Bestselling author Lisa Turner's hard-boiled Detective Billy Able returns in this dark Southern mystery about the murder of a dazzling Memphis socialite—and the scandals revealed in the wake of her deathThe heart can be an assassin. Detective Billy Able knows that from experience. Fresh from solving Memphis' most sensational murder case, Homicide Detective Billy Able and his ambitious new partner Frankie Malone are called to a bizarre crime scene on the outskirts of town. A high society attorney has been murdered while dressed in a wedding gown. Billy is shocked to discover he has a very personal connection to the victim. When the attorney's death exposes illegal practices at her family's prestigious law firm, the scandal is enough to rock the southern city's social world. In a tale of the remnants of Old South aristocracy and entitlement, twisted by greed and vengeance, Billy must confront the secrets of his own past to have any... Views: 20
All Taylor Brand wanted was a baby of her own But at nearly forty and recently divorced, embarking on a "solo" trek on the Continental Divide Trail, her time was tight and her options slim. Maybe the curt cowboy who'd been charged with watching out for her was her best shot. After all, Clint McAllister was shadowing her on a high-country horseback trip for the money. Would he be up for being hired for something else? Classy ladies like Taylor didn't normally give a rough rodeo-rider like him a second glance...much less ask him to father a baby. And while Clint didn't need an excuse to take Taylor to bed, he did wonder if this plan was perhaps the wisest. Who knew what would happen once he got to taste the forbidden? Views: 20
The Flamethrowers meets Let the Great World Spin in this electrifying debut novel set amid the heated conflict of Seattle's 1999 WTO protests.
On a rainy, cold day in November, young Victor--a nomadic, scrappy teenager who's run away from home--sets out to join the throng of WTO demonstrators determined to shut down the city. With the proceeds, he plans to buy a plane ticket and leave Seattle forever, but it quickly becomes clear that the history-making 50,000 anti-globalization protestors--from anarchists to environmentalists to teamsters--are testing the patience of the police, and what started out as a peaceful protest is threatening to erupt into violence.
Over the course of one life-altering afternoon, the fates of seven people will change forever: foremost among them police Chief Bishop, the estranged father Victor hasn't seen in three years, two protesters struggling to stay true to their non-violent principles as the day descends into chaos, two police officers in the street, and the coolly elegant financial minister from Sri Lanka whose life, as well as his country's fate, hinges on getting through the angry crowd, out of jail, and to his meeting with the President of the United States. When Chief Bishop reluctantly unleashes tear gas on the unsuspecting crowd, it seems his hopes for reconciliation with his son, as well as the future of his city, are in serious peril.
In this raw and breathtaking novel, Yapa marries a deep rage with a deep humanity. In doing so he casts an unflinching eye on the nature and limits of compassion, and the heartbreaking difference between what is right and what is possible.
**Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of January 2016: Coursing with energy, Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a rocket ship of a book, filled with heroics, violence and the propulsive action of a heart. Over the course of a day, Yapa spools a narrative of the now infamous World Trade Organization protests that took place along the streets of Seattle in 1990--a day that started peacefully and ended in blood. Yapa’s world introduces you to a kaleidoscope of characters and each is raw, real, driven by their own obligation and role in the protests—from the Chief of Police whose city it is to protect, to an ardent non-violent activist, to a delegate making his way to an important meeting in the hopes of transforming his country. This epic day unravels from every vantage point, and the result is a story empowered with exacting empathy. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is vivid, visceral, sly, and charged with action. You will race through it with a beating heart. --Al Woodworth
Review
"A fantastic debut novel.... What is so enthralling about this novel is its syncopated riff of empathy as the perspective jumps around these participants--some peaceful, some violent, some determined, some incredulous... Yapa creates a fluid sense of the riot as it washes over the city. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist ultimately does for WTO protests what Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night did for the 1967 March on the Pentagon, gathering that confrontation in competing visions of what happened and what it meant."--Ron Charles, *Washington Post*
"A symphony of a novel. Sunil Yapa inhabits the skins of characters vastly different to himself: a riot cop in Seattle, a punk activist, a disillusioned world traveler and a high-level diplomat, among others. Through it all Yapa showcases a raw and rare talent. This is a protest novel which finds, at its core, a deep and abiding regard for the music of what happens. In the contemporary tradition of Aleksandar Hemon and Phillipp Meyer, with echoes of Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy, Yapa strives forward with a literary molotov cocktail to light up the dark."--Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin
"Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is visceral, horrifying, and often heroic. But above all, this book is a full-throated chorus of voices on all sides--protestors, cops, delegates, politicians, and ramblers--as democracy runs headlong into the machinery of global power. Sunil Yapa has achieved something special, a story that is as tragic as it is relevant, as unflinching as it is humane."
