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The Player of Games
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Curgeh is the best, the champion. In the ancient, all-embracing Culture in which there is no disease or disaster, only the endless games, he has beaten them all. But an empire's challenge will teach him what the Game is really all about. “Striking for its breadth of vision, its ability to suggest the sprawling facets of an old, far-flung culture." --Publishers Weekly “A genuine and original talent." -- The Detroit NewsNo serious science fiction fan can resist this seminal novel in Banks' renowned series about the universe of the Culture. |
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Through Darkest America
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The Hereafter Gang
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Pink Vodka Blues
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This isn't the first time boozer Russell Murray has met a new day with brass bands marching through his skull-and a stranger in his bed. No big deal, except that after this lost weekend, everyone in town is out for Russ's head. the cops want him for a triple-murder rap. Ritchie 'Bones' Pinelli wants his briefcase back. Killer twins Irv and Mort Wacker want Russell on a slab. And somewhere in Russ Murray's alcoholic fog are Mafia boss Frank Cannatella and his boyhood chum, Senator Jack Byron, who wants to be our next president. |
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Dead Dog Blues
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Nothing ever happens in Pharaoh, Texas.... Drunks and missing auto parts headline the local crime wave until a barking dead dog shows up in millionaire Max Coomer's backyard. Then Coomer himself is discovered frosty cold and very dead, running for fame and glory forever down the gridiron at Pharaoh High. That's just the beginning of the mayhem that erupts in a sleepy Texas town - and the start of temporary constable Jack Track's nightmarish pursuit of a maniac who doesn't like anyone in Pharaoh, Texas. There are enough bizarre characters in Dead Dog Blues to convince any reader to steer clear of small towns. There's Jack's best friend, Earl Murphy, a black man who made a fortune on Wall Street and sleeps in his white Aston-Martin Lagonda by Jack's creek. There's George, the catfish mogul, and cheery funeral director Eddie Trost - plus an ever-growing cast of the local missing and dead. Jack is content with lovely Cecily Benet, the frozen-yogurt queen, until Max Coomer's widow, Millie Jean, decides to fan the flames of her high-school romance with Jack - an affair that turns into double trouble when Millie's jailbait daughter, Smoothy, takes a run at Jack herself. Author Neal Barrett, Jr., showed us he knows how to stir up an exciting blend of humor and suspense in his first mystery, Pink Vodka Blues (SMP, 1992). With Dead Dog Blues, he takes his place as one of the most talented writers in the field. |
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Peter Nevsky and the Story of the Russian Moon Landing
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John Calvin Batchelor's Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing is a triumphant return to the epic grandeur of his earlier novels The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica and American Falls. Eight years in the making and based on long-rumored accounts of a Soviet manned mission to the moon launched prior to Apollo II, it takes on nothing less than the titanic contest of the Cold War, the never-to-be-repeated heroics of the sixties' space race, and the hopelessly tragic history of the Soviet Union. Peter is an orphan, the only son of Apollon Nevsky, the greatest air ace of the Second World War. As he begins his story, it is 1968, the eve of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It is also the homestretch of the moon race, and Peter is freshly arrived at Starry Town (Russia's Houston Manned Space Center), a cosmonaut candidate who dreams of claiming the glowing white orb of the moon for Mother Russia. Exuberant, patriotic, loyal, he is nonetheless haunted by his patrimony. His father is one of the vanished, a hero of heroes slaughtered for his heroism by Stalin's henchmen. And now he is being watched - by the Chekhist thugs who dominate every aspect of Russian life and by a mysterious and powerful woman whose role in his life is darker and more deadly than he can yet know. At Starry Town, Peter falls under the influence of his three "uncles," known as the Martian Troika - his father's three bravest wingmen during the war. They are the heart, soul, and passion of the Russian space program. Peter's idols, they are ruthless men, though certainly no less ruthless than the forces pitched on all sides against them. Like Ishmael aboard mad Ahab's Pequod, Peter is both witness to and willing participant in the tragic and momentous events of the next year - culminating in his uncles' indomitable, doomed quest for the moon. Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing is a story of Russia in our time. Peter tells us of betrayal, |
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Manifold: Time
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The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. As the world's governments turn inward, one man dares to envision a bolder, brighter future. That man, Reid Malenfant, has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space. Now Malenfant gambles the very existence of time on a single desperate throw of the dice. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they? |
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Manifold: Space
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In Manifold: Time, space explorer Reid Malenfant journeyed to the edge of time. Now, in this second installment to the Manifold series we find him embarking on a grand tour of the universe, while the fate of earth itself appears threatened by the tow-pronged menace of an emerging alien presence and out-of-control environmental degradation.Following Malenfant's journey of millions of light years, we find him once more faced with a choice both impossible and necessary--a choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself. About the Author: Stephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge (mathematics) and Southhampton Universities (doctorate in aero-engineering research). Baxter is the winner of both The British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, as well as being a nominee for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He has won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel, the John W. Campbell Award, and tow Phillip K. Dick Awards. |
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Phase Space
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Blood Music
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The book that launched the career of Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Greg Bear--and earned him an avalanche of praise from the SF world--Blood Music offers a "dazzling flight of disciplined imagination. (It's) one of the most interesting stories to come along in years" (Poul Anderson). |
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Eon
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Perhaps it wasn't from our time, perhaps it wasn't even from our universe, but perhaps the arrival of the 300 km long stone was the answer to humanity's desperate plea to end the threat of nuclear war. Inside the deep recesses of the stone lies Thistledown: the remnants of a human society, versed in English, Russian and Chinese. The artifacts of this familiar people foretell a great Death caused by the ravages of war, but the government and scientists are unable to decide how to use this knowledge. Deeper still within the stone is the Way. For some the Way means salvation from death, for others it is a parallel world where loved ones live again. But, unlike Thistledown, the Way is not entirely dead, and the inhabitants hold the knowledge of a present war, over a million miles away, using weapons far more deadly than any that mankind has ever conceived. |
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Eternity
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Here is the powerful sequel to Eon, now with a dramatic new cover, coinciding with the Tor mass market release of Bear's latest novel, Moving Mars. At the close of Eon, Patricia Vasquez settled on an alternate Earth, Garry Lanier retired, and the Jarts and Naderites were caught in the Corridor. Now the fate of the universe is up for grabs. |
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Heads
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Ice Pit Station, an almost abandoned mining colony beneath the surface of the moon, is now the site of two experiments that may stretch the boundaries of the possible. Project One: to achieve a temperature of Absolute Zero - the ultimate state of cold, cold that can freeze space-time itself...and bend the laws of physics. Project Two: to take four hundred and ten human heads, cryogenically frozen for decades, and record the memories preserved in their ancient brains. In effect, to read the minds of the dead. But a bizarre Earthborn cult is out to stop the research at Ice Pit Station and they will resort to any tactic, no matter how treacherous, to destroy the Heads. |
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Moving Mars
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The young may not remember Mars of old, under the yellow Sun, its cloud-streaked skies dusted pink, its soil rusty and fine, its inhabitants living in pressurized burrows and venturing Up only as rite of passage or to do maintenance or tend the ropy crops spread like nests of intensely green snakes over the wind-scoured farms. That Mars, an old and tired Mars filled with young lives, is gone forever. Now I am old and tired, and Mars is young again. Our lives are not our own, but by God, we must behave as if they are. When I was young, what I did seemed too small to be of any consequence; but the shiver of dust, we are told, expands in time to the planet-sweeping storm.... Casseia Majumdar was a daughter of one of Mars' oldest, most conservative Binding Multiples - the extended family syndicates that had colonized the red planet. But her life was changed forever by the student protest of 2171. Those brief days of idealism forged bonds that would last a lifetime, and set the stage for a more dramatic act of revolution than anyone could have imagined. Charles Franklin, too, was caught up in those days of passionate youth. A brilliant young physicist with a deep love for his native planet, he was forced to leave his world behind to gain the training he needed. And in those years, the political distance between Earth and Mars was growing wider than the empty reaches of interplanetary space. Moving Mars is Greg Bear's brilliant conception of humanity's colonization of the red planet, with lovingly painted details and a grand historical sweep, embellishing an audacious scientific speculation. |
