Here, upon this bloodstained stage,  a faceless killer performs his violent specialty:  The first to die brutally is a fifteen-year-old  girl. She is drained of blood, then carefully bathed  and shrouded in white. Precisely one week later, a  second victim is found. From the sacred  Wailing Wall to the monasteries where dark secrets  are cloistered, from black-clad bedouin enclaves  to labyrinthine midnight alleys, veteran police  inspector Daniel Sharavi and his crack team plunge  deep into a city simmering with religious and  political passions to hunt for a murderer whos  insatiable taste for young women could destroy the  delicate balance on which Jerusalem's very survival  depends. A brilliant novel by a master of  the genre, a vivid look at the tortured  complexities of a psychopath's mind, a rich evocation of a  city steeped in history -- this, and more, is  The Butcher's Theater.

    His life story has even been sold to Hollywood. But now he stands accused of defacing a historic monument in China’s Forbidden City. Under house arrest in Peking with a case against him pending in Washington, this looks like the end of Mac’s illustrious career. But he has a plan of his own: kidnap the Pope.What’s the ransom? Just one American dollar—for every Catholic in the world. Add to the mix a slew of shady “investors,” Mac’s four persuasive, well-endowed ex-wives, and a young lawyer and fellow soldier who wants nothing more than to return to private life, and readers have in their hands one relentlessly irreverent page-turner.Originally published under the pseudonym Michael Shepard.“Don’t ever begin a [Robert] Ludlum novel if you have to go to work the next day.”—Chicago Sun-Times“Ludlum stuffs more surprises into his novels than any other six-pack of thriller writers combined.”—The New York Times

    However, the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witch doctors.

    Throw in a gig as a phone sex operator, an unexpected hunk of a boyfriend, and a client's murder, and you have all the ingredients for the perfect chick lit romp. Even bloggers at Trashionista just had to read it: "A fabulous book.” Shy, funny, loveable Emily’s a pretty unlikely candidate for a phone sex operator. She’d die if she had to talk dirty face-to-face—especially to her hot cop boyfriend. She sure didn’t set out to do phone sex—she wanted to be a writer. But when her BFF framed her for plagiarism, she got in a tiny financial hole and saw this ad for “phone actresses”… Hey, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. No pantyhose or pantsuits, no regular hours, you’re your own boss, and lots of people to talk to. Guys, that is. But here’s the odd thing—lots of them want to talk about more than Emily’s imagined attributes; they start to think of her as the best friend they’ll never have to meet. Next thing you know, one of her customers gets killed. What’s a phone kitten to do? Solve the murder herself, of course! “Phone Kitten was a fun debut read with an interesting premise and some great characters – excellent chick lit.” -The Brazen Bookworm “Marika Christian's debut novel was one of the most fun reads I have had this year. Sweet Emily taking a job as a 'phone actress' has to be one of the funniest things ever.” -Just Jump A fun, refreshing treat for fans of Jennifer Crusie, Janet Evanovich, and Stephanie Bond, Phone Kitten is your ticket to hours of giggles—so long as you’re not looking for raunch. Because this is so not it! “When I first heard of this book I was intrigued; a phone-sex worker turned sleuth? Sounds like the perfect mix...a fabulous book. --Trashionista Excerpt: The girl who answered the phone sounded a lot like me. She was perky, upbeat, and wanted me to come in that night for an interview. The thought terrified me, but my only other option was Walmart. I heard Walmart locks employees in the store. I've often wondered what would happen if one of the employees were pregnant and went into labor while locked up. Would they let her out? Would her supervisor deliver the baby in housewares and slap a little smiley face sticker on the baby's bottom? Phone sex had to be better than twenty-four hour retail. The company name was Dimensions. Located in the back of an industrial park, it was a little scary. There was a gravel parking lot with a dozen cars and only one door with a camera to capture anyone who pressed the call button. I was buzzed in immediately. I wondered, Why does a phone sex place need this much security? I was met by Taylor, the bubbly girl I talked to on the phone. “Come on, I'll take you in the back and we can talk.” She wasn't what I pictured. Taylor was a tattooed Goth chick, with every piercing imaginable. Taylor isn't what most people envisioned when it came to “bubbly.” Once we were in her office, she quickly closed the door. “Look, we talk dirty here. The language is sexually explicit. You have to say it all. Tits, cock, and fuck. Can you do that?” “Yes.” There, I said it. I said I could do it. I hoped I really could. She whipped out a headset, plugged it in, and said, “I want you to listen to a call.

