When hours pass without a word from the kidnapper, puzzlement grows as to his motive. After a gruesome package arrives at Price’s doorstep, the questions change. Just what does the kidnapper want--and how many people is he willing to kill to get it?Evil hides behind the genteel facades of affluent Strivers’ Row and stalks the ballroom of one of Harlem’s most famous gay parties. In a complex plot that keeps the reader tied to the page, Black Orchid Blues explores the depths of human depravity and the desperation of its victims.

    She attended public schools and has lived in several of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods, including Dickeyville, Tuscany-Canterbury, Evergreen, and South Federal Hill.CONTENTSIntroductionPart I: The Way Things Used To Be“Easy As A-B-C” by Laura Lippman (Locust Point)“Fat Chance” by Robert Ward (Old Northwood)“Pigtown Will Shine Tonight” by Jack Bludis (Pigtown)“Over My Dead Body” by Rob Hiaasen (Fell’s Point)“The Invisible Man” by Rafael Alvarez (Highlandtown)Part II: The Way Things Are“Stainless Steel” by David Simon (Sandtown-Winchester)“Home Movies” by Marcia Talley (Little Italy)“Liminal” by Joseph Wallace (Security Boulevard-Woodlawn)“Almost Missed It By a Hair” by Lisa Respers (France Howard Park)“Ode to the O’s” by Charlie Stella (Memorial Stadium)“Don¹t Walk in Front of Me” by Sarah Weinman (Pikesville)Part III: The Way Things Never Were“As Seen on TV” by Dan Fesperman (Fells Point)“The Haunting of Slink Ridgely” by Tim Cockey (Greenspring Valley)“The Homecoming” by Jim Fusilli (Camden Yards)“Frog Cycle” by Ben Neihart (Inner Harbor)“Goodwood Gardens” by Sujata Massey (Roland Park)

    The marathon dance craze flourished during the 1930s, but the underside was a competition and violence unknown to most ballrooms—a dark side that Horace McCoy's classic American novel powerfully captures."Were it not in its physical details so carefully documented, it would be lurid beyond itself." —Nation

    The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph.

    It was published, and the rest is history.One Night Stands and Lost Weekends is a sterling collection of short crime fiction and suspense novelettes penned between 1958 and 1962 by a budding young master and soon-to-be Grand Master—an essential slice of genre history, and more fun than a high-speed police chase following a bank job gone bad.

    She tackles eros and intimacy with a deceptively light touch, a keen awareness of how their nervous systems tangle and sometimes short-circuit, and a genius for revealing our most vulnerable, spirited selves. In “Desert Hearts,” a woman takes a job selling sex toys in San Francisco rather than embark on the law career she pursued only for the sake of her father. In “Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love,” a woman realizes she much prefers the company of her pit bull—and herself—to the neurotic foreign fling who won’t decamp from her apartment. In “How Am I Supposed to Talk to You?” a daughter hauls a suitcase of lingerie to Mexico for her flighty, estranged mother to resell there, wondering whether her personal mission—to come out—is worth the same effort. And in “Barbara the Slut,” a young woman with an autistic brother, a Princeton acceptance letter, and a love of sex navigates her high school’s toxic, slut-shaming culture with open eyes. With heart, sass, and pitch-perfect characters, Barbara the Slut is a head-turning debut from a writer with a limitless career before her.

    Gómez, Raymond Mungo, Rachel Shteir, Philip Spitzer, and Thad Ziolkowski.FROM THE INTRODUCTION by Jonathan Santlofer: "Like film, literature has been no stranger to marijuana and hashish, going back to Charles Baudelaire's 1860 Artificial Paradises, in which the French poet not only describes the effects of hashish but postulates it could be an aid in creating an ideal world. The pleasures, pains, and complexities of marijuana are more than hinted at in works by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, and Thomas Pynchon, to name just a few, and I hope this anthology will add to that legacy and keep the flame of pot literature burning bright . . ."This diverse group of writers, poets, and artists makes it clear that there is no one point of view here. Each of them approaches the idea of marijuana with the sharp eye of an observer, anthropologist, and artist, and expands upon it. Some writing projects are difficult; this one was smooth and mellow and a continual pleasure . . . I hope you will sit back, relax, and enjoy these wide-ranging tales of the most debated and discussed drug of our time. Though, according to former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, 'That is not a drug, it's a leaf.'"

    Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the geographic area of the book.Brand-new stories by: Ace Atkins, William Boyle, Megan Abbott, Jack Pendarvis, Dominiqua Dickey, Michael Kardos, Jamie Paige, Jimmy Cajoleas, Chris Offutt, Michael Farris Smith, Andrew Paul, Lee Durkee, Robert Busby, John M. Floyd, RaShell R. Smith-Spears, and Mary Miller.

    She used those attributes to survive a divorce in 1940s America with two children and to claw her way out of poverty, becoming a successful businesswoman. But Mildred also had two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to her monstrous daughter.Out of these elements, Cain created a novel (later made into a film noir classic) of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence—and a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.