―*Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek
"Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a stunningly orchestrated, symphonic work of narrative power. This novel marshals all the vital forces of our existence--from the domestic to the political--and offers them to the reader with equal doses of compassion and beauty."―Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names**
"There is nothing to say about Sunil Yapa's debut novel that its wonderful title doesn't already promise--its heart beats and bleeds on every page, in prose so raw it feels built of muscle and tissue and sinew and sweat. This book is delightfully, forcefully alive, and I feel more alive for having read it."―Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints**
"An open-armed love letter to humanity, this glorious novel loops around a burning center encompassing the warmth of parents and the coolness of patriarchy. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist will compel you to look and then to witness. 'We are mad with hope' the narrator says early on, and by the end the reader is too."―Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning**
"Sunil Yapa's debut novel is possibly the most gorgeous book I've read in my entire life... Yapa's pattern of meandering, artful, full-bodied imagery, punctuated by zingy one-liners makes for a seriously addictive read... It's painful. It's gorgeous. I can't say this enough: read it."
―***Bustle Magazine
"A vital, powerful read, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is an absorbing, multi-faceted, acutely hopeful novel."―Patrick deWitt, author of Undermajordomo Minor and The Sisters Brothers**
"A great wrenching beautiful book."―Laline Paull, author of The Bees**
"Chilling...A memorable, pulse-pounding literary experience."―Publisher's Weekly
"[A] gripping debut...Yapa is a skilled storyteller, revealing just enough about his characters and the direction of his plot to engage his readers, yet effectively building dramatic impact by withholding certain key details. In the style of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, Yapa ties together seemingly disparate characters and narratives through a charged moment in history, showing how it still affects us all in different ways."―*Booklist*
"Yapa's writing is visceral and unsparing. Noteworthy, capital-I Important and a ripping read, his novel will be on many "best" lists in 2016."―*Library Journal (starred review)*
"In this beautifully written, kaleidoscopically shifting novel.... Yapa penetrates to the human connections and disconnections at play between the lines of history in the era of the global village."―*Chicago Tribune*
"Explosive."―*Entertainment Weekly*
"If you're looking for a novel that moves with heat this winter, look no further."―*Flavorwire*
"The energy and sheer humanity of Sunil Yapa's debut will grab you, wrap you in, and won't let you go-and that's just the start of why you're going to love this. Seven characters narrate this charged book, which centers on a protest. It's so layered, you'll finish this wondering how Yapa pulled off what he did."―*Bustle*
"It's not often that a novel takes a fraught event from the recent past, one that most of us only experienced in the flash of the cable news cycle or the static of print headlines, and imbues it with so much heart and soul that we do something we almost never do in the constant crush forward and faster-we pause and reconsider. That is the power of literature. Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist does just this for the momentous protests of the 1999 World Trade Organization's (WTO).... Yapa does a heroic job of journeying into the heart of this complex set of events, illustrating how they grow out of and impact the character's lives. And while the heart may be the size of a fist, here it paradoxically seems to encompass the whole world and all of its citizens, who pulse with its every beat."―*The Rumpus*
"[A] gripping, profoundly humane first novel.... An absolutely compelling read."―*Bookpage* Views: 20
