  --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


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Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.


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Leland Gaunt is a stranger in Castle Rock--and he calls his new shop Needful Things， where there is something for everyone. Mr. Gaunt takes pleasure in seeing how much people will pay for their most secret dreams and desires， and he knows that almost everything is for sale: love， hope， even the human soul.


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The Plant is a serial novel published in 2000 as an e-book by Stephen King.
The American author Stephen King wrote a few parts of a story by the same name and sent out as chapbooks to his friends instead of Christmas cards in 1982, 1983, and 1985. Only three installments were produced by Philtrum Press before the story was shelved, and the original editions are hotly sought-after collector's items today.
In 2000, King picked up The Plant again and started to publish it as an electronic serial. The first part (matching the 1982 story) was put on his own web site for anyone to download. He also said that he wanted everyone that downloaded the story to pay him $1 either before or after reading it.
The idea was that if enough people paid up, more parts would be published in the same way. The limit was set at 75% of payers versus downloaders. The rate of paying customers decreased over time, but at least the first parts were over the set limit. As of mid-2001, six parts have been published (making up the first somewhat self-contained part of the novel). King has said that there will be more, but that some other projects will be finished first. To date there has been no further mention of the story.
The story tells of a person working as editor on a paperback publishing house. One day he gets a manuscript from what seems like a crackpot. It's about magic, but it also contains photographs that seem very real. He writes a rejection slip about the book, but on grounds of the photographs, he also notifies the police where the author lives. This enrages the author who sends a mysterious plant to the editor's office.
The story is told in epistolary format, consisting entirely of letters, memos, and so on.


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In recent novels, which have been called “hypnotic,” “stunning,” and “exhilarating,” David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as “Novelist”) announces that since this will be his final effort, he has “carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases.” 

Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists — their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.

As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.


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SUMMARY:
From the internationally best-selling author Daniel Kehlmann, a provocative and wickedly funny novel about two unpredictable menone an artist and the other a journalist, who together embark on an unexpected adventure with uproarious results. Sebastian Zollner's failure as a journalist is matched only by his personal failures: his girlfriend is moving in a new lover before Sebastian even knows he's been dumped. Searching for the break that will redeem him in the eyes of his peers, he heads off on a wild goose chase into the mountains to interview the eccentric, legendary painter Manuel Kaminski, with the hope of writing his biography. Kaminski is going blind and is living in seclusion with his daughter. He could be working on his next masterpiece or easing into his final days, and his inconsistent career raises the question of whether he has been a fraud or a genius. His artistic reputation hinges on any number of factors but most prominently on a definitive biography. Enter Zollnerwho has no intention of writing a puff piece. He's out to dig dirt and to force Kaminski to confront the legacy of his work. But the secrets he uncovers will lead Kaminski, and Zollner himself, to places neither of them ever expected to go. With edgy wit and intelligence, Daniel Kehlmann dives into the problems of what is "truth" in our celebrity-crazed times and embraces the energy and humanity that lie beneath the pretensions of the art and journalistic worlds. A firecracker of a novel. From the Hardcover edition.


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Loosely based on the lives of 19th-century explorer Alexander von Humboldt and a contemporary, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, Kehlmann's novel, a German bestseller widely heralded as an exemplar of "new" German fiction, injects musty history with shots of whimsy and irony. Humboldt voyages to South America to map the Orinoco River, climb the Chimborazo peak in Ecuador and measure "every river, every mountain and every lake in his path." Gauss is the hedgehog to Humboldt's fox, leaping out of bed on his wedding night to jot down a formula and rarely leaving his hometown of Göttingen. The two meet at a scientific congress in 1828, when Germany is in turmoil after the fall of Napoleon. Other luminaries appear throughout the novel, including a senile Immanuel Kant, Louis Daguerre and Thomas Jefferson. The narrative is notable for its brisk pacing, lively prose and wry humor (curmudgeonly Gauss laments, for instance, how "every idiot would be able to... invent the most complete nonsense" about him 200 years hence), which keenly complements Kehlmann's intelligent, if not especially deep, treatment of science, mathematics and reason at the end of the Enlightenment.


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SUMMARY:
Tom Franklin's extraordinary talent has been hailed by the leading lights of contemporary literature—Philip Roth, Richard Ford, Lee Smith, and Dennis Lehane. Reviewers have called his fiction "ingenious" (USA Today) and "compulsively readable" (Memphis Commercial Appeal). His narrative power and flair for character-ization have been compared to the likes of Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, Elmore Leonard, and Cormac McCarthy.   Now the Edgar Award-winning author returns with his most accomplished and resonant novel so far—an atmospheric drama set in rural Mississippi. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother. Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town.   More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.


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Denny is a secretary who has just begun an affair with her boss, while also maintaining a friendship with his wife. Invited to the family's house for Thanksgiving dinner, she enters into a chain of events that will change everyone's lives in ways that none can imagine. Hilarious, scorching, and full of surprises, The Body of Jonah Boyd is a tribute to the power of home, the lure of success, and, above all, the sisterhood of secretaries.


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SUMMARY:
Questions for Charles Yu on How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe    
 
    
 You’re a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award-winner and this is your debut novel. When and why did you start writing, and what advice do you have for other young writers out there trying to get published?     I wrote poems and essays as a kid, and in college, I dreamed of becoming a professional writer, whatever I thought that meant, although, for a lot of reasons, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.  Mostly, my parents were going to murder me if I tried to apply to an MFA program.  First-degree murder.      So I didn’t actually start writing until 2002, shortly after I began my career as a lawyer.  Working in a high-pressure environment was squeezing me pretty hard, and all that pressure found its way out in the form of little things I was jotting down, in the margins of receipts, on the backs of business cards.  I wrote a series of physics problems about a married couple’s life together.  I wrote some instructions for how to play a metaphysical video game.  Stuff like that.      But I didn’t think I was actually writing, let alone writing what anyone would call fiction, until I read CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders.  That book blew the doors off the empty little space that had previously housed my puny imagination.      Up until that point, I’d had no clue as to what a story could be.  And it was because my ideas were assumptions.  Tacit, limiting, ultimately false assumptions, which added up to a severely impoverished conception of what was possible in fiction.  After reading CivilWarLand, I knew I wanted that feeling, wanted to be surprised like that, and flattened onto the floor, and embarrassed my by own narrowness.  I wanted to have my doors blown off again and again.  It was a short distance to go from wanting to have that feeling to also wanting to see if maybe I could ever give that feeling to someone else.    As for advice, it would be to transfer all the anxiety about publication into anxiety about whether the story works, whether a reader is going to care about the characters.  I break down the process into four components: writing, rewriting, submitting, and worrying.  My ideal, not at all realistic, scenario, would be to make the proportion of time spent on each of those activities something like: 19 percent, 80 percent, 1 percent, 0 percent.  This is very hypocritical of me to say, of course, as I’ve never done this myself, I’ve never even been close.  But I do know that the farther from zero the last two numbers get, the more I’m in trouble.  And that the second number should be much bigger than the first.
    
 How has your interest in and knowledge of science and science fiction contributed to and inspired your writing of this book?     I read and collected comics as a kid, read pretty much everything I could find of Asimov, including the whole Foundation series in one semester in eighth grade (to the detriment of my English grade), and so much else, too much to list or even remember.  Then, at some point in high school, I got the idea that there were serious books we read in school, and there was science fiction, and there was not a lot of overlap.  That lasted until my senior year in college, when I stumbled on Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2, which wasn’t exactly science fiction, it was this amazing love story. It also handled actual science (cognitive science, artificial intelligence) without watering it down, and yet was still clearly Serious Fiction, whatever that meant to me back then, the kind that was in the Sunday book review sections.  After that, I began to search out more writing like that, more Powers, and Jonathan Lethem.    Currently, I read more science than I do anything else, including fiction.  I especially enjoy reading books written by scientists for lay folk, like me.  I was a biochem major in college, and so part of it is that I am interested in the science itself, but I’m just as interested in the process of explanation, how the author, an expert in a specialized field, tries to explain difficult concepts through simplification and creative analogy.  I am fascinated by that process of distilling something really complex into something most people can understand.  There are so many examples of great books that do this, but the one that still stands out for me is Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.  After finishing that book, I was convinced I had a working knowledge of string theory.  I was like, I can do this stuff; I could hang with string theorists at a cocktail party.  Of course, when I tried to explain even the simplest concept from the book to someone else, I realized how much Greene had been holding my hand.  I was like a baby who thought he could walk, until I tried on my own.
    
 Your book deals with time travel in a more serious and even tragic way than most stories about the subject, though you mask the severity with humor to keep the dialogue light and amusing. What made you decide to write about this complicated topic, and how did you come to write about it in this unique manner?     I knew I wanted the novel to be a family story, mostly about a father and son, but also about a marriage, and a son-mother story, too.  But I could not find the right frame for the story.  At the same time, I kept coming back to this idea that had been floating around in my head and on my laptop for years, but one that I could never find a home for.  It was about of a man who keeps popping up in different hypothetical universes, trying to find the universe where he belongs.  I’d been messing around with that conceit, on and off, for close to five years.  Then I remembered a book I’d read years earlier, called The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch (which sets out, among other things, Deutsch’s multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics), and in particular, one specific sentence from that book:  “Other times are just special cases of other universes.”  That sentence was a bridge for me.  I realized I didn’t want to write a story about hypothetical universes. I wanted to write a time travel story.      Once I decided that the novel would be about time travel, the book started to take shape.  Not quickly, more like, I had a frame, and now little pieces started sticking to the frame, just odd scraps here and there, but the frame was the right one, and I could hang things on it.  Most important, what happened was that the two vocabularies—the emotion of a father-mother-son story and the technical glossary of a time travel story--started to interact; like two dry wool blankets, they started to rub up against each other and crackle a bit. Things would pop out of that, phraselets and new words and little surprises of grammar and language and emotion, and science fiction would fall out from that interaction.      Whatever humor there is in there, if any, is probably also a product of that process, of smashing together two sub-languages, emotional and science fictional, and seeing what weird tonal particles are produced from the collision.  I knew that the story needed weight, because if it were just whimsical, a reader might wonder why any of it mattered, and of course, the most important thing that I am trying to do is create characters who matter to the reader.  I do hope that there are at least a few laughs in there. 
       
 Your protagonist, a time travel technician attempting to save people from trying to alter their pasts, is named Charles Yu. How did you come to name him after yourself?     It was originally a placeholder, to be honest.  So was the father’s name, which is my father’s name.  I tried different names for the son and the father, but none of them would take, so I just put in my real name (and my dad’s) so I could get going with the writing, but when I did that, a strange thing happened: the story started moving, fast, in a different direction.  Suddenly, it was about a self meeting his self, and the details of the character’s life started to come together, as did the relationship between the son and the father.  I think having my actual name in there gave me a straw man, a straw story, that I could write in reaction to.  For some reason, once the name of the character became Charles Yu, I stopped slipping in autobiographical or semi-autobiographical information, and actually started removing it.  I think I realized, wow, if this character is going to have my name, I’d better take some of this stuff out.  There is still a fair amount of it in there, semi- or pseudo-autobiographical, but much of it is more emotionally resonant than factually resonant. 
     
 Though there is a definite science fictional aspect to your novel, it is also heavily literary and much more about real life than it at first appears. How, then, would you characterize your novel? Fiction, science fiction, or something outside the realm of typical genre classifications?     I was hoping it would be characterized as a time machine, although I realize there is no section for time machines in most bookstores.  In terms of topology, I think of it as a stable, looped, four-dimensional object with chronodiegetic properties.  In terms of genre, I would be happy for it to be shelved in both fiction and in science fiction.  Or maybe under a new category, where they would put books that resist either classification.  A lot of my favorite books would be in that category.
     
 What’s next for you?   I’m working on a new novel that takes place in “America,” i.e., not America, but a dream-and-desire-fueled holographic projection of the collective mental environment of Americans, which exists as a geographical place that happens to overlap the physical America.  It’s also a story about a man looking for his ex-wife and daughter.  I hope I can figure out a way to make that make sense.
    (Photo &#169; Michael Zara)


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SUMMARY:
Lois McMaster Bujold’s best-selling Vorkosigan series is a publishing phenomenon, winning record-breaking sales, critical praise, four Hugo Awards and a Nebula award. And the thousands of devotees of the series now have a book that will be a goldmine of information, background details, and little-known facts about the Vorkosigan saga. Included are an all-new interview with Bujold as well as essays by her on crafting the Vorkosigan universe, articles on the biology, technology and sociology of the planet Barrayar, appreciations of the individual novels by experts, maps, a complete timeline of the series, and more. Readers can’t get enough of the Vorkosigan series and they’ll jump at the chance to read this story behind the stories. Baen has a new novel in the Vorkosigan series under contract.


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Julie Powell thought cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the craziest thing she'd ever do-- until she embarked on the voyage recounted in her new memoir, CLEAVING. Her marriage challenged by an insane, irresistible love affair, Julie decides to leave town and immerse herself in a new obsession: butchery. She finds her way to Fleischer's, a butcher shop where she buries herself in the details of food. She learns how to break down a side of beef and French a rack of ribs--tough, physical work that only sometimes distracts her from thoughts of afternoon trysts. The camaraderie at Fleischer's leads Julie to search out fellow butchers around the world-- from South America to Europe to Africa. At the end of her odyssey, she has learned a new art and perhaps even mastered her unruly heart.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

The world's two deadliest spies in the ultimate  showdown. At a small-town carnival two men, each  mysteriously summoned by telegram, witness a bizarre  killing. The telegrams are signed Jason Bourne.  Only they know Bourne's true identity and understand  the telegram is really a message from Bourne's  mortal enemy, Carlos, known also as the Jackal, the  world's deadliest and most elusive terrorist. And  furthermore, they know that the Jackal wants: a  final confrontation with Bourne. Now David Webb,  professor of Oriental studies, husband, and father,  must do what he hoped he would never have to do  again -- assume the terrible identity of Jason Bourne.  His plan is simple: to infiltrate the politically  and economically Medusan group and use himself as  bait to lure the cunning Jackal into a deadly trap  -- a trap from which only one of them will escape.


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The Soviets' new ballistic-missile submarine is attempting to defect to the United States, but the Soviet Atlantic fleet has been ordered to find and destroy her at all costs. Can Red October reach the U.S. safely? Gripping military thriller about the chase after a top-secret Russian missilesubmarine.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Jack Ryan confronts terrorists in the Middle East in Tom Clancy's spectacular sixth novel -- another Sunday Times No 1 bestseller -- now reissued with a new cover.  As those in power around the globe face up to the challenges of a new world order, in Washington CIA Deputy Director Jack Ryan is putting everything into a plan that could finally bring peace to a Middle East still suffering from the ravages of war. But too many groups have invested too much blood to allow the plan to succeed -- the terrorists have one final desperate card to play. With one terrible act the world is plunged into nuclear crisis.  His dreams of peace shattered, Ryan is confronted with a situation he has never dared to imagine: with the world standing on the brink of war, what do you do if the US President is incompetent to deal with the greatest crisis of all?


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From England to Ireland to America, an explosive wave of violence sweeps CIA analyst Jack Ryan and his family into the deadliest game of our time: international terrorism. An ultra-left-wing faction of the IRA has targeted Ryan for his act of salvation in an assassination attempt. Now Ryan must pay--with his life. HC: G.P. Putnam.


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The controversial bestseller from Tom Clancy, the all-time master of the techno-thriller. CIA Deputy Director Jack Ryan joins the war on drugs. And when three American officials are assassinated in Colombia, the U.S. response is swift-and shocking.


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Two men possess vital data on Russia's Star Wars missile defense system. One isted by the KGB. The other is Jack Ryan, hero of The Hunt for Red October,ld to peace. A 4-month #1 New York Times bestseller, with 1.3 million hardcover copies in print. HC: Putnam.


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His work for the CIA is brilliant, cold-blooded and efficient, but who is he? In a harrowing tour de force, phenomenally bestselling author Tom Clancy shows how an ordinary man named John Kelly crossed the lines of justice and morality to become the CIA legend known as Mr. Clark. It is an unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness, without mercy--without remorse.


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Called out of retirement to serve as National Security Advisor to the president, Jack Ryan, with the help of CIA officers John Clark and Domingo Chavez, must prepare the untested president to meet the challenges of a new world order. Reissue.


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Jack Ryan becomes president by sheer accident when the former president, most of Congress, the Cabinet and the Supreme Court are bombed out of existence. Ryan must jump in to discover who did it, all the while contending with the threat of military takeover and covert biological warfare. Herrmann reads this spy-thriller with chilling precision, flawlessly switching from one scene to another in this choppy abridgment. As the plots rush to conclusion, Herrmann keeps track of the multitude of accents, representing both "good guys" and "bad guys" around the world.


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Early in his career, Jack Ryan accepts his first assignment as a freelance analyst under James Greer of the CIA and faces a mission involving a high-level Soviet defector who has reported a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Reprint.


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Ex-Navy SEAL John Clark is the newly named head of Rainbow, an international task force dedicated to combating terrorism. In a trial by fire, he must stop a terrorist group of men and women so extreme that their success could literally mean the end of life on earth as we know it.