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Legacy
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In this sequel to EON, Greg Bear continues to explore the possibilities presented by the asteroid Thistledown, a remnant of a lost human civilization. The Way is a tunnel through space and time that leads to other worlds, some more like planet Earth than Earth itself. It is perhaps the most formidable discovery in Thistledown and with such an important discovery comes dispute as to the nature of the Way and how it should be used. The Way can only be reached through Axis City, the only space station of Thistledown. The ruling body of Axis City, the Hexamon, has decreed that other worlds reached by The Way must be left untouched as an insurance against future needs of the human race. But then the Hexamon hear of a group of clandestine colonists who have settled in one of the new worlds. Olmy Ap Sennon is an eager young career soldier who must go and investigate this illegal colony, and at the same time confront his own humanity. As he witnesses the hardship and beauty of the outlaw human colony, he learns what it means to struggle with war, ecological disasters, love, and death. |
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New Legends
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"Hard" science fiction--SF that takes known scientific principles as its starting point--is, for many readers, the durable core of the field. But it is also accused, of being, as Greg Bear puts it, "a restrictive genre without a soul." Here, Nebula Award winner Bear puts forth the counterargument: an original collection of new SF tales from the cutting edge of the field, each an example of "science fiction with a great soul." |
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Timescape
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The Demolished Man
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The Stars My Destination
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In this pulse-quickening novel, Alfred Bester imagines a future in which people "jaunte" a thousand miles with a single thought, where the rich barricade themselves in labyrinths and protect themselves with radioactive hit men - and where an inarticulate outcast is the most valuable and dangerous man alive. The Stars My Destination is a classic of technological prophecy and timeless narrative enchantment by an acknowledged master of science fiction. |
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Virtual Unrealities : The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester
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"Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester's methods. His stories never stand still a moment." --Damon Knight, author of Why Do Birds Alfred Bester took science fiction into hyperdrive, endowing it with a wit, speed, and narrative inventiveness that have inspired two generations of writers. And nowhere is Bester funnier, speedier, or more audacious than in these seventeen short stories--two of them previously unpublished--that have now been brought together in a single volume for the first time. Read about the sweet-natured young man whose phenomenal good luck turns out to be disastrous for the rest of humanity. Find out why tourists are flocking to a hellish little town in a post-nuclear Kansas. Meet a warlock who practices on Park Avenue and whose potions comply with the Pure Food and Drug Act. Make a deal with the Devil--but not without calling your agent. Dazzling, effervescent, sexy, and sardonic, Virtual Unrealities is a historic collection from one of science fiction's true pathbreakers. "Alfred Bester was one of the handful of writers who invented modern science fiction. " --Harry Harrison |
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Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas
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Count Geiger's Blues
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Brittle Innings
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For seventeen-year-old Danny Boles, a 5'5" shortstop out of Tenkiller, Oklahoma, the summer of 1943 would be a season to remember. The country's at war, and professional baseball needs able-bodied men. Danny's headed for Highbridge, Georgia - home of the Goober Pride peanut butter factory and the Highbridge Hellbenders, a Class C farm club in the Chattahoochee Valley League. He's a scrappy player with one minor quirk: a violent encounter on the train to Georgia has rendered him mute, his vocal cords tied up in knots. Danny's idiosyncrasy, however, is nothing compared to that of his new Hellbender roommate, an erudite seven-foot giant by the name of Jumbo Hank Clerval. With his yellow eyes, strangely scarred face, and sausage-sized fingers, Hank seems to have been put together in a meat-packing plant. But he plays a mean first base and can hit the ball a mile. With the Hellbenders in a pennant race as hot as the relentless Georgia sun, the eloquent Clerval forms a special kinship with the speechless kid from Oklahoma. Danny soon realizes that Hank is not an ordinary man but something more complex...more mysterious than he'd imagined. These two very different ballplayers forge a bond as the season moves inexorably toward its dramatic, and ultimately violent, conclusion. Both want a shot at the major leagues and both want to know what it's like to be a man. But they are about to discover how ambition and desire can turn even the gentlest soul into the worst kind of monster. At turns funny, tragic, and ultimately uplifting, Brittle Innings is a brilliant evocation of a uniquely American drama: a season-long contest in which fantasies are engaged, heroes are created and destroyed, and innocence is lost forever. |
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Bears Discover Fire
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"Bears Discover Fire," the title story in this eagerly awaited collection, is one of the most acclaimed science fiction stories of the Nineties. "Particularly delightful," raved The Christian Science Monitor, while Newsday called it "the finest story in the Dozois [Best of the Year] volume." Michael Swanwick, the Nebula Award-winning author of Stations of the Tide, pronounced it "one of the best genre stories of the decade, and an encouraging omen of what we might expect from the Nineties." "Bears Discover Fire" won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Sturgeon Award, and the Locus Poll Award; it was also nominated for the World Fantasy Award. But "Bears Discover Fire" was only one of a series of brilliant, unpredictable stories that sent shock waves of delight through the field and, almost overnight, made Terry Bisson one of the top sf short story writers. This volume collects all of Bisson's short fiction to date, including other Hugo and Nebula nominees, in what will surely be one of the most important sf collections of the decade. Explore Bisson's unique imagination in stories that are sometimes moving, sometimes funny, and always unforgettable: All the great living writers move to one small town in Kentucky. The British Isles begin a stately voyage to America. Two guys from the future disrupt the life of a struggling New York artist. An overly helpful banking machine brings strangers together. And a young boy discovers how his world changes when the bears discover fire. The New York Review of Science Fiction says, "Bisson knows his territory and writes about it cleanly, sympathetically, without condescension...[his] narrative voice...has a sweet inner music, that sly Southern smoothness written from the inside out not to baroque effect, but for the lean economy with which it conveys information." His stories are among the chief treasures of science fiction today. |
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The Last Coin
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Judas betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Twenty-nine of the coins are already in the possession of the unpleasant Pennyman. The last coin is all that stands between the world and doom, and it now belongs to ordinary Andrew Vanbergen, owner of an inn where dark magic and bizarre heroism are about to intertwine. |
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Thirteen Phantasms
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Hit Man
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Keller is a killer. Professional, cool, confident, competent, reliable. But he is also a complex person: Guarded and reclusive, icy and ruthlessly efficient, he is prone to loneliness and self-doubt, nightmares and career worries. He is known to his therapist as a "corporate troubleshooter," but Keller's real business is murder. He lives the life of a well-paid but lonely traveling businessman, a habitue of impersonal hotel rooms, bleak stretches of highways in rental cars, and anonymous eateries. A born New Yorker, he nonetheless fantasizes about the good life in the country, and in every place he visits, he dreams of setting up a home, away from the pressures and moral complexities his line of work entails. |
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Time and Chance
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Her Pilgrim Soul
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The Postman
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This is the story of a lie that became the most powerful kind of truth. A timeless novel as urgently compelling as War Day or Alas, Babylon, David Brin's The Postman is the dramatically moving saga of a man who rekindled the spirit of America through the power of a dream, from a modern master of science fiction. He was a survivor--a wanderer who traded tales for food and shelter in the dark and savage aftermath of a devastating war. Fate touches him one chill winter's day when he borrows the jacket of a long-dead postal worker to protect himself from the cold. The old, worn uniform still has power as a symbol of hope, and with it he begins to weave his greatest tale, of a nation on the road to recovery. |
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The Lost Get-Back Boogie
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During his twenties Iry Paret took life easy and cool, playing guitar in honky-tonk bars in south Louisiana, boozing it up whenever possible, and trying to stay away from trouble. But trouble found him one night when he killed a man in a barroom fight and was later convicted of manslaughter. As James Lee Burke's remarkable new novel, The Lost Get-Back Boogie, begins, Iry has just been paroled after serving two years in the state prison at Angola. Hoping to reorder his life, he decides to sever all ties to his past and strike out for new parts. 'I think I'm just going to roll, Ace, ' he says to his straitlaced brother, and piling into his father's old pickup, he heads west. |
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The Neon Rain
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Heaven's Prisoners
