Both fathers hope the union will save their ailing businesses; little do they know that each is as bankrupt as the other. But Morgan's inclinations have long lain in another, perverse, direction and poor Esther must struggle as best she can not only to survive a loveless marriage, but also to build up a business of her own in a man's world.

    One a lawyer with no respect for the law, the other a doctor, with no respect for human life; both trapped by rage. What happens when their paths cross and history catches up with them? Can they escape the cages they have built?Lawyer Claire McBride is a good person.She believes in fair play and operating within the rules but when told by her consultant, the cancer she thought she’d beaten is terminal, she descends into a dark and alien place at odds with her character. Compelled to right wrongs and punish those who have caused harm and avoided justice she seeks to take back ownership of what little life she has left.She does not know there is someone from her past, far more dangerous than her, who calls the shots. Issy Moran, Claire’s consultant; a bitter, deranged, narcissist, has for years routinely ended the lives of those patients she judges unworthy of treatment.From childhood she has harboured a grudge against Claire and when by chance, they meet she seizes the opportunity to satisfy her twisted desire to first befriend her and then destroy her.

    A soup kitchen and a makeshift shanty sure beat his days as a POW in Vietnam. But Chloe Roberts can’t handle the eviction that sends her into the hell of homelessness. With no family or friends to turn to, Chloe and her children are sucked into the traumatic world of night shelters, and dangerous predators.When they bump into each other at the soup kitchen, Frank offers Chloe a glimmer of hope that she can pull her life back together. She rekindles his lost sense of self-worth by taking his mind off his own problems. But they will not meet again until Frank is riding high as a working man, and Chloe has hit rock bottom.By helping Chloe rebuild her broken life, Frank banishes the demons from his own past. Unfortunately, the past comes strolling back into their lives, threatening to destroy the happiness they have finally found.

    Thwarted in a previous attempt to bring charges for other nefarious crimes, Ms. Battle is determined to put the crime boss behind bars, and this time she has what looks like an airtight case. Claiming he has been framed, Carmine hires the blue blood, Harvard-educated attorney Harrison Fletcher, Jr. who was recently fired from his position as Assistant DA for refusing to compromise his ethics, to help him prove his innocence. Assisted by his beautiful wife and a scruffy, alcohol-loving detective, Harry sets out to discover who set the fire and why. As what really happened that June night becomes clear, evidence begins to disappear. With the defense’s case starting to crumble, Harry devises a way to prove Carmine’s innocence. But will the plan work?

    These stories are informed by a childhood growing up near that middle-class mecca, the Grand Concourse; falling in love with three voluptuous librarians at a public library in the Lower Depths of the South Bronx; and eating at Mafia-owned restaurants along Arthur Avenue's restaurant row, amid a "land of deprivation…where fathers trundled home…with a monumental sadness on their shoulders."In "Lorelei," a lonely hearts grifter returns home and finds his childhood sweetheart still living in the same apartment house on the Concourse; in "Archy and Mehitabel" a high school romance blossoms around a newspaper comic strip; in "Major Leaguer" a former New York Yankee confronts both a gang of drug dealers and the wreckage that Robert Moses wrought in his old neighborhood; and in three interconnected stories—"Silk Silk," "Little Sister," and "Marla"—Marla Silk, a successful Manhattan attorney, discovers her father's past in the Bronx and a mysterious younger sister who was hidden from her, kept in a fancy rest home near the Botanical Garden. In these stories and others, the past and present tumble together in Charyn's singular and distinctly "New York prose, street-smart, sly, and full of lurches" (John Leonard, New York Times).Throughout it all looms the "master builder" Robert Moses, a man who believed he could "save" the Bronx by building a highway through it, dynamiting whole neighborhoods in the process. Bitter Bronx stands as both a fictional eulogy for the people and places paved over by Moses' expressway and an affirmation of Charyn's "brilliant imagination" (Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune).

    Zesty Meyers is Boston s fastest bike messenger caffeine fueled, wise-cracking and reckless accustomed to hurtling through Boston s kamikaze streets at breakneck speed, always just a bumper or car door away from disaster.Will Meyers is Zesty s father, Beantown s former backroom poker king and political fixer, who is suffering from Alzheimer s and a growing dread that the Big Dig carving its way through some of Boston s toughest neighborhoods will expose the bodies and secrets he d assumed were buried forever.When the heist of an armored truck goes violently wrong, Zesty is forced to navigate Beantown s gritty underworld of gangsters and blood money, desperately trying to outrace his family s criminal past and stay alive in a changing city where death loiters on every corner and the odds of survival have narrowed to pulling a straight flush on the river."

    This collection features new stories from all the Zelmer Pulp regulars as well as stunning noir photography from Mark Krajnak and an introduction by Brit Grit Godfather Paul D. Brazill.Zelmer Pulp arrives with both guns out in this Volume 1 noir collection.

    Master storyteller Les Edgerton guides us on a haunting journey inside the criminal mind to show that no matter how depraved a person appears to be, there might still exist a spark of humanity.