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When a terrorist leader and a drug warlord form a dangerous alliance, three new Hendley Associates agents--FBI agent Dominic Caruso, his Marine captain brother Brian, and their cousin, Jack Ryan, Jr.--encounter unexpected dangers. A man named Mohammed sits in a cafe in Vienna, about to propose a deal to a Colombian. Mohammed has a strong network of agents and sympathizers throughout Europe and the Middle East, and the Colombian has an equally strong drug network throughout America. What if they were to form an alliance, to combine all their assets and connections? The potential for profits would be enormous-and the potential for destruction unimaginable. In the Brave New World of terrorism-where anybody with a spare AK-47, a knowledge of kitchen chemistry, or simply the will to die can become a player-the old rules no longer apply. No matter what new governmental organizations come into being, the only truly effective ones are those that are quick and agile, free of oversight and restrictions...and outside the system. Way outside the system. In a nondescript office building in suburban Maryland, the firm Hendley Associates does a profitable business in stocks, bonds, and international currencies, but its true mission is quite different: to identify and locate terrorist threats, and then deal with them, in whatever manner necessary. Established with the knowledge of President John Patrick Ryan, "the Campus" is always on the lookout for promising new talent, its recruiters scattered throughout the armed forces and government agencies-and three men are about to cross its radar. The first is Dominic Caruso, a rookie FBI agent, barely a year out of Quantico, whose decisive actions resolve a particularly brutal kidnap/murder case. The second is Caruso's brother, Brian, a Marine captain just back from his first combat action in Afghanistan, and already a man to watch. And the third is their cousin...a young man named Jack Ryan, Jr. Jack was raised on intrigue. As his father moved through the ranks of the CIA and then into the White House, Jack received a life course in the world and the way it operates from agents, statesmen, analysts, Secret Service men, and black ops specialists such as John Clark and Ding Chavez. He wants to put it all to work now-but when he knocks on the front door of "the Campus," he finds that nothing has prepared him for what he is about to encounter. For it is indeed a different world out there, and in here...and it is about to become far more dangerous.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Four Cassettes, 6 hoursTime and again, **Tom Clancy**'s novels have been praised not only for their big-scale drama and propulsive narrative drive, but for their cutting-edge prescience in predicting future events.  In *The Bear and The Dragon*, the future is very near at hand indeed.Newly elected in his own right, Jack Ryan has found that being President has gotten no easier.  Domestic pitfalls await him at every turn, there's a revolution in Liberia, the Asian economy is going down the tubes, and now, in Moscow, someone may have tried to take out the chairman of the SVR - the former KGB - with a rocket-propelled grenade.  Things are unstable enough in Russia without high-level assassination, but even more disturbing may be the identities of the assassins.  Were they political enemies, the Russian Mafia, disaffected former KGB?  Or, Ryan wonders, is something far more dangerous at work here.Ryan is right.   For even while he dispatches his most trusted eyes and ears, including black ops specialist John Clark, to find out the truth of the matter, forces in China are moving ahead with a plan of truly audacious proportions.  If they succeed, the world as we know it will never look the same.  If they fail--the consequences will be unspeakable.


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From the author of The Hunt For Red October, a New York Times bestseller for over 40 weeks, comes his greatest performance yet. Red Storm Rising is an alarmingly authentic portrait of escalating aggression between superpowers on all fronts--land, sea, air and space.


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2 cassettes / 3 hoursRead by Edward HerrmannThe first blockbuster novel in the thrilling Op Center series.Op-Center is a beating heart of defense, intelligence, and crisis management technology. It is run by a crack team of operatives both within its won walls and out in the field. And when a job is too dirty, or too dangerous, Op-Center is the only place out government can turn.Op-Center is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik--inspiring this audio cassette, as well as the special NBC Television presentation.


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The second volume in the bestselling series of high-tech, high-action thrillers created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik -- repackaged in a stunning new-look cover. In Tom Clancy's Op-Centre, bestselling author Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, novelist and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, have created an astonishingly popular thriller series, which has already sold over 1 million HarperCollins paperbacks. Now the first three volumes are being repackaged to coincide with the publication of the latest volume in the series, Acts of War. In this second volume, the new President of Russia is trying to create a new democratic regime. But there are strong elements within the country that are trying to stop him: the ruthless Russian Mafia, the right-wing nationalists and those nefarious forces that will do whatever it takes to return Russia to the days of the Czar. The Op-Centre team begins a race against the clock and against the hardliners. Their task is made even more difficult by the discovery of a Russian counterpart...but this one's controlled by those same repressive hardliners.


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Just in time for the ABC television event! Here comes a first: a new series of novels for young adults starring a team of troubleshooting teens--the Net Force Explorers--that knows more about cutting-edge technology than its teachers! The year is 2010, computers are superpowers. Those who control them, control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: Net Force. When the director of Net Force is assassinated, Deputy Director Alex Michaels is thrust into one of the most powerful and dangerous positions in the world.


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Kurdish terrorists have attacked a dam inside the borders of Turkey, threatening the water supply of their homeland. It is not insanity, but the first step in a deceptively simple plan: force all-out war in the Middle East, drawing in the major players in the new world order. What the terrorists don't know is that a new Regional Op-Center is now on-line in Turkey and is a cutting edge surveillance and information mecca. Its team can see exactly what the Kurdish rebels are trying to do. But the terrorists are more resourceful than anyone thinks. They have ways of obtaining classified information, and the Regional Op-Center is a prize they can t possibly pass up . . .


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“Sometimes having company is not all it’s cracked up to be.” Fifteen-year-old Finn is a loner, living with his dad and his amazing dog, Dylan. This summer he’s hoping for a job where he doesn’t have to talk to anyone except his pal Matthew. Then Johanna moves in next door. She’s 10 years older, cool, funny, and she treats Finn as an equal. Dylan loves her, too. Johanna’s dealing with breast cancer, and Matthew and Finn learn to care for her, emotionally and physically. When she hires Finn to create a garden, his gardening ideas backfire comically. But Johanna and the garden help Finn discover his talents for connecting with people.


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An atmospheric new Fry and Cooper thriller for fans of Peter Robinson and Reginald Hill.A May Bank Holiday in the Peak District is ruined by the tragic drowning of an eight-year-old girl in picturesque Dovedale. For Detective Constable Ben Cooper, a helpless witness to the tragedy, the incident is not only traumatic, but leads him to become involved in the tangled lives of the Neilds, the dead girl's family.As he gets to know them, Cooper begins to suspect that one of them is harbouring a secret - a secret that the whole family might be willing to cover up.Meanwhile, Detective Sergeant Diane Fry has a journey of her own to make - a journey back to her roots. As she finds herself drawn into an investigation of her own among the inner-city streets of Birmingham, Fry realises there is only one person she can rely on to provide the help she needs.But that man is Ben Cooper, and he's back in Derbyshire, where his suspicions are leading him towards a shocking discovery on the banks of another Peak District river.


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As a good girl waiting for her chance to be bad, Grace McAllen felt lost and discontented. But all that changed one day when a gorgeous stranger with ocean blue eyes rode into tiny Edenville, Texas, on a Harley. Grace knew in her heart that the chance meeting was just the beginning of a grand new adventure....Don't miss this prequel story to bestselling author Susan Wiggs's novel, "The Ocean Between Us"!


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The stunning continuation of the timeless classic The Phantom of the Opera.In The Phantom of Manhattan, acclaimed, bestselling suspense novelist Frederick Forsyth pens a magnificent work of historical fiction, rife with the insights and sounds of turn-of-the-century New York City, while continuing the dramatic saga which began with Gaston Leroux's brilliant novel The Phantom of the Opera....More than two decades have passed since Antoinette Giry, the mistress of the corps de ballet at the Paris Opera, rescued a hideously disfigured boy named Erik from a carnival and brought him to live in the labyrinthine cellars of the opera house. Soon thereafter, his intense, unrequited love for a beautiful chorus girl set in motion a tragic string of events, forcing him to flee Paris forever. Now, as she lies dying in a convent, Madam Giry tells the untold story of the Phantom and his clandestine journey to New York City to start anew, where he would become a wealthy entrepreneur and build the glorious Manhattan Opera House....all so he could see his beloved, now a famous diva, once again. But the outcome of her visit would prove even more devastating than before-- and yet, would allow the Phantom to know, for the first time in his brutal life, the true meaning of love....


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In the newly unified Germany, old horrors are reborn. It is the beginning of Chaos Days, a time when neo-Nazi groups gather to spread violence and resurrect dead dreams. But this year Germany isn't the only target. Plans are afoot to destabilize Europe and cause turmoil throughout the United States. Paul Hood and his team, already in Germany to buy a technology for the new Regional Op-Center, become entangled in the crisis. They uncover a shocking force behind the chaos -- a group that uses cutting-edge technology to promote hate and to influence world events. A powerful profile of America's defense, intelligence, and crisis management technology, Tom Clancy's Op-Center is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik -- inspiring this and other gripping novels.


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"Clancy knows how to build a thriller." - Boston GlobeSpain is a nation poised to suffer its worst internal strife in a thousand years. Certain well-placed Spanish diplomats sense it. Op-Center intelligence corroborates it. All the United States and Spain have to do is find a way to avert it.Before they can, an Op-Center representative is assassinated in Madrid on her way to a top secret diplomatic meeting. Now all fears are confirmed. Someone very powerful wants another Spanish civil war -- no matter what the cost.A powerful profile of America's defense, intelligence, and crisis management technology, Tom Clancy's Op-Center is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik - inspiring this and other gripping novels.


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Ingrid Betancourt tells the story of her captivity in the Colombian jungle, sharing powerful teachings of resilience, resistance, and faith. Born in Bogotį, raised in France, Ingrid Betancourt at the age of thirty-two gave up a life of comfort and safety to return to Colombia to become a political leader in a country that was being slowly destroyed by terrorism, violence, fear, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness. In 2002, while campaigning as a candidate in the Colombian presidential elections, she was abducted by the FARC. Nothing could have prepared her for what came next. She would spend the next six and a half years in the depths of the jungle as a prisoner of the FARC. Even Silence Has an Endis her deeply personal and moving account of that time. Chained day and night for much of her captivity, she never stopped dreaming of escape and, in fact, succeeded in getting away several times, always to be recaptured. In her most successful effort she and a fellow captive survived a week away, but were caught when her companion became desperately ill; she learned later that they had been mere miles from freedom. The facts of her story are astounding, but it is Betancourt's indomitable spirit that drives this very special account, bringing life, nuance, and profundity to the narrative. Attending as intimately to the landscape of her mind as she does to the events of her capture and captivity, Even Silence Has an Endis a meditation on the very stuff of life-fear and freedom, hope and what inspires it. Betancourt tracks her metamorphosis, sharing how in the routines she established for herself-listening to her mother and two children broadcast to her over the radio, daily prayer-she was able to do the unthinkable: to move through the pain of the moment and find a place of serenity. Freed in 2008 by the Colombian army, today Betancourt is determined to draw attention to the plight of hostages and victims of terrorism throughout the world and it is that passion that motivates Even Silence Has an End. The lessons she offers here-in courage, resilience, and humanity-are gifts to treasure.


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Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly. Iain Banks' celebrated first novel is a work of extraordinary originality, imagination and horrifying compulsion: horrifying, because it enters a mind whose realities are not our own, whose values of life and death are alien to our society; and compulsive, because the humour and compassion of that mind reach out to us all.


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"It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach."So begins Iain Banks’ The Crow Road, the tale of Prentice McHoan and his complex but enduring Scottish family. Prentice, preoccupied with thoughts of sex, death, booze, drugs, and God, has returned to his home village of Gallanach full of questions about the McHoan past, present, and future.When his beloved Uncle Rory disappears, Prentice becomes obsessed with the papers Rory left behind — the notes and sketches for a book called The Crow Road. With the help of an old friend, Prentice sets out to solve the mystery of his uncle’s disappearance, inadvertently confronting the McHoans’ long association with tragedy — an association that includes his sister’s fatal car crash and his father’s dramatic death by lightning. The Crow Road is a coming-of-age story as only Iain Banks could write — an arresting combination of dark humor, menace, and thought-provoking meditations on the nature of love, mortality, and identity.


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In a world renowned even within a galaxy full of wonders, a crime within a war. For one brother it means a desperate flight, and a search for the one - maybe two - people who could clear his name.  For his brother it means a life lived under constant threat of treachery and murder.  And for their sister, even without knowing the full truth, it means returning to a place she'd thought abandoned forever.

Only the sister is not what she once was; Djan Seriy Anaplian has changed almost beyond recognition to become an agent of the Culture's Special Circumstances section, charged with high-level interference in civilisations throughout the greater galaxy.

Concealing her new identity - and her particular set of abilities - might be a dangerous strategy, however. In the world to which Anaplian returns, nothing is quite as it seems; and determining the appropriate level of interference in someone else's war is never a simple matter.

MATTER is a novel of dazzling wit and serious purpose. An extraordinary feat of storytelling and breathtaking invention on a grand scale, it is a tour de force from a writer who has turned science fiction on its head.


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Getting your dream job in the arts is no mean feat these days. In this book, the author explores the world of museums and galleries, focusing on contemporary issues and current options for employment in this field. This down-to-earth guide will help you work out what kind of job you would be best suited to, and how to prepare for a career in your chosen field. Featuring many case studies and real life examples, this book takes a practical approach to finding the right job for you. It includes advice on creating an eye-catching CV, applying for an advertised post, finding work experience, the interview itself, and creating the career you really want. The book features a foreword by Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery.


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In "The Quest for Meaning", Tariq Ramadan, philosopher and Islamic scholar, invites the reader to join him on a journey to the deep ocean of religious, secular, and indigenous spiritual traditions to explore the most pressing contemporary issues. Along the way, Ramadan interrogates the concepts that frame current debates including: faith and reason, emotions and spirituality, tradition and modernity, freedom, equality, universality, and civilization. He acknowledges the greatest flashpoints and attempts to bridge divergent paths to a common ground between these religious and intellectual traditions. He calls urgently for a deep and meaningful dialogue that leads us to go beyond tolerant co-existence to mutual respect and enrichment. Written in a both direct and meditative style this is an important, timely and intelligent book that aims to direct and shape debate around the most important questions of our time.


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Sent to unravel the mystery of an enigmatic monolith left on the moon by an unknown alien intelligence, two astronauts aboard the spacecraft Discovery find their journey into space and their very lives jeopardized by the jealousy of an extraordinary computer named Hal. Reissue.


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2010: Odyssey Two is a best-selling science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, which was published in January 1982. It is the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1983.[1] The novel was adapted for the screen and released as a film in 1984.

The story is set nine years after the failure of the Discovery One mission to Jupiter.[4]

A joint Soviet-American crew,[5] including Heywood Floyd from 2001, on the Soviet spaceship Alexei Leonov (named after the famous cosmonaut) arrives to discover what went wrong with the earlier mission, to investigate the monolith in orbit around the planet, and to resolve the disappearance of David Bowman. They hypothesize that much of this information is locked away on the now-abandoned Discovery One. The Soviets have an advanced new "Sakharov" drive which will propel them to Jupiter ahead of the American Discovery Two, so Floyd is assigned to the Leonov crew.

However, a Chinese space station rockets out of Earth orbit, revealing itself to be the interplanetary spacecraft Tsien, also aimed at Jupiter. The Leonov crewmembers think the Chinese are on a one-way trip due to its speed, but Floyd surmises that due to the large water content of Europa they intend to land there and use the water content to refuel. The Tsien's daring mission ends in failure, when it is destroyed by an indigenous life-form on Europa. The only survivor radios the story to the Leonov; it is presumed that he dies when his spacesuit air supply runs out.


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One thousand years after the Jupiter mission to explore the mysterious Monolith had been destroyed, after Dave Bowman was transformed into the Star Child, Frank Poole drifted in space, frozen and forgotten, leaving the supercomputer HAL inoperable. But now Poole has returned to life, awakening in a world far different from the one he left behind--and just as the Monolith may be stirring once again. . . . A Main Selection of the Science Fiction Book Club®Selected by the Literary Guild® and Doubleday Book Club®


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Centenarian Heywood Floyd, survivor of two encounters with mysterious monoliths, once again confronts Dave Bowman, an independent HAL, and an unseen alien race


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Frostmourne.It was caught in a hovering, jagged chunk of ice, the runes that ran the length of its blade glowing a cool blue. Below it was a dais of some sort, standing on a large gently raised mound that was covered in a dusting of snow. A soft light, coming from somewhere high above where the cavern was open to daylight, shone down on the runeblade. The icy prison hid some details of the sword's shape and form, exaggerated others. It was revealed and concealed at the same time, and all the more tempting, like a new lover imperfectly glimpsed through a gauzy curtain. Arthas knew the blade -- it was the selfsame sword he had seen in his dream when he first arrived. The sword that had not killed Invincible, but that had brought him back healed and healthy. He'd thought it a good omen then, but now he knew it was a true sign. This was what he had come to find. This sword would change everything. Arthas stared raptly at it, his hands almost physically aching to grasp it, his fingers to wrap themselves around the hilt, his arms to feel the weapon swinging smoothly in the blow that would end Mal'Ganis, end the torment he had visited upon the people of Lordaeron, end this lust for revenge. Drawn, he stepped forward.The uncanny elemental spirit drew its icy sword. "Turn away, before it is too late," it intoned.* * *His evil is legend. Lord of the undead Scourge, wielder of the runeblade Frostmourne, and enemy of the free peoples of Azeroth. The Lich King is an entity of incalculable power and unparalleled malice -- his icy soul utterly consumed by his plans to destroy all life on the World of Warcraft.But it was not always so. Long before his soul was fused with that of the orc shaman Ner'zhul, the Lich King was Arthas Menethil, crown prince of Lordaeron and faithful paladin of the Silver Hand.When a plague of undeath threatened all that he loved, Arthas was driven to pursue an ill-fated quest for a runeblade powerful enough to save his homeland. Yet the object of his search would exact a heavy price from its new master, beginning a horrifying descent into damnation. Arthas's path would lead him through the arctic northern wastes toward the Frozen Throne, where he would face, at long last, the darkest of destinies.


