But on Miranda’s twelfth birthday, Billy has a mysterious falling-out with her mother and suddenly disappears from Miranda’s life. She doesn’t hear from him again until sixteen years later when she receives unexpected news: Billy has died and left her Prospero Books, which is teetering on bankruptcy—and one final scavenger hunt.

    In the middle of a tropical storm one night, these characters are among the passengers it carries: Fay Benton, a single mom and cocktail waitress desperate for something to go right for once; Johnny and the Contusions, a ship's band with so little talent they are . . . well, the ship's band; Arnold and Phil, two refugees from the Beaux Arts Senior Center; Lou Tarant, a wide, bald man who has killed nine people, though none recently; and an assortment of uglies whose job it is to facilitate the ship's true business, which is money-laundering or drug-smuggling or . . . something.

    With the smart and sexy Cassiopeia Vitt by his side, Malone faces down the world’s deadliest terrorists, assassins, and con men—and unravels some of history’s most legendary and iconic mysteries along the way.Now in one exclusive eBook bundle are the first seven novels of Steve Berry’s extraordinary series:The Templar LegacyThe Alexandria LinkThe Venetian BetrayalThe Charlemagne PursuitThe Paris VendettaThe Emperor's TombThe Jefferson Key

    From Africa to the Middle East, and from London to Beijing, Archer takes us to places we've never seen and introduces us to people we'll never forget.Meet the philandering husband who thinks he's committed the perfect murder; the self-assured chess champion who plays a beautiful woman for stakes far higher than cash; and the finance minister who needs to crack the secrets of a Swiss bank. Jeffrey Archer's collection of twelve spellbinding stories will sweep you on a journey of thwarted ambition, undying passion, and unswerving honor that you'll never forget.

    Just ask Rachel Morgan, private investigator and witch. First her never-do-well boyfriend disappears into the night. Then the hunky protege of vampire crimelord Piscary starts eyeing her curves... not to mention her throat. Throw in a demon or two keen to singe her hide - or take her soul - and you'd think she was the poster child for doom instead of one savvy spellcaster. Luckily she shares her business and the deconsecrated church she calls home with roomies Ivy, lithe living vampire, and Jenks, the world's crankiest pixie. For it'll take more than boots to grind down the hell-magic and mayhem that surround her. EVERY WHICH WAY BUT DEAD finds Rachel in a battle of wits and spells, going head to head with nemesis Trent Kalamack and the dark magic he's long ago forged in becoming a drug lord. Who would have guessed Rachel's own father had been his partner? But as she reels from tis blistering truth, arch-demon Algaliarept returns to claim her as his familiar, a bargain she'd struck in exchange for his testifying against Piscary. The price of failing to comply? Her soul whisked off to the darkest ever-after... In A FISTFUL OF CHARMS, Rachel's former boyfriend, Nick, has stolen the focus, a cursed Were statue able to create new Weres through biting rather than birthing. The statue is the stuff of legend - and ultimate power. for it would give Weres dominion over vampires ... and spark all-out war. To stop a bloodbath no one wants, Rachel will pull out every stop, spell and incantation to save the day. --- from book's dustjacket

    With a beautiful, terrified woman. On the 40th floor of a deserted office building. By the psyshopath they call "The Butcher."DON'T LOOK DOWNBecause you're an ex-mountain climber. Because a fall from Everest left you with a bad leg... and a paralyzing fear of heights.DON'T LOOK DOWNBecause he has slaughtered the guards and short-circuited the elevators. Because the stairways are blocked, and for you and the woman with you, there's only one escape route.DON'T LOOK DOWNBecause 600 feet of empty space are looking back at you."A real breath-taker... should hold you glued to its pages till the wee small hours." --West Coast Review of Books

    Now together in one volume, the fifth and sixth books of the Morganville Vampires series show that defeating Bishop is a task that's going to take some serious skill....LORD OF MISRULEIn Morganville, violent black clouds promise a storm of devastating proportions. As student Claire Danvers and her friends prepare to defend Morganville against the elements - both natural and unnatural - the unexpected happens: Morganville's vampires begin to vanish one by one. Discovering why leads Claire to one last choice: Swear allegiance to Bishop - or die....CARPE CORPUSAn underground resistance is brewing in Morganville. In order to contain it, Bishop vows to obliterate the town and all its inhabitants - the living and the undead. Claire Danvers and her friends are the only ones who stand in his way. But even if they defeat Bishop, will the vampires ever be content to go back to the old rules after having such a taste of power?

    Stephen King's "dark half" may have saved the best for last.A fellow named Richard Bachman wrote Blaze in 1973 on an Olivetti typewriter, then turned the machine over to Stephen King, who used it to write Carrie. Bachman died in 1985 ("cancer of the pseudonym"), but in late 2006 King found the original typescript of Blaze among his papers at the University of Maine's Fogler Library ("How did this get here?!"), and decided that with a little revision it ought to be published.Blaze is the story of Clayton Blaisdell, Jr. --of the crimes committed against him and the crimes he commits, including his last, the kidnapping of a baby heir worth millions. Blaze has been a slow thinker since childhood, when his father threw him down the stairs--and then threw him down again. After escaping an abusive institution for boys when he was a teenager, Blaze hooks up with George, a seasoned criminal who thinks he has all the answers. But then George is killed, and Blaze, though haunted by his partner, is on his own.He becomes one of the most sympathetic criminals of all of literature. This is a crime story of surprising strength and sadness, with a suspenseful current sustained by the classic workings of fate and character--as taut and riveting as Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon.

