Hold on to your tights! Meg Cabot, author of the Princess Diaries series, says, "I don't know how, but Louise Rennison has done it again. Tallulah is even funnier, warmer, and sweeter than her cousin Georgia Nicolson. I fell in love with Withering Tights, and you will too!"For a limited time, bestselling author Louise Rennison's laugh-out-loud Withering Tights is available with a special sneak peek of A Midsummer Tights Dream, the next book detailing cheeky heroine Tallulah Casey's (mis)adventures! Views: 26
In a late-night showdown, Detective Lindsay Boxer has to make an instantaneous decision: in self-defence she fires her weapon - and sets off a chain of events that leaves a police force disgraced, a city divided and a family destroyed. Now everything she's worked for her entire life hinges on the decision of twelve jurors. To escape the media circus, Lindsay retreats to the picturesque town of Half Moon Bay. Soon after, a string of grisly murders punches through the community. There are no witnesses; there is no pattern. But a key detail reminds Lindsay of an unsolved murder she worked on years ago. As summer comes into full swing, Lindsay and her friends in the Women's Murder Club battle for her life on two fronts: in court and against a ruthless killer. Views: 26
From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Two misfits find common ground and a unique, surreal friendship via unspoken words in Coupland's latest (after JPod), a fine return to form. In the two years since his wife's (nonfatal) cancer was diagnosed, Roger Thorpe has devolved into a dejected, hard-drinking, divorced father and the oldest employee by a fair margin at Staples. A frustrated novelist to boot, Roger considers himself lost, continually haunted by dreams of missed opportunities and a long ago car accident that claimed four friends. His younger, disgruntled goth co-worker, Bethany Twain, one day discovers Roger's diary—filled with mock re-imaginings of her thoughts and feelings—in the break room. She lays down a supreme challenge for them both to write diary entries to each other, but neither is allowed to acknowledge the other around the store. Through exchanged hopes and dreams, customer stories, world views and cautionary revelations (time speeds up in a terrifying manner in your mid-thirties), the pair become intimately acquainted before things unravel for both. Running parallel to the epistolary narrative are chapters from Roger's novel, Glove Pond, which begins having much in common with the larger narrative it's enclosed in. Coupland shines, the story is humorous, frenetic, focused and curiously affecting. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. FromRelentlessly contemporary Coupland helped explode the Gen-X mind-set, and now follows his specimens as they stumble into their inevitable midlife crisis. Roger, a forty-something alcoholic washup and aisle-jockey at Staples ponders the unlikelihood of escaping one's pitiable little life. Another soul trapped in the sterile confines is Bethany, a goth girl with her own private disaster of a life. The two form an unlikely friendship in this cleverly crafted, bitterly funny epistolary novel, while at the same time Roger works on his own novel, a Cheever-like exercise wherein bitter couples lob witty insults at each other while drowning in Scotch and failure. When the Roger and Bethany story lags and meanders, it is this gloriously bad novel that keeps the reading so mightily entertaining. Chronicling life's crises that don't only happen in the middle, Coupland mostly coasts along on being clever—and he is almost always very clever—rather than heartfelt as his creations slowly tick off the things that they will never become. But just because it's intentional doesn't change the fact that this is about as warm as fluorescent lighting on goth-whitewashed cheeks. Chipman, Ian Views: 26
The third 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. The third volume takes us to the newly unified Germany during the 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 USA. Paul Hood and his team, already in Germany to buy technology for the new Regional Op-Centre, become entangled in the crisis. They uncover a shocking force behind the chaos — a group that uses cutting-edge technology to promote hate and influence world events. Views: 26
"The Romantics is a smart, edgy novel that is wickedly insightful about class and privilege, amusingly cynical about love and friendship, and thoroughly entertaining throughout. Galt Niederhoffer is an elegant prose stylist and a shrewd social observer."—Tom PerrottaLaura and Lila were once as close as could be—college roommates at the center of a tight-knit group of friends. But the friendship has wilted a bit. Now, ten years after college, the friends—and the boyfriend they shared—have reunited for Lila's wedding at her family's seaside estate in Maine. Laura is reserved, single, and the only Jew in the group, while the bride, Lila, is a WASP-y moneyed golden girl, and the groom, Tom, a swim team star from a working class Catholic background, is a perfect paradox of confidence and confusion. As the wedding draws near and wine flows faster, the disappointments and desires of the reuniting friends come... Views: 26
