Love can be magically romantic. Love can be all about finding “the one”. Love can sweep you away or cross borders. Love is sometimes unexpected but always welcome. Love is a choice. Everywhere, every day, love is demonstrated. Love may have unexpected consequences but love always has the best intentions. Views: 50
After coming to the aid of an oldster, Chet Westoe finds himself being tracked by three unknown riders. A confrontation in the town of Desolation Wells leads to a shootout, but faced with the prospect of jail, Westoe breaks free. He heads for a ranch called the Barbed S, his only clue to the mystery, but when he arrives is entangled in a whole heap of trouble from which he barely emerges with his life. The tension builds to a shattering climax as the trail leads straight to an all-out clash with the outlaw gang known as the Bronco Boys, when the truth is finally revealed. Views: 50
From Publishers WeeklyMeno (How the Hula Girl Sings) gives his proverbial coming-of-age tale a punk-rock edge, as 17-year-old Chicagoan Brian Oswald tries to land his first girlfriend and make it through high school. Brian loves video games, metal music and his best friend, Gretchen, an overweight, foul-mouthed, pink-haired badass famous for beating up other girls. Gretchen, meanwhile, loves the Ramones and the Clash and 26-year-old "white power thug" Tony Degan. Gretchen keeps Brian at bay even as their friendship starts to bloom into a romance, forcing him to find comfort with the fetching but slatternly Dorie. Typical adolescent drama reigns: Brian's parents are having marital problems, he needs money to buy wheels ("I needed a van because, like Mike always said, guys with vans always got the most trim, after the guys who could grow mustaches"), he experiments with sex and vandalism. Meno ably explores Brian's emotional uncertainty and his poignant youthful search for meaning, both in music and in his on-again, off-again situation with Gretchen; his gabby, heartfelt and utterly believable take on adolescence strikes a winning chord. Meno also deals honestly with teenage violence—though Gretchen's fights have a certain slapstick quality, Brian's occasional bouts of anger and destruction seem very real. He's a sympathetic narrator and a prime example of awkward adolescence, even if he doesn't have much of a plot crafted around him. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From School Library JournalAdult/High School - Set in Chicago's South Side in the early 1990s, this novel follows a year in the life of high school student Brian Oswald. His friend Gretchen, a heavyset, fight-provoking, punk-music fan, travels with him through the adolescent world of shopping malls, music stores, and suburban streets. And Brian is madly in love with her. Unfortunately, Gretchen loves Tony, a 20-something white-power hooligan who hangs out in arcades to pick up impressionable high school girls. Brian spends the first half of the book trying to build up enough courage to ask Gretchen out. When he makes his feelings known, their relationship is severed. For a time, he moves on and away from her. Trouble between his parents and issues of peer pressure flesh out the skeleton of this work. Written as a first-person narrative, the novel brings Brian to life by making full use of those colorful expletives and sexual jokes that high school boys love so much. The teen is not a nerd or a jock, but lives in a space between those stereotypes. Yet he struggles desperately to find his niche, circulating from cliques as diverse as the D&D geeks to the hyper-violent skinheads. Meno plays with music in a fashion reminiscent of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (Penguin, 1996). The story winds its way back to Gretchen, who inadvertently leads Brian to realize that punk, too, is its own form of a fabricated identity. In the end he learns that he is Brian Oswald - and he's okay with that. - Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Views: 50
A man, chained inside a tunnel and then dismembered and scattered along
the tracks by the early morning train from Portsmouth to London. The
beginning of DI Joe Faraday's most gruesome case yet. A bizarre suicide?
The cruelest of murders? Checking the list of missing persons as the
police attempt to identify the body DC Winter comes across a missing
man, someone who stepped out of their ordered life with no hint of
leaving. He's not the man in the tunnel, he's simply disappeared. The
only person he can find who knew him works in the city morgue. Once
again Graham Hurley has taken his forensic skill to the lives of people,
victims, criminals and police, struggling to survive life in a modern
British city. With his trademark realism and his focus on two very
different policeman; one awkward and by the book, the other bolshy and
walking the thinnest of lines, Hurley's Faraday and Winter novels are
earning ever more spectacular reviews, and building readership. One
Under: two deaths, two tangles of emotions and thwarted love, one
brilliant microcosm of Britain today. Views: 50
Product DescriptionIn Chicago and New York, in sleazy speakeasies and on Easy Street, to the strains of jazz and the beat of the Charleston, the twenties roared. The horrors of the Great War behind it, the decade went mad with abandon—and mad over the movies, radio, telephones, and the motorcar. But beneath the froth and the folly, the razzle and dazzle, lay a darker world, a hard and often violent world, for the twenties belonged as much to the gangster as they did to the flapper. The stories in this vastly entertaining collection of whodunnits crafted by talents like Amy Myers, Robert Randisi, Jon L. Breen, Edward D. Hoch, Marilyn Todd, and Mike Stotter reflect the allures—and the deadly dangers—of both those worlds. Views: 50
In international bestselling author Campbell Armstrong's page-turning thriller, counterterrorism agent Frank Pagan races against the clock to defuse a confrontation with the Russians that might change the map of Europe Escorting a hard-drinking, fun-loving, probably-former-KGB Russian "envoy" to Edinburgh would appear to be one of the more relaxing jobs in Frank Pagan's career. But in the flash of a gunshot everything changes. Now Frank's got a Russian official with a bullet lodged in his heart, his bosses at Scotland Yard wondering if Frank missed a step, and countless politicians and secret service agencies screaming bloody murder. With spies from the KGB, MI6, and the CIA dogging his every move, Pagan has to find the men behind the deadly shooting. From the Baltic émigré community, where he meets a beautiful woman who might provide answers, to the United States to the Soviet Union, Pagan unravels a chilling plot that will have... Views: 50
Kendall is football town, and Jerry Downing is the high school's star quarterback, working to redeem himself after he nearly killed a girl in a drunk driving accident last year. Carla Jenson, lead reporter for the school newspaper's sports section, has recruited Jerry to co-author a blog chronicling the season from each of their perspectives. When Jerry's best friend on the team takes a hit too hard and gets hurt, Carla wonders publicly if injury in the game comes at too high a cost in a player's life—but not everyone in Kendall wants to hear it...David Klass and Perri Klass's Second Impact is an action-packed story will resonate with readers who have been following recent news stories are football injuries. Views: 50
From a bestselling author with intimate knowledge of CIA tradecraft comes an electrifying novel of terrifying possibilities –– a story of betrayal and secrets that could implode America's war on terrorism ... and a nightmarish conspiracy firmly rooted in the very highest levels of our nation's government. Views: 50
