Adrift in mist-shrouded San Francisco mornings and alcohol-fogged nights, homicide detective Kate Martinelli can't escape the void left by her departed lover, who has gone off to rethink their relationship. But when twelve-year-old Jules Cameron comes to Kate for a professional consultation, Kate's not sure she's that desperate for distraction.
Jules is worried about her friend Dio, a homeless boy she met in a park. Dio has disappeared without a word of farewell, and Jules wants Kate to find him Reluctant as she is, Kate can't say no--and soon she finds herself forming a friendship with the bright, quirky girl. But the search for Dio will prove to be much more than both bargained for--and it's only the beginning.
When Jules disappears while taking a trip with Kate, a desperate search begins...and Kate knows all too well the odds of finding the child alive... Views: 707
Susan had never hung up a stocking . She'd never put a tooth under her pillow in the serious expectation that a dentally inclined fairy would turn up. It wasn't that her parents didn't believe in such things. They didn't need to believe in them. They know they existed. They just wished they didn't. There are those who believe and those who don't. Through the ages, superstition has had its uses. Nowhere more so than in the Discworld where it's helped to maintain the status quo. Anything that undermines superstition has to be viewed with some caution. There may be consequences, particularly on the last night of the year when the time is turning. When those consequences turn out to be the end of the world, you need to be prepared. You might even want more standing between you and oblivion than a mere slip of a girl - even if she has looked Death in the face on numerous occasions. . . Views: 702
The protagonist of Siri Hustvedt's astonishing second novel is a heroine of the old style: tough, beautiful, and brave. Standing at the threshold of adulthood, she enters a new world of erotic adventure, profound but unexpected friendship, and inexplicable, frightening acts of madness. Lily's story is also the story of a small town--Webster, Minnesota--where people are brought together by a powerful sense of place, both geographical and spiritual. Here gossip, secrets, and storytelling are as essential to the bond among its people as the borders that enclose the town.
The real secret at the heart of the book is the one that lies between reality and appearances, between waking life and dreams, at the place where imagination draws on its transforming powers in the face of death. Views: 702
Forget the lottery.
Teenager Charlie Newell has just discovered something that will make him and his friends billionaires. What if a world existed in which no humans ever evolved? No cities. No pollution. No laws. A fantastic world filled with unimaginable riches in which everything—everything—was yours just for the taking?
Charlie has found that world. And he plans to use it to make him and his friends rich.
There is a problem: How do you keep something this big a secret? Views: 699
Led by circumstances to accept the kind of case he dislikes—a "worried mother job"—"Nameless" reluctantly agrees to investigate the strange disappearance of college student Allison McDowell and her mysterious new boyfriend while on a driving strip from Oregon to San Francisco. The young couple vanished suddenly and without a trace after their car broke down and they were forced to spend a night in the tiny village of Creekside, in the remote Northwestern corner of California.When "Nameless" travels to Creekside and begins to question the locals, he encounters apparent apathy, hostility, and mounting evidence that suggests the couple may have met with foul play. Is one or more of the inhabitants of Creekside responsible? Is it Allison's boyfriend, whose identity is unknown even to her mother? Or is it forces of a far more sinister nature? "Nameless's" search takes him to Eugene, Oregon and then back to the Northern California wilderness. And it leads him from what seems to be a simple disappearance to a complex conspiracy of evil, one which reaches far beyond this remote backwater and threatens to destroy him as well before he can expose the truth. Views: 698
From Publishers WeeklyAs a former officer of the USS Hammerhead, DiMercurio knows his submarines, and the high-tech detail that he brings to his fourth undersea thriller (after Phoenix Sub Zero) should delight fans of the genre. Especially impressive here are the futuristic methods employed by a Japanese spy infiltrating a new nation's atomic missile site, and the unique means employed by Japan to try to render that site useless. When those means backfire, events escalate into a U.N. blockade of Japan and a confrontation between the U.S. and the Imperial sub fleet. All this takes place early in the next century, as the first female president follows the lead of a returning DiMercurio hero, the maverick Admiral Michael Pacino, in agreeing to the step that puts the world at the brink of war. The initial confrontation with Japan leaves Pacino in charge of a minimal fleet against overwhelming odds, but a lone, specially armed American sub may save the day?if it can reach the Sea of China in time. DiMercurio's matter-of-fact style squeezes much of the tension out of the story, and some readers may find his characters' sub-speak awfully dry. Those who thrill to the blip of sonar and the thud of torpedoes, however, will relish the author's latest deep-water dive. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product DescriptionIn this acclaimed undersea thriller, Michael DiMercurio, a veteran submarine officer and author of Threat Vector and Piranha Firing Point, takes readers behind the scenes of a naval crisis-and below the surface... A new independent nation has emerged in Asia-with a nuclear arsenal. And its most powerful geographic neighbor has launched a preemptive strike against them. The result: worldwide outrage. When a U.N. blockade against the aggressors is met with underwater attacks, Admiral Michael Pacino is forced to take on one of the world's strongest nations-and destroy one of the greatest submarine fleets. Views: 689
In the ninth century b.c., the Phoenician princess Jezebel orders the execution of all the prophets who refuse to worship the pagan god Baal. Commanded by an angel of God to flee Israel, Elijah seeks safety in the land of Zarephath, where he unexpectedly finds true love with a young widow. But this newfound rapture is to be cut short, and Elijah sees all of his hopes and dreams irrevocably erased as he is swept into a whirlwind of events that threatens his very existence.