    Tracy Whitney is young, beautiful and intelligent - and about to marry into wealth and glamour. Until, suddenly, she is betrayed, framed by a ruthless Mafia gang, abandoned by the man she loves. Only her ingenuity saves her and helps her fight back.

    But times have changed. The world has changed. And now the Chocolate Mountains are the home of the largest military artillery range in the world.Harry’s living on disability and getting liquored up and beaten down. Frank’s a feisty old-timer battling cancer and a domineering daughter. And Ricky’s a good kid in a bad spot, doing everything for family. Together they’re staking what little they have left on a dangerous quest to the Big Maria Mine—and the gold that can offer them a new beginning.Unfortunately a meth-dealing biker wants a piece, a trigger-happy AWOL soldier wants to play chicken in a live minefield, two stubborn burros want to go home, a starving mountain lion wants his dinner, and the US Army wants to rain on our heroes’ parade with real bombs.When you’re all out of crazy ideas, you’ve got to try the stupid ones.Imagine Chuck Palahniuk and Don Winslow’s love child – and that would be ribald author Johnny Shaw. His novel Big Maria is a unfiltered, wild romp in which three men get one chance to find a lost gold mine; the only problem is the Big Maria Mine is right in the middle of a US Army artillery range.

    Number one New York Times bestselling author, Janet Evanovich, is moving into the fast lane with Metro Girl, a thrilling, high-octane misadventure with high stakes, hot nights, cold-blooded murder, sunken treasure, a woman with a chassis built for speed, and one very good, very sexy NASCAR driver who’s along for the ride."Wild" Bill Barnaby's dropped off the face of the earth and big sister Alex heads for Miami, Bill's last known sighting, on a harrowing hunt to save her brother ... and maybe the world. Truth is, Alex has been bailing her brother out of trouble since they were kids. Not that Bill's a bad sort. More that he acts first and thinks later. Unfortunately, this time around, Wild Bill will be Dead Bill if Alex doesn't find him in time.Alex blasts through the bars of South Beach and points her search to Key West and Cuba, laying waste to Miami hit men, dodging Palmetto bugs big enough to eat her alive, and putting the pedal to the metal with NASCAR driver Sam Hooker.Engaged in a deadly race, Wild Bill's "borrowed" Hooker's sixty-five foot Hatteras and sailed off into the sunset ... just when Hooker has plans for the boat. Hooker figures he'll attach himself to Alex and maybe run into Bill. Maybe Hooker can salvage what's left of his vacation. And maybe Hooker'll get lucky in love with Bill's sweetie pie sister. After all, Hooker is NASCAR Guy. And NASCAR Guy is good at revving a woman’s engine.The race to the finish is hot and hard, taking Alex and Hooker into international waters, exposing a plot to grab Cuban gold and a sinister relic of the Cuban missile crises.Creative cussing and sexual innuendo included.

    Although he would prefer to write short stories, he earns a living composing obituaries for a newspaper. He longs to see his work published, yet the subjects of his obituaries continue to cling to life. But when he opens the newspaper to see his work in print for the first time, his pride swiftly turns to terror. He and Misha have been drawn into a trap from which there appears to be no escape.

    As the pressure mounts, the eight strangers begin slowly opening up to one another and reveal long-hidden truths.First is Zara, a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else until tragedy changed her life. Now, she’s obsessed with visiting open houses to see how ordinary people live—and, perhaps, to set an old wrong to right. Then there’s Roger and Anna-Lena, an Ikea-addicted retired couple who are on a never-ending hunt for fixer-uppers to hide the fact that they don’t know how to fix their own failing marriage. Julia and Ro are a young lesbian couple and soon-to-be parents who are nervous about their chances for a successful life together since they can’t agree on anything. And there’s Estelle, an eighty-year-old woman who has lived long enough to be unimpressed by a masked bank robber waving a gun in her face. And despite the story she tells them all, Estelle hasn’t really come to the apartment to view it for her daughter, and her husband really isn’t outside parking the car.As police surround the premises and television channels broadcast the hostage situation live, the tension mounts and even deeper secrets are slowly revealed. Before long, the robber must decide which is the more terrifying prospect: going out to face the police, or staying in the apartment with this group of impossible people.Rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature” (Shelf Awareness), Anxious People’s whimsical plot serves up unforgettable insights into the human condition and a gentle reminder to be compassionate to all the anxious people we encounter every day.