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Black Cherry Blues
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A Morning For Flamingos
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A Stained White Radiance
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In the Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead
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PAST MEETS PRESENT IN THE LOUISIANA SWAMPS The image of the dead girl's body lingered in detective Dave Robicheaux's mind as he drove home. After seeing the young victim's corpse, the last thing he needed to come across was a drunk driver. But when he saw the Cadillac fishtail across the road, Robicheaux knew the driver was in trouble. What Dave didn't realize, was that by pulling the car over, he was opening his murder case wider than he could ever imagine. The driver, Elrod Sykes, in New Iberia to star in a movie, leads Dave to the skeletal remains of a black man that had washed up in the Atchafalaya swamp. So begins a mystery that takes Dave back to an unsolved murder -- a murder that he witnessed in 1957. Haunted by the past as he confronts the gruesome present - day rape and murder of young prostitutes, Robicheaux must also contend with a new partner from the F.B.I., and the local criminal gentry. But for Dave, the answers he seeks lie somewhere in the bayou mist with the ghosts of soldiers long since forgotten... A masterwork of detective fiction, In the Electric Mist With Confederate Dead is James Lee Burke's most suspenseful work to date./p |
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Dixie City Jam
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The search for a forgotten Nazi submarine sunk off the coast of New Orleans stirs up old hatreds submerged for just as long, in a brilliant new book by Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke. With Dixie City Jam, the writer USA Today called "the Grisham Alternative" enters the front ranks of contemporary fiction writers . . . and mainstream bestsellers. They're out there, under the salt - the bodies of German seamen who used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for unescorted American tankers sailing from the oil refineries of Baton Rouge out into the Gulf of Mexico. As a child, Dave Robicheaux had been haunted by the sailors' images; then, as a young college student, he'd accidentally discovered one of their subs while scuba diving. Years later, in a New Orleans populated by desperate hustlers and millennium-watchers of all stripes, Robicheaux, a detective with the New Iberia sheriff's office, finds himself and his family at serious risk, stalked for his knowledge of a watery burial ground by a mysterious man named Will Buchalter - a man who believes that the Holocaust was one big hoax. American crime fiction's "finest prose stylist" (Los Angeles Times) is at the peak of his powers in Dixie City Jam as he looks long and deep into the human heart of darkness. |
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Burning Angel
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At the center of Burning Angel is Sonny Boy Marsallus, a fixer, a gambler, a lender of money to prostitutes who are trying to leave the life. But since Prohibition, the Giacano family has locked up the action in New Orleans and its surrounding parishes. When things get hot for Sonny Boy, he hightails it south of the border for parts unknown in El Salvador and Guatemala. When Sonny resurfaces in New Orleans, Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish sheriff's office couldn't be more surprised - that is, not until Sonny passes him a mysterious notebook for safekeeping that seems to contain dark secrets about his activities in Latin America. Robicheaux must wrestle with secrets closer to home as well when his help is enlisted by the Fontenot family, descendants of sharecroppers, whose claim to land they've lived on for almost one hundred years is jeopardized. Who wants the land so badly? And what of the longtime, clandestine affair between Moleen Bertrand, lord of the manor, and Ruthie Jean Fontenot, now reputed to be a local madam? As Dave determines to find out who's honing in on the Bertrand spread, he puts himself in increasing peril at the hands of local mobsters and a hired assassin with a shady past that intersects with that of Sonny Boy Marsallus. |
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Cadillac Jukebox
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To the people of New Iberia, Aaron Crown's ways are the stuff of "poor white piney-woods folklore." His family were shiftless timber people from north Louisiana who brought their ways into the Cajun wetlands: poaching deer, stealing livestock, trailing rumors of ties to the Ku Klux Klan. No one was surprised when Crown was accused of assassinating the most famous black civil rights leader in Louisiana. But it took twenty-eight years for the system to put him in Angola Penitentiary. Now, Crown is proclaiming his innocence - and asking Dave Robicheaux for help. Dave tries to stay removed from the political maelstrom swirling around Aaron Crown, but deep in his heart he worries that Crown has been made a scapegoat for the collective guilt of an entire generation. But when Buford LaRose - scion of an old Southern family and author of a book that sent Crown to prison - is elected governor, Dave Robicheaux's involvement with the case deepens to a level that threatens to overwhelm him. LaRose's wife, Karyn, is a social-climbing politician's wife, but years ago she and Dave were romantically involved. Now, when she once again turns her seductive powers on Dave, and her husband offers him a job as head of the state police, Dave knows that, somehow, he must find out the truth about Aaron Crown: a truth that too many people want hidden. |
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Sunset Limited
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Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux is back, as polite as ever, after sitting out Burke's "Cimarron Rose" (LJ 6/15/97). Accompanying Dave is his buddy Clete and a marvelous cast of characters; downtrodden Cool Breeze Broussard, tortured Lila Terrebonne, slimy Harpo Scruggs, and photojournalist Megan Flynn, whose father, a labor organizer, was crucified on a barn wall 40 years ago. When Megan, still haunted by her father's unsolved murder, returns to New Iberia, she sets in motion a series of events that draws Dave into the dark, twisting relationships of these tortured characters, who are intertwined in a plot too convoluted to summarize but that bears all the hallmarks of a Burke mysterybloody racial sins from the past mixed with violent, inbred kinships that haunt the present. Once again, with strong and graceful prose, Burke presents a tale as dark and rich as a cup of chicory coffee. |
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Purple Cane Road
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Dave Robicheaux has spent his life confronting the age-old adage that the sins of the father pass on to the son. But what was his mother's legacy? Dead to him since his youth, Mae Guillory has been shuttered away in the deep recesses of Robicheaux's mind. He's lived with the fact that he would never really know what happened to the woman who left him to the devices of a whiskey-driven father. But deep down, Dave still feels the loss of his mother and knows that the infinite series of disappointments in her life could not have come to a good end." "While helping out an old friend, Dave is stunned when a pimp looks at him sideways and asks if he is the son of Mae Guillory, the whore a bunch of cops murdered thirty years ago. Her body was dumped in the bayou bordering Purple Cane Road, and the cops who left her there are still on the job." "Dave's search for his mother's killers leads him to the darker places in his past, and solving this case teaches him what it means to be his mother's son. |
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Jolie Blon's Bounce
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"When a beautiful teenage girl is killed, the victim of a particularly savage rape, New Iberia, Louisiana, police detective Dave Robicheaux senses from the very start of the investigation that the most likely suspect, Tee Bobby Hulin, is not the actual killer. Though a drug addict and general ne'er-do-well, Hulin just doesn't fit the profile for this kind of brutal crime." "But when another murder occurs - this victim is a drugged-out prostitute who happens to be the daughter of one of the local mafia bigwigs - all clues once again point to Tee Bobby Hulin, and the cries for arrest become too loud to ignore. The dead girl's father, however, prefers to take matters in his own hands and sets out to find - and punish - the killer himself." "But before Robicheaux can solve these crimes and bring the killer or killers to justice, he is forced to battle his own inner demons, including a painkiller addiction, a habit that begins as the result of a brutal and humiliating beating he suffers at the hands of the mysterious and diabolical character known as Legion. A fixture in the area for years, Legion was once the overseer on a local sugarcane plantation and now gets by doing odd jobs. In temperament, however, he's still the malicious and malevolent bully he always was, a man defined by evil and seemingly possessed with supernatural skills of survival." Added to the mix, and on the good guy side of the balance sheet, is Clete Purcel, a longtime buddy of Robicheaux's and a confirmed boozer and womanizer. Clete comes to New Iberia for a visit and is quickly drawn into the struggle between the various forces of evil in the town, including Jimmy Dean Styles, a black man intent on maintaining his empire of corruption; Joe Zeroski, a trailer park mafioso with palatial aspirations - and of course, Legion Guidry, the devil incarnate, in whom Robicheaux finds himself facing a challenge and an enemy unlike any he has ever known. And soon, what began as a duel of wits has turned i |
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Road Fever
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Tim Cahill reports on the road trip to end all road trips: a journey that took him from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in a record-breaking twenty three and a half days. |
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The Postman Always Rings Twice
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An amoral young tramp. A beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband. A problem that has only one grisly solution--a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve. First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism, The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic of the roman noir. It established James M. Cain as a major novelist with an unsparing vision of America's bleak underside, and was acknowledged by Albert Camus as the model for The Stranger. |
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Double Indemnity