Benjamin Benjamin has lost virtually everything--his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. With few options, Ben enrolls in a night class called The Fundamentals of Caregiving, where he is instructed in the art of inserting catheters and avoiding liability, about professionalism, and on how to keep physical and emotional distance between client and provider. But when Ben is assigned to tyrannical nineteen-year-old Trevor, who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy, he soon discovers that the endless mnemonics and service plan checklists have done little to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated adolescent with an ax to grind with the world at large. Though begun with mutual misgivings, the relationship between Trev and Ben evolves into a close camaraderie, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur as they embark on a road trip to visit Trev's ailing father. A series of must-see roadside attractions divert them into an impulsive adventure interrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. Bursting with energy, this big-hearted and inspired novel ponders life's terrible surprises and the heart's uncanny capacity to mend. Views: 26
'A dark treat' Kate Riordan, author of The Stranger Haunting and moving, The Woman in the Mirror is a tale of obsession tinged with suspense, perfect for fans of Tracy Rees and Lulu Taylor. 'You'll be the woman of this house, next, miss. And you'll like it.' 1947 Governess Alice Miller loves Winterbourne the moment she sees it. Towering over the Cornish cliffs, its dark corners and tall turrets promise that, if Alice can hide from her ghosts anywhere, it's here. And who better to play hide and seek with than twins Constance and Edmund? Angelic and motherless, they are perfect little companions. 2018 Adopted at birth, Rachel's roots are a mystery. So, when a letter brings news of the death of an unknown relative, Constance de Grey, Rachel travels to Cornwall, vowing to uncover her past. With each new arrival, something in Winterbourne stirs. It's hiding in the paintings. It's sitting on the stairs. It's waiting in a mirror, behind a locked door. Views: 26
EDITORIAL REVIEW: Celebrated for his "palm-sweating tension" *(The New York Times)* and "rare insight" *(The Plain Dealer),* Gerald Seymour defines spy fiction at its best. Now, in this chilling revenge mission and haunting love story, he floodlights the East German Stasi as a young female British army corporal seeks retribution for Cold War atrocities. One frozen night, Tracy Barnes witnesses the killing of her lover by the East German secret police. Years later, when the Wall has crumbled and old enemies have become new friends, Tracy encounters the murderer and plans to make him pay. But in a country still at war with itself, Tracy finds that she is being played as a pawn in a far bigger game reaching all the way to Moscow. Views: 26
Consider Vivien in November 1922. She is twenty-four, and a spinster. She wears fashionably droopy clothes, but she is plain and - almost worse in those times - intelligent. At nearly six foot tall, she is known unkindly by her family as 'the giantess'. Fortunately, Vivien is rich, so she can travel to London and bribe a charismatic gentleman publisher to marry her. What he does not know is that Vivien is pregnant with another's child, and will die in childbirth in just a few months... Fay Weldon, with one eye on the present and one on the past, offers Vivien's fate to the reader, along with that of London between the wars. This is a city fizzing with change, full of flat-chested flappers, shell-shocked soldiers and aristocrats clinging onto the past. Inventive, warm, playful and full of Weldon's trademark ironic edge, this is a spellbinding historical novel from one of the best novelists of our time. Views: 26
Seventeen-year-old Christina McBurney has led a sheltered life. But when her twin brother, Jonathan, dies of consumption, Christina, unwilling to be farmed out as a nursemaid or teacher, runs away from home and her destiny. In Owen Sound she boards the Asia, a steamship that transports passengers and freight throughout the Great Lakes. She doesn't really have a plan other than to get to Sault Ste. Marie. She'll figure things out once she's settled. But a violent storm suddenly rises on Georgian Bay, and the overloaded and top-heavy steamship begins to sink. Christina is tossed overboard. Pulled to safety just before she loses consciousness, she finds herself on a lifeboat, surrounded by a number of bedraggled and terrified passengers and crew. One by one they succumb to their injuries, until only Christina and a brooding young man named Daniel are left alive. The usual rules of society no longer apply—Daniel and Christina must now work together as equals to survive. Big... Views: 26