    . .#1 bestselling author Jeffery Deaver has created the most riveting and original novel of the year-a race-against-the-clock mystery, told in reverse.THE OCTOBER LISTGabriela waits desperately for news of her abducted daughter.At last, the door opens.But it's not the negotiators. It's not the FBI.It's the kidnapper.And he has a gun.How did it come to this?Two days ago, Gabriela's life was normal. Then, out of the blue, she gets word that her six-year-old daughter has been taken. She's given an ultimatum: pay half a million dollars and find a mysterious document known as the "October List" within 30 hours, or she'll never see her child again. A mind-bending novel with twists and turns that unfold from its dramatic climax back to its surprising beginning, THE OCTOBER LIST is Jeffery Deaver at his masterful, inventive best.

    The city of Miami is Detective Tom Moon's back yard. He's always kept it local, attending University of Miami on a football scholarship, and, as a Miami PD officer, protecting the city's most vulnerable. Now, as the new leader of an FBI task force called "Operation Guardian," it's his mission to combat international crime. Moon's investigative team discovers that the opportunistic "Blood Brothers" -- Russian nationals Roman and Emile Rostoff -- have evaded authorities while building a vast, powerful, and deadly crime syndicate throughout Europe and metropolitan Miami. Moon played offense for U of M, but he's on the other side of the field this time. And as the Rostoffs zero in on a target dear to Tom, they're not playing by anyone's rules.

    Scott Fitzgerald, the iconic American writer of The Great Gatsby who is more widely read today than ever.I’d Die For You is a collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel. Fitzgerald did not design the stories in I’d Die For You as a collection. Most were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but were never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald. They date from the earliest days of Fitzgerald’s career to the last. They come from various sources, from libraries to private collections, including those of Fitzgerald’s family. Readers will experience Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention. “I’d Die For You,” the collection’s title story, is drawn from Fitzgerald’s stays in the mountains of North Carolina when his health, and that of his wife Zelda, was falling apart. With the addition of a Hollywood star and film crew to the Smoky Mountain lakes and pines, Fitzgerald brings in the cinematic world in which he would soon be living. Most of the stories printed here come from this time period, during the middle and late1930s, though the collection spans Fitzgerald’s career from 1920 to the end of his life. The book is subtitled And Other Lost Stories in recognition of an absence until now. Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that, and good things can wait patiently in libraries for many centuries sometimes. I’d Die For You And Other Lost Stories echoes as well the nostalgia and elegy in Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase “a lost generation,” that generation for whom Fitzgerald was a leading figure. Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career. I’d Die For You is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.

    A teenager with no past, no family - and no memories. Carol and Paul were instantly drawn to her, this girl they named Jane - she was the daughter they never had. It was almost too good to be true.

    What she has never had is a real family. That changes when she meets and marries Lewis Aiken, an exuberant surgeon fifteen years older than Anny. When they marry, she finds her family—not a traditional one, but a group of Charleston childhood friends who are inseparable, who are one another's surrogate family. They are called the Scrubs, and they all, in some way, have the common cord of family.Instantly upon meeting them at the old beach house on Sullivan's Island, which they co-own, Anny knows that she has found home and family. They vow that, when the time comes, they will find a place where they can live together by the sea.Bad things begin to happen—a hurricane, a fire, deaths—but still the remaining Scrubs cling together. They are watched over and bolstered by Camilla Curry, the heart and core of their group, always the healer. Anny herself allows Camilla to enfold and to care for her. It is the first time she has felt this kind of love and support.

    The only way for her to get it: A coffee plantation she has inherited. But there's a catch: She has to run the plantation, deep in the jungles of Colombia, a land of drug lords and warlords. The mysterious inheritance of the plantation, from the father she had never met, comes at the same time a criminal conspiracy is turning her life into a living hell--a conspiracy that stretches all the way to Colombia.  Racing to South America, on the run from the police, she becomes entangled with suspicious characters: Ramon, rich and handsome, with a secret sex life that shocks even Nash though she considers herself an adventurous woman; Josh, an American expatriate, who claims to be a simple gem smuggler and arouses passions in Nash she thought were long dead; and Lily Soong, an erotic Chinese beauty who men--and women--lust after, often to their doom. But no one brings as much danger to her life as Pablo Escobar, king of the Medellín drug cartels, considered the most dangerous man in Colombia, the murder capital of the world.  Things get even more complicated when Nash's quest to clear herself takes her to Shanghai, home of the powerful Chinese Triads that control the flow of dirty money from gambling, prostitution, drugs and murder. Refusing to let the cartel's murderers drive her off the plantation and ruin the lives of hundreds of families who work it, Nash tackles organized crime and police agencies on two continents to save her plantation . . . and stay alive.

    53 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more – everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Four to Score. This detailed literature summary also contains Topics for Discussion and a Free Quiz on Four to Score by Janet Evanovich.