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Tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful, Double Indemnity gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935, this novel reaffirmed James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the roman noir. |
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Ender's Game
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Speaker for the Dead
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In the aftermath of his terrible war, Ender Wiggin disappeared, and a powerful voice arose: The Speaker for the Dead, who told the true story of the Bugger War. Now, long years later, a second alien race has been discovered, but again the aliens' ways are strange and frightening...again, humans die. And it is only the Speaker for the Dead, who is also Ender Wiggin the Xenocide, who has the courage to confront the mystery...and the truth. |
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The Panic Hand
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Through the course of his eight unforgettable novels, Jonathan Carroll has earned comparisons to writers as diverse as Herman Hesse, Stephen King, Mark Helprin, Shirley Jackson, C. S. Lewis, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and John Milton. As this volume of shorter fiction demonstrates, however, Jonathan Carroll is one of a kind. The twenty stories collected here transmit the same intense charges of intellect and emotion that characterize Carroll's longer works. Among the many pleasures are:. "Friend's Best Man" - An award-winning story about a dog that teaches its owner the real and very frightening meaning of "The Animal Kingdom;" "Black Cocktail" - A short novel about a high-school kid who never grew up - literally;. "The Sadness of Detail" - What are we to do when contacted by angels? What are we to do when one makes an offer we can't refuse?; and. "A Flash in the Pants " - Original to this volume - a story about a beautiful stranger and a house that remembers all too well its previous owners. |
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The Bad Popes
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Let yourself be swept up by this colorful, panoramic story of seven men who ruled the Church of Rome at seven critical periods in the 600 years leading up to the Reformation. During this age of grandeur and corruption, popes led armies, made love and war, conspired for power, and armed themselves with the techniques of assassination and seduction while clothed with the authority of the Church. Dramatic accounts of these papal bad boys include: Urban VI, the wild man from Naples, whose grotesque savageries widened and maintained the scandalous gap of the Great Schism; Alexander VI, who brought to the See of Peter the intrigues of the Borgia; and Clement VII, the unskillful fox, whose fall brought down Rome itself. Profusely illustrated with architectural photographs and contemporary art from both Catholic and Protestant sources, this absorbing work vividly depicts the ecclesiastical corruptions which changed the course of history. |
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The Big Sleep
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Chandler's first novel, published in 1939, introduces Philip Marlowe, a 38-year-old P.I. moving through the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s. This classic case includes as characters a paralyzed California millionaire, his two psychotic daughters, plus blackmail, murder, corrupt wealth, secret vices, family scandal, and more. "Chandler [writes] like a slumming angel and invest[s] the sun-blinded streets of Los Angelos with a romantic presence." --Ross Macdonald |
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Farewell, My Lovely
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Marlowe stumbles upon a murder in '30s L.A., taking in the city's gambling circuit and three deadly beauties en route. |
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The Long Goodbye
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Raymond Chandler's ingenious novel finds Philip Marlowe constantly on the move with a case involving a war scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife. A psychotic gangster's on his trail; he's in trouble with the cops, and an unequaled number of corpses turns up. |
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The Worst Journey in the World
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Cherry-Garrard, who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott to the Antarctic on the explorer's doomed quest for the South Pole, recounts the unforgettable journey across forbidding, inhospitable terrain. He was also a member of the search party that ultimately discovered Scott's frozen body along with his last notebook entries. With an introduction by the author, this tale of adventure stands out as a literary accomplishment as well as a classic of exploration. |
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Stories of Your Life and Others
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Ted Chiang's first published story, "Tower of Babylon," won the Nebula Award in 1990. Subsequent stories have won the Asimov's SF Magazine reader poll, a second Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Sidewise Award for alternate history. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1992. Story for story, he is the most honored young writer in modern SF. Now, collected here for the first time are all seven of this extraordinary writer's stories so far-plus an eighth story written especially for this volume. What if men built a tower from Earth to Heaven-and broke through to Heaven's other side? What if we discovered that the fundamentals of mathematics were arbitrary and inconsistent? What if there were a science of naming things that calls life into being from inanimate matter? What if exposure to an alien language forever changed our perception of time? What if all the beliefs of fundamentalist Christianity were literally true, and the sight of sinners being swallowed into fiery pits were a routine event on city streets? These are the kinds of outrageous questions posed by the stories of Ted Chiang. Stories of your life . . . and others. |
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Deal Breaker
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Sports agent Myron Bolitar is poised on the edge of the big time. So is Christian Steele, a rookie quarterback and Myron's prized client. But when Christian gets a phone call from a former girlfriend, a woman who everyone, including the police, believes is dead, the deal starts to go sour. Trying to unravel the truth about a family's tragedy, a woman's secret, and a man's lies, Myron is up against the dark side of his business--where image and talent make you rich, but the truth can get you killed. In novels that crackle with wit and suspense, Edgar Award winner Harlan Coben has created one of the most fascinating and complex heroes in suspense fiction--Myron Bolitar--a hotheaded, tenderhearted sports agent who grows more and more engaging and unpredictable with each page-turning appearance. |
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Drop Shot
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Valerie Simpson is a young female tennis star with a troubled past who's now on the verge of a comeback and wants Myron as her agent. Myron, who's also got the hottest young male tennis star, Duane Richwood, primed to take his first grand slam tournament, couldn't be happier. That is, until Valerie is murdered in broad daylight at the U.S. Open and Myron's number one client becomes the number one suspect. Clearing Duane's name should be easy enough. Duane was playing in a match at the time of Valerie's death. But why is his phone number in Valerie's black book when he claims only to have known her in passing? Why was she calling him from a phone booth on the street? The police stop caring once they pin the murder on a man known for having stalked Valerie and seen talking to her moments before the murder. But Myron isn't satisfied. It seems too clean for him. Myron pries a bit and finds himself prying open the past where six years before, Valerie's fiancee, the son of a senator, was brutally murdered by a juvenile delinquent and a straight-A student was subsequently gunned down on the street in retaliation, his death squandered in bureaucratic files. And everyone from the Senator to the mob want Myron to stop digging. The truth beneath the truth is not only dangerous, it's deadly. And Myron may be the next victim. In novels that crackle with wit and suspense, Edgar Award winner Harlan Coben has created one of the most fascinating and complex heroes in suspense fiction--Myron Bolitar--a hotheaded, tenderhearted sports agent who grows more and more engaging and unpredictable with each page-turning appearance. |
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Fade Away
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The home was top-notch New Jersey suburban. The living room was Martha Stewart. The basement was Legos--and blood. For sports agent Myron Bolitar, the disappearance of a man he'd once competed against was bringing back memories--of the sport he and Greg Downing had both played and the woman they both loved. Now, among the stars, the wanna-bes, the gamblers and groupies, Myron is unraveling the strange, violent life of a sports hero gone wrong, and coming face-to-face with a past he can't relive, and a present he may not survive. In novels that crackle with wit and suspense, Edgar Award winner Harlan Coben has created one of the most fascinating and complex heroes in suspense fiction--Myron Bolitar--a hotheaded, tenderhearted sports agent who grows more and more engaging and unpredictable with each page-turning appearance. |
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Back Spin
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Kidnappers have snatched the teenage son of super-star golfer Linda Coldren and her husband, Jack, an aging pro, at the height of the U.S. Open. To help get the boy back, sports agent Myron Bolitar goes charging after clues and suspects from the Main Line mansions to a downtown cheaters' motel--and back in time to a U.S. Open twenty-three years ago, when Jack Coldren should have won, but didn't. Suddenly Myron finds him self surrounded by blue bloods, criminals, and liars. And as one family's darkest secrets explode into murder, Myron finds out just how rough this game can get. In novels that crackle with wit and suspense, Edgar Award winner Harlan Coben has created one of the most fascinating and complex heroes in suspense fiction--Myron Bolitar--a hotheaded, tenderhearted sports agent who grows more and more engaging and unpredictable with each page-turning appearance. |
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One False Move