Written with the same masterful prose and clarity of vision that made *The Alchemist *an international phenomenon, *The Fifth Mountain* is a quietly moving account of a man touched by the hand of God who must triumph over his frustrations in a soul-shattering trial of faith. Views: 686
Avi's suspenseful seafaring adventure ESCAPE FROM HOME continues in INTO THE STORM.
Fifteen-year-old Maura and twelve-year-old Patrick O'Connell are finally free from the impoverished conditions of their small Irish village. Though they've made it onto the ship to America, there's still a treacherous journey ahead of them.
In the storage hold, ten-year-old Laurence Kirkle struggles to survive and stay hidden as the ship's crew searches for stowaways to throw overboard.
All three children are in search of a better world and a new home. But will they find what they're looking for in America?
Once again, Avi skillfully creates an edge-of-your-seat adventure brimming with action and heart. Views: 685
In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young.
Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist.
Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his
experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three.
Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of
his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time.
Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique
portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 685
High Lonesome is a darkly comic, fiercely tragic, and strikingly original odyssey into American life. This collection by the author of Airships and Bats Out of Hell explores lost moments in time with intensity, emotion, and an eye to the past. In "Uncle High Lonesome," a young man recalls his Uncle Peter, whose even temper was marred only by his drinking binges, which would unleash moments of rage hinting at his much deeper distress. Fishing is transformed into a life-altering, almost mystical event in "A Creature in the Bay of St. Louis," when a huge fish caught on a line threatens to pull a young boy, and his entire world with him, underwater and out to sea. And in "Snerd and Niggero," a deep friendship between two men is inspired by the loss of a woman they both loved, a woman who was mistress to one and wife to the other. Viewed through memory and time's distance, Hannah's characters are brightly illuminated figures from a lost time, whose occassionally bleak lives are still... Views: 680
The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.
Elayne, Aviendha, and Mat come ever closer to the bowl ter'angreal that may reverse the world's endless heat wave and restore natural weather. Egwene begins to gather all manner of women who can channel--Sea Folk, Windfinders, Wise Ones, and some surprising others. And above all, Rand faces the dread Forsaken Sammael, in the shadows of Shadar Logoth, where the blood-hungry mist, Mashadar, waits for prey. Views: 679
In the Beauty of the Lilies begins in 1910 and traces God’s relation to four generations of American seekers, beginning with Clarence Wilmot, a clergyman in Paterson, New Jersey. He loses his faith but finds solace at the movies, respite from “the bleak facts of life, his life, gutted by God’s withdrawal.” His son, Teddy, becomes a mailman who retreats from American exceptionalism, religious and otherwise, into a life of studied ordinariness. Teddy has a daughter, Esther, who becomes a movie star, an object of worship, an All-American goddess. Her neglected son, Clark, is possessed of a native Christian fervor that brings the story full circle: in the late 1980s he joins a Colorado sect called the Temple, a handful of “God’s elect” hastening the day of reckoning. In following the Wilmots’ collective search for transcendence, John Updike pulls one wandering thread from the tapestry of the American Century and writes perhaps the greatest of his later novels. Views: 678
A printing office of a newspaper is no place for a member of the female sex.' 1890s, regional Australia. Koolgalla is a gold town, but the gold rush is beginning to wane. In the office of the Koolgalla Argus, the editors must decide between protecting old interests and investing in the farmland of the future. The new editorial assistant, J. G. Milford, arrives—but it turns out the 'J' stands for Jenny. The Torrents is a forgotten classic. In 1955 it was the co-winner, with Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, of the Playwrights' Advisory Board's award for Best Play. Yet while Lawler's play is considered a defining feature of Australian theatre, The Torrents is underappreciated and was perhaps ahead of its time. Currency Press is proud to re-publish this crucial work, whose themes of media chauvinism, environmental destruction and corrupt powers are chillingly relevant today.Features a new introduction by Anne-Louise Sarks. Views: 678