    In 1933, the year that forms the centerpiece of the narrative, Harry is 11 years old and living with his mother, father, and younger sister on a farm outside of Marvel Creek, Texas, near the Sabine River bottoms. Harry's world changes forever when he discovers the corpse of a young black woman tied to a tree in the forest near his home. The woman, who is eventually identified as a local prostitute, has been murdered, molested, and sexually mutilated. She is also, as Harry will soon discover, the first in a series of similar corpses, all of them the victims of a new, unprecedented sort of monster: a traveling serial killer.From his privileged position as the son of constable (and farmer and part-time barber) Jacob Collins, Harry watches as the distinctly amateur investigation unfolds. As more bodies -- not all of them "colored" -- surface, the mood of the local residents darkens. Racial tensions -- never far from the surface, even in the best of times -- gradually kindle. When circumstantial evidence implicates an ancient, innocent black man named Mose, the Ku Klux Klan mobilizes, initiating a chilling, graphically described lynching that will occupy a permanent place in Harry Collins's memories. With Mose dead and the threat to local white women presumably put to rest, the residents of Marvel Creek resume their normal lives, only to find that the actual killer remains at large and continues to threaten the safety and stability of the town.Lansdale uses this protracted murder investigation to open up a window on an insular, poverty-stricken, racially divided community. With humor, precision, and great narrative economy, he evokes the society of Marvel Creek in all its alternating tawdriness and nobility, offering us a varied, absolutely convincing portrait of a world that has receded into history. At the same time, he offers us a richly detailed re-creation of the vibrant, dangerous physical landscapes that were part of that world and have since been buried under the concrete and cement of the industrialized juggernaut of the late 20th century. In Lansdale's hands, the gritty realities of Depression-era Texas are as authentic -- and memorable -- as anything in recent American fiction.

    No man could resist her charms—not even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to find out who turned her into a faceless corpse. As this tough cop probes the mystery of Laura's death, he becomes obsessed with her strange power. Soon he realizes he's been seduced by a dead woman—or has he? Laura won lasting renown as an Academy Award-nominated 1944 film, the greatest noir romance of all time. Vera Caspary's equally haunting novel is remarkable for its stylish, hardboiled writing, its electrifying plot twists, and its darkly complex characters—including a woman who stands as the ultimate femme fatale.

    Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption--the most satisfying tale of unjust imprisonment and offbeat escape since The Count of Monte Cristo.Apt Pupil--a golden California schoolboy and an old man whose hideous past he uncovers enter into a fateful and chilling mutual parasitism.The Body--four rambunctious young boys venture into the Maine woods and in sunlight and thunder find life, death, and intimations of their own mortality.The Breathing Method--a tale told in a strange club about a woman determined to give birth no matter what.source: stephenking.com

    The stories in Fresh Complaint explore equally rich­­—and intriguing—territory. Ranging from the bitingly reproductive antics of “Baster” to the dreamy, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for Best American Short Stories), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national emergencies. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people’s wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art founder under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; and, in “Fresh Complaint,” a high school student whose wish to escape the strictures of her immigrant family lead her to a drastic decision that upends the life of a middle-aged British physicist. Narratively compelling, beautifully written, and packed with a density of ideas despite their fluid grace, these stories chart the development and maturation of a major American writer.Complainers --Air mail --Baster --Early music --Timeshare --Find the bad guy --The oracular vulva --Capricious gardens --Great experiment --Fresh complaint

    In the thirteen decades since A Study in Scarlet first appeared, countless variations on that theme have been played, from Mary Russell to Greg House, from 'Basil of Baker Street' to the new BBC Holmes-in-the-internet-age.We suspect that you have in the back of your mind a story that plays a variation on the Holmes theme...And what if these great writers read that proposal and decided that yes, they did have that kind of tale in the back of their minds? The result is A Study in Sherlock, Stories Inspired by the Sherlock Holmes Canon, with stories by Alan Bradley, Tony Broadbent, Jan Burke, Lionel Chetwynd, Lee Child, Colin Cotterill, Neil Gaiman, Laura Lippman, Gayle Lynds and John Sheldon, Phillip and Jerry Margolin, Margaret Maron, Thomas Perry, S.J. Rozan, Dana Stabenow, Charles Todd, and Jacqueline Winspear.

    The tales range from the deadly serious to the absurdly hilarious. Also included is a new, never-before-published novella that takes place after the cliff-hanger ending of the new April 2010 hardcover, Changes.Contains:+ "Restoration of Faith"+ "Vignette"+ "Something Borrowed" -- from My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding + "It's My Birthday Too" -- from Many Bloody Returns + "Heorot" -- from My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon + "Day Off" -- from Blood Lite + "Backup" -- novelette from Thomas' point of view, originally published by Subterranean Press+ "The Warrior" -- novelette from Mean Streets + "Last Call" -- from Strange Brew + "Love Hurts" -- from Songs of Love and Death + Aftermath -- all-new novella from Murphy's point of view, set forty-five minutes after the end of Changes