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Myron Bolitar is a hotheaded sports agent with a fierce wit, a taste for Yoo-Hoo, and a penchant for falling into jobs he doesn't want. In this novel Myron is asked to keep an eye on the star of the new women's basketball league who's been receiving threats on her life. Myron takes on the seemingly innocuous task, figuring he'll pick up the star as a new client. But soon her beauty and her quiet strength have him falling for her terrible story - the mother who disappeared twenty years before and the father who was recently discovered murdered - as he moves headlong into a case that prevails against his own better judgment, maybe to win her heart, maybe to save his own. The answer is at the end of a narrow trail of lies, lust, and murder, where one false move can cost both of them their lives. |
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The Final Detail
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Myron Bolitar, sports agent and reluctant sleuth, is happily basking in the sun of the Caribbean, clearing his head with a woman he hardly knows, when Win, his loyal but morally questionable sidekick, arrives to tell him that Esperanza, Myron's partner at MB SportsReps and best friend, has been arrested for the murder of Clu Haid, a fallen baseball star and Bolitar client. Myron returns to the city immediately to prove Esperanza's innocence. Myron finds himself scouring the strangest angles: a transsexual nightclub, a Yankee owner with a long-lost daughter, a dubious drug test, an impossible murder scene, and a computer disk with the image of a disintegrating girl. |
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Darkest Fear
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Edgar Award-winner Harlan Coben brings us his most astonishing -- and deeply personal -- novel yet. And it all begins when Myron Bolitar's ex tells him he's a father ... of a dying thirteen-year-old boy. Myron never saw it coming. A surprise visit from an ex-girlfriend is unsettling enough. But Emily Downing's news brings him to his knees. Her son Jeremy is dying and needs a bone-marrow transplant -- from a donor who has vanished without a trace. Then comes the real shocker: The boy is Myron's son, conceived the night before her wedding to another man. Staggered by the news, Myron plunges into a search for the missing donor. But finding him means cracking open a dark mystery that involves a broken family, a brutal kidnapping spree, and the FBI. Somewhere in the sordid mess is the donor who disappeared. And as doubts emerge about Jeremy's true paternity, a child vanishes, igniting a chain reaction of heartbreaking truth and chilling revelation. |
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The Poet
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Jack McEvoy specializes in death. As a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, he has seen every kind of murder. But his professional bravado doesn't lessen the brutal shock of learning that his only brother is dead, a suicide. Jack's brother was a homicide detective, and he had been depressed about a recent murder case, a hideously grisly one, that he'd been unable to solve. McEvoy decides that the best way to exorcise his grief is by writing a feature on police suicides. But when he begins his research, he quickly arrives at a stunning revelation. Following his leads, protecting his sources, muscling his way inside a federal investigation, Jack grabs hold of what is clearly the story of a lifetime. He also knows that in taking on the story, he's making himself the most visible target for a murderer who has eluded the greatest investigators alive. |
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Trunk Music
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Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch lands his first case: a Hollywood producer found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, shot twice in the head. It looks like "trunk music," a Mafia hit. The LAPD's organized crime unit is oddly uninterested, but Harry thinks they're wrong. He follows the money trail from the producer's office to Las Vegas, where he quickly finds evidence of Mafia involvement. But something about the case doesn't add up, and Harry follows a string of odd clues - glitter in the producer's cuffs, an over-the-counter medication in the Rolls's glovebox - in a different direction entirely. Just when Harry thinks he's on firm ground, the bottom falls out. Blindsided again and again, at odds with his superiors, and overwhelmed by a romance that has cropped up in the middle of the case, Harry is as off balance as he's ever been. |
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Blood Work
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Blood Work -- that's what Terrell McCaleb used to call his job at the FBI. Until a heart condition forced him to take early retirement, he headed all investigations of serial murders in the Los Angeles area. Now he is recovering from a heart transplant operation and leads a quiet life. But McCaleb's calm seas turn rough when a story in the L.A. Times brings him face-to-face with Graciela Rivers, a darkly intriguing woman who hooks him with the story of her sister's unsolved murder. Against doctor's orders and his own better judgement, McCaleb agrees to take up the case. Soon Terry is on the trail of a killer whose crimes are more baffling and horrifying than anything he has ever encountered. It's a mind-bending, breakneck case that leads McCaleb into the darkest place he's ever known, unsure whether he even wants to survive his own investigation. |
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Angels Flight
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At the foot of Angels Flight, an inclined railway in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, a lawyer is found murdered on the eve of a landmark trial. Howard Elias's lawsuits charging the LAPD with racism and brutality made him a celebrity - even as his success earned him the hatred of nearly every police officer in the city. When Harry Bosch is put in charge of the team investigating Elias's murder he knows that his colleagues are likely to be his chief suspects. He also knows that the city's smoldering racial tensions could ignite if he missteps. As he works night and day in the glare of a major media event, Bosch struggles with a more personally urgent mystery: trying to find out whether his wife's disappearance means she has left him for good or fallen deeper into a dangerous addiction. On streets filled with angry mobs, amid burning buildings and under fire from rooftop snipers, Bosch must find the one answer that will make sense of the case's strangely unconnected pieces - exposing himself to grave danger in the hope of saving his job, his marriage, and his city. |
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Void Moon
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The new thriller from the bestselling author of Angels Flight, Void Moon brings us Michael Connelly's most appealing hero yet a woman caught up in a scam that may cost her the one thing she holds dearer than her own life. Cassie Black is lured back to a profession she'd left behind - robbing casino gamblers of their winnings - by a setup that looks too good to pass up. Her work goes as planned, except that the mark has too much money - so much that someone very powerful must be very angry. Cassie soon finds herself running from gunmen who somehow know her every move in advance. They also seem to be closing in on Cassie's most guarded secret, the one thing that could have caused her to return to crime - and the one thing she will do anything to protect.Written with the fiery pace and brilliant plotting that have made bestsellers of Angels Flight and Blood Work, and featuring one of the strongest heroines to come along in years, Void Moon is Michael Connelly's most original and surprising novel yet./p |
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A Darkness More Than Night
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A spectacular new crime novel — the most astounding in his already remarkable career—from the New York Times bestselling star of thriller writing, Michael Connelly. |
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Lost Light
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"Only the money was real. Four years ago, LAPD detective Harry Bosch was on a movie set asking questions about the murder of a young production assistant when an armored car arrived with two million dollars cash for use in a heist scene. In a life-imitates-art firestorm, a gang of masked men converged on the delivery and robbed the armored car with guns blazing. Bosch got off a shot that struck one of the robbers as their van sped away, but the money was never recovered. And the young woman's murder was in the stack of unsolved-case files Bosch carried home the night he left the LAPD." Now Bosch moves full bore back into that case, determined to find justice for the young woman. Without a badge to open doors and strike fear into the guilty, he learns afresh how brutally indifferent the world can be. But something draws him on, past humiliation and harassment. It's not just that the dead woman had no discernible link to the robbery. Nor is it his sympathy for the cops who took over the case, one of them killed on duty and the other paralyzed by a bullet in the same attack. With every conversation and every thread of evidence, Bosch senses a larger presence, an organization bigger than the movie studios and more ruthless than even the LAPD. The part of Bosch that will never back down finds as fatal an opponent as he's ever encountered - and there's no guarantee that Bosch will survive the showdown ahead. |
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The Narrows
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Private investigator Harry Bosch confronts the most terrifying killer he's ever known--the monster known to millions as the Poet.FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she's dreaded for years. The Poet has returned. Years earlier she worked on the famous case tracking the serial killer who wove lines of poetry into his hideous crimes. Rachel has never forgotten the Poet--and apparently he has not forgotten her.Former LAPD detective Harry Bosch gets a call, too, from an old friend whose husband recently died. The death appeared natural, but this man's ties to the hunt for the Poet make Harry dig deep. What he finds leads him into the most terrifying situation he has ever encountered.Michael Connelly is the author of the bestselling series of Harry Bosch novels, including, A Darkness More than Night, City of Bones, and, most recently, Lost Light; and the bestselling novels Chasing the Dime, The Poet, Blood Work, and Void Moon. He lives in Florida. |
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The Winter King
