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The Courtship of Izzy McCree

Isabella McCree wanted to be loved. So she traded her lonely Eastern existence for life in a mountain cabin with her rugged mail-order husband and his brood. But could she ever put her haunting secrets behind her and become a 'real' wife? Between raising four children and training wild stallions, Matt Prescott had no idea how to court a woman again. Especially not a shy beauty like Isabella. Yet when he looked into her blue-green eyes he saw strength - as well as a pain that mirrored his own - and knew he'd somehow find the way to her heart.
Views: 726

Named of the Dragon

Tormented by horrific nightmares since the death of her baby five years before, literary agent Lyn Ravenshaw agrees to accompany an author to Wales, where she encounters an eccentric young widow desperately afraid for her own infant's safety and a reclusive playwright who could be her only salvation.
Views: 724

Time to Hunt

He is the most dangerous man alive.  He only wants to live in peace with his family, and forget the war that nearly killed him... It's not going to happen. Stephen Hunter's epic national bestsellers, Point of Impact and Black Light, introduced millions of readers to Bob Lee Swagger, called "Bob the Nailer," a heroic but flawed Vietnam War veteran forced twice to use his skills as a master sniper to defend his life and his honor.  Now, in his grandest, most intensely thrilling adventure yet, Bob the Nailer must face his deadliest foe from Vietnam--and his own demons--to save his wife and daughter. During the latter days of the Vietnam War, deep in-country, a young idealistic Marine named Donny Fenn was cut down by a sniper's bullet as he set out on patrol with Swagger, who himself received a grievous wound.  Years later Swagger married Donny's widow, Julie, and together they raise their daughter, Nikki, on a ranch in the isolated Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho.  Although he struggles with the painful legacy of Vietnam, Swagger's greatest wish--to leave his violent past behind and live quietly with his family--seems to have come true. Then one idyllic day, a man, a woman, and a girl set out from the ranch on horseback.  High on a ridge above a mountain pass, a thousand yards distant, a calm, cold-eyed shooter, one of the world's greatest marksmen, peers through a telescopic sight at the three approaching figures. Out of his tortured past, a mortal enemy has once again found Bob the Nailer.  Time to Hunt proves anew why so many consider Stephen Hunter to be our best living thriller writer.  With a plot that sweeps from the killing fields of Vietnam to the corridors of power in Washington to the shadowy plots of the new world order, Hunter delivers all the complex, stay-up-all-night action his fans demand in a masterful tale of family heartbreak and international intrigue--and shows why, for Bob Lee Swagger, it's once again time to hunt. From the Hardcover edition.
Views: 722

Glamorama

The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero continues to shock and haunt us with his incisive and brilliant dissection of the modern world.  In his most ambitious and gripping book yet, Bret Easton Ellis takes our celebrity obsessed culture and increases the volume exponentially. Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs who exists in magazines and gossip columns and whose life resembles an ultra-hip movie, is living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another.  And then it's time to move on to the next stage.  But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 722

Smart Dog

Amy Prochenko has spent most of fifth grade avoiding both the bully Katilyn Walker, whose bark is as bad as her bite, and Sean Gorman, the only kid less popular than Amy. As if life isn't hard enough, along comes Sherlock. After escaping from a research laboratory, all Sherlock wants is to be an ordinary dog. But Sherlock is anything but normal: he can talk. And when he asks Amy for help, she says yes. But Amy may have bitten off more than she can chew! Soon she finds herself tangled up in dangerous schemes and hanging out with people she never would have before. For the first time, thanks to Sherlock, Amy's popular! Even better, Sherlock is the best friend she's wanted. But Amy's not sure she can save him. Will this dog ever have his day?
Views: 721

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief Sammy Keyes

With this debut book of a new mystery series, Wendelin Van Draanen establishes Samantha Keyes as a crime fighter to watch. Though, actually, the book opens with Sammy watching...a crime in progress. And when theman with the wad of cash in one hand and the open purse in the other catches Sammy watching him, the chase is on--but is Sammy on the trail of the thief, or is he on hers? If the police don't believe Sammy's story about athief with black gloves, black glasses, and a black beard, she isn't too surprised. Vice principal Caan didn't exactly believe her either when she explained that she couldn't possibly have broken Heather's nose. Well, Sammy's not putting up with this. Does she look like a liar? She knows what she saw and how hard she can hit. And somehow she's going to prove it. "From theHardcover Library Binding edition."
Views: 719

Elmore Leonard's Western Roundup #1

Bounty Hunters, Forty Lashes Less One, and Gunsights comprise this collection of great western stories by the author of Get Shorty.
Views: 718

Fear Nothing

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 shared by only one thousand other Americans, a 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 ever will, ever can - the mystery, the beauty, the many terrors, and the eerie, silken rhythms of the night - for it is only at night that he is free. Until the night he 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 strangeness of Moonlight Bay and its residents.
Views: 713