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Thrall, wise shaman and the warchief of the Horde, has sensed a disturbing change . . . Long ago, Azeroth’s destructive native elementals raged across the world until the benevolent titans imprisoned them within the Elemental Plane. Despite the titans’ intervention, many elementals have ended up back on Azeroth. 

Over the ages, shaman like Thrall have communed with these spirits and, through patience and dedication, learned to soothe roaring infernos, bring rain to sun-scorched lands, and otherwise temper the elementals’ ruinous influence on the world of Azeroth. Now Thrall has discovered that the elementals no longer heed the shaman’s call. The link shared with these spirits has grown thin and frayed, as if Azeroth itself were under great duress. While Thrall seeks answers to what ails the confused elements, he also wrestles with the orcs’ precarious future as his people face dwindling supplies and growing hostility with their night elf neighbors. 

Meanwhile, King Varian Wrynn of Stormwind is considering violent action in response to mounting tensions between the Alliance and the Horde, a hard-line approach that threatens to alienate those closest to him, including his son, Anduin. The conflicted young prince has set out to find his own path, but in doing so, he risks becoming entangled in political instability that is setting the world on edge.The fate of Azeroth’s great races is shrouded in a fog of uncertainty, and the erratic behavior of the elemental spirits, troubling though it is, may only be the first ominous warning sign of the cataclysm to come. 
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In this follow-up to her NY Times bestseller, ARTHAS, Christie Golden delivers a sensational tie-in to the newest World of Warcraft game expansion!


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In present-day Manhattan， four masked horsemen dressed as Templar  Knights stage a bloody raid on the Metropolitan Museum of Art during an exhibit of Vatican treasures. Emerging with a strange geared device， they disappear into the night. What follows is an investigation that will draw an archaeologist and FBI agent into the dark， hidden history of the crusading Knights-and into a deadly game of cat and mouse with ruthless killers-as they race across three continents to recover the lost secret of the Templars.


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When his parents are kidnapped, whats ten-year-old Charlie Ashanti to do? Rescue them, thats what! He doesnt know who has taken his parents, or why. But he does know that one special talent will aid him on his journeyhis amazing ability to speak Cat. Charlie calls on his clever feline friendsfrom stray city cats to magnificent caged lionsfor help. With them by his side, Charlie uses wit and courage to try to find his parents before its too late.  With its whirlwind action and suspense, Lionboy is a nonstop page-turner. Already being compared to J. K. Rowling, this mother-daughter writing team will fascinate readers of all ages with their Cat-speaking hero!


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在线阅读本书

  A beautiful, haunting evocation of the medieval Japan of Lian Hearn's imagination, this thrilling follow-up to Grass for His Pillow and Across the Nightingale Floor delves deeper into the complex loyalties that bind its characters from birth. Filled with adventure and surprising twists of plot and fortune, this final volume travels beyond the Three Countries, to the outside influences that threaten to intrude upon this isolated realm.


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The surprise fourth installment, the epic conclusion of Lian Hearn's beloved, bestselling Tales of the Otori. <br/><br/> The Harsh Cry of the Heron: The Last Tale of the Otori is a truly epic novel. It is the rich and satisfying conclusion to the Tales of the Otori series that both completes the characters' lives-prophesied and otherwise-and brilliantly illuminates unexpected aspects of the entire Otori saga. The Harsh Cry of the Heron is the only fitting end to such a stirring series: a book that takes the storytelling achievement of Lian Hearn's fantastic medieval Japanese world to startling new heights of drama and action. <br/><br/> Hearn's Otori series is the best (and only) literary expression of a cultural phenomenon that has swept through cinema (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), comics (manga), and popular culture at large. And, with this book, Hearn delivers in full ninja vs. samurai fashion the kinetic, simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting resolution that the Otori's hundreds of thousands of fans richly deserve-whose epic satisfaction will surely draw even more readers into the fold.


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Lord Shigeru, heir to the Otori clan, faces hostility from the shrewdly ambitious Iida family in the East and base treachery at home from his uncles. His noble education and training as a warrior have prepared him for leadership and combat, but fate and Shigeru's youthful determination bring the Three Countries to war, and he must endure terrible and tragic defeat at thebattle of Yaegahara... and its brutal consequences.  Heaven's Net is Wide is the first and last Tale, which both closes the circle and introduces new readers to the strange and beautiful world of the Otori. It is an epic historical fantasy of revenge and betrayal, honour and loyalty, beauty and passion and the overwhelming power of love.


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在线阅读本书

  This is the first book in a new epic trilogy that has already become a bestselling sensation in England and Australia, earning comparisons to The Lord of the Rings. It begins with the legend of a nightingale floor in a black-walled fortress-a floor that sings in alarm at the step of an assassin. It will take true courage and all the skills of an ancient Tribe for one orphaned youth named Takeo to discover the magical destiny that awaits him...across the nightingale floor.


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Both Takeo and Kaede have visions of their future. Takeo works to escape the Tribe and fulfill the last wishes of his adoptive father, Lord Shigeru Otori. And Kaede, heir to two seats of power, moves forward step by step, aided by her own wits and a precarious alliance with Lord Fujiwara. In their separate worlds, the two long for each other, knowing that they are meant to be together, wondering if they will ever see each other again. . . .  'The beauty, savagery and strangeness of Hearn's gripping tale is heightened by her exquisite, crystalline prose. The second instalment in the "Tales of the Otori" is, astonishingly, even better than " Across the Nightingale Floor"' - Amanda Craig, " Independent on Sunday"


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In the year 2010, computers are the new superpower.  Those who control them control the world.  To enforce the New Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency with the FBI: the Net Force.

Instructions on how to make a bomb...a list of every U.S. spy in the Euro-Asian theater...Someone with access to classified information is posting it on the Internet-and it's costing lives.  Net Force Commander Alex Michaels is in the hot seat.  Now, before a hostile Senate committee, he must justify the very existence of the Net Force.

Meanwhile, a virus is unleashed that throws the federal financial systems into chaos.  And the Net Force operatives must hunt the wily hacker through the twists and turns of cyberspace-down a path that leads them dangerously close to home...


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Driven by greed, a group of U.N. peacekeeping soldiers called "Keepers" devises a shocking scheme to get the world's attention after their tour of duty ends. Op-Center head Paul Hood has to put retirement on hold because the Keepers have taken over the U.N., where his daughter is performing for ambassadors at a gala function. This time the Keepers have made it personal, and the Op-Center forces will strike with deadly vengeance.


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It's a mission that only Striker -- the military arm of Op-Center -- can handle: capture an Islamic cleric who is stirring up a rebellion against the Indian government. But when the border between India and Pakistan erupts, the Striker team gets caught in the crossfire. Now America's most proficient covert team is trapped in a full-fledged war. Their fate rests in the hands of a devious double agent whose own agenda is unknown -- a man who could just as easily sell them out as set them free.... 

 A powerful profile of America's defense, intelligence, and crisis management technology, *Tom Clancy's Op-Center* is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik -- inspiring this and other gripping audiobooks.


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Shadowy elements within the State Department secretly cause tensions to flare between Iran and the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. They hope to start a shooting war to increase their own power and profit. 

 At the same time, the conspirators decide to up the ante -- by deposing the President of the United States. In a treacherous scheme, they convince the President that he is mentally unstable, and a silent coup d'etat is within their reach. 

 Now, Paul Hood and the members of Op-Center are pitted against the clock to prevent the outbreak of war, save the honor of the President -- and expose the traitors within... 

 *A powerful profile of America's defense, intelligence, and crisis management technology,* Tom Clancy's Op-Center *is the creation of Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik -- inspiring this and other gripping audiobooks.*


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When Op-Center's budget is cut, General Mike Rodgers finds himself out of a job until he is propositioned by a Senator Donald Orr, who, making a run for president as the head of his own third party, needs a military advisor, but his new position comes with a high price - murder. Original.


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Updated with new material on Seawolf and Virginia    "Takes readers deeper than they ve ever gone inside a nuclear submarine." (Kirkus Reviews)    A rare glimpse inside a Los Angeles-class (SSN-688) nuclear submarine with Tom Clancy as your guide...    Only the author of The Hunt for Red October could capture the reality of life aboard a nuclear submarine. Only a writer of Mr. Clancy s magnitude could obtain security clearance for information， diagrams， and photographs never before available to the public. Now， every civilian can enter this top secret world and experience the drama and excitement of this stunning technological achievement...the weapons， the procedures， the people themselves.    Submarine includes:  * Exclusive photographs， illustrations， and diagrams  * Mock war scenarios and weapons launch procedures  * An inside look at life on board， from captain to crew， from training exercises to operations  * The fascinating history and evolution of submarines  * Tom Clancy s controversial views on submariner tactics and training methods.


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CIA operative Mitch Rapp follows a trail of contract killers leading directly to the heart of our nation's capital in "New York Times" bestselling author Vince Flynn's eighth explosive thriller. It's a gorgeous autumn day in Georgetown. The Democratic candidates for president and vice president of the United States are dutifully glad-handing voters and the media outside a grand estate where a national security conference has just been held, bringing together the world's greatest minds to discuss the issues that are threatening the country. It's American politicking at its best. That's when all hell breaks loose. When presidential candidate Josh Alexander's motorcade is ambushed by a group of terrorists, the nation is thrown into turmoil. Two weeks following the attack, Alexander is carried to victory by a sympathy vote, but his assailants have not been found. On the surface it appears to be the work of al-Qaeda, despite the tremendous job that the U.S. and her allies have done eliminating terrorist cells within the heart of America. While the FBI and the rest of the government begin scouring the world for jihadists, CIA director Irene Kennedy and Special Agent Skip McMahon are presented with classified information so toxic that they consider destroying it altogether, as it contains intelligence pointing to some of the most powerful players in Washington. Enter Mitch Rapp, the one man reckless enough to follow the evidence to its explosive conclusion. His journey takes him through the shadowy world of contract killers, into the darkest corners of the globe, and eventually back to Washington, where the fragile pillars of power are shaken to their core.


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New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn returns with his most explosive political thriller yet. A tour de force of action-packed suspense, Protect and Defend delivers an all-too-realistic and utterly compelling vision of nations navigating the minefield of international intrigue. A true  heavyweight in the political thriller arena  (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Vince Flynn has created a flesh-and-blood hero that readers can cheer for and a  finger-blistering page-turner  they won t dare put down.In Protect and Defend, the action begins in the heart of Iran, where billions of dollars are being spent on the development of a nuclear program. No longer willing to wait for the international community to stop its neighboring enemy, Israel launches one of the most creative and daring espionage operations ever conceived.  The attack leaves a radioactive tomb and environmental disaster in the middle of Iran s second largest city.  An outraged Iranian government publicly blames both Israel and the United States for the attack and demands retribution.  Privately, Iran s bombastic president wants much more.  He wants America and Israel to pay for their aggression with blood.Enter Mitch Rapp, America s top counterterrorism operative. Used to employing deception, Rapp sees an opportunity where others see only Iranian reprisals that could leave thousands of Americans dead.  Rapp convinces President Josh Alexander to sign off on a risky operation that will further embarrass the Iranian government and push their country to the brink of revolution.  As part of the plan, CIA director Irene Kennedy is dispatched to the region for a clandestine meeting with Azad Ashani, her Iranian counterpart.But Rapp isn t the only one hatching plans.  Iranian President Amatullah, has recruited Hezbollah master terrorist Imad Mukhtar to do his dirty work.  For decades Mukhtar has acted as a surrogate for Iran, blazing a trail of death and destruction across the Middle East and beyond.  When Kennedy s meeting with Ashani goes disastrously wrong, Rapp and Mukhtar are set on a collision course that threatens to engulf the entire region in war.  With the clock ticking, Rapp is given twenty-four hours, no questions asked, to do whatever it takes to stop Mukhtar, and avert an unthinkable catastrophe.


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Fearless counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp finds himself directly in the line of fire in the latest riveting political thriller from *New York Times* bestselling author Vince Flynn.

For years, Mitch Rapp's bold actions have saved the lives of countless Americans. His battles for peace and freedom have made him a hero to many, and an enemy to countless more. In the tangled, duplicitous world of espionage, there are those, even among America's allies, who want to see Mitch Rapp eliminated. They have decided the time has come.

Now, the powerful father of a dead terrorist demands vengeance in its simplest form -- an eye for an eye, and Rapp instantly becomes the target of an international conspiracy. This time, he must use all of his vigilance and determination to save himself before he can turn his fury on those who have dared to betray him.

*Consent to Kill* takes listeners behind the headlines and catapults them to the front lines of the global war on terror. It sizzles "with inside information, military muscle, and CIA secrets" (Dan Brown). Vince Flynn mixes military technology with his exclusive knowledge of Washington politics to create a hero that Americans will wish existed outside the realm of fiction.


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**In the newest devastatingly intense thriller by #1 *New York Times* bestselling phenomenon Vince Flynn, his deadly and charismatic hero Mitch Rapp wages a war against a new enemy with the help of a fellow soldier as dedicated and as lethal as they come.**

Vince Flynn's thrillers, featuring counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp, have dominated the imagination of readers everywhere. In them, Flynn has captured the secretive world of the fearless men and women, who, bound by duty, risk their lives in a covert war they must hide from even their own political leaders.

Now, Rapp and his protege, Mike Nash, may have met their match. The CIA has detected and intercepted two terrorist cells, but a third is feared to be on the loose. Led by a dangerous mastermind obsessed with becoming the leader of al-Qaeda, this determined and terrifying group is about to descend on America.

Rapp needs the best on this assignment, and Nash, who has served his government honorably for sixteen years first as an officer in the Marine Corps and then as an operative in an elite counterterrorism team run by Rapp is his choice. Together, they have made careers out of meeting violence with extreme violence and have never wavered in the fight against the jihadists and their culture of death. Both have fought the war on terrorism in secret without accolades or acknowledgment of their personal sacrifices. Both have been forced to lie to virtually every single person they care about, and both have soldiered on with the knowledge that their hard work and lethal tactics have saved thousands of lives.

But the political winds have changed in America, and certain leaders on Capitol Hill are pushing to have men like Rapp and Nash put back on a short leash. And then one spring afternoon in Washington, DC, everything changes.

Using his insider knowledge of intelligence agencies and the military, Flynn once again delivers an all-too-real portrayal of a war that is that is waged every day by a handful of brave, devoted souls. Smart, fast-paced, and jaw-droppingly realistic, *Extreme Measures* is *the* political thriller of our time.


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On a busy Washington morning, amid the shuffle of tourists and the brisk rush of government officials, the stately calm of the White House is shattered in a hail of gunfire. A group of terrorists has descended on the Executive Mansion, and gained access by means of a violent massacre that has left dozens of innocent bystanders murdered. Through the quick actions of the Secret Service, the president is evacuated to his underground bunker, but not before almost one hundred hostages are taken. While the politicians and the military leaders argue over how to negotiate with the terrorists, one man is sent in to break through the barrage of panicked responses and political agendas surrounding the chaotic crisis. Mitch Rapp, the CIA's top counterterrorism operative, makes his way into the White House and soon discovers that the president is not as safe as Washington's power elite had thought. Moving stealthily among the corridors and secret passageways of the White House, stepping terrifyingly close to the enemy, Rapp scrambles to save the hostages before the terrorists can extract the president from the safety of his bunker. In a race against time, Rapp makes a chilling discovery that could rock Washington to its core: someone within his own government is maneuvering in hopes that his rescue attempt will fail. With the crackling tension and explosive action that made Term Limits "a roller-coaster, edge-of-your-seat thriller" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune), Vince Flynn delivers Transfer of Power -- a blockbuster novel that carries us just beyond today's headlines.


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When diplomacy has failed and military intervention is deemed inappropriate, our leaders sometimes takeTHE THIRD OPTIONMitch Rapp, the CIA's most lethal and efficient counterterrorism operative, is putting into play a meticulous plan to take out a notorious sponsor of terrorism -- When he falls prey to government forces with an agenda of their own.Dr. Irene Kennedy is named the successor to dying CIA Director Thomas Stansfield -- a choice that enrages many inside the world's most powerful intelligence agency. And her detractors will resort to extreme measures to prevent her from taking the reins.But what the Washington conspirators and backstabbing insiders do not know is that Mitch Rapp won't tolerate being their pawn. And he will stop at nothing to find out who has set him up.New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn brings this first-rate political thriller to life with authentic detail and action that sizzles.


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CIA superagent Mitch Rapp s cover has been blown -- just when the world needs him more than ever....EXECUTIVE POWERReturning from a covert mission， Mitch Rapp was publicly hailed by the president for his role in the fight against terrorism. After years of working in the shadows， Rapp was caught in the media spotlight -- and marked for death by virtually every terrorist in the world. Now a CIA advisor， Rapp is ready to battle terror far from the front lines. But when a Navy SEAL team in the Philippines is ambushed， all evidence points to a leak within the U.S. State Department. And a greater threat still lurks -- a ruthless assassin working for the most powerful men in the Middle East， who are bent on igniting a world war. With the world watching， Rapp must hold back the flames of Armageddon....