    She must face unsurmountable danger, taking lives and putting hers on the line to save him while dealing with emotional turmoil when she found out her loving husband was not as devoted as she thought and her enemies are more powerful and devious than she imagined.

    Onstage he wore a cape, clamped a bone to his nose, and carried a staff topped with a human skull. Offstage, he insisted he'd been raised by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, that he'd joined the army at fourteen, that he'd defeated the middleweight boxing champion of Alaska, that he'd fathered seventy-five illegitimate children.The R&B wildman Screamin' Jay Hawkins only had a single hit, the classic "I Put a Spell On You," and was often written off as a clownish novelty act -- or worse, an offense to his race -- but his myth-making was legendary. In his second novel, Mark Binelli embraces the man and the legend to create a hilarious, tragic, fantastical portrait of this unlikeliest of protagonists. Hawkins saw his life story as a wild picaresque, and Binelli's novel follows suit, tackling the subject in a dazzling collage-like style.At Rolling Stone, Binelli has profiled some of the greatest musicians of our time, and this novel deftly plays with the inordinate focus on "authenticity" in so much music writing about African-Americans. An entire novel built around a musician as deliberately inauthentic as Screamin' Jay Hawkins thus becomes a sort of subversive act, as well as an extremely funny and surprisingly moving one.

    This thriller marks the debut of Mechelle Deakes, a hard edged African-American detective who is assigned to Atlanta's Cold Case Unit - and a partner who is determined to find a twisted serial killer - no matter what the cost.

    It is a sad city, the saddest of cities, a place so utterly depressing that even their ales are brewed with the most sorrow-filled tears. They built it on the back of a colossal mountain-sized animal, where its woeful citizens live like human fleas within the hairy, pulsing landscape. And those tasked with keeping the city in a state of constant melancholy are the Stressmen-a team of professional sadness-makers who are perpetually striving to invent new ways of causing absolute misery. But for the Stressman known as Fernando Mendez, creating grief hasn't been so easy as of late. His ideas aren't effective anymore. His treatments are more likely to induce happiness than sadness. And if he wants to get back in the game, he's going to have to relearn the true meaning of despair.Like "James and the Giant Peach" combined with one of David Cronenberg's early body horror films, "The Tick People" is a charming children's fable that quickly devolves into a grotesque sexual nightmare.

    1 bestselling crime series featuring clinical psychologist Dr Tony Hill, hero of TV’s much loved WIRE IN THE BLOOD.THE MERMAIDS SINGINGUp till now, the only serial killers Tony Hill had encountered were safely behind bars. This one’s different – this one’s on the loose.Four men have been found mutilated and tortured. As fear grips the city, the police turn to clinical psychologist Tony Hill for a profile of the killer. But soon Tony becomes the unsuspecting target in a battle of wits and wills where he has to use every ounce of his professional nerve to survive.THE WIRE IN THE BLOODYoung girls are disappearing around the country, and there is nothing to connect them to one another, let alone the killer whose charming manner hides a warped and sick mind.Dr Tony Hill, head of the new National Profiling Task Force, sets his team an exercise: they are given the details of missing teenagers and asked to discover any possible links between the cases. Only one officer comes up with a theory – a theory that is ridiculed by the group … until one of their number is murdered and mutilated.For Tony Hill, the murder becomes a matter for personal revenge and, joined by colleague Carol Jordan, he embarks on a campaign of psychological terrorism – a game where hunter and hunted can all too easily be reversed.THE LAST TEMPTATIONA twisted killer targeting psychologists has left a grisly trail across Europe.Dr Tony Hill, expert at mapping the minds of murderers, is reluctant to get involved. But then the next victim is much closer to home…Meanwhile, his former partner DCI Carol Jordan is working undercover in Berlin, on a dangerous operation to trap a millionaire trafficker. When the game turns nasty, Tony is the only person she can call on for help.Confronting a cruelty that has its roots in Nazi atrocities, Tony and Carol are thrown together in a world of violence and corruption, where they have no one to trust but each other.

    Henry Graham is a ten year-old boy whose father has just left home for good. When the two meet in 1971 at a downtown Pittsburgh bus stop, all they seem to have in common is their love of baseball. But that is enough to begin a life-long friendship that, eventually, enables both men to confront old enemies and heal old wounds. Philip Beard's third and most accomplished novel swings between two narratives the way John Kostka swings through life. The result is a multifaceted meditation on childhood heroes, the beauty of baseball and the power of love to heal a family in crisis. "SWING is at once heartbreaking, uplifting and emotionally resonant. In a word, it’s beautiful." –Pittsburgh Magazine "It wouldn't be fair or accurate to call SWING a sports book. It's too rare for that." –The Sporting News ​"SWING is richly rewarding...a tight, poignant coming of age novel...[that] will stay with you long after you put this book down." –Sports Illustrated “Every character—the absent father, the troubled sister, the mysterious wonder that is John Kostka—feels alive due to Beard‘s skillfully simple prose and dialogue. With SWING, Beard has hit it out of the park.” –Foreword Reviews ". . . just about perfect.” – The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette