Bennett's sensational trial pitted an aggressive, mercurial county prosecutor against the author's father, a civil trial attorney who had never before defended anyone for murder. The book not only recreates the tension and excitement of this courtroom battle, but also highlights the uncertain edge that often divides guilt from innocence. The author was ten years old when he answered the phone late at night when Bennett called his father from jail, seeking his legal representation. Forty years later and long after his father's death, the author found the Bennett file in the bottom of his mother's closet. From the moment he began reading the papers, the long-forgotten drama cast a spell on him. As he uncovered more and more of the facts, the story he had known as a child disappeared, replaced by one far different. The Edge of Innocence takes the reader through the criminal justice system and ultimately to the trial where the reader, like a juror, must sift through competing claims and conflicting evidence. Full of twists and turns and colorful characters, The Edge of Innocence is all the more entertaining because it tells a true story.

    But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?

    Seventeen-year-old Pinkie, malign and ruthless, has killed a man. Believing he can escape retribution, he is unprepared for the courageous, life-embracing Ida Arnold. Greene's gripping thriller, exposes a world of loneliness and fear, of life lived on the 'dangerous edge of things'.WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY J.M. COETZEE

    Raised on an isolated West Texas ranch that he was forced to flee at age eighteen following the violent breakup of his foster family, Jimmy has found a home and a profession in Galveston -- and a mentor in Rose Maceo.Looming over Jimmy's story like an ancient curse is the specter of his fearsome father. Their ties of blood, evident since Jimmy's boyhood, have been drawn tighter over time. Then a strange and beautiful girl enters his life and a swift and terrifying sequence of events is set in motion. Jimmy must cross the border and go deep into the brutal and merciless country of his ancestors -- where the story's harrowing climax closes a circle of destiny many years in the making.

    A professor at a small New England college, Hansard has a second, secret career with The White Group, a "consulting agency" with shadowy Washington connections.When Hansard's work exposes one of his closest friends, Allan Berenson, as a Soviet agent, and Berenson dies mysteriously, the connections seem all too clear. Shaken, Hansard turns away from secrets to investigate a manuscript that may be a lost play from Christopher Marlowe. Surely, he thinks, four hundred years is a safe distance from the events of the present.He is wrong.Allan Berenson's murder has set in motion a deadly chain reaction, as spies run for cover, traitors hide their tracks, and assassins stalk their victims. Berenson's lover--herself an unsuspected spy--seeks revenge by completing Berenson's final project: the theft of the West's most crucial military secret. Its use will forever change the balance of power in Europe.But the key to completing the plan is hidden in the Marlowe manuscript... and only Nicholas Mansard can find it.Pursued and manipulated by all sides, Hansard is caught in a crossfire where no loyalty, identity or motive is what it appears, and a name from the time of Elizabeth I will bring the world to the brink of war.The Scholars of Night is an extraordinary novel of technological espionage and human betrayal, weaving past and present into a web of unbearable suspense.

    Butterfly--for he appears to be a discreet gentleman who paints rare butterflies. But as inconspicuous as Farfalla tries to make himself, his real profession is deadly, unbeknownst to the sometime brothel worker, Clara, with whom he sleeps.Of a certain age, and as his feelings for Clara intensify, Farfalla has resolved to make his next job his last--all the while sensing a treacherous circle closing in on him.

    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.