Book picks similar to
The Forlorn Exotic by Joel Matulich


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The Cruise


Anthony Hulse - 2012
    This is a second edition and alternative cover.

Kill Switch


Gordon Bonnet - 2015
     When high school teacher Chris Franzia comes home on the last day of school, he finds two FBI agents waiting for him. A string of seemingly unrelated murders has left them baffled, and they can find only one commonality. All five victims shared a college class with Chris thirty years earlier... and now he may be next. Struggling with the sheer impossibility of the situation, Chris’s skepticism fades after a series of failed attempts on his life makes things deadly clear. Thus begins a harrowing cross-country race, forcing Chris to put together the pieces of his past while staying one step ahead of his mysterious assailants. Can he make the connection in time? And will the deadly picture of reconstructed memory be worth the price of knowing?

Gunslinger Girl Omnibus 2


Yu Aida - 2011
    Seven Seas is pleased to republish Gunslinger Girl in two omnibus editions and will then release all-new individual volumes that have never been published in North America.The Social Welfare Agency: a secret counter-terrorism unit for the Italian government that rescues troubled young girls and turns them into cybernetically-enhanced ruthless killers who do the government’s dirty work. Yet the child assassins are not as heartless as they were programmed to be. Henrietta struggles with her conflicted feelings towards her handler Jose, while fellow agent Triela combats her own inner demons as she strives to remember the girl she once was. Meanwhile, the clash between the Social Welfare Agency and the covert radical group known as the Five Republics continues. As the Five Republics targets one of the Agency’s handlers, the Agency plans its own counter-strike that will pit Triela against the professional assassin and martial arts master known as Pinocchio in a rematch to the death.

Dead City


Shane Stevens - 1973
    The acclaimed author of By Reason of Insanity, The Anvil Chorus, and Go Down Dead offers "a relentlessly chilling and stark novel" (The Kansas City Star) and "a fresh, vital look at organized criminals that is so authentic, it's scary" (The Boston Globe).

Mercenary


Jon Kiln - 2014
    And Ganry discovers that there is more at stake than his own survival.

The Japanese Tattoo


Sandi Fellman - 1987
    They are the visions of the Irezumi, the legendary tattoo artists, who spend years creating living masterpieces. Photographer Sandi Fellman describes this strange and violent world both in her text and in her stunning, large 20 x 24 inch Polaroid photographs.

The President's Daughter


Nan Britton - 1927
    No. This is not a tawdry fable. This is fact. The President was Warren G. Harding who then died suddenly. Some say he was murdered. Her book is great. In Chapter 18 she describes how on July 30, 1917 she finally lost her virginity to the future president after a long courtship, in a New York City hotel on 30th Street overlooking Broadway. Only moments after the intercourse had been completed, the New York City Vice Squad broke down the door. Harding was forced to identify himself. When the police realized that their target, Warren G. Harding, was a United States Senator (he was not yet president), the Vice Squad apologized and beat a hasty retreat. It was not before long that Nan Britton discovered that she was pregnant. Senator Harding set her up in a house in Asbury Park, New Jersey near a casino where he sometimes played poker, and he sent her money through messengers. She was able to keep her pregnancy and the subsequent birth to her of an illegitimate child a secret from everybody, except for her actual lover who was US Senator and then President Warren G. Harding. The child, Elizabeth Ann, was born on October 22, 1919, not in a hospital but in the same house in Asbury Park NJ where Nan Britton had been staying. The resulting book, The President's Daughter, has a story all its own. Bills were introduced in the United States Congress to stop the publication of this book or to make possession of it illegal. The New York City Vice Squad raided the printing plant and confiscated all the plates. No major, reputable book publisher would touch this book. All turned it down. Finally, the book was published. Naturally, as the book featured sex romps in the White House, it became a best seller.

Awakening


Robert Stanek - 2014
    It's Theirs.The human survivors lead a hardscrabble life, scavenging what they can from the dead city, waiting and watching. Cedes isn't like Matthew and his regulars. She dreams. She talks. She questions. She wonders why Luke disappeared, where Luke disappeared to. She wants to know what we are to the machines. This is her story. This is our story. This is the story of us, the humans who survive.In the ruins of our world, a new order arose, an order controlled by the very machines humankind created. The end for us came not from a massive global war but from something unthinkable, incomprehensible. The machines simply replaced us and we let them, and so, in the end, humanity went out not with a bang, but with a whimper. No shots fired. No bombs dropped. No cities destroyed. We ended and the machines began--or at least that is what the few human survivors of the machine apocalypse believe.

Ask A Foolish Question


Robert Sheckley - 1953
    So ... a mechanical answerer, geared to produce the ultimate revelations in reference to anything you want to know, might have unsuspected limitations."-From Ask A Foolish QuestionThis short science fiction story by Robert Sheckley was first publsihed in Science Fiction magazine but is now available on the Kindle with illustrations and original text.

Wire to Wire


Scott Sparling - 2011
    After a questionable recovery and a broken relationship, he abandons his new home in the Arizona desert, though not before leaving a man for dead. Slater returns to Michigan in a busted-up Ford to reunite with an old train-hopping pal, but quickly discovers that the Pleasant Peninsula of his youth is none too pleasant. As Slater’s past catches up with his present—a love triangle, a local drug dealer, the damaged residents of a destitute Northern Michigan town—rock bottom keeps slipping farther away.Three years later, Slater sits in a dark video-editing suite, popping speed like penny candy, attempting to reconcile himself with the unfilmed memories that haunt his screens and his conscience.

The Corporal's Wife


Gerald Seymour - 2013
    If they are caught, they will all be executed by the fundamentalist government - the Brits because they are effectively spies and Farideh because her husband is regarded as a traitor and she has a dangerous mind of her own.Farideh's husband is a corporal in the Revolutionary Guard, entrapped by MI6 and held in a safe house in Austria for interrogation. His lowly position would not normally make him a target, but his job as a driver to a top general means that he knows the location of secret nuclear sites and has overheard many unguarded conversations.But he won't talk unless they will bring out Farideh. The SAS say it's too dangerous, but the director of the operation doesn't want to lose his prize. He assembles a little team of three ex-soldiers and one student drop-out who knows the language and smuggles them into Tehran.The journey out is an epic of drama and suspense, culminating in a never-to-be-forgotten run for the border. Along the way, we meet many characters, both British and Iranian, who display courage, cowardice, hatred, and love.

The Third World War


Humphrey Hawksley - 2003
    Hundreds die in the Indian parliament in Delhi, the president of Pakistan is assassinated, and a U.S. military base is hit by a North Korean missile. America and Britain discover chilling links between the attacks, but U.S. President Jim West wants to avoid another war. No one is yet aware that the war is already unstoppable. Detail by authentic detail, Humphrey Hawksley chillingly captures the unthinkable—a world speeding towards its own destruction.

The Journey Home


Michael Baron - 2010
    Several people are near him when he opens his eyes, all strangers. All of them seem perfectly friendly, but none of them can explain to him how he got there. They offer him a delicious meal and pleasant conversation in a beautifully decorated room. This would be a very nice experience if not for one thing: Joseph doesn't know where he is and he has no way to contact his wife, who he is sure is worried sick over him. Thanking the people for their hospitality, he leaves to make his way back home. The only problem is that whatever happened to him has stripped him of most of his memories. He knows he needs to get back to his wife, but he doesn't know how to find her. He sets out on a journey to find his home with no sense of where he's going and only the precious, indelible vision of the woman he loves to guide him.Antoinette is an elderly woman in an assisted living facility. She’s spent the last six years there since her husband died, and most of those years have been happy. She enjoys the company of others in her situation and her son comes to visit often. But in recent months, she’s had a tougher and tougher time leaving her room. Her friends seem different to her and the world seems increasingly confusing. She spends an escalating amount of time on a journey inside her head. There, her body and mind haven’t betrayed her. There, she’s a young newlywed with a husband who dotes on her and an entire life of dreams to live. There, she is truly home.Warren, Antoinette’s son, is a man in his early forties going through the toughest year of his life. His marriage ended, he lost his job, and in the past few months, his mother has gone from hale to increasingly hazy. Having trouble finding work, he spends more and more time by his mother’s bedside. But her lack of lucidity both frustrates and frightens him. With far too much time on his hands, he decides to try to recreate his memories of home by attempting to cook his mother’s greatest dishes using the rudimentary appliances available in her room. He finds the challenge surprisingly rewarding, especially because the only time he feels his mother is truly with him anymore is when she is eating the meals he prepares for her.Joseph, Antoinette, and Warren are three people on different searches for home. How they find it, and how they connect with one another at this critical stage in each of their lives, is the foundation for a profound and deeply moving story.

Drink the Tea


Thomas Kaufman - 2010
    Growing up without parents or a home, by age twelve he is a successful young man, running his own small empire, until he meets Shadrack Davies. That's Captain Shadrack Davies, of the D.C. Police. Davies wants to reform Gidney and becomes his foster father. Though he tries not to, Gidney learns a small amount of ethics from Shad---just enough to bother a kid from the streets for the rest of his life.Now Gidney is a PI, walking those same streets. So it's no surprise that when his closest friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, asks Gidney to find his missing daughter, Gidney is compelled to say yes---even though she's been missing for twenty-five years. He finds a woman who may be the girl's mother--and within hours she turns up dead. The police accuse Gidney of the murder and throw him in jail.Maybe Gidney should quit while he's behind. But when his investigation puts him up against a ruthless multinational corporation, a two-faced congressman, and a young woman desperate to conceal her past, Gidney has no time left for second thoughts. In fact, he may have no time left at all.Thomas Kaufman is a winner of the PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Competition. His debut novel, Drink the Tea, which boasts an original PI and an engaging cast of characters, adds a fresh perspective to the genre.

Off You Go: A Novella


Boo Walker - 2014
    She left a suicide note in her abandoned car. There were witnesses. But her mother doesn’t buy it and hires Dewey Moses, the vegetable farmer and sometime private investigator to find out the truth. Dewey finds out quickly that sometimes it’s best to leave things alone.