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It takes a remarkable writer to make an old story as fresh and compelling as the first time we heard it. With The Winter King, the first volume of his magnificent Warlord Chronicles, Bernard Cornwell finally turns to the story he was born to write: the mythic saga of King Arthur. The tale begins in Dark Age Britain, a land where Arthur has been banished and Merlin has disappeared, where a child-king sits unprotected on the throne, where religion vies with magic for the souls of the people. It is to this desperate land that Arthur returns, a man at once utterly human and truly heroic: a man of honor, loyalty, and amazing valor; a man who loves Guinevere more passionately than he should; a man whose life is at once tragic and triumphant. As Arthur fights to keep a flicker of civilization alive in a barbaric world, Bernard Cornwell makes a familiar tale into a legend all over again. |
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Enemy of God
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Arthur, having defeated the last holdouts of civil war in southern Britain, has secured King Mordred's throne. But the unified kingdom seems no steadier, its balance threatened by Merlin's ceaseless - and some say futile - quest for the last of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain, by the conflict between the ancient religion and the new Christianity, and by Britain's war against the Saxons. Arthur must face other foes as well, foes more powerful and more dangerous - becuase they pose as friends. |
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Excalibur
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In The Winter King and Enemy of God Bernard Cornwell demonstrated his astonishing ability to make the oft-told legend of King Arthur fresh and new for our time. Now, in this riveting final volume of The Warlord Chronicles, Cornwell tells the unforgettable tale of Arthur's final struggles against the Saxons and his last attempts to triumph over a ruined marriage and ravaged dreams. This is the tale not only of a broken love remade, but also of forces both earthly and unearthly that threaten everything Arthur stands for. Peopled by princesses and bards, by warriors and magicians, Excalibur is the story of love, war, loyalty, and betrayal-the work of a magnificent storyteller at the height of his powers. |
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The Monkey's Raincoat
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Stalking the Angel
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Lullaby Town
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Hollywood's newest wunderkind is Peter Alan Nelson, the brilliant, erratic director known as the King of Adventure. His films make billions, but his manners make enemies. What the boy king wants, he gets, and what Nelson wants is for Elvis to comb the country for the airhead wife and infant child the film-school flunkout dumped en route to becoming the third biggest filmmaker in America. It's the kind of case Cole can handle in his sleep -- until it turns out to be a nightmare. For when Cole finds Nelson's wife in a small Conneticut town, she's nothing like what he expects. The lady has some unwanted -- and very nasty -- mob connections, which means Elvis could be opening the East Coast branch of his P.I. office . . .at the bottom of the Hudson River. |
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Free Fall
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Elvis Cole's first appearance in The Monkey's Raincoat garnered Robert Crais the prestigious Anthony and Macavity awards as well as nominations for Edgar and Shamus honors. With the next two electrifying entries in this bestselling series, Stalking the Angel and Lullaby Town, the legion of Elvis fans expanded among readers and critics alike. Now in Free Fall Elvis gets caught up in his hottest case yet, a case that tests the limits of the human heart as Elvis uncovers a world of cops gone wrong in L.A.'s most explosive neighborhood. Jennifer Sheridan has a good job, a great future, and an engagement ring from the man she loves, a member of an elite LAPD plainclothes unit operating in the war zone known as South Central Los Angeles. But her great future is suddenly in jeopardy - and it's her cop fiance who's the problem. Jennifer is certain that Mark Thurman is in some kind of trouble, and she wants Elvis Cole to find out what it is. Elvis never could say no to a woman in love, so he takes on the case only to find that some jobs are easier than others: Before Elvis even has a chance to leave his office, Thurman himself drops by to discourage Elvis from proceeding with the investigation. Jennifer's suspicion that he's in trouble is off track, he says; there's no trouble, there's just another woman - it may not be pretty, but it's not criminal, either. Elvis's investigation seems to bear out Thurman's claim. Then he discovers the very thorough, nearly undetectable search someone has made of his office. Someone with a lot of practice at careful inspections. Someone like a cop. Suddenly the case turns deadly as Elvis and his enigmatic partner Joe Pike plummet into a world of racist cops, South Central street gangs, and conspiracies of silence. But Jennifer Sheridan won't give up on her man so easily, and the case kicks over into white-hot overdrive as Elvis and Joe find themselves framed for a crime they didn't commit, and L.A.'s deadliest street gang targets Mark a |
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Voodoo River
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Robert Crais has established Elvis Cole, his wisecracking private eye with a tough exterior but a soft heart, in the consciousness of mystery readers and reviewers everywhere. In Voodoo River, Elvis Cole returns in his most exciting adventure yet. Hired to uncover the past of Jodi Taylor, an actress in a hit television series, Elvis leaves his native Los Angeles to journey to deepest Louisiana to search for Jodi's biological parents. Soon he discovers the real reason he's been sent there - but not before run-ins with an amazing cast of characters, including a crazed, Raid-spraying housewife; a Cajun thug who looks like he's been built out of spare parts; and a menacing, hundred-year-old river turtle named Luther. |
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Sunset Express
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Elvis Cole is back on his own turf in Los Angeles, and embroiled in a controversial high-profile murder case. A wealthy restaurateur is accused of murdering his wife, and his hot-shot defense attorney hires Elvis to find proof that police detective Angela Rossi fooled around with the evidence. Rossi had been cleared of an earlier charge of planting evidence to convict a counterfeiter, but her career was damaged and she's rumored to be willing to do anything to get it back on track - even if it means framing an innocent man. Yet as Elvis investigates Rossi for the defense team, he begins to be more suspicious of the media-loving lawyers than the cops. As the investigation continues, Elvis is visited by Lucy Chenier, the Louisiana lawyer he'd met several months ago. Lucy is in Los Angeles for a business trip, and as she and Elvis spend more time together, their mutual attraction grows. As the fireworks ignite, Elvis and Lucy are drawn deeper into the intrigue and dangers surrounding the case of the missing woman. |
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Indigo Slam
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When fifteen-year-old Teri Hewitt pleads with Elvis to find the father who abandoned her and her two younger siblings, his first reaction is to turn the case over to the California department of social services. But when he sees that Teri has the lives and care of her little family well in hand, he decides to take the job, asking Joe Pike to help him keep an eye on the kids. The missing dad, Clark Hewitt, is an unemployed printer whose personal history is hard to pin down; as Elvis investigates, the image of Hewitt that emerges indicates a chronically unemployed drug addict who slums through the criminal world, not a bona fide printer but a master counterfeiter. The clues soon send Elvis to Hewitt's home town, Seattle, where Elvis runs afoul of both the newly emerging Russian Mafia and U.S. Federal Marshals as he discovers more about the elusive deadbeat dad. In the meantime, Lucy Chenier comes to L.A. to interview for a television job she wants badly. This will mean her moving to Elvis's town, and will cement the seriousness of their relationship. But things get complicated when her ex-husband shows up at Elvis's office, claiming that Lucy still loves him and that he won't permit her to leave Louisiana. Just as Joe Pike has just about had it with babysitting, the bad guys converge in a breathtaking chase at Disneyland, and the novel comes to its unbearably suspenseful climax. With characteristic hilarity and wit, Robert Crais makes Indigo Slam his most compelling book yet. |
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L.A. Requiem
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Los Angeles is a city of perpetual reinvention. Inviting, with a promise of infinite hope, it can also be a glittering landscape of debilitating isolation. The city's lost souls take comfort in its promise-the notion that tomorrow could be the day to start all over again, to transform oneself into someone else. Someone more powerful, more beautiful, more daring. /p |
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Demolition Angel
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TERRIFIC . . . EXPLOSIVE . . . [A] HIGH POWERED THRILL RIDE. -The Wall Street Journal CRAIS IS AT THE TOP OF HIS GAME, and Demolition Angel delivers the goods. With a bang. . . . It's Silence of the Lambs meets Speed as down-on-her-luck former bomb-squad ace Carol Starkey plays cat-and-mouse with a serial bomber. . . . Crais knows how to press all the right buttons in keeping the story line taut and the action, well, explosive.” -San Francisco Chronicle “GRIPPING . . . CRAIS PILES ON PLOT TWISTS . . . gathering the separate threads at the end and igniting them like a string of fireworks.” -People “A POWERFUL, SELF-CONTAINED NOVEL OF SUSPENSE that has the compactness, velocity, and effectiveness of a well-aimed bullet . . . This is a thriller that works on every level, a pivotal work from a crime novelist operating at the top of his game.” -Los Angeles Times “FASCINATING AND FRIGHTENINGLY BELIEVABLE . . . Starkey is one of the toughest characters to grace the crowded field of thriller books in a long time.” -USA Today |
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The Last Detective
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"Elvis Cole's relationship with attorney Lucy Chenier is strained. When she moved from Louisiana to join Elvis in Los Angeles, she never dreamed that violence would so easily touch her life. But then the unthinkable happens. While Lucy is away on business and her ten-year-old son, Ben, is staying with Elvis, Ben disappears without a trace. Desperate to believe that the boy has run away, Elvis soon receives a phone call that suggests a much darker scenario." "Joining forces with his enigmatic partner, Joe Pike, Elvis frantically searches for Ben with the help of LAPD Detective Carol Starkey, even as Lucy's wealthy, oil-industry ex-husband attempts to wrest away control of the investigation. Amid the maelstrom of personal conflicts, Elvis and Joe are forced to consider a troubling and recurring possibility - that Ben's disappearance is not random, but is connected to a terrible long-held secret from Elvis Cole's past." Venturing deep inside a complex psyche, Robert Crais explores Elvis's search for family - the military that embraced him as a troubled adolescent, his rock-solid partnership with Pike, and his floundering relationship with Lucy - as he races the clock in his search for Ben. |
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The Forgotten Man
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Six months after nearly losing everything to the men who kidnapped his girlfriend's son, Elvis Cole is slowly rebuilding his life - when he receives an ominous call from the LAPD. An unidentified body has been found at a seedy Los Angeles motel and Elvis is needed urgently at the scene. When he arrives to identify the dead man, cops scrutinize Cole's reaction, but Elvis is unable to help - he has never seen the man before. Finally, Elvis is told that the subject was still alive when the first officer responded. Before he died, the old man claimed that Elvis Cole was his son. Cole turns to the one person who can help him navigate the minefield of his past - his longtime partner and confidant, Joe Pike. As the two men launch a feverish search for the dead man's identity, Elvis struggles between wanting to believe he's found his father at last - and allowing suspicions to hold him back. With each clue they uncover, a frightening picture begins to emerge about who Elvis Cole's father might have been, and the terrible crimes he might have committed. Drawing ever-closer to a deeply buried and violent secret, Cole and Pike are unaware that they've also awakened a sleeping monster - a merciless killer who has meticulously prepared for the day he would be found, setting an intricate ambush that is guaranteed to destroy anyone who comes looking. As Elvis and Joe approach the true identity of the dead man they follow a treacherous path lines with anguish and deception, straight into Elvis' worst nightmare. |
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The Last Good Kiss
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An unforgettable detective story starring C.W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. |
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Blackburn
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Blackburn is a serial killer. But, like the rest of us, he confronts the same hypocrisies and frustrations of the world and, unable to help himself, or at the mercy of circumstance, he crosses a dangerous threshold--and he kills. In this novel, we meet many of his twenty-one victims: law enforcers, writers, adulterers, auto mechanics, and other liars. And each crime reveals another side of his psyche . . . and his disturbing rationale for murder. |
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Ribofunk
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Following the shock wave of cyberpunk writing in the late 1980s, Paul Di Filippo's first book, The Steampunk Trilogy, burst on the scene in 1995, leading SF veteran William Gibson to declare the young writer's work "spooky, haunting, hilarious." Cyberpunk concentrated on cold hardware. Di Filippo coined "ribofunk" by fusing "ribosome" (as in cellular biology) with "funk" (as in rock and roll). In the world of Ribofunk, biology is a cutting-edge science, where the Protein Police patrol for renegade gene splicers and part-human sea creatures live in Lake Superior, dealing with toxic spills. Ribofunk depicts a sentient river; a sultry bodyguard who happens to be part wolverine; a reluctant thrill seeker who climbs a skyscraper - and finds himself stuck; and a chain-smoking Peter Rabbit who leads his fellows in a bloody rebellion against - whom else? - Mr. McGregor. |
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Fractal Paisleys
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Ten funky science fiction stories by the widely acclaimed author of Steampunk and Ribofunk. Irreverent, funny and sexy - samples of what Di Filippo calls "trailer park science fiction" - Fractal Paisleys explains the real reason for the disappearance of the dinosaurs, how John Lennon found inspiration, how the L'il Bear Bar in Providence, R.I., ended up with a talking moose head on its wall, why Republicans ruled the U.S. for an unbroken twelve years and many more secrets of life. The stories are united by Di Filippo's fascination with the infinite variety of alternate worlds: "what-if" scenarios that place an ordinary Joe or Jane in command of the forces that power the universe. Invariably, the results are ... unexpected, to say the least. Fractal Paisleys includes two never-before-published tales: the other stories were published in such science fiction standbys as Amazing Stories, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Interzone. |
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Lost Pages
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When Paul Di Filippo unleashes his imagination, watch out. The result is sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious, always unpredictable. In Lost Pages, Di Filippo has deliberately selected as protagonists for his nine alternate world stories men and women who in our world became known for their work as writers -- people of strong character who, whatever their situation, would have proved extraordinary. He envisions "Frank" Kafka as the scourge of Gotham's mean streets -- by day, the mild-mannered advice columnist behind "Ask Josephine," by night, "the Jackdaw," a superhero who terrifies evildoers. Anne Frank, having escaped by a matter of days the German invasion of Holland, becomes the Hollywood stand-in for Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and later the drug-addled ex-wife of Michey Rooney. Little Prince author Antoine de St.-Exupery -- "Tonio de Saint-Ex" to his many admirers -- is as dashing in Di Filippo's world as he was in ours. He appears as the pilot who can save the remnants of Western civilization in the aftermath of a devastating plague, and along the way has a passionate affair with Beryl Markham. Henry Miller: messenger for Western Union. Philip K. Dick: hardware store salesman and husband of a chronically depressed, alcoholic (and unrecognized) Linda Ronstadt. |
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Time Out of Joint
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Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke. |
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The Man in the High Castle
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It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. the few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war--and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to awake. |
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Martian Time-Slip
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On the arid colony of Mars the only thing more precious than water may be a ten-year-old schizophrenic boy named Manfred Steiner. For although the UN has slated "anomalous" children for deportation and destruction, other people--especially Supreme Goodmember Arnie Kott of the Water Worker's union--suspect that Manfred's disorder may be a window into the future. In Martian Time-Slip Philip K. Dick uses power politics and extraterrestrial real estate scams, adultery, and murder to penetrate the mysteries of being and time. |
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Clans of the Alphane Moon
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Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke. |
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
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In this wildly disorienting funhouse of a novel, populated by God-like--or perhaps Satanic--takeover artists and corporate psychics, Philip K. Dick explores mysteries that were once the property of St. Paul and Aquinas. His wit, compassion, and knife-edged irony make The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch moving as well as genuinely visionary. |
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Now Wait for Last Year
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Dr. Eric Sweetscent has problems. His planet is enmeshed in an unwinnable war. His wife is lethally addicted to a drug that whips its users helplessly back and forth across time -- and is hell-bent on making Eric suffer along with her. And Sweetscent's newest patient is not only the most important man on the embattled planet Earth but quite possibly the sickest. For Secretary Gino Molinari has turned his mortal illness into an instrument of political policy -- and Eric cannot tell if his job is to make the Male better or to keep him poised just this side of death.Now Wait for Last fear bursts through the envelope between the impossible and the inevitable. Even as ushers us into a future that looks uncannily like the present, it makes the normal seem terrifyingly provisional -- and compels anyone who reads it to wonder if he really knows what time it is. |
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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"The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world." --John Brunner THE INSPIRATION FOR BLADERUNNER. . . Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Grim and foreboding, even today it is a masterpiece ahead of its time. By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . . They even built humans. Emigrees to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results. "[Dick] sees all the sparkling and terrifying possibilities. . . that other authors shy away from." --Paul Williams Rolling Stone |
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Ubik
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Philip K. Dick's searing metaphysical comedy of death and salvation is a tour de force of panoramic menace and unfettered slapstick, in which the departed give business advice, shop for their next incarnation, and run the continual risk of dying yet again. |
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Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
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On October 11 the television star Jason Taverner is so famous that 30 million viewers eagerly watch his prime-time show. On October 12 Jason Taverner is not a has-been but a never-was -- a man who has lost not only his audience but all proof of his existence. And in the claustrophobic betrayal state of Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, loss of proof is synonyms with loss of life.Taverner races to solve the riddle of his disappearance", immerses us in a horribly plausible Philip K. Dick United States in which everyone -- from a waiflike forger of identity cards to a surgically altered pleasure -- informs on everyone else, a world in which omniscient police have something to hide. His bleakly beautiful novel bores into the deepest bedrock self and plants a stick of dynamite at its center. |