    The Groom Posse had already sprung an airport prank on him, and he’d survived it, and if that was the worst of it, everything should be okay. Smooth sailing from now on.Seth has absolutely no idea what he’s about to get into. In the next several hours, he and his friends will become embroiled with rioters, Russian gangsters, angry strippers, a pimp as big as the Death Star, a very desperate Haitian refugee on the run with her two children from some very bad men, and an eleven-foot albino Burmese python named Blossom. And there’re still two days to go before the wedding.As it turns out, it’s not smooth sailing, it’s more like a trip on the Titanic. And the water below him is getting deeper every minute. By the end, amid gunfire, high-speed chases, and mayhem of the most unimaginable sort, violent men will fall, heroes will rise, and many lives will change.Seth’s, not least of all.

    Worse still, the press seem to have it in for him – his every move is headline news. When he discovers that the killer has killed before – that each murder is a homage to a classic crime novel – the fourth estate are quick to coin a nickname… The Novelist…With both men in the public eye, the case develops into a personal duel, each hell-bent on outsmarting the other. There can only be one winner – whoever has the least to lose…

    Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved.Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt’s latest inquiry takes him back to a past he’s tried to escape—and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead. Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past—with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she’ll stop at nothing to find answers.As fate brings these damaged souls together, their obsessive quests spark sexual currents neither can resist. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them?

    Then one afternoon, Evie disappears, and as a rabid, giddy panic spreads through the balmy suburban community, everyone turns to Lizzie for answers. Was Evie unhappy, troubled, or upset? Had she mentioned being followed? Would she have gotten into the car of a stranger?Compelled by curiosity, Lizzie takes up her own furtive pursuit of the truth. Haunted by dreams of her lost friend and titillated by her own new power as the center of the disappearance, Lizzie uncovers secret after secret and begins to wonder if she knew anything at all about her best friend.

    And The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is the type of story–swift, twisted, hilarious, somehow hopeful—that only he could dream up.The fact is, whether it’s a dog hit by a train or an old lady who had a heart attack on the can, someone has to clean up the nasty mess. And that someone is Webster Fillmore Goodhue, who just may be the least likely person in Los Angeles County to hold down such a gig. With his teaching career derailed by tragedy, Web hasn’t done much for the last year except some heavy slacking. But when his only friend in the world lets him know that his freeloading days are over, and he tires of taking cash from his spaced-out mom and refuses to take any more from his embittered father, Web joins Clean Team—and soon finds himself sponging a Malibu suicide’s brains from a bathroom mirror, and flirting with the man’s bereaved and beautiful daughter.Then things get weird: The dead man’s daughter asks a favor. Her brother’s in need of somebody who can clean up a mess. Every cell in Web’s brain tells him to turn her down, but something else makes him hit the Harbor Freeway at midnight to help her however he can. Is it her laugh? Her desperate tone of voice? The chance that this might be history’s strangest booty call? Whatever it is, soon enough it’s Web who needs the help when gun-toting California cowboys start showing up on his doorstep. What’s the deal? Is it something to do with what he cleaned up in that motel room in Carson? Or is it all about the brewing war between rival trauma cleaners? Web doesn’t have a clue, but he’ll need to get one if he’s going to keep from getting his face kicked in. Again. And again. And again.Full of black humor, stunning violence, singular characters, and neon dialogue, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death is classic Charlie Huston: a wild ride that’ll leave you breathless and shaken, grinning and begging for more.

    Here comes trouble, says Leonard, and he's right. She was always trouble, but she had this laugh when she was happy in bed that could win Hap over every time. Trudy has a proposition: an easy two hundred thousand dollars, tax-free. It's just a simple matter of digging it up ...Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, white and black, straight and gay, are the unlikeliest duo in crime fiction. Savage Season is their debut.