Both sought to redefine themselves beneath the stars. By the time they made it to the snowy Cascade Range of British Columbia—the trail’s end—Aspen and Justin were in love.Embarking on a new pilgrimage the next summer, they returned to those same mossy mountains where they’d met, and they married. They built a world together, three years of a happy marriage. Until a cold November morning, when, after kissing Aspen goodbye, Justin left to attend the funeral of a close friend.He never came back. As days became weeks, her husband’s inexplicable absence left Aspen unmoored. Shock, grief, fear, and anger battled for control—but nothing prepared her for the disarming truth. A revelation that would lead Aspen to reassess not only her own life but that of the disappeared as well.The result is a brave and inspiring memoir of secrets kept and unearthed, of a vanishing that became a gift: a woman’s empowering reclamation of unmitigated purpose in the surreal wake of mystifying loss.

    In these, "the sort of stories you might tell in front of a fire", Calvin Trillin brings together twelve funny, troubling, moving and always revealing narratives--extended pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker over the past seven years.

      You don’t have to break the rules if you make the rules. Case in point: Jack Reacher, the two-fisted, quick-witted, “current poster-boy of American crime fiction” (Los Angeles Times). The brainchild of #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child, Reacher is a freelance troubleshooter with a mysterious past—and a serious passion for justice.  Now the hard-won knowledge and hard-hitting strategies of fiction’s toughest tough guy are within every thriller reader’s reach—in a rapid-fire rundown of the trade secrets, tried-and-true tricks, and time-honored tactics that separate the man in the street from the man to beat.  Rule 1. When in doubt, drink coffee.Rule 2. Never volunteer for anything.Rule 3. Don’t break the furniture.Rule 4. Only one woman at a time.Rule 5. Show them what they’re messing with.Please note: Jack Reacher’s Rules is a compilation of advice, wisdom, and facts from the Jack Reacher series of novels by #1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child. It features an introduction by Lee Child, but is not a Jack Reacher novel.

    Even back then, she was a mystery that I wanted to solve. The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on Smithson High School, first during Rosalind's student years and then again when she returned to teach drama. As much as Rosalind's life was a mystery to Gemma when they were students together, her death presents even more of a puzzle. What made Rosalind quit her teaching job in Sydney and return to her hometown? Why did she live in a small, run-down apartment when her father was one of the town's richest men? And despite her many admirers, did anyone in the town truly know her? Rosalind's enigmas frustrate and obsess Gemma, who has her own dangerous secrets--an affair with her colleague and past tragedies that may not stay in the past. Brilliantly rendered, THE DARK LAKE has characters as compelling and mysteries as layered as the best thrillers from Gillian Flynn and Sophie Hannah.

    Two novels of suspense and faith by bestselling author Terri Blackstone.

    He’s a man of the Law—the letter of the Law—and he’sa man of his word. But he’s at a breaking point, ready to quit the force. Hisfather’s murder is ten-years cold, his young wife’s premature death haunts him,and tribal police in Oklahoma are being prevented from ensuring the Peoplereceive justice. A mix of tribal and non-tribal lands has created a checkerboardlaw enforcement community—federal, state, municipal and Indian—a land thatlawbreakers jokingly refer to as lawless. Indian women are the ones paying thehighest price. One in three can expect to be raped in her lifetime, and tribalpolice cannot arrest the assailant if he is not Indian. And then, Chitto isassigned to work undercover on a mystifying case. In pre-dawn light, a sacredChoctaw ceremonial ground is transformed into an execution site. The naked,beheaded corpse is the husband of a Chickasaw woman and stepfather to her youngdaughter. Except for the victim’s driver’s license, no evidence is left behind—with one exception: his freshly laundered clothes retain the odor of fabricsoftener. A series of seemingly unrelated incidents come together to help Chittosolve the case, but he is forced to make a decision that could not onlychallenge his personal code of ethics but also cost a man his life.

    On assignment in West Africa in a post-9/11 world, he is tasked with hunting down the terrorist Omar al-Suqqit, who is looking to launch his group of ragtag militants onto the international jihadi stage. But chasing a terrorist proves an easier challenge than managing his agency’s bureaucracy. Omar, meanwhile, faces his own bureaucratic struggles as he joins forces with a global terrorist group that begins micro-managing its franchises in an effort to streamline attacks. When Victor appears on his own country’s Terrorist Watch List and Omar finds himself struggling to write “Lessons Learned” in the suicide bomber program, they each realize they might have a common enemy: red tape.