Riding Freedom

Charlotte Parkhurst is raised in an orphanage for boys, which suits her just fine. She doesn’t like playing with dolls, she can hold her own in a fight, and she loves to work in the stables. Charlotte has a way with horses and wants to spend her life training and riding them on a ranch of her own. The problem is, as a girl in the mid-1800s, Charlotte is expected to live a much different life – one without freedom. But Charlotte is smart and determined, and she figures out a way to live her dreams with a plan so clever and so secret – almost no one figures it out.
Views: 709

Spiderweb

Spiderweb is the twelfth novel by Booker Prize winning author Penelope Lively. Stella Brentwood has led an exotic life for a woman of her time. Her frivolous best friend at Oxford, Nadine, knew early what she wanted: marriage and children. Stella, too, has had her share of passion, but her work as an anthropologist - always the outsider, the observer, was her priority. Now she has decided to root herself in Somerset landscape. But she finds that village society in England us far more chaotic, more unpredictable, and even more cruel, than she has known before. And that she cannot - or will not - conform to its rules. 'She is a writer of great subtlety and understanding, and this is her best novel since Moon Tiger, which won the Booker Prize in 1987' The Scotsman 'Evokes an escalating atmosphere of menace . . . Lively at her deceptively easy-to-read best' *Daily Mail * Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger. Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra's Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012. Penelope Lively lives in London.
Views: 706

Abby and the Best Kid Ever

When Lou McNally was last in Stoneybrook, she was the Worst Kid Ever. Now she's back...and Abby is going to be her baby-sitter. She's prepared for the worst, but Lou is a perfect angel. Is the new Lou too good to be true?
Views: 705

Fly, Cherokee, Fly

When Darryl discovers a homing pigeon with a broken wing, things look bleak - after all who wants a pigeon with a broken wing? But Darryl has never had a pet - and he is determined to keep her. Soon his patience is rewarded and Cherokee starts to fly again. But then a more menacing struggle begins - with someone whose secret knowledge of the pigeon's past threatens to separate Darryl from his beloved Cherokee forever.
Views: 703

Ten Years Later

Ten Years After are an English blues rock band, most popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Between 1968 and 1973, Ten Years After scored eight Top 40 albums on the UK Albums Chart. In addition they had twelve albums enter the US Billboard 200, and are best known for tracks such as "I\'m Going Home", "Hear Me Calling", "I\'d Love to Change the World" and "Love Like a Man". Their musical style consisted of blues rock, and hard rock.
Views: 702

Rules of the Road

Meet Jenna Boller, star employee at Gladstone's Shoe Store in Chicago. Standing a gawky 5'11'' at 16 years old, Jenna is the kind of girl most likely to stand out in the crowd for all the wrong reasons. But that doesn't stop Madeline Gladstone, the president of Gladstone's Shoes 176 outlets in 37 states, from hiring Jenna to drive her cross country in a last ditch effort to stop Elden Gladstone from taking over his mother's company and turning a quality business into a shop-and-schlock empire. Now Jenna Boller shoe salesperson is about to become a shoe-store spy as she joins her crusty old employer for an eye-opening adventure that will teach them both the rules of the road...and the rules of life. Joan Bauer lives in Darien, CT.
Views: 698

The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

These days, Frank McCourt would seem to have cornered the market on lyrical depictions of Celtic poverty. But never fear, Sebastian Barry--the brilliant Irish playwright, poet, and prose-wrangler--is here. His new novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty recounts the odyssey of a small-town innocent, who grows up in circumstances more bucolic, but no less threadbare, than McCourt's. It's clear from the very first paragraph, however, that Barry means to take a wide-angle view of his Irish urchin: "In the middle of the lonesome town, at the back of John Street, in the third house from the end, there is a little room. For this small bracket in the long paragraph of the street's history, it belongs to Eneas McNulty. All about him the century has just begun, a century some of which he will endure, but none of which will belong to him." Having handily survived his Sligo childhood, Eneas joins the British Army in time for World War I--and upon his return home, finds himself shunned as a collaborator. Tarred with this very Britannic brush, he goes one better and enlists in the Royal Irish Constabulary. Alas, this move only cements his fate as a marked man, and his father is soon issued a warning: "Let your son keep out of Sligo if he wants to keep his ability to walk." With a price on his head, Eneas commences a life of wandering, from Mexico to Africa to Nigeria (which the moonlight, he notices, "brings closer to Ireland.") From time to time he sneaks back to Sligo and is promptly expelled. In another author's hands, this epic of dislocation could well be a bitter one. Yet the stoical and simple-minded Eneas is surprisingly free of anguish, and even his constant fear "has become something else, could he dare call it strength, a privacy anyhow." And the reader, at least, has the delightful distraction of Barry's prose, in which the occasional Joycean notes are entirely subsumed by the author's own colloquial brilliance. In the end, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty is less a novel than an exhibition of bardic fireworks--a latter-day Aeniad that's actually worthy of the name. --James Marcus
Views: 695