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CIA superagent Mitch Rapp is back in action in Vince Flynn's high-velocity New York Times bestseller.Newly appointed CIA director Dr. Irene Kennedy is the target of an inside plot to destroy her and prematurely end the American President's term. To make matters worse, Saddam Hussein is close to entering the nuclear arms race -- something Israel has vowed to stop. With the haunting specter of World War III looming, the President calls on his secret weapon: top counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp. But with only two weeks to take out the nukes, Rapp is up against a ticking clock -- and impossible odds.


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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR VINCE FLYNN RETURNS WITH HIS MOST EXHILARATING POLITICAL THRILLER TO DATE, A PULSE-POUNDING TALE OF ESPIONAGE, COVERT INTELLIGENCE, AND COUNTERTERRORISM.The action begins six days after a series of explosions devastated Washington, D.C., targeting the National Counterterrorism Center and killing 185 people, including public officials and CIA employees. It was a bizarre act of extreme violence that called for extreme measures on the part of elite counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp and his trusted team member, Mike Nash. Now that the initial shock of the catastrophe is over, key Washington officials are up in arms over whether to make friends or foes of the agents who stepped between the enemy's bullets and countless American lives regardless of the legal consequences. Not for the first time, Rapp finds himself in the frustrating position of having to illustrate the realities of national security to politicians whose view from the sidelines is inevitably obstructed.Meanwhile, three of the al Qaeda terrorists are still at large, and Rapp has been unofficially ordered to find them by any means necessary. No one knows the personal, physical, and emotional sacrifices required of the job better than Rapp. When he sees Nash cracking under the pressure of the mission and the memories of the horrors he witnessed during the terrorist attack, he makes a call he hopes will save his friend, assuage the naysayers on Capitol Hill, and get him one step closer to the enemy before it's too late. Once again, Rapp proves himself to be a hero unafraid "to walk the fine line between the moral high ground and violence" (The Salt Lake Tribune) for our country's safety, for the sake of freedom, for the pursuit of honor.


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EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Fearless counterterrorism operative Mitch Rapp is called upon to fight against the world's most deadly terrorists in this harrowing political thriller by *New York Times* bestselling author Vince Flynn. 

 It's just seven days before Memorial Day, and the nation's capital is buzzing with last-minute preparations for the unveiling of the magnificent new memorial honoring the men and women who fought in World War II. Despite the hopeful energy of the city, Mitch Rapp senses trouble. A spike in CIA intelligence has pointed to a major terrorist attack on the United States. Now it's up to Rapp to pull out all the stops. 

 Rapp immediately leaves for Afghanistan, where he leads a special forces unit on a daring commando raid across the border into a remote Pakistani village. Their target: an al Qaeda stronghold. Within a subterranean room, Rapp and his team discover a treasure trove of maps, computers, files, and bills of lading for multiple freighters heading to U.S. ports -- all pointing to plans for a catastrophic nuclear attack on Washington, DC. 

 Information is quickly relayed back to CIA headquarters, and a nuclear emergency support team scrambles to the scene. In a few hours, the freighters have been located and disarmed and the danger has been averted. Or has it? 

 Despite all the backslapping and congratulations, Mitch Rapp can't shake the feeling that the operation seemed just a bit too easy. Rapp follows his instincts on a quest to unearth the whole truth. What he finds is truly terrifying, and with Memorial Day closing fast, Rapp must find a way to prevent a disaster of unimaginable proportions. 

 Packed with the heartstopping action and political intrigue that Vince Flynn's fans love, here is a stylish thriller exalting America's past battles for freedom as well as its continued fight for peace.


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Taking America back...one politician at a time   TERM LIMITS In one bloody night， three of Washington s most powerful politicians are executed with surgical precision. Their assassins then deliver a shocking ultimatum to the American government: set aside partisan politics and restore power to the people. No one， they warn， is out of their reach -- not even the president. A joint FBI-CIA task force reveals the killers are elite military commandos， but no one knows exactly who they are or when they will strike next. Only Michael O Rourke， a former U.S. Marine and freshman congressman， holds a clue to the violence: a haunting incident in his own past with explosive implications for his country s future.... "Ingenious....Outpaces anything recently published， including Baldacci and Clancy."  -- Florida Times-Union Includes an excerpt from Memorial Day， Vince Flynn s electrifying new hardcover


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Huck is a page-turning, unforgettable true story of the tenacity of one small dog, the unexpected, extraordinary kindness of strangers, and a family's devotion to each other. Michael was four when his relentless campaign for a dog began. At seven he made a PowerPoint presentation, "My Dog," with headings like "A Childhood Without a Dog is a Sad Thing." His parents, Janet and Rich, were steadfast; bringing a dog into their fast-paced New York City lives was utterly impractical. However, on a trip to Italy, a chance happening leads Janet to reconsider, a decision then hastened by a diagnosis of breast cancer. Janet decides the excitement of a new puppy would be the perfect antidote to the strain on the family of months of arduous treatments for her illness. The prospect of a new puppy would be an affirmation of life, a powerful talisman for them all. On Thanksgiving weekend, soon after the grueling months of treatments are over, Huck, a sweet, mischievous, red-haired, toy poodle joins the family and wins everyone's heart. A few months later the family ventures to baseball's spring training, leaving Huck with Janet's sister in Ramsey, New Jersey. Barely twenty-four hours into the trip, Janet receives the dreaded phone call: Huck has slipped through the backyard fence and run away. Broken-hearted and frantic, the family catches the first plane to New Jersey to begin a search for their lost puppy. It is a race against time, for little Huck is now lost in an area entirely unfamiliar to him, facing the threat of bears and coyotes, swamps and freezing temperatures, rain and fast cars. Moved by the family's plight, strangers - from school children to townspeople to the police lieutenant - join the search, one that proves to be an unyielding test of determination and faith. Touching and warm-hearted, Huck is a spirit-lifting story about resilience, the generosity of strangers, and hope.


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Before turning to high-tech fertility treatments, the 15 percent of all  couples who experience fertility problems might consider reading and trying  the many conception tips in Winifred Conkling's highly helpful Getting  Pregnant Naturally: Healthy Choices to Boost Your Chances of Conceiving  Without Fertility Drugs. Conkling, an experienced medical and natural  health writer and mother of two children (one who took a long time to  conceive), differentiates between "infertile" and "subfertile" couples, and  asserts that more than half of all couples who have failed to conceive in a  year or more of trying can go on to get pregnant and have healthy babies.  Her book describes how.
    Conkling begins with a clear description of the complicated mechanics of  conception and the basics of enhancing conception chances.  Combining  accessible and straightforward information with simple checklists, she  then presents dietary suggestions (men should avoid cottonseed oil, a  natural antifertility agent), herbal remedies, homeopathy, acupressure  (complete with pressure-point maps), and stress-reduction techniques  (including enjoying good orgasms, biofeedback, meditation, visualization,  massage, and refraining from adopting a child as a means to reduce  infertility stress). For each suggestion and remedy, a complete,  easy-to-follow description is provided. Getting Pregnant Naturally  concludes with lifestyle suggestions such as losing weight gradually (if  needed) and avoiding bicycling (for men), as well as quitting smoking and  recreational drugs, minimizing air travel, and limiting computer use (there  may be a link between computer use and miscarriage). A 27-page appendix  listing resources rounds out this highly helpful guide.  --Ericka Lutz


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Newly promoted to sergeant， Philadelphia detective Matt Payne finds himself in the middle of three assignments at once: trying to nail down a cop killer， a serial rapist， and a murderer who fled to France 20 years ago. It s enough to burn out any cop. But Payne s not just any cop. And he s about to show the bad guys that there s no place they can hide from him-or from justice...


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A vicious madman is on a kidnapping and rape spree. Inspector Peter Wohl, commander of the new Special Operations task force, is determined to stop the maniacal reign of violence, facing off against a desperate public, a hostile press and reluctant witnesses.


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A perfectly typed bomb threat makes its way to the Philadelphia Police Department--the calling card of a political assassin on the loose. It couldn't happen at a worse time, since a rogue cop has brought corruption into the force. The police can't trust their own people as seconds tick away toward an explosion that could rock the nation.


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A brutal crime...A group of urban terrorists...An investigation of dirty cops...  The leads in these supposedly unconnected cases have become tangled in some very ugly--and dangerous--knots. Now Special Operations detective Matt Payne and his colleagues find themselves fearing not only for their jobs， but also for their very lives...


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Tony the Zee DeZego is found dead and bleeding on the concrete， and it is clear that it was a Mafia hit. But one puzzling fact remains: Penny Detweiler， a wealthy debutante involved with DeZego， was also shot. Policeman Matt Payne is a prime suspect--even by the police! Original.


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The dramatic new novel in Griffin's New York Times- bestselling chronicle of the Philadelphia police force. There's a sudden spike in murders in Philadelphia, but no one seems to mind much because the victims all seem to be lowlifes. The more Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne investigates, however, the more he gets a bad feeling-one that only gets worse when vigilante groups spring up claiming credit for some of the hits, even though Payne knows it can't be true. As the targets get bigger and events start moving out of control, Payne realizes that if he and his colleagues can't figure out who's behind this very soon, the violence could overtake them all. Filled with authentic color and detail, this is a riveting novel of the men and women who put their lives on the line-storytelling at its absolute best.


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Officer Matt Payne is assigned to protect a witness to a robbery and murder of an innocent bystander by terrorists. In a deadly confrontation， Payne kills one of the terrorists . . . and his hame is added to their hit list. "(Griffin) captivates you with characters the way few authors can."--Tom Clancy. Original.


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A vice cop is shot dead in his home. A bar owner and his wife are gunned down during a robbery. And in a mansion, a young woman dies of a heroine overdose. The crimes seem unconnected. But these deaths are about to trigger a convergence of corruption, cops, and the mob that could tear the Philadelphia Police Department apart from the inside out.


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Philadelphia Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne is paired with a Texas Ranger to bring down a murderer with Mexican cartel connections. The odd couple of the Philly cop and the Texas lawman must run down the killer and his gang-before the body count rises again.


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A cop has been shot--cold-bloodedly gunned down while trying to prevent a holdup. Regulations say the investigation is to be handled like any other homicide. But when a cop is killed in the line of duty， it is different. And the brotherhood in blue will stop at nothing to bring the killer to justice. Original.


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A stirring portrait of the decade when the Steelers became the greatest team in NFL history, even as Pittsburgh was crumbling around them. In the 1970s, the city of Pittsburgh was in need of heroes. In that decade the steel industry, long the lifeblood of the city, went into massive decline, putting 150,000 steelworkers out of work. And then the unthinkable happened: The Pittsburgh Steelers, perennial also-rans in the NFL, rose up to become the most feared team in the league, dominating opponents with their famed "Steel Curtain" defense, winning four Super Bowls in six years, and lifting the spirits of a city on the brink. In The Ones Who Hit the Hardest, Chad Millman and Shawn Coyne trace the rise of the Steelers amidst the backdrop of the fading city they fought for, bringing to life characters such as: Art Rooney, the owner of the team so beloved by Pittsburgh that he was known simply as "The Chief"; Chuck Noll, the headstrong coach who used the ethos of steelworkers to motivate his players; Terry Bradshaw, the strong-armed and underestimated QB; Joe Green, the defensive tackle whose fighting nature lifted the franchise; and Jack Lambert, the linebacker whose snarling, toothless grin embodied the Pittsburgh defense. Every story needs a villain, and in this one it's played by the Dallas Cowboys. As Pittsburgh rusted, the new and glittering metropolis of Dallas, rich from the capital infusion of oil revenue, signaled the future of America. Indeed, the town brimmed with such confidence that the Cowboys felt comfortable nicknaming themselves "America's Team." Throughout the 1970s, the teams jostled for control of the NFL-the Cowboys doing it with finesse and the Steelers doing it with brawn-culminating in Super Bowl XIII in 1979, when the aging Steelers attempted to hold off the Cowboys one last time. Thoroughly researched and grippingly written, The Ones Who Hit the Hardestis a stirring tribute to a city, a team, and an era.


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<div>
 
 <h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
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 Starred Review. As 18-year-old orphaned actor Will Hawthorne explains early on in this clever page-turner, I don't want you thinking you're going to get a tale about some blue-eyed tyke with a heart of gold in a world where good triumphs over evil. You're not, I'm not, and in my experience it never does. Charged as a rebel after escaping the authorities in a world not unlike Elizabethan England, obnoxious, charming Will joins a small mercenary group and proves himself the least honorable of them all. When the group comes under attack from crimson-armored raiders, Will reluctantly fails to betray the companions he is even more reluctantly growing to like. In small, swift scenes, Hartley (<i>On the Fifth Day</i>) deftly proves that people you shouldn't trust at your back can be the best ones to have at your side. <i>(Mar.)</i> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 
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 This fantasy by a Shakespearean scholar tells the story of hapless young actor William Hawthorne in a fictional world that, not unlike Elizabethan England, brims with intrigue. Saving his neck by joining a band of heroes led by a warrior possessed of a magical and powerful sword, Hawthorne unwittingly joins a battle against an evil empire bent on crushing everyone to its will. The subsequent story is at times formulaic, the whole piece a pastiche of clichés and plot twists from better-known movies and adventure fiction. Only someone unfamiliar with the genre may be surprised, for example, that Hartley’s foolish and cowardly protagonist learns, over the course of this ripping yarn, to be wise and brave. Hartley’s prose is so graceful, his narrative so taut, and his battle scenes so exciting and well described, however, that one quickly forgives his betimes paint-by-numbers development. All this is especially true of the compulsively readable second half, which unfolds with remarkable elegance and power. --Jack Helbig
 
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<div>
 
 <h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
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 Fans of 2009's <i>Act of Will</i>, Hartley's first tale featuring roguish almost-hero Will Hawthorne, may be disappointed that the adventurers split up early on and two don't reappear until late in the story. Fortunately, all of the fast pacing, outrageous dilemmas, and sharp, cynical humor are back in full force. Will and his intermittently traitorous friends are about to be captured by soldiers of the Diamond Empire when a mysterious ambassador smuggles them out of the city and possibly the world. They're almost immediately enmeshed in a war between goblins and the eerily humanlike Fair Folk, where nothing is certain except Will's ability to make a bad situation worse. Fans will dive in with the gusto of Will quaffing a tankard of beer, and new readers should have no problem keeping up. <i>(Feb.)</i> <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 
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 <div><div><div>While on the run from Empire guards, Will Hawthorne and his band of thieves are transported to a mysterious land that none of them recognize or know how to get home from. Turns out that they've landed right in the middle of a battle between goblins and humans. Their human allies are practically storybook counterparts to the rough sorts they knew in Stavis, speaking in high-flown prose, dressed to the height of fashion, and dripping with wealth and social propriety. Will's companions are quite taken by these fine folks, but the Fair Folk are appalled by Will's unorthodoxy.<br><br>At first Will does whatever he can to try to squirm into their good graces, but just when his efforts are feeling totally futile, he begins to wonder if these too-perfect courtiers and warriors have anything to offer beyond their glamour and their burning hatred of the goblins. But is there any recourse for Will and his friends once it turns out that the humans who are sheltering them may not be on the right side of their eternal conflict?<br><br>Will Power is a funny and fleet-footed stand-alone fantasy featuring the characters readers grew to love in <i>Act of Will </i>in an all-new adventure about the danger of first impressions.</div></div></div>
 