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Confessions of a Crap Artist
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A Scanner Darkly
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Bob Arctor is a dealer of the lethally addictive drug Substance D. Fred is the police agent assigned to tail and eventually bust him. To do so, Fred takes on the identity of a drug dealer named Bob Arctor. And since Substance D--which Arctor takes in massive doses--gradually splits the user's brain into two distinct, combative entities, Fred doesn't realize he is narcing on himself. Caustically funny, eerily accurate in its depiction of junkies, scam artists, and the walking brain-dead, Philip K. Dick's industrial-grade stress test of identity is as unnerving as it is enthralling. |
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Valis
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The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
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The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, the final novel in the trilogy that also includes Valis and The Divine Invasion, is an anguished, learned, and very moving investigation of the paradoxes of belief. It is the story of Timothy Archer, an urbane Episcopal bishop haunted by the suicides of his son and mistress--and driven by them into a bizarre quest for the identity of Christ. |
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Radio Free Albemuth
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In Radio Free Albemuth, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest science fiction writer. |
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We Can Build You
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The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (with Sutin, Lawrence)
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Philip K. Dick has established himself as a major figure in American literature. The landscape of his imagination features a wealth of concepts and fictional worlds: Nazi-rule in a postwar nightmare; androids and the unification of man and machine; and an existence that no longer follows the logic of reality. His vision has shaped the way we perceive the past and present and how we look to the future. This first-time collection assembles his nonfiction writings (the bulk of which either have never before been published or have appeared only in obscure and out-of-print publications) - essays, journals, speeches, and interviews. In these writings he explores issues ranging from the merging of physics and metaphysics to the potential influences of "virtual" reality and its consequences to a plot-scenario for a potential episode of "Mission: Impossible," to the challenge that fundamental "human" values face in the age of technology and spiritual decline. This collection is at once penetrating and entertaining. It is sure to reconfirm Philip K. Dick not only as an important science-fiction writer but also as an explorative thinker. |
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Dr. Bloodmoney
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Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952, he began writing professionally and proceeded to write numerous novels and short-story collections. He won the Hugo Award for the best novel in 1962 for The Man in the High Castle and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Philip K. Dick died on March 2, 1982, in Santa Ana, California, of heart failure following a stroke. |
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Camp Concentration
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Modern Classics of Science Fiction
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Geek Love
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Geek Love is the story of the Binewskis, a carny family whose mater- and paterfamilias set out-with the help of amphetamine, arsenic, and radioisotopes-to breed their own exhibit of human oddities. There's Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs and a megalomaniac ambition worthy of Genghis Khan . . . Iphy and Elly, the lissome Siamese twins . . . albino hunchback Oly, and the outwardly normal Chick, whose mysterious gifts make him the family's most precious-and dangerous-asset. As the Binewskis take their act across the backwaters of the U.S., inspiring fanatical devotion and murderous revulsion; as its members conduct their own Machiavellian version of sibling rivalry, Geek Love throws its sulfurous light on our notions of the freakish and the normal, the beautiful and the ugly, the holy and the obscene. Family values will never be the same.About the Author: Katherine Dunn lives in Oregon. |
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Booked to Die
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Denver homicide detective Cliff Janeway may not always play by the book, but he's an avid collector of rare and first editions. After a local bookscout is killed on his turf, Janeway would like nothing better than to rearrange the suspect's spine. But the suspect, sleazeball Jackie Newton, is a master at eluding murder convictions. Unfortunately for Janeway, his swift form of off-duty justice costs him his badge. Turning to his lifelong passion, Janeway opens a bookshop -- all the while searching for evidence to put Newton away. But when prized volumes in a highly sought-after collection begin to appear, so do dead bodies. Now Janeway's life is about to change in profound and shocking ways as he attempts to find out who's dealing death along with vintage Chandlers and Twains. |
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The Bookman's Wake
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The story starts and ends, aptly with a book, a very special book: a 1969 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, published by the tiny, prestigious Grayson Press, of Northbend, Washington. No bibliography mentions the 1969 edition. If it indeed exists, it could be worth a fortune to the right collector. It's the kind of book somebody might kill for. In fact, somebody probably already has. Ex-Denver cop Cliff Janeway is happily at work selling rare and used books when one day a former police colleague, Clydell Slater, arrives with an offer. Janeway never did much care for Slater, and he doesn't like him any better now, but Slater's proposal is intriguing. Slater runs a detective agency, and he wants Janeway to go to Seattle to pick up a young woman fugitive and deliver her to her bail bondsman and a district court in Taos, New Mexico. The woman is wanted for burglary and assault. She may also have stolen a copy of the 1969 Grayson Press Raven when she ransacked a Taos house. The rare-book angle gets to Janeway every time. He could say no to a five thousand-dollar fee, even though the money could buy him some special books, but he couldn't turn down a chance to find a hitherto unknown copy of The Raven. Janeway flies to Seattle, finds his "skip," discovers she shares his love of books, takes her on a scouting expedition through some of the city's best rare-book haunts, then loses her on the way to the airport. She's young and frightened, alone on the streets of a big city with some very nasty men after her. Janeway signed onto the case because of a book, but he stays because of a vulnerable young woman whose heart belongs to books, but whose eyes are filled with pain. He will discover not only her story, but the poignant tale of a once-great small press, where paper and ink became books in the hands of a master craftsman. |
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Project Orion
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In 1957, a small group of scientists, supported by the U.S. government, launched a serious attempt to build a four-thousand-ton spaceship propelled by nuclear bombs. The initial plan called for missions to Mars by 1965 and to Saturn by 1970. After seven years of work, the project's technical challenges seemed surmountable, but political obstacles brought the effort to a halt. The Orion team, led by the American bomb-designer Theodore B. Taylor, included the physicist Freeman Dyson, whose son George was five years old when the existence of the project was first announced. In Project Orion, George Dyson has synthesized hundreds of hours of interviews and thousands of pages of newly excavated documents, still only partially declassified, to piece together a history of scientific dreams unrealized. Undoubtedly, the mission to build Orion -- vividly re-created by Dyson -- remains one of the most tantalizing "what if?" stories of the twentieth century. |
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When Gravity Fails
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Axiomatic
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Our Lady of Chernobyl
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Quarantine
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It causes riots and religions. It has people dancing in the streets and leaping off skyscrapers. And it's all because of the impenetrable gray shield that slid into place around the solar system on the night of November 15, 2034.Some see the bubble as the revenge of an insane God. Some see it as justice. Some even see it as protection. But one thing is for certain -- now there is the universe, and the earth. And never the twain shall meet.Or so it seems. Until a bio-enhanced PI named Nick Stavrianos takes on a job for an anonymous client: find a girl named Laura who disappeared from a mental institution by the most direct possible method -- walking through the walls. |
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Diaspora
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Behold the Orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knotting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software. Others opted for gleisners: disposable, renewable robotic bodies that remain in contact with the physical world of force and friction. Many of these have left the Solar System forever in fusion drive starships. And there are the holdouts. The fleshers left behind in the muck and jungle of Earth - some devolved into dream-apes; others cavorting in the seas or the air; while the statics and bridgers try to shape out a roughly human destiny. But the complacency of the citizens is shattered when an unforeseen disaster ravages the fleshers, and reveals the possibility that the polises themselves might be at risk from bizarre astrophysical processes that seem to violate fundamental laws of nature. The Orphan joins a group of citizens and flesher refugees in a search for the knowledge that will guarantee their safety... |
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Luminous
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The Essential Ellison
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