    Forty New York Times #1 Bestsellers. One lousy band. Now go behind the scenes to hear their stories firsthand.In 1992, a cadre of the world’s bestselling authors formed a rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. For two decades the band played proudly (and some would say, terribly) to sold out crowds across the country. Now they’re hanging up their guitar picks, drumsticks and leather whips, but not without a look back at twenty years of friendship, love, writing, and the redemptive power of rock ’n’ roll.Hard Listening is a voyeuristic view into the private lives of your favorite authors, combining essays, fiction, musings, candid email exchanges and conversations, compromising photographs, audio and video clips, and interactive quizzes for a groundbreaking ebook experience. See Stephen King, Scott Turow, Amy Tan, Dave and Sam Barry, Roy Blount Jr., Mitch Albom, James McBride, Ridley Pearson, Matt Groening, Greg Iles, and rock legend Roger McGuinn at their most unguarded.

    Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece "Slaughterhouse-Five;" wry dispatches from Vonnegut's years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Gunter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Vonnegut's unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels--from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing "atomic" bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. ("Knopf, for example, might give John Updike's contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion's contract in return.") Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon. - On a job he had as a young man: "Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors."- To a relative who calls him a "great literary figure" "I am an American fad--of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop."- To his daughter Nanny: "Most letters from a parent contain a parent's own lost dreams disguised as good advice."- To Norman Mailer: "I am cuter than you are." Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote.

    . . DEAD After a tough breakup with her boyfriend, Lucy Kincaid needs a different kind of break. So she heads west to join her brother, an ex-cop, for a long weekend of skiing in the mountains. At a picturesque lodge tucked high in the Sierra Nevada, Lucy finds just what she’s looking for: a peaceful retreat undisturbed by Internet, television, and cell phone distractions. She also finds an unexpected group of newlyweds seeking their own idyllic getaway.But finding one of her fellow guests dead wasn’t in the brochure. And neither was the overnight snowstorm that leaves the lodge cut off from the outside world. When Lucy’s brother suspects the honeymooner’s death was foul play, he’s mysteriously stricken ill. Now, to keep him and herself alive, it’s up to aspiring FBI agent Lucy Kincaid to figure out which of the lovebirds trapped in the lodge is really a bird of prey.BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Allison Brennan’s upcoming novel Kiss Me, Kill Me as well as an exclusive excerpt from an FBI interview with Lucy Kincaid!

    On the Lower East Side, two boys playing at a pier discover a floating human torso wrapped tightly in oilcloth. Blueberry pickers near Harlem stumble upon neatly severed limbs in an overgrown ditch. Clues to a horrifying crime are turning up all over New York, but the police are baffled: There are no witnesses, no motives, no suspects.The grisly finds that began on the afternoon of June 26, 1897, plunged detectives headlong into the era's most baffling murder mystery. Seized upon by battling media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the case became a publicity circus. Reenactments of the murder were staged in Times Square, armed reporters lurked in the streets of Hell's Kitchen in pursuit of suspects, and an unlikely trio — a hard-luck cop, a cub reporter, and an eccentric professor — all raced to solve the crime.What emerged was a sensational love triangle and an even more sensational trial: an unprecedented capital case hinging on circumstantial evidence around a victim whom the police couldn't identify with certainty, and who the defense claimed wasn't even dead. The Murder of the Century is a rollicking tale — a rich evocation of America during the Gilded Age and a colorful re-creation of the tabloid wars that have dominated media to this day.

    The job is simple, to kill a man and get out of town immediately. Why would he stay? He hates Christmas, and hanging around after the crime could be dangerous, but a stranger's compassion forces him to question everything he's always believed, tempting him to stay just another day longer... First published in the Christmas edition of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine (Jan, 2004), this story was subsequently reviewed in Mystery Scene, which described it as "bordering on the magnificent". (Please note - this is a short story of approximately 45 Kindle pages.)

    They have wondered what caused his pain and suffering. What was his motivation?Instead of basking in the glow of the spotlight, Kane has shunned attention. Kane did not utter a single word for the first years of his career. In a time when Superstars scream for attention, he drew in the masses with onlyhis presence."Journey Into Darkness" is the story of a boy who suffers an unspeakable childhood tragedy, losing his family in a fiery blaze. This left him aloneand at the mercy of strangers, who whispered about this friendless child who must be cursed.Follow Kane into a terrifying place that few would dare to go -- his life.

    Tales of their grisly conquests have kept us cowering under the covers, but still turning the pages.Psychos is the first book to collect in a single volume the scariest and most well-crafted fictional works about these deranged killers. Some of the stories are classics, the best that the genre has to offer, by renowned writers such as Neil Gaiman, Jack Ketchum, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Bloch, and Thomas Harris. Other selections are from the latest and most promising crop of new authors.John Skipp, who is also the editor of Zombies, Demons and Werewolves and Shapeshifters, provides fascinating insight, through two nonfiction essays, into our insatiable obsession with serial killers and how these madmen are portrayed in popular culture. Resources at the end of the book includes lists of the genre's best long-form fiction, movies, websites, and writers.

    These interviews are compiled in Scout, Atticus, and Boo, the perfect companion to one of the most important American books of the 20th Century. Scout, Atticus, and Boo will also feature a foreword from acclaimed writer Wally Lamb.