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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Furst ( Night Soldiers ) will make his mark with this intelligent, provocative and gripping novel. In 1933, Andre Szara, a highly regarded Polish-born foreign correspondent for Pravda , is asked to perform small espionage tasks by the NKVD. These assignments escalate, until Szara finds himself responsible for obtaining vital production figures from a German-Jewish industrialist who fabricates steel wire essential to airplanes. Inevitably, Szara's integrity as a journalist is also compromised. During this period of Stalinist purges, clearly and chillingly described by Furst, only unpredictability is certain. Szara senses the precariousness of his position, which is compounded by an urgent appeal from a wealthy Jewish Frenchman for Szara to honor his own Jewish heritage by trading his steel wire information to the British in exchange for desperately needed immigration certificates to mandated Palestine. Furst depicts the historical, geographic and political context in lucid and highly readable prose; his observation that Russia annexed Lithuania and Estonia while the world's attention was focused on France's struggle with Germany has an eerie timeliness. As darkness descends over Europe, Szara clings to life while simultaneously attempting to make some meaning of it. His story is not a pretty one; but it is beautifully and compellingly told. <br />Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>This is an intriguing combination of spy story and historical novel. It is about a Pravda journalist forced to become a Soviet intelligence agent in the years immediately before World War II. It is also about a Europe being driven into war, not simply by supposedly irresistible social forces but by the genuinely evil men who manipulate and direct events. Seen in this way, Stalin is as responsible for the coming of war as Hitler, and Stalin's Russian purges signal the future deaths of millions in Central Europe. Agents in this novel are not just spies but metaphors for the actors, large and small, on the stage of history. Entertaining, exciting, and thought-provoking reading.<br /><em>- Charles Mi chaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.</em><br />Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>Grilling is a science, and it's only when you understand the science of grilling that you can transform it into an art. That's what makes <em>Mastering the Grill</em> a standout on the cookbook shelf. From equipment (grill types and tools) to fire (wood, charcoal, or gas) to ingredients (meat, poultry, fish, and vegetables), the authors have shared their impressive grilling know-how to explain the whys and the hows and guarantee the wows clearly and comprehensively. In addition to hundreds of tips and techniques, this ultimate guide is packed with how-to illustrations and mouthwatering photographs plus 350 surefire recipes everything from rubs and marinades to appetizers, entrees, side dishes, and desserts. <em>Mastering the Grill</em> is a master class in cooking, destined to become a sauce-stained, well-thumbed classic. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Andrew Schloss is a well-known teacher, food writer, cookbook author, and food industry consultant. He lives in Pennsylvania.  </p><p>David Joachim has authored, edited, or collaborated on more than 25 cookbooks. He lives in Pennsylvania. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>At the start of this tepid stand-alone from Vachss (Haiku), professional thief Tim "Sugar" Caine finds himself in an interesting dilemma--a rape victim has mistakenly identified him as her attacker, but he hesitates to tell the cops the truth because he was participating in a jewel robbery at the time. The canny ex-con figures that if he does time for the sex crime, he will evade scrutiny for the crime he did commit. Caine ends up serving a five-year sentence for sexual assault before he's back on the New York City streets, where he reconnects with Solly Vizner, the man who put the jewel heist together. Most of the book concerns Caine's efforts to track down another member of the crew who Vizner fears could squeal on everyone else, but a less than exciting lead and a slow-moving plot make this one of Vachss's weaker crime novels. (Nov.) (c) <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Andrew Vachss can always be depended on to deliver powerful fiction, and his new novel, <em>The Weight</em>, is no exception."<br />-Chet Williamson  </p><p>--chetwilliamson.com/2010/09/andrew-vachsss-the-weight-due-in-november-first-review/  </p><p>"[Andrew Vachss'] new book, <em>The Weight</em>, may be his finest hour to date. [It] works on the surface as a stunning mystery. Compulsively readable."<br />-Ken Bruen --mulhollandbooks.com/2010/11/04/ken-bruen-reviews-the-weight-by-andrew-vachss/  </p><p>"Andrews Vachss at his best" --_Los Angeles Times_ --latimes.com/features/books/la-et-book-20101120,0,7958452.story  </p><p> “The hardest-boiled crime fiction this side of Sing Sing.” <br />—_USA Today_   </p><p>“Many writers try to cover the same ground as Vachss. A handful are as good. None are better.” <br />—_People_  </p><p>“Vachss is red hot and as serious as a punctured lung.” <br />—_Playboy_  </p><p>“[Vachss writes] some of the cleanest, meanest, stripped-down-and-sparkling prose ever penned.” <br />—_The Austin Chronicle_  </p><p>“Vachss’s writing is like a dark roller-coaster ride of fear, love, and hate.” <br />—New Orleans <em>Times-Picayune</em>  </p><p>“There’s no way to put a [Vachss book] down once you’ve begun.” <br />—_Detroit Free Press_  </p><p>“Andrew Vachss is a contemporary master.” <br />—_The Atlanta Journal-Constitution_</p>


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 <h3>Product Description</h3>
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 Separate from the government; outside the police, beyond the United Nations; Torchwood sets its own rules. A team of investigators, using alien technology to solve crime - both alien and human. This new British sci-fi crime thriller, created by Russell T. Davies, sees them delve into the unknown. A group of people fighting the impossible. The series stars Captain Jack Harkness, last seen in Doctor Who. This novel is a brand-new Torchwood story.
 
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<h3>Review</h3><p>“Addictive… Packed with wild action and revealing tradecraft.”<br />_–Daily Telegraph  </p><p>_“McNab is a terrific novelist. When it comes to thrills, he’s Forsyth class.”<br /><em>–Mail on Sunday</em>  </p><p><em>From the Paperback edition.</em></p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>The stunning new thriller from the master of the genre.  </p><p>Nick Stone seems to be living his dream, not a care in the world as he steers his camper van round the surfing and parachuting centres of Australia, a board on the roof, freefall rig behind him, and a beautiful young backpacker at his side. But when he witnesses on TV the massacre of children in a terrorist siege on the other side of the world, long-suppressed memories are triggered and Nick finds himself catapulted once more into working for the American secret services — only this time, of his own free will.  </p><p>As events unfold in the bleak, medieval villages of Azerbajhan, and the teeming streets of modern Istanbul, it isn’t long before Nick discovers the true objective of the mission on which he has embarked. His talents are being misused by those who stalk the corridors of power, and he is determined to make a stand.  </p><p>Hurtled at breakneck pace through a deadly landscape of greed, violence and ever-shifting allegiances, the reader will be left in no doubt that McNab is the master of the genre — and <strong>Aggressor </strong>is McNab at his searing, blockbusting best.  </p><p><em>From the Trade Paperback edition.</em></p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>The Weavers’ grip on Saramyr’s rulers has grown ever more powerful, and all the while, the blight they have brought grows harsher. The land is slipping into civil war. In the mounting chaos, Kaiku and the orphaned heir-Empress must fight for their destiny and their survival, as Saramyr succumbs to the twisting of the Weave and the unknowable ambitions of the secretive Weavers.</p><p>Written by young publishing phenomenon Chris Wooding, <em>The Braided Path</em> is a dark, manga-influenced fantasy of a terrifying world—a world across which plays a spellbinding plot of power, violence, and betrayal. Still in his twenties, Chris Wooding has published 18 books, including the <em>Broken Sky</em> series, which has sold more than 200,000 copies in the U.S. alone. He is also a winner of Britain’s prestigious Silver Smarties Prize for his acclaimed novel, <strong>The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray</strong>, which he is now adapting for a Hollywood film. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>Chris Wooding is 26. He has had more than a dozen novels published including the Silver Smartie Award-winning THE HAUNTING OF ALAIZABEL CRAY and the much praised POISON. HAUNTING has been bought by Hollywood and Chris has been employed to write the screenplay. He lives in North West London. </p>


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Christopher Hitchens, described in theLondon Observeras "one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time" takes on his biggest subject yetthe increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell'sWhy I Am Not a Christianand Sam Harris's recent bestseller,The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope's awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix. From the Hardcover edition.


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>In this sequel to Bram Stoker's <em>Dracula</em>, his great-grandnephew offers one of the rowdiest revisionist treatments of the most influential vampire novel ever written. In 1912, as Stoker labors to adapt <em>Dracula</em> for the stage, its characters are dying gruesomely all over London. It turns out they are as real as Stoker himself, who learned their secret story on the sly and took creative liberties when turning it into his popular penny dreadful. Dracula's true story involves the passing of his blood line through Mina Harker to her son; a malignant Dr. Van Helsing, who Scotland Yard suspects had a hand in the murders attributed to Jack the Ripper; and the exploits of a 16th-century vampire countess, Dracula's former lover, who cuts a bloody swath through London seeking the survivors of Dracula's last stand in Transylvania. Energetically paced and packed with outrageously entertaining action, this supernatural thriller is a well-needed shot of fresh blood for the Dracula mythos. <em>(Oct.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>Review</h3><p>"Energetically paced and packed with outrageously entertaining action, this supernatural thriller is a well-needed shot of fresh blood for the Dracula mythos." <br />--_Publisher's Weekly_   </p><p>"The authors (Stoker is a descendant of Bram, and Holt is a noted Dracula historian) skillfully explore the nature of evil while weaving together several complex plotlines throughout this mesmerizing story. Readers who enjoy dark fantasy with fast-paced action will plow through this book, not wanting to stop." <br />--_Library Journal_</p>


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<h3>From</h3><p>Timothy doesn’t really know what to make of Abigail, the new girl in his seventh-grade class. After she is humiliated before her classmates, bad things start happening. Timothy’s best friend sees the clawed monster from his favorite video game at the bottom of a pool. Their teacher begins to get paranoid about the creepy specimen jars surrounding his classroom. But it’s not Abigail’s fault; in fact, she is seeing visions of the Nightmarys—two sinister little girls who beckon her to come play with them. It’s a marvelously disorienting setup, and Poblocki has a knack for cornering his characters in the most unlikely of vulnerable places: a laundry room, a changing room, a hospital bed. As the plot begins to hammer sense into the horrific happenings—it all has to do with a mystical jawbone, an insane professor, and a demon called the Daughter of Chaos—the scares get bigger, though often less impactful. More than anything, this is a mystery, complete with clues and secret codes, and Poblocki’s deft handling of the multiple threads makes this a devilish delight. Grades 6-10. --Daniel Kraus </p><h3>Product Description</h3><p>Timothy July has been having nightmares. About his brother, who is in a coma after being wounded in Iraq; about his best friend, Stuart, who is behaving like a jerk; about the old biology specimens in jars lining the walls of his classroom; and about Abigail, the new girl who seems to be a magnet for trouble. Or perhaps she is the cause.  </p><p>Suddenly Timothy’s nightmares are coming true. His brother, his face decaying, approaches Timothy on the street. Stuart ends up in the hospital, terrified that monsters are stalking him. And the specimen jars are tormenting not only Timothy but his teacher as well.   </p><p>What is the secret in Abigail’s past that is the key to these horrors? And can Timothy figure it out before his nightmares become a deadly reality?  </p><p>A follow-up to the well-received <em>Stone Child</em>, Dan Poblocki’s second novel will have his readers mesmerized until the last page—and sleeping with the lights on. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
<p>Traversing broiling deserts, snowy mountain passes and dank rain forests on its crooked way from Mexico to Canada, the Pacific Coast Trail is an epic challenge for die-hard backpackers. White and his girlfriend, Melissa, set out, late in the season and bereft of experience, to tread all 2,650 miles of it, leaving behind lousy reporting jobs and hoping to find self-definition and a deepened relationship. (They call their trek the Lois and Clark Expedition.) Hilarious greenhorn misadventures ensue—including the author's ill-advised chomp, while dizzy with dehydration, into a reputedly moisture-laden prickly-pear cactus—that tested their survival skills and commitment as a couple. The trail becomes less an itinerary than a world unto itself, full of squalor, discomfort and majestic scenery, and peopled by charismatic misfits and an austere cult of ultra-light speed-hikers, as the couple rely on arcane camping gear and bizarre gummy-bear-and-marshmallow diets. The wilderness authenticity the author seeks proves elusive; all journey and no destination, the story itself eventually trails off with the hero even more callow and confused than when he started. Still, White's vivid prose and hangdog humor make readers want to keep up. <em>(June)</em> <br />
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 
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<h3>Review</h3>
<p>"Drawing on diaries he kept at the time, White polishes up these memories, serving them forth with brio and dash…[The Cactus Eaters] brings a fresh perspective to the timeworn adventure-travel genre." -- <em>Kirkus Reviews</em>  
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<p>"In the well-written, laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating spirit of Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods and Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally, Dan White takes us along for a walk on the wild side of adventure and love. I could not put it down." -- <em>Eric Blehm, National Outdoor Book Award-winning author of THE LAST SEASON.</em>  
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<p>"It is a funny, frequently harrowing, and altogether mesmerizing memoir about just how wrong a backpacking expedition can go….‘The Cactus Eaters’ is far more than a Sierra Club-approved romp. It’s gorp for the soul, a fascinating and surprisingly moving testament to the call of the wild." -- <em>Steve Almond, Boston Globe</em>
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<h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Grade 7-10–In this sequel to <em>Traitor</em> (Putnam, 2005), Danny and his ex-SAS grandfather, Fergus Watts, survive an attempt on their lives while hiding out in Spain. They stop running and return to the UK with the hope of clearing their names and resuming a normal life, and are recruited to help uncover a corrupt MI5 agent who, at the same time, is trying to have them killed. Danny enlists the help of his friend Elena so that he and Fergus can accomplish the impossible: breaking into the heavily secured British Ministry of Defense in order to get official proof of Fergus's background and save their lives. The police are on high alert because of a series of suicide bombings carried out by teenagers, and MI5 tries to frame Danny as a terrorist. Adventure and suspense drive this plot. Despite some weak character development, the book will find a ready audience._–Michael Giller, South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, Greenville_ <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>This sequel to <em>Traitor</em> (2005) opens with Danny Watts and his former secret-service-agent grandfather, Fergus, hiding out in Spain. An attempt on their lives, however, sends them back to England, where the country is in turmoil after a series of suicide bombings. After Fergus is seriously wounded, he and Danny enlist Danny's friend Elena to help unravel the mystery of the attackers' identities. Despite many loose ends, young spy-fiction fans will enjoy entering Danny's murky world, where things are not as they initially seem. Teens will also enjoy the fast-paced, action-laden plot and the wealth of details about tricks of the spy trade. Some may find the thicket of English phrases and place-names a little dense, but a glossary at the front of the book will help them sort out vocabulary questions. This second book in the Danny Watts series will pull in plenty of new fans. <em>Todd Morning</em><br /><em>Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved</em></p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3>
<p>In this debut novel, veteran journalist Silva mines the reliable territory of World War II espionage to produce a gripping, historically detailed thriller. In early 1944 the Allies were preparing their invasion of Normandy; critical to the invasion's success was an elaborate set of deceptions--from phony radio signals to bogus airfields and barracks--intended to keep Hitler in the dark about when and where the Allied troops would arrive. Catherine Blake is the beautiful, ruthless spy who could bring the whole charade crashing down; Alfred Vicary is the brilliant but bumbling professor Churchill has tapped to protect the operation. Along with a teeming cast of other characters, real and fictional, they bring the chase to a furious and satisfying climax. 
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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
<p>Will Nazi spies escape from Britain with Allied plans for the imminent invasion of Normandy? As history tells us, obviously not?so the challenge for veteran journalist and CNN producer Silva in his first novel is to brew up enough intrigue and tension to make readers forget the obvious. While Silva employs multiple characters and settings, his key players are an English counterintelligence officer and a beautiful Nazi spy. Alfred Vicary is an academic recruited to work for MI5. The intelligence reports he fabricates and sends to Germany are designed to persuade the Nazis that their utterly compromised spy network, the Abwehr, is still fully operational. MI5 learns, however, that the Abwehr has been keeping a few sleeper operatives under deep cover throughout the war. Now they pose a serious threat to the invasion plans. One of these operatives is Catherine Blake, a ruthless assassin and spy. Her assignment is to become romantically involved with Peter Jordan, an American engineer working on a top-secret D-Day project. Will Vicary be able to stop her? Silva's characters are strong; but, despite occasional bursts of high suspense and a body count to remember, his overall pacing is uneven, and most readers won't forget that D-Day succeeded. The final plot twist, moreover, while unpredictable, seems more logical than shocking. Silva's debut will find an audience among devoted readers of WWII thrillers, and deservedly so, but he's not yet on a par with such masters of the genre as Ken Follett, Robert Harris and Jack Higgins. 150,000 first printing; $150,000 ad/promo; BOMC alternate selection; Reader's Digest Condensed Book selection; simultaneous BDD audio; foreign rights to 16 countries; author tour. <br />
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>The territory Evans covers in her debut collection may be small, but she owns it. Her main characters are almost all teen girls and young women who struggle with disorder, and the reader is given close access to each one's interior, from which the muted plots originate. "Jellyfish," one of the better stories, starts out with the plight of middle-aged William, whose roof has just collapsed, before settling on his adult daughter, Eva, and examining her life. The two friends in "Virgins," the opening and best story, maneuver unsteadily through the minefield of casually predatory men and boys. "Snakes" looks back on a consequential summer in the lives of two little girls. "The King of a Vast Empire" is the biggest departure from form and is narrated by good son Terrence, who frustratedly tells the story of his free-spirited sister, Liddie. The stories are beautifully observed, though their similarities in theme and voice make them better read individually than together. Evans has some great chops that would really shine with a little more narrative breadth. <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Evans’ first collection of short stories deals thoughtfully and incisively with considerations of class, race, and coming-of-age. That six of the stories are told in their female or male protagonists’ first-person voices brings them immediacy and emotional resonance. Sometimes, though, this device results in narrative voices that sound too much alike while the stories they tell lack thematic originality. Interestingly, two of the best stories—“Someone Ought to Tell Her There’s Nowhere to Go,” about a deeply troubled veteran of the Iraq War, and “Jellyfish,” about the fraught relationship of a young woman and her father—are told in third person. Yet, whether told in first or third person, what all of the stories share is a demonstration of the profound influence of the past on the present-day lives of their characters and the intricacies of relationships among African American, white, Hispanic, and mixed-race young people. Clearly, Evans lives up to her reputation as an important new voice in literary fiction. --Michael Cart </p>


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A fully illustrated edition of the international best-seller "Longitude." "The Illustrated Longitude" recounts in words and images the epic quest to solve the greatest scientific problem of the eighteenth and three prior centuries: determining how a captain could pinpoint his ship's location at sea. All too often throughout the ages of exploration, voyages ended in disaster when crew and cargo were either lost at sea or destroyed upon the rocks of an unexpected landfall. Thousands of lives and the fortunes of nations hung on a resolution to the longitude problem. To encourage a solution, governments established prizes for anyone whose method or device proved successful. The largest reward of 20,000-- truly a king's ransom-- was offered by Britain's Parliament in 1714. The scientific establishment-- from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton-- had been certain that a celestial answer would be found and invested untold effort in this pursuit. By contrast, John Harrison imagined and built the unimaginable: a clock that told perfect time at sea, known today as the chronometer. Harrison's trials and tribulations during his forty-year quest to win the prize are the culmination of this remarkable story. "The Illustrated Longitude" brings a new and important dimension to Dava Sobel's celebrated story. It contains the entire original narrative of "Longitude," redesigned to accompany 183 images chosen by William Andrewes-- from portraints of every important figure in the story to maps and diagrams, scientifc instruments, and John Harrison's remarkable sea clocks themselves. Andrewes's elegant captions and sidebars on scientific and historical events tell their own story of longitude, paralleling and illuminating Sobel's memorable tale. Dava Sobel is the author of the best-sellers "Longitude" and "Galileo's Daughter," and the editor and translator of "Letters to Father." She lives in East Hampton, New York. William J. H. Andrewes is a museum consultant specializing in the history of scientific instruments and time measurement. He is the editor of "The Quest for Longitude" and lives in Concord, Massachusetts. Praise for "The Illustrated Longitude" "Two respected tellers of the longitude tale have teamed up! Sobel 's compelling prose is coupled with colorful and detailed illustrations provided by Andrewes. This edition responds to entreaties by readers who loved Sobel's "Longitude" but who wanted pictures to go with it."-- "Mercator's World" "Enormous care has been devoted to the illustrations and captions. Readers will finish this book considerably more educated about geography and navigation."-- "USA Today" "This new illustrated edition of Sobel's 1995 study of Harrison's remarkable instrument strikingly illuminates this largely unknown but crucial discovery."-- "Dallas Morning News" Praise for "Longitude" "As much a tale of intrigue as it is of science .... A book full of gems for anyone interested in history, geography, astronomy, navigation, clockmaking, and-- not the least-- plain old human ambition and greed."-- "Philadelphia Inquirer" "Intricate and elegant .... No novelist could improve on the elements of Dava Sobel's "Longitude.""-- "Newsweek" "Anyone with an interest in history or things maritime should consider "Longitude." This fascinating volume brings alive the eighteenth century."-- "USA Today" "Nearly perfect prose and a magnificent story, an extraordinary book."-- "Washington Post Book World"


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>From David Weber to David Feintuch to David Drake, military writers have exploded onto the science fiction scene and continue to leave their mark. Now, bestselling Hammer's Slammers creator David Drake pays homage to his own sub-genre by gathering 10 classic tales of men at arms by SF greats, including Hary Harrison, Joe Haldeman, Richard C. Matheson, Gene Wolfe, Keith Laumer, and David Drake himself. </p><p>A stronghold of bestselling authors </p><p>Contributors to this collection include such notable authors as Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Joe Haldeman, Harry Harrison, Richard C. Matheson, and many more. </p>


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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>A fool and his money are soon parted--and nowhere so quickly as in the stock market, it would seem. In David Liss's ambitious first novel, <em>A Conspiracy of Paper</em>, the year is 1719 and the place London, where human greed, apparently, operated then in much the same manner as it does today. Liss focuses his intricate tale of murder, money, and conspiracy on Benjamin Weaver, ex-boxer, self-described "protector, guardian, bailiff, constable-for-hire, and thief-taker," and son of a Portuguese Jewish "stock-jobber." Weaver's father, from whom he has been estranged, has recently died, the victim of a horse-drawn carriage hit and run. Though his uncle has suggested that the accident wasn't quite so accidental, Benjamin doesn't give the idea much credence: </p><blockquote><p>I blush to own I rewarded his efforts to seek my opinion with only a formal reply in which I dismissed his ideas as nonsensical. I did so in part because I did not wish to involve myself with my family and in part because I knew that my uncle, for reasons that eluded me, had loved my father and could not accept the senselessness of so random a death. </p></blockquote><p>But then Benjamin is hired by two different men to solve two seemingly unrelated cases. One client, Mr. Balfour, claims his own father's unexpected death "was made to look like self-murder so that a villain or villains could take his money with impunity," and even suggests there might be a link between Balfour senior's death and that of Weaver's father. His next customer is Sir Owen Nettleton, an aristocrat who is keen to recover some highly confidential papers that were stolen from him while he cavorted with a prostitute. Weaver takes on the first case with some reluctance, the second with more enthusiasm. In the end, both converge, leading him back to his family even as they take him deep into the underbelly of London's financial markets. </p><p>Liss seems right at home in the world he's created, whether describing the company manners of wealthy Jewish merchants at home or the inner workings of Exchange Alley--the 18th-century version of Wall Street. His London is a dank and filthy place, almost lawless but for the scant protection offered by such rogues as Jonathan Wilde, the sinister head of a gang of thieves who profits by selling back to their owners items stolen by his own men. Though better connected socially, the investors involved with the shady South Sea Company have equally larcenous hearts, and Liss does an admirable job of leading the reader through the intricacies of stock trading, bond selling, and insider trading with as little fuss, muss, and confusion as possible. What really makes the book come alive, however, are the details of 18th-century life--from the boxing matches our hero once participated in to the coffee houses, gin joints, and brothels where he trolls for clues. And then there is the matter of Weaver's Jewishness, the prejudices of the society he lives in, and his struggle to come to terms with his own ethnicity. <em>A Conspiracy of Paper</em> weaves all these themes together in a manner reminiscent of the long, gossipy novels of Henry Fielding and Laurence Stern. Indeed, Liss manages to suggest the prose style of those authors while keeping his own, less convoluted style. This is one conspiracy guaranteed to succeed. <em>--Alix Wilber</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>This remarkably accomplished first novel, by a young man still completing his doctoral dissertation at Columbia, has a great deal going on. It is at once a penetrating study of the beginnings of stock speculation and the retreat from a mineral-based currency in early 18th-century London, a sympathetic look at the life of a Jew in that time and place and a vision of the struggle between the Bank of England and the upstart South Sea Company to become the repository of the nation's fiscal faith. If all that sounds daunting, it is above all a headlong adventure yarn full of dastardly villains, brawls, wenches and as commanding a hero as has graced a novel in some time. He is Benjamin Weaver, a Jewish former boxer who had once abandoned his family, and virtually his faith, too, for a life on the fringes of criminal society as a kind of freelance bailiff who brings debtors to book for their creditors. When his uncherished father dies suddenly, however, and he has reason to suspect the apparent accident was actually murder, he plunges himself into a hunt for those responsible, and in the process changes his life. With his native cunning and his brawling skills, he soon finds himself deeply embroiled with the villainous Jonathan Wild, thief-taker par excellence, who has institutionalized criminal mayhem. He also becomes the pawn of some powerful financial giants lurking in the shadows (much like the corporate villains in contemporary thrillers), comes to suspect his glamorous cousin Miriam of actions unbecoming a lady and employs the wiles of his philosophical Scottish friend Elias to decode the mysterious ways of finance and the laws of probability. The period detail is authentic but never obtrusive; the dialogue is a marvel of courtly locution masking murderous bluntness; and the plot, though devious in the extreme, never becomes opaque. It seems clear that Weaver is being set up as a series hero, which can only be good news for lovers of the best in dashing historical fiction. Agent, Liz Darhansoff. (Feb.) <br />Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>In this candid and gripping account, President George W. Bush describes the critical decisions that shaped his presidency and personal life.  </p><p>George W. Bush served as president of the United States during eight of the most consequential years in American history. The decisions that reached his desk impacted people around the world and defined the times in which we live._  </p><p>Decision Points_ brings readers inside the Texas governor's mansion on the night of the 2000 election, aboard Air Force One during the harrowing hours after the attacks of September 11, 2001, into the Situation Room moments before the start of the war in Iraq, and behind the scenes at the White House for many other historic presidential decisions.  </p><p>For the first time, we learn President Bush's perspective and insights on:  </p><ul> <li>     His decision to quit drinking and the journey that led him to his Christian faith </li> <li>     The selection of the vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of state, Supreme Court justices, and other key officials </li> <li>     His relationships with his wife, daughters, and parents, including heartfelt letters between the president and his father on the eve of the Iraq War </li> <li>     His administration's counterterrorism programs, including the CIA's enhanced interrogations and the Terrorist Surveillance Program </li> <li>     Why the worst moment of the presidency was hearing accusations that race played a role in the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, and a critical assessment of what he would have done differently during the crisis </li> <li>     His deep concern that Iraq could turn into a defeat costlier than Vietnam, and how he decided to defy public opinion by ordering the troop surge </li> <li>     His legislative achievements, including tax cuts and reforming education and Medicare, as well as his setbacks, including Social Security and immigration reform </li> <li>     The relationships he forged with other world leaders, including an honest assessment of those he did and didn’t trust </li> <li>     Why the failure to bring Osama bin Laden to justice ranks as his biggest disappointment and why his success in denying the terrorists their fondest wish—attacking America again—is among his proudest achievements  </li></ul><p>A groundbreaking new brand of presidential memoir, <em>Decision Points</em> will captivate supporters, surprise critics, and change perspectives on eight remarkable years in American history—and on the man at the center of events.  </p><p>Since leaving office, President George W. Bush has led the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. The center includes an active policy institute working to advance initiatives in the fields of education reform, global health, economic growth, and human freedom, with a special emphasis on promoting social entrepreneurship and creating opportunities for women around the world. It will also house an official government archive and a state-of-the-art museum that will open in 2013. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>George W. Bush is the 43rd President of the United States. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p><em>Sex and the City</em> meets London's Roaring '20s in Davis's satisfying fifth novel. Grace Rutherford leads a double life: by day she's an advertising copywriter supporting a widowed sister and mother. By night, she's Diamond Sharp—a newspaper gossip columnist and glamorous lady about town. She adores her single status until she meets mysterious American author Dexter O'Connell, with whom she begins a steamy cat-and-mouse affair that turns her world upside down. The trouble? She's concurrently swept off her feet by her charming and equally delicious neighbor John Cramer—Dexter's bitter enemy. Grace is determined to get to the bottom of their hatred for each other. But whose story should she believe? To make matters worse, her sister is possibly falling for John, too. When Grace delves into their closets looking for skeletons, she realizes she must ultimately face her own. Davis, best known for <em>The Shoe Queen</em>, delights once again with this romp through pre-Manolo chick lit turf. <em>(June)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Grace is an iconic flapper in the Roaring Twenties, burning the candle at both ends between her job as a copywriter in a London ad agency and a newspaper columnist under the pen name Diamond Sharp. Her frantic pace and upbeat writing keep her from thinking about the responsibilities at home, where she takes care of her mother, widowed sister, and young niece and nephew. Things become even more hectic when she spots a gorgeous American author, and taunts him in her columns until they start a fiery love affair. Dexter is as mysterious and dramatic as the book that made him famous. In contrast to her tempestuous relationship with Dexter, she meets her neighbor John Cramer, also an American, who writes for the New York Times. There is bad blood between the two men, and Grace is torn between her “Devil” Dexter and his antagonist, John, who may have captured her sister’s heart. Davis presents a rip-roaring read filled with enticing characters emulating the American literati living it up overseas after the First World War. --Patty Engelmann </p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p><em></em>Piper Hecht’s first and greatest secret is that he knows <strong></strong>how to kill gods. What’s not a secret is that he knows how to win wars   </p><p><em></em>Piper Hecht’s secrets make him dangerous, but his skill and his  reputation put him in danger—from his enemies, who fear what he might do, or who want revenge for what he has already done; and from his friends, who want to use his military gifts for their own purposes. His sister Heris and his living ancestor  Cloven Februaren, the Ninth Unknown, have made Hecht part  of their fight against the return of the dark god Kharoulke the Windwalker. At the same time, the half-mad Empress Katrin wants  him to lead the armies of the Grail Empire eastward on a crusade  against his old coreligionists the Praman.   </p><p>Meanwhile, all around them, the world is changing. The winters are growing longer and harder every year, and the seas are  getting shallower. The far north and the high mountain ranges are  going under the ice, and fast. The Wells of Power, everywhere,  keep getting weaker. And the old evils, the Instrumentalities from the Time Before Time, have begun to ooze back into the world.  As ever, the genius of Glen Cook’s storytelling lies in his common  touch: in soldiers who are like real soldiers, in men and women  who love and laugh and sweat, with real hopes and real fears, united only in their determination to face the oncoming night. </p><h3>About the Author</h3><p>GLEN COOK, author of the bestselling Black Company series, lives in St. Louis, Missouri.</p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Sedaris's sparkling essays always shimmer more brightly when read aloud by the author. And his expert timing, mimicry and droll asides are never more polished than during live performances in front of an audience. Happily, four of the 22 pieces are live recordings, and listeners can hear Sedaris's energy increase from the roaring, rolling laughter of the appreciative audience. Sedaris's studio recording of his 10-page Of Mice and Men runs 16 minutes, while the live recording of Town and Country, which runs the same length in print, expands to 22 minutes thanks to an audience that often doesn't let him finish a sentence without making him pause for laughter to subside. The studio recordings usually begin with an acoustic bass and brief sound effect (a buzzing fly, the lighting of a cigarette, the clinking of ice in a drink, etc.). Sedaris's brilliant magnum opus, The Smoking Section (about his successful trip to Tokyo is quit smoking) stretches across the final two CDs. <em>A Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 28). (June)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>With essay collections such as Naked (1997) and Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Sedaris kicked the door down for the “quirky memoir” genre and left it open for writers like Augusten Burroughs and Jeannette Walls to mosey on through. Sometimes the originators of a certain trend in literature are surpassed by their own disciples—but, this is Sedaris we’re talking about. When it comes to fashioning the sardonic wisecrack, the humiliating circumstance, and the absurdist fantasy, there’s nobody better. Unfortunately, being in a league of your own often means competing with yourself. This latest collection of 22 essays proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he’s also getting better. True, the terrain is familiar. The essays “Old Faithful” and “That’s Amore” again feature Sedaris’ overly competent boyfriend, Hugh. And nutty sister Amy can be found leafing through bestial pornography in “Town and Country.” Present also are Sedaris’ favored topics: death, compulsion, unwanted sexual advances, corporal decay, and more death. Nevertheless, Sedaris’ best stuff will still—after all this time—move, surprise, and entertain. --Jerry Eberle </p>


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 <span>"A sprawling epic...action packed and romantic...twists through vast swathes of time, space and metaphysics. A great read for sci-fi lovers everywhere." </span> --award winning filmmaker and author Martin Simpson<br><br>"This is a really interesting novel that touches on a number of subjects, including very ancient history, religion and racial prejudice. Yes, it's very much worth reading." --Dead Trees Review
 
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 In the far future, the last free humans have fled to a massive space station in Earth's orbit. On the planet below lurk their oppressors: a race of vampires who seek to breed and harvest them like animals. Orphaned as a child, Alex grows to manhood in the shadow of his legendary father who united the scattered remnants of humanity. But as he takes up his father's banner, he uncovers a frightening secret about himself: he is the Falsifier, fated to bring down the Vampire Empire. As he struggles with his destiny, the vampires abduct him in a surprise raid. With humanity's survival at stake, Alex must find and fight his way back and take his place in history.
 
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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>The year is 1929. New York is ruled by the Bright Young Things: flappers and socialites seeking thrills and chasing dreams in the anything-goes era of the Roaring Twenties. </p><p>Letty Larkspur and Cordelia Grey escaped their small Midwestern town for New York's glittering metropolis. All Letty wants is to see her name in lights, but she quickly discovers Manhattan is filled with pretty girls who will do anything to be a star… </p><p>Cordelia is searching for the father she's never known, a man as infamous for his wild parties as he is for his shadowy schemes. Overnight, she enters a world more thrilling and glamorous than she ever could have imagined—and more dangerous. It's a life anyone would kill for . . . and someone will. </p><p>The only person Cordelia can trust is Astrid Donal, a flapper who seems to have it all: money, looks, and the love of Cordelia's brother, Charlie. But Astrid's perfect veneer hides a score of family secrets. </p><p>Across the vast lawns of Long Island, in the illicit speakeasies of Manhattan, and on the blindingly lit stages of Broadway, the three girls' fortunes will rise and fall—together and apart. From the <em>New York Times</em> bestselling author of <em>The Luxe</em> comes an epic new series set in the dizzying last summer of the Jazz Age. </p><hr /><p><strong> Anna Godberson’s Playlist </strong><br /><strong> </strong> _<br />Bright Young Things_ may take place during the Jazz Age, but author Anna Godberson shows us that the tunes she prefers range from Cat Power to Prince. Check out what she loves and why. (Click on the song name to listen to a sample) <em></em>  </p><p><em></em><br />I spend a lot of time in a chair in front of my computer obsessively reworking sentences. This song is ecstatic and full of life and whenever I hear it I want to get up and move.  </p><p><hr />This song sounds to me like the wise, sad, tired, wired, voice of experience, the kind of beauty that you can only see after you’ve been worn down. That’s what <em>Bright Young Things</em> is all about.   </p><p><hr />This one is like an exquisite <em>New Yorker</em> story, perfect in its simplicity and specificity but universal in what it expresses.   </p><p><hr />That’s where I’m from, and this is the soundtrack of my homesickness. Plus, the lyrics are literary and whip-smart and impossible for a California girl to forget.   </p><p><hr />People like to make fun of Liz Phair these days, but her voice was the voice of my young womanhood, and “Go West” was the anthem of all to-hell-with-men, bridge-burning episodes.   </p><p><hr />The title says it all, and it just gets better from there.   </p><p><hr />Awesome plea for romantic decency, but in that raw, lusty, commanding voice. After at least four thousand listens, I still nod along like the first time.   </p><p><hr />Not to date myself, but around the time I graduated from college, this was the coolest band to mock. Who cares? In my opinion, this is the ultimate jogging song.   </p><p><hr />This is also an instant dance party number for me—is anyone as weird and cool as Prince?   </p><p><hr />To me, this is the ultimate expression of an artist’s belief in self. There is something bleak, but also really clear-eyed and uplifting about. Plus, it’s gorgeous.   </p><p><hr />If I could curl up in Sam Cooke’s voice and sleep forever, I’d do it. This one is just so desperate and romantic and it sounds just like what it means.   </p><p><hr />My parents were hippies, and I grew up in the Church Of Dylan. For a guaranteed good time, get on the freeway, roll the window down, step on the gas, and turn the volume up on this number. Please be prepared to sing along.   </p><hr /><h3>Review</h3><p>Praise for the Luxe series:“Characters are vividly sketched, and the suspenseful story is propelled by interwoven scandals and well–supported plot twists. A compulsively readable romance about young women who strain against societal conventions.” (ALA Booklist )  </p><p>“Mystery, romance, jealousy, betrayal, humor, and gorgeous, historically accurate details. I couldn’t put The Luxe down!” (Cecily von Ziegesar, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Gossip Girl series )  </p><p>“Readers will clamor for this sharp, smart drama of friends, lovers, lies and betrayal.” (Kirkus Reviews ) </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>This debut novel follows the adventures of 14-year-old Princess Emeralda and the talking frog she meets one day in a swamp. The frog begs her to give him a kiss so that he will turn back into Prince Eadric, his identity before an evil witch turned him into an amphibian. When the young royal obliges, she, too, is transformed into a frog, and the two leap off in search of the spell-casting witch to ask her to reverse her handiwork. Describing the duo's futile quest in laborious detail, the author pads her tale with some curiously drab characters, including another witch (who hopes to use Emeralda and Eadric in a spell she's concocting) and a bat and snake who reside in her cottage. The tale occasionally offers peppy dialogue and some comical scenes-particularly as the newly transformed Emeralda adjusts to catching flies with her tongue ("My eye-tongue coordination wasn't very good," she admits). Unfortunately, the plot doesn't make much of the magical elements (for example, the characters' encounters with a dragon and a nymph seem inconsequential), resulting in a disappointingly flat fantasy. Ages 8-14. <br />Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From School Library Journal</h3><p>Grade 4-6–In E.D. Baker's twist on the classic fairy tale (Bloomsbury, 2002), Princess Emeralda has quite an adventure when she kisses a prince-turned-frog and everything goes terribly awry. The book follows her exciting quest, along with the frog prince Eadric, to transform themselves back into their human selves. The text itself is weak, with poor story logic, many fruitless tangents, and excessive detail. However, the dialogue between the perky princess, her valiant but foolish prince, and some of the other odd characters they encounter is often genuinely funny. Narrator Katherine Kellgren produces a variety of voices that are well tailored to the characters and their personalities. This romantic comedy and non-violent adventure would appeal to youngsters fond of twisted fairy tales, but some of the jokes and sophisticated vocabulary will be beyond the intended audience.–_Jenna Innes, Edmonton Public Library, Alberta, Canada_ <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Starred Review. Multiple Hugo and Nebula winner Bear (City at the End of Time) sets this difficult but rewarding short novel on an interstellar colony ship gone astray. Teacher was supposed to be awakened just before landfall. What he finds when he gains some semblance of consciousness, however, is a dangerous and chaotic environment, with monsters roaming the ship's corridors and no one in charge. As he and a small band of equally ignorant crew members attempt to reach the gigantic ship's control center, they travel through a series of labyrinthine spaces, uncovering a variety of clues to the disaster that has destroyed large parts of the starship and damaged the controlling AIs. Not for those who prefer their space opera simpleminded, this beautifully written tale where nothing is as it seems will please readers with a well-developed sense of wonder. (Dec.) <br />(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. </p><h3>From</h3><p>Never one to play it safe in his consistently inventive fiction, Bear takes the reader for a harrowing ride on a labyrinthine starship in his latest hard-SF-oriented novel. Bear’s protagonist is an amnesiac starship crew member just released from a deep hibernation state called Dreamtime. Naked, disoriented, and forced by extreme temperature and gravity fluctuations to find safety somewhere among a confusing network of passageways, the man eventually receives help from an odd assortment of fellow Dreamtime refugees. Taking stock of their surroundings, while avoiding onboard killing machines, the gang quickly realizes the starship has given them each a unique role to play, including discovering collectively why the ship has been seriously damaged and cast aside from its mission to seek out habitable worlds. Bear’s pithy, occasionally cryptic writing style perfectly captures the chaotic experiences and unsettling revelations the team endures, while putting an intriguing spin on the timeworn SF theme of interstellar planet hunting. One of Bear’s most thought-provoking and well-crafted novels to date. --Carl Hays </p>


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 This reading of Anne Perry's sixth Victorian mystery featuring Thomas and Charlotte Pitt (Defend and Betray, Audio Reviews, LJ 6/15/96) is skillfully rendered by David McCallum, who gives an impeccable performance. Here Perry explores the social and moral issues of the day. Unity Bellwood, assistant to Reverend Ramsey Parmenter, falls down a flight of stairs to her death; her last words are: "No, no, Reverend!" He is suspected of pushing the young woman to her death. There are, however, other people in the house. Thomas, commander of the Bow Street police station, will not be satisfied until the whole truth can be unearthed. Engrossing and enjoyable for lovers of traditional mystery novels, although it holds few surprises for the discerning. Recommended for public library collections.?Jacqueline Seewald, Red Bank Reg. H.S., Little Silver, NJ.<br>Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
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 <br>In London's affluent Brunswick Gardens, the battle over Charles Darwin's revolutionary theory of evolution intensifies as the respected Reverend Parmenter is boldly challenged by his beautiful assistant, Unity Bellwood--a "new woman" whose feminism and aggressive Darwinism he finds appalling.<p>When Unity, three months pregnant, tumbles down the staircase to her death, superintendent Thomas Pitt is virtually certain that one of the three deeply devout men in the house committed murder. Could it have been the Reverend Parmenter, his handsome curate, or his Roman Catholic son? Pitt and his clever wife, Charlotte, refuse to settle for less than the truth--and justice. . . .
 
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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
<p>Benford (The Martian Race), a physics professor at UC-Irvine and a Nebula winner for his novel Timescape, is one of the leading exponents of hard SFAwhich, no matter how fantastic it might seem, never violates established scientific laws. His newest novel takes one of the oldest SF plotsAfirst contactAand spruces it up with great success using the latest developments in astronomy and, in particular, new information on black holes. In the early 21st century, astronomers observe what appears to be a distant gamma-ray burster, a black hole swallowing another star many light years away. The data is troubling because a second burster occurs only 13 h ours later, which, given the immense distance between stars, should be impossible. Eventually, the astronomers realize that the black hole, rather than being incredibly distant, is on the edge of our solar system, and moving our way at considerable speed. Stranger still, it appears to be under intelligent guidance, or, perhaps, to be intelligent itself. One of Benford's specialties is presenting science the way it's really done, and this is clearly the case here. His three astronomer-protagonistsABenjamin Knowlton; his cancer-stricken wife, Channing; and the British Astronomer Royal, Kingsley Dart, whom Benford has partly based on Freeman DysonAare nicely drawn and highly believable. His alien is, well, incredibly alien and endlessly fascinating. Less successful are Benford's government officials, who can come across as caricaturesAbut this is a minor fault. Full of astronomical pyrotechnics and the kind of intellectual verbal fencing that seems to go along with creative scientific thinking, Benford's latest should delight any serious reader of SF. Agent, Ralph Vicinanza. <br />
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
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<h3>From School Library Journal</h3>
<p>YA-Long before there was time, a black hole became a wandering entity, feeding on asteroids, planets, and remnants of the Big Bang. Eventually, it began engulfing ancient civilizations in its never-ending roaming across the expanse of time and space. When it reaches the edge of Earth's solar system, three scientists, Benjamin Knowlton, his wife Channing, and their friend and colleague Kingsley Dart, take on the fight to prevent the black hole, named Eater, from annihilating the Earth. Basing the foundation of the story on scientific knowledge in the fields of physics and astronomy, Benford gives enough background in both areas to elucidate concepts without overstating the obvious. He develops the main characters as the story unfolds, paralleling their personal changes, their shared history, and their heroic interactions with the increasing malevolence of the Eater. Deftly weaving scientific procedure around an exciting plot of adventure and destruction, and inserting the interpersonal relationships of three intense personalities, Benford creates scientific fiction that sounds very real.<br />
<em>Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA </em><br />
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p><strong>A Q&amp;A with Anne Rice</strong>   </p><p><strong>Question:</strong> You’ve written about many kinds of immortal or supernatural beings. What inspired you to turn to angels in this new book? </p><p><strong>Anne Rice:</strong> I have always been fascinated by the idea of angels--these perfect beings who are God’s messengers, sinless, bold, and unfathomable to the human mind. I was deliciously challenged to be biblically correct about them, and theologically correct: to present Malchiah as truly perfect, yet sent to interact with my hero Toby, and commissioned therefore to take a human body and reflect human emotions and respond to Toby’s human emotions.</p><p><strong>Question:</strong> How did imagining a character like Malchiah the angel differ from creating one like the vampire Lestat?</p><p><strong>Anne Rice:</strong> Well, again, Malchiah is perfect and sinless. And to make such a character appealing is a challenge; he has to reflect God’s love for human beings, God’s compassion. He’s not sent to judge Toby; he’s sent to guide him to salvation, and to enlist Toby in working for the angels on earth. He must feel things; he must have a personality, but with marvelous theological constraints. Doing Lestat was entirely different: Lestat is sinful and ferociously human, a rebel who wants to be good at being bad; a rebel who is seeking redemption but turning away from it all the time. There is a certain joy in writing about Malchiah because he is sent from God. There was never a perfect joy in writing about Lestat: Lestat suffers too much and does too many bad things with relish.</p><p><strong>Question:</strong> The hero of <em>Angel Time</em> is Toby O’Dare, a boy who had a tough life growing up in New Orleans and who goes on to become a skilled assassin before meeting Malchiah. How does Toby compare to your past protagonists? What is unique about him?</p><p><strong>Anne Rice:</strong> Well, Toby is deeply flawed, much like the vampires. He’s an assassin, and he has done terrible things, and questionable things. But he turns around in the very first book of the series and sets out to do the bidding of the angels in helping others. I think of all those characters I’ve created, Toby is most like Michael Curry in </p><p><strong>Question:</strong> People who have read your memoir </p><p><strong>Anne Rice:</strong> Yes, I did identify with Toby, though my life has been nothing like his. I know what it is like to struggle with an alcoholic parent; I know what it is like to care for younger siblings in an alcoholic household. But of course Toby suffers a family tragedy that I didn’t suffer, and he turns to evil in a defiant way, whereas I only turned to writing about evil.</p><p><strong>Question:</strong> How did you imagine the concept of Angel Time (as opposed to Normal Time)? And what sources did you reference while reading about angels?</p><p><strong>Anne Rice:</strong> I came up with the concept of Angel Time through meditating on it; really, figuring that from God’s standpoint there is no linear time. I felt certain that the angels would be able to move back and forth in our linear time, and to grasp how some one can be lifted from one century and put down in another to work a solution that then becomes part of the very future from which the original person came. I think meditation led to this definition of Angel Time, more than any actual reading. It seemed logical to me that the angels could do this. I did read theology about angels, of course, including St. Thomas Aquinas and books by Catholic writers who have studied angels and all the biblical references to them. It all starts with the Bible, of course and how angels appear in those pages. But the scholars Pascal Parente and Peter Kreeft help me to cover the sources. I stayed away from other writers’ more fanciful conjectures about angels. I wanted the biblical facts, and the way that the theologians interpreted them. </p><p><strong>Question:</strong> People are clearly fascinated with angels. Why do you think even those people who do not consider themselves religious are so drawn to the idea of angels?</p><p><strong>Anne Rice:</strong> People are drawn to angels because there is a deep seated instinctive belief that they do exist, that creatures from Heaven are here on Earth looking out for us and playing a special role in our care. Of course we read of this in the Bible. And it is a very seductive idea. It’s sometimes easier to pray to one’s guardian angel than to pray to the saints or even to the Lord. It’s easy to imagine that our guardian angel is right here with us. In my novel, Toby really does believe this, though after he suffered tragedy, he blamed the angels in charge for not stopping it. And he lived as a cursed human being for ten years.</p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Full of provocative moral reflections, this kickoff to bestseller Rice's new Songs of the Seraphim religious romance series centers on hired assassin Toby O'Dare, a one-time aspirant to the priesthood until personal tragedy unmoored his life. Guardian angel Malchiah visits Toby, who's just consummated his latest kill, and offers him redemption for his sins. After accepting the offer, Toby is whisked away to 13th-century England, where, in the guise of a Dominican friar, he becomes the protector of a Jewish couple accused wrongly by the gentile populace of having murdered their young daughter for her conversion to Christianity. Two eloquently told if clunkily joined digressions give the backstory on Toby and on the persecution of the Jews in medieval Europe. Readers will revel in Rice's colorful recreation of the historical past and in her moving depiction of characters struggling to reconcile matters of the heart with their personal sense of faith. <em>250,000 first printing. (Oct.)</em> <br />Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. </p>