Marie Carrington is running from a host of bad memories. Broke and desperate, she's hoping to find safety and sanctuary on Prince Edward Island, where she reluctantly agrees to help decorate a renovated bed-and-breakfast before it opens for prime tourist season.Seth Sloane didn't move three thousand miles to work on his uncle's B&B so he could babysit a woman with a taste for expensive antiques and a bewildering habit of jumping every time he brushes past her. He came to help restore the old Victorian—and to forget about the fiancée who broke his heart.The only thing Marie and Seth agree on is that getting the Red Door Inn ready to open in just three months will take everything they've got. Can these two wounded souls find hope, healing, and perhaps a bit of romance on this beautiful island?Step into the Red Door Inn, a lovely home away from home tucked along the north shore of fabled Prince Edward Island. It's a place where the wounded come to heal, the... Views: 20
"I suppose I did it because I wanted something to show for the thirty years—longer than I had lived in my homeland—that I had been here in America. Something that was properly appreciated, even if someone else got all the credit." Liu Qingwu doesn't set out to commit a crime. He only wants to sell a painting—something more substantial than the Impressionist knockoffs he flogs to tourists outside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. But the lucrative commission he receives from a Chelsea art dealer is more complicated than he initially realizes. Liu has been hired to create not an homage to Andrew Cantrell's modernist masterpiece, Elegy, but a forgery that will sell for millions. The painting will change the lives of everyone associated with it—Liu, a Chinese immigrant still reeling from his wife's recent departure; Caroline, a gallery owner intent on saving her aunt's legacy; Molly, her perceptive assistant; and... Views: 20
Brewster McWhirtle's life has been spiralling downward ever since his wife, Melanie, was killed a year earlier. Now without a reason to push him out of bed each morning, Brewster wonders if he can find meaning in the botanical project he and Melanie once pursued with great passion. With help from a selfless park ranger, Brewster finally begins taking baby steps toward a new life.After he gifts his wife's flower shop to a loyal longtime employee, Brewster's anger and despair is quieted by the cheerful florets of the blue wildflowers Melanie loved so much. As he tentatively moves into uncharted territory, fate leads Brewster to unexpectedly meet Clotilde, an extraordinary botanical artist, and to become intertwined with a family dealing with devastating personal challenges. As he slowly learns to lean on his reawakened faith, Brewster soon discovers that within an uncharted life, Jesus is always there, just like the wildflowers his wife once adored.In this inspirational... Views: 20
From a three-time Edgar Award–winning author: A private eye trails a blackmailer, a missing Florida widow, and a double-indemnity swindler. Freelance private investigator Jake Dekker and his lovely assistant, Elinor, are kicking back in Biscayne Bay as they plan their next move on a new case: masquerading as newlyweds and insinuating themselves into the confidence of South Miami Beach's highly respected Thoren family. Only weeks before, patriarch Walter Thoren died in a car accident after taking out a double-indemnity policy for a cool six figures, and the insurance company suspects fraud. They won't have to pay if Jake can prove it was suicide. Unfortunately for Jake, things don't add up: Walter was healthy, sane, and prosperous. And given the particulars of the crash, it couldn't have been murder. So what exactly are the Thorens concealing? To find out, Jake and Elinor will head down a twisting trail of blackmail, mob connections, kidnapping, family... Views: 20
Three unconnected people travel north, each passing in isolation over one of the most troubled and controversial dividing lines in the world: the Mexico‒US border. But in a melee of language and blood, their stories and the stories of those they meet—of a young serial killer, a waitress and graphic novelist and her lover (and former professor), and an outsider artist in a mental institution—gradually begin to coalesce. Daring in both its protagonists and its structure, Edmundo Paz Soldán's Norte is a fast-paced, vivid, and operatic blending of distinct voices. Together, they lay bare the darkness of the line over which these souls—like so many others—have passed.A prominent member of a new generation of Latin American writers, Paz Soldán stands in defiant opposition to the magical realism of the past century, instead grounding his work in political, economic, and historical realities. Norte is no exception; it is a tale of... Views: 20