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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>Max Parkman—autistic and whip-smart, emotionally fragile and aggressive—is perfect in his mother[HTML_REMOVED]s eyes. Until he[HTML_REMOVED]s accused of murder.</p><p>Attorney Danielle Parkman knows her teenage son Max[HTML_REMOVED]s behavior has been getting worse—using drugs and lashing out. But she can[HTML_REMOVED]t accept the diagnosis she receives at a top-notch adolescent psychiatric facility that her son is deeply disturbed. Dangerous.</p><p>Until she finds Max, unconscious and bloodied, beside a patient who has been brutally stabbed to death.</p><p>Trapped in a world of doubt and fear, barred from contacting Max, Danielle clings to the belief that her son is innocent. But has she, too, lost touch with reality? Is her son really a killer?</p><p>With the justice system bearing down on them, Danielle steels herself to discover the truth, no matter what it is. She[HTML_REMOVED]ll do whatever it takes to find the killer and to save her son from being destroyed by a system that[HTML_REMOVED]s all too eager to convict him. </p><h3>Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.</h3><p>Danielle falls gratefully into the leather chair in Dr. Leonard's waiting room. She has just raced from her law firm's conference room, where she spent the entire morning with a priggish Brit who couldn't imagine that his business dealings across the pond could possibly have subjected him to the indignities of a New York lawsuit. Max, her son, sits in his customary place in the corner of the psychiatrist's waiting room—as far away from her as possible. He is hunched over his new iPhone, thumbs punching furiously. It's as if he's grown a new appendage, so rarely does she see him without it. At his insistence, Danielle also has an identical one in her purse. The faintest shadow of a moustache stains his upper lip, his handsome face marred by a cruel, silver piercing on his eyebrow. His scowl is that of an adult, not a child. He seems to feel her stare. He looks up and then averts his lovely, tenebrous eyes.</p><p>She thinks of all the doctors, the myriad of medications, the countless dead ends, and the dark, seemingly irreversible changes in Max. Yet somehow the ghost of her boy wraps his thin, tanned arms around her neck—his mouth cinnamon-sweet with Red Hots—and plants a sticky kiss on her cheek. He rests there a moment, his small body breathing rapidly, his heart her metronome. She shakes her head. To her, there is still only one Max. And in the center of this boy lies the tenderest, sweetest middle—her baby, the part she can never give up.</p><p>Her eyes return to the present Max. He's a teenager, she tells herself. Even as the hopeful thought flits across her mind, she knows she is lying to herself. Max has Asperger's Syndrome, high-functioning autism. Although very bright, he is clueless about getting along with people. This has caused him anguish and heartache all his life.</p><p>When he was very young, Max discovered computers. His teachers were stunned at his aptitude. Now sixteen, Danielle still has no idea of the extent of Max's abilities, but she knows that he is a virtual genius—a true savant. While this initially made him fascinating to his peers, none of them could possibly maintain interest in the minutiae Max droned on about. People with Asperger's often wax rhapsodic about their specific obsessions—whether or not the listener is even vaguely interested in the topic. Max's quirky behavior and learning disabilities have made him the object of further ridicule. His response has been to act out or retaliate, although lately it seems that he has just withdrawn further into himself, cinching thicker and tighter coils around his heart.</p><p>Sonya, his first real girlfriend, broke up with him a few months ago. Max was devastated. He finally had a relationship—like everybody else—and she dumped him in front of all his classmates. Max became so depressed that he refused to go to school; cut off contact with the few friends he had; and started using drugs. The latter she discovered when she walked into his room unannounced to find Max staring at her coolly—a joint in his hand; a blue, redolent cloud over his head; and a rainbow assortment of pills scattered carelessly on his desk. She didn't say a word, but waited until he took a shower a few hours later and then confiscated the bag of dope and every pill she could find. That afternoon she dragged him—cursing and screaming—to Dr. Leonard's office. The visits seemed to help. At least he had gone back to school and, in an odd way, seemed happier. He was tender and loving toward Danielle—a young Max, eager to please. As far as the drugs went, her secret forays into his room turned up nothing. That wasn't to say, of course, that he hadn't simply moved them to school or a friend's house.</p><p>But, she thinks ruefully, recent events pale in comparison to what brings them here today. Yesterday after Max left for school and she performed her daily search-and-seizure reconnaissance, she discovered a soft, leather-bound journal stuffed under his bed. Guiltily, she pried open the metal clasp with a paring knife. The first page so frightened her that she fell into a chair, hands shaking. Twenty pages of his boyish scrawl detailed a plan so intricate, so terrifying, that she only noticed her ragged breathing and stifled sobs when she looked around the room and wondered where the sounds were coming from. Did the blame lie with her? Could she have done something differently? Better? The old shame and humiliation filled her.</p><p>The door opens and Georgia walks in. A tiny blonde, she sits next to Danielle and gives her a brief, strong hug. Danielle smiles. Georgia is not only her best friend—she is family. As an only child with both parents gone, Danielle has come to rely upon Georgia's unflagging loyalty and support, not to mention her deep love for Max. Despite her sweet expression, Georgia has the quick mind of a tough lawyer. Their law firm is Blackwood &amp; Price, a multinational firm with four hundred lawyers and offices in New York, Oslo and London. She is typically in her office by now—seated behind a perfectly ordered desk, a pile of finished work at her elbow. Danielle can't remember when she has been so glad to see someone. Georgia gives Max a wave and a smile. "Hi, you."</p><p>"Hey." The monosyllabic task accomplished, he closes his eyes and slouches lower into his chair.</p><p>"How is he?" asks Georgia.</p><p>"Either glued to his laptop or on that damned phone of his," she whispers. "He doesn't know I found his…journal. I'd never have gotten him here otherwise."</p><p>Georgia squeezes her shoulder. "It'll be all right. We'll get through this somehow."</p><p>"You're so wonderful to come. I can't tell you how much it means to me." She forces normality into her voice. "So, how did it go this morning?"</p><p>"I barely got to court in time, but I think I did okay."</p><p>"What happened?"</p><p>She shrugs. "Jonathan."</p><p>Danielle squeezes her hand. Her husband, Jonathan, although a brilliant plastic surgeon, has an unquenchable thirst that threatens to ruin not only his marriage, but his career. Georgia suspects that he is also addicted to cocaine, but has voiced that fear only to Danielle. No one at their law firm seems to know, despite his boorish behavior at the last Christmas party. The firm, an old-line Manhattan institution, does not look kindly upon spousal comportment that smacks of anything other than the rarified, blue-blooded professionals they believe themselves to be. With a two-year-old daughter, Georgia is reluctant to even consider divorce.</p><p>"What was it this time?" asks Danielle.</p><p>Her azure eyes are nubilous. "Came in at four; passed out in the bathtub; pissed all over himself."</p><p>"Oh, God."</p><p>"Melissa found him and came crying into the bedroom." Georgia shakes her head. "She thought he was dead."</p><p>This time it is Danielle who does the hugging.</p><p>Georgia forces a smile and turns her gaze upon Max, who has sunk even lower into his leather chair and appears to be asleep. "Has the doctor read his journal?"</p><p>"I'm sure he has," she says wearily. "I messengered it to him yesterday."</p><p>"Have you heard from the school?"</p><p>"He's out." Max's principal had politely suggested to Danielle that another "environment" might be more "successful" in meeting Max's "challenges." In other words, they want him the hell out of there.</p><p>Max's Asperger's has magnified tenfold since he became a teenager. As his peers have graduated to sophisticated social interaction, Max has struggled at a middle-school level. Saddled with severe learning disabilities, he stands out even more. Danielle understands it. If you are incessantly derided, you cannot risk further social laceration. Isolation at least staunches the pain. And it isn't as if Danielle hasn't tried like hell. Max had cut a swath through countless schools in Manhattan. Even the special schools that cater to students with disabilities had kicked him out. For years she had beaten paths to every doctor who might have something new to offer. A different medication. A different dream.</p><p>"Georgia," she whispers. "Why is this happening? What am I supposed to do?" She looks at her friend. Sadness is one emotion they mirror perfectly in one another's eyes. Danielle feels the inevitable pressure at the back of her eyes and fiddles with the hem of her skirt. There's a thread that won't stay put.</p><p>"You're here, aren't you?" Georgia's voice is a gentle spring rain. "There has to be a solution."</p><p>Danielle clenches her hands as the tears come hard and fast. She glances at Max, but he is still asleep. Georgia pulls a handkerchief from her purse. Danielle wipes her eyes and returns it. Without warning, Georgia reaches over and pushes up the sleeve of Danielle's blouse—all the way to the elbow. Danielle jerks her arm back, but Georgia grabs her wrist and pulls her arm toward her. Long, red slashes stretch from pulse to elbow.</p><p>"Don't!" Danielle yanks her sleeve down, her voice a fierce whisper. "He didn't mean it. It was just that one time—when I found his drugs."</p><p>Georgia's face is full of alarm. "This can't go on—not for him and not for you."</p><p>Danielle jerks back her arm and fumbles furiously with her cuff. The scarlet wounds are covered, but her secret is no longer safe. It is hers to know; hers to bear.</p><p>"Ms. Parkman?" The bland, smooth voice is straight from central casting. The short haircut and black glasses that frame Dr. Leonard's boyish face are cookie-cutter perfect—a walking advertisement for the American Psychiatric Association.</p><p>Still panicked by Georgia's discovery, she wills herself to appear normal. "Good morning, Doctor."</p><p>He regards her carefully. "Would you like to come in?"</p><p>Danielle nods, hastily gathering her things. She feels hot crimson flush her face.</p><p>"Max?" asks Dr. Leonard.</p><p>Barely awake, Max shrugs. "Whatever." He struggles to his feet and reluctantly follows Dr. Leonard down the hall.</p><p>Danielle flin... </p>


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SUMMARY:
Singers and musicians are gathered for a course in folk music that will occupy a weekend in the fantastic country mansion called Follymead. Most come only to sing or to listen, but one or two have non-musical scores to settle. When brilliantly talented Liri Palmer sings " Black, black, black is the color of my true-love's heart!" she clearly has a message for someone in the audience. Passions run high, and there is murder brewing at Follymead.


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<div>
 
 <h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
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 In the sure-to-please follow-up to Michael Tolliver Lives, the bestselling Tales of the City reboot, it's been 20 years since series anchor Mary Ann Singleton left her family and headed to New York. Maupin's San Francisco is comforting in its familiarity, and the gang is (mostly) all here, older, wiser, and settled in: Michael "Mouse" Tolliver is married to Ben; Shawna, Mary Ann's estranged daughter, is a popular sex blogger who is dating Otto, an enigmatic professional clown; and grand dame Anna Madrigal, once landlady to Michael and Mary Ann, is still kicking in her late 80s. Into this milieu returns Mary Ann, who ditched her husband and the young Shawna for a career in television. Now, nearing 60, she's back with news she can't bear to tell anyone but Michael. From the haven of his tiny garden cottage, Mary Ann regroups and confronts some uncomfortable chapters in her past. As ever, Maupin's edgy wit energizes the layered story lines. His keen eye for irony and human foible is balanced by an innate compassion in this examination of the life of a woman of a certain age. <br>Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
 
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 <h3>Review</h3>
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 “Sure-to-please...Maupin’s edgy wit energizes the layered story lines. His keen eye for irony and human foible is balanced by an innate compassion in this examination of the life of a woman of a certain age.” (Publishers Weekly )<br><br>“Even more satisfying than Michael Tolliver Lives, [Mary Ann in Autumn] is a juicy, twisty tale that’s of the moment (Facebook plays an essential role) as it takes us back to the heady days of our beloved San Francisco fantasyland.” (Modern Tonic )<br><br>“This novel shows the beloved characters of Barbary Lane approaching middle age and beyond with grace and thoughtfulness. . . . The charm of the Tales has not waned. . . . A must for fans, but new readers will find it an accessible entry point.” (Library Journal )<br><br>“The graying of the Tales of the City cast won’t sadden readers. This affectionate novel, with its carefully unfolding story line (and perfect ending), will work its warmth and charm.” (Booklist )<br><br>“You don’t review a new installment of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series—you rejoice in it...[These] are not fictional characters but dear friends and soul mates, as permanently a part of this town’s heart as cable cars, the Folsom Street Fair, and Maupin himself...” (San Francisco magazine )<br><br>“Maupin’s chronicle of interconnected lives and tangled personal relations is as engaging and warmhearted as ever.” (Kirkus Reviews )
 
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<h3>Product Description</h3><p>The ancient Roman city exuded evil. From the moment she entered the walls of Aurae Phiala, Chrlotte Rossignol knew her life was in danger. But she coudn't turn back. As the only surviving heir of Dr. Alan Morris, she would never rest until her missing relative was found. </p>


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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
<p>In this captivating memoir, Steinberg, a Harvard grad and struggling obituary writer, spends two years as a librarian and writing instructor at a Boston prison that's an irrepressibly literary place. True, his patrons turn books into weapons (and one robs him while out on parole), but he's beguiled by the rough poetry of inmate essays and "kites"--contraband notes secreted in library books--and entranced by the "skywriting" with which they semaphore messages letter-by-letter across the courtyard. And there's always an informal colloquium of prostitutes, thieves, and drug dealers convened at the checkout desk, discussing everything from Steinberg's love life to the "gangsta" subculture of Hasidic Jews. Gradually, the prison pulls him in and undermines his bemused neutrality. He helps a forlorn female prisoner communicate with her inmate son, develops a dangerous beef with a guard, and finds himself collaborating on the memoir of a charismatic pimp whose seductive rap disguises a nasty rap sheet; he has to choose sides, make queasy compromises, and decide between rules and loyalty. Steinberg writes a stylish prose that blends deadpan wit with an acute moral seriousness. The result is a fine portrait of prison life and the thwarted humanity that courses through it. (Oct. 26) (c) <br />
Copyright © PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. 
</p>

<h3>From</h3>
<p>When Steinberg graduated from Harvard, he expected to become a rabbi, but neither his faith nor his chosen lifestyle made that a suitable career choice. As a stopgap, he applied to work in a Boston jail library. There he was responsible not only for the day-to-day functioning of the library but also for teaching inmates creative writing. A dedicated intellectual and instinctively diffident, he was almost too easy prey for tough, aggressive, streetwise, ever-conniving criminals. To his chagrin, the hard-bitten prison staff equally tested his presuppositions about humanity’s benevolence. Caroming instantaneously from profane comedy to abysmal tragedy, Steinberg recounts his struggles to relate humanely to people at the edge of society. Prison librarianship offers some of the profession’s greatest challenges, and Steinberg tells just what it’s like to suddenly recognize that the mugger attacking him in the park was the same guy he had checked out some books to a few months earlier. --Mark Knoblauch 
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One of the George Felse mysteries. Det Sgt Felse is called in to investigate a murder at a new roadhouse, once a beautiful old inn known as "The Joyful Woman". There is no shortage of suspects, but the arrest of Kitty Norris leads Felse's young son, who is convinced she is innocent, into danger.


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Dominic Felse and the Swami Premanathanand, a man of peace, unravel a deadly Indian rope trick of hatred and murder when they try to discover who is behind the violent deaths of several landlords.


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<h3>Review</h3>
<p>“Fascinating . . . One of the finest works of history written . . . A splendid and glittering performance.”<br />
–_The New York Times<br />
_<br />
“MORE DRAMATIC THAN FICTION . . . A MAGNIFICENT NARRATIVE . . . elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained . . . The product of painstaking and sophisticated research.”<br />
–_Chicago Tribune_<em></em>  
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<p><em></em>“A BRILLIANT PIECE OF MILITARY HISTORY which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’ A writer with an impeccable sense of telling detail, Mrs. Tuchman is able to evoke both the enormous pattern of the tragedy and the minutiae which make it human.”<br />
–_Newsweek_  
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<p>“[A] BEAUTIFULLY ORGANIZED, COMPELLING NARRATIVE.”<br />
–_San Francisco Chronicle<em></em><br />
<em></em>_<br />
“AN EPIC NEVER FLAGGING IN SUSPENSE . . . It seemed hardly possible that anything new of significance could be said about the prelude to and the first month of World War I. But this is exactly what Mrs. Tuchman has succeeded in doing . . . by transforming the drama’s protagonists as well as its immense supporting cast, from half-legendary and half shadowy figures into full-dimensional, believable persons.”<br />
–_The Christian Science Monitor_  
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<p>“EXCELLENT . . . [_The Guns of August_] has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues.”<br />
–_The Wall Street Journal_<em></em><br />
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<h3>Product Description</h3>
<p>"More dramtatic than fiction...THE GUNS OF AUGUST is a magnificent narrative--beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained....The product of painstaking and sophisticated research."<br />
CHICAGO TRIBUNE<br />
Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to Worl War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and why it could have been stopped but wasn't. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.  
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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>Originally published in 1951, but just now making its first American appearance, this mystery launched Peters's Inspector Felse series. Set in Britain just after WW II, the main sleuth here is not actually George Felse but his 13-year-old son Dominic. He and his best friend, Pussy Hart, are playing when Dom finds the body of Helmut Schauffler, an ex-P.O.W. who had stayed on after the war in the Comerford area. An autopsy indicates that Schauffler's skull was fractured by blows that were "precise, neat and of murderous intention." Helmut, a loathsome blend of cruelty, cowardice and anti-Semitism, is hardly mourned, but his death so rends the village's social fabric that solving the case is imperative. In his first murder investigation, George has difficulty viewing his neighbors as suspects, although the area does have its share of demobilized veterans, i.e., trained killers. Even more distressing to George and his wife Bunty is the proprietary--and potentially fatal--interest that Dom takes in the case. By giving the youth a finely balanced blend of doggedness, good luck, ingenuity and foolhardiness, Peters sets out a very effective mystery while expressing, through the gradual unfolding of the character of Helmut,her own serious skepticism that aperson--or a country--can change his--or its--spots. In 1991, Mysterious reissued Flight of the Witch , a Felse mystery written in 1964. <br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p><h3>From Library Journal</h3><p>Widely known for her Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries, Peters also built a series around British detective George Felse. This title, which initiated that series, is now published in the United States for the first time.<br />Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>


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Product Description

 Affordable, compact, and authoritative, this one-volume edition of <b>The Annotated Milton</b> encompasses the monumental sweep of John Milton’s poetry. Here are Milton’ s early works, including his first great poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” the light and lyrical “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” the masque <i>Comus,</i> and the lushly beautiful pastoral elegy “Lycidas.” Here, too, included in their entirety, are the three epic poems considered to be among the finest works in the English language: <i>Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,</i> and <i>Samson Agonistes.<br><br></i>Fully annotated by Burton Raffel, this distinguished edition clarifies the complex allusions of Milton’s verse and references the personal, religious, historical, and mythical influences that inspired the great blind poet of England, who ranks among the undisputed giants of world literature.
 
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 <h3>About the Author</h3>
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 Burton Raffel is a translator, poet, and scholar whose major translations include <b>The Canterbury Tales</b>, <b>Beowulf</b>, <i>Don Quijote</i>, <i>The Red and the Black</i>, and <i>Gargantua and Pantagruel</i>. He has also annotated several Shakespeare plays for Yale University Press. He was the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities and emeritus professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette until 2003. He lives in Louisiana.
 
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<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3>
<p>Your initial reaction to Bill Bryson's reading of <em>A Walk in the Woods</em> may well be "Egads! What a bore!" But by sentence three or four, his clearly articulated, slightly adenoidal, British/American-accented speech pattern begins to grow on you and becomes quite engaging. You immediately get a hint of the humor that lies ahead, such as one of the innumerable reasons he longed to walk as many of the 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail as he could. "It would get me fit after years of waddlesome sloth" is delivered with glorious deadpan flair. By the time our storyteller recounts his trip to the Dartmouth Co-op, suffering serious sticker shock over equipment prices, you'll be hooked. 
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<p>When Bryson speaks for the many Americans he encounters along the way--in various shops, restaurants, airports, and along the trail--he launches into his American accent, which is whiny and full of hard <em>r</em>'s. And his southern intonations are a hoot. He's even got a special voice used exclusively when speaking for his somewhat surprising trail partner, Katz. In the 25 years since their school days together, Katz has put on quite a bit of weight. In fact, "he brought to mind Orson Welles after a very bad night. He was limping a little and breathing harder than one ought to after a walk of 20 yards." Katz often speaks in monosyllables, and Bryson brings his limited vocabulary humorously to life. One of Katz's more memorable utterings is "flung," as in flung most of his provisions over the cliff because they were too heavy to carry any farther. 
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<p>The author has thoroughly researched the history and the making of the Appalachian Trail. Bryson describes the destruction of many parts of the forest and warns of the continuing perils (both natural and man-made) the Trail faces. He speaks of the natural beauty and splendor as he and Katz pass through, and he recalls clearly the serious dangers the two face during their time together on the trail. So, <em>A Walk in the Woods</em> is not simply an out-of-shape, middle-aged man's desire to prove that he can still accomplish a major physical task; it's also a plea for the conservation of America's last wilderness. Bryson's telling is a knee-slapping, laugh-out-loud funny trek through the woods, with a touch of science and history thrown in for good measure. (Running time: 360 minutes, four cassettes) <em>--Colleen Preston</em>
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<h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3>
<p>Returning to the U.S. after 20 years in England, Iowa native Bryson decided to reconnect with his mother country by hiking the length of the 2100-mile Appalachian Trail. Awed by merely the camping section of his local sporting goods store, he nevertheless plunges into the wilderness and emerges with a consistently comical account of a neophyte woodsman learning hard lessons about self-reliance. Bryson (The Lost Continent) carries himself in an irresistibly bewildered manner, accepting each new calamity with wonder and hilarity. He reviews the characters of the AT (as the trail is called), from a pack of incompetent Boy Scouts to a perpetually lost geezer named Chicken John. Most amusing is his cranky, crude and inestimable companion, Katz, a reformed substance abuser who once had single-handedly "become, in effect, Iowa's drug culture." The uneasy but always entertaining relationship between Bryson and Katz keeps their walk interesting, even during the flat stretches. Bryson completes the trail as planned, and he records the misadventure with insight and elegance. He is a popular author in Britain and his impeccably graceful and witty style deserves a large American audience as well. <br />
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. 
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