Book picks similar to
The Hollywood Trilogy: A Couple of Comedians, The True Story of Jody McKeegan, and Turnaround by Don Carpenter
fiction
hollywood
american-fiction
los-angeles
Badge Of Evil
Craig Horowitz - 2015
Badge of Evil is the first novel in a bold new thriller series from the writing team of private investigator Bill Stanton and award-winning journalist Craig Horowitz.All eyes are on New York City’s police commissioner Lawrence Brock after his hands-on role in a raid on a potential terrorist cell that turns into a blazing shootout. There’s even talk that he may be headed to Washington to take over Homeland Security.Investigative journalist A. J. Ross wants to expose the ruthless opportunist behind Brock’s heroic image. Freewheeling private investigator Frank Bishop is hired by the family of the lone surviving suspect, desperate to prove the young man’s innocence. A. J. and Bishop hate each other at first sight, but they’ll need to learn to work together quickly if they want to take down the commissioner—because Lawrence Brock will do anything to ensure the dark secrets of his past remain hidden.Badge of Evil introduces a dynamic new voice in thriller fiction, in the spirit of such bestselling authors as Harlan Coben and David Baldacci. It is a novel of our times and for our times—an all too familiar story of corruption and abuse at the highest levels, and how the lust for power can drive men to commit the most shocking acts.
Flight For Control
Karlene Petitt - 2012
But her husband, Captain Bill Jacobs, has his concerns. While her twin daughters are off at camp, and Bill is actively campaigning for the Pilot Union Presidency, Kathryn secretly begins her investigation. What she learns will shock the nation. Flight For Control is a thriller that reads like a mystery. But to Kathryn, there is no mystery on the condition of the airline industry—it’s broken. Planes are crashing. Pensions are lost. Pilots are financially and emotionally bankrupt due to fatigue, furloughs, and loss of seniority. It’s time that someone takes control before it’s too late—unless it already is. Your life is in your pilot’s hands. Do you know who’s flying your plane?
Lake Wobegon Days
Garrison Keillor - 1985
"Filled with warmth and humor, sadness and tenderness, songs and poems, Lake Wobegon Days is an unforgettable portrait of small-town American life, of why 'we are what we are' and why 'smart doesn't count for much."
The Great American Novel
Philip Roth - 1973
"Roth is better than he's ever been before.... The prose is electric." (The Atlantic)Gil Gamesh is the only pitcher who ever tried to kill the umpire, and John Baal, The Babe Ruth of the Big House, never hit a home run sober. But you've never heard of them -- or of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history -- because of the communist plot and the capitalist scandal that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.
The Cobra Event
Richard Preston - 1997
By her midmorning art class, Kate's runny nose gives way to violent seizures and a hideous scene of self-cannibalization. She dies soon after. When a homeless man meets a similarly gruesome and mystifying fate, the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta sends pathologist Alice Austen to investigate. What she uncovers is the work of a killer, a man who calls himself Archimedes and is intent on spreading his deadly Cobra virus throughout New York City. A silent crisis erupts, with Austen and a secret FBI forensic team rushing to expose the terrorist.Even more frightening than Preston's story about the fictitious Cobra virus, however, is the truth that lies beneath it. As the author writes in his introduction, "The nonfiction roots of this book run deep.... My sources include eyewitnesses who have seen a variety of biological-weapons installations in different countries, and people who have developed and tested strategic bioweapons." In fact, the only reason The Cobra Event was not written as nonfiction is that none of Preston's sources would go on record.Woven throughout the novel are sections of straight nonfiction reporting that reveal the terrifying truth about the development of biological weapons and the clandestine operations of Russia and Iraq. Three years of research and more than 100 interviewswithhigh-level sources in the FBI, the U.S. military, and the scientific community went into The Cobra Event. The result is sure to shock you.
Desperate Characters
Paula Fox - 1970
Their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. After Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a stray, perhaps rabies-infected cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague the Bentwoods' lives, revealing the fault lines and fractures in a marriage—and a society—wrenching itself apart.First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature — a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day."
Code Name Camelot
David Archer - 2018
With the help of childhood friends, he learns to watch others around him and mimic their behaviors, in order to conceal the fact that his mind operates more like a computer that he has spent years programming. That program is what allows Noah to pass himself off as normal, by establishing parameters of right and wrong that are completely inviolable to him.As a young adult, Noah finds structure in the U.S. Army, and becomes an excellent and exemplary soldier, but when his self-imposed programming is put to the test by the murderous acts of the superior officer, Noah finds himself quickly made expendable, charged with crimes he did not commit and facing the possibility of execution. Without any reasonable hope for a reprieve, Noah's logic-based mind accepts his fate.Sometimes, though, things are not all as they seem to be, and Noah is offered one chance to save himself. It was his disability, his lack of emotion, that made him the soldier he had become. Now, an ultrasecret organization known as E & E wants Noah's talents, offering him a chance to survive…As the most deadly assassin the world has ever known.
A Perfect Spy
John le Carré - 1986
Who is he? Who was he? Who owns him? Who trained him? Secrets of state are at risk. As the truth about Pym gradually emerges, the reader joins Pym's pursuers to explore the unsettling life and motives of a man who fought the wars he inherited with the only weapons he knew, and so became a perfect spy.
The Hammer of Eden
Ken Follett - 1993
Crackerjack young FBI agent Judy Maddox is assigned to track down the elusive, sinister group called the "Hammer of Eden."Judy's boss, who has a grudge against her, thinks he has given her a waste-of-time assignment. But Judy's research leads her to maverick seismologist Michael Quercus, who gives her the shocking news that it might just be possible for an earthquake to be deliberately triggered. And when a tremor in a remote California desert shows evidence of being machine-generated, Judy knows the threat is terrifyingly real.Suddenly in charge of a life-or-death investigation, Judy must pinpoint the terrorists' next target, with the help of the erratic but attractive Michael. Their compelling romantic drama is played out as they race to beat the terrorist deadline and prevent an unthinkable disaster.Unknown to them, Michael's estranged wife, gorgeous but angry, has fallen under the spell of a clever, sexy cult leader called Priest -- and they have stolen from Michael's computer the key data that enables the Hammer of Eden to carry out their cataclysmic threat. Worse still, Michael's son is with his wife -- and under the control of Priest. All of them are in mortal jeopardy as Judy and Michael fight to save San Francisco from being brought down in ruins.Ken Follett became a best-selling author in 1978 with the publication of "Eye of the Needle, " which won the Edgar award and became a major motion picture. He has sincewritten numerous other best-selling thrillers and historical novels, including "The Third Twin, " and "A Place Called Freedom."
Lost Boys
Orson Scott Card - 1992
But from the first, eight-year-old Stevie's life there is an unending parade of misery and disaster.Cruelly ostracized at his school, Stevie retreats further and further into himself and into a strange computer game and a group of imaginary friends.But there is something eerie about his loyal, invisible new playmates: each shares the name of a child who has recently vanished from the sleepy Southern town. And terror grows for Step and DeAnne as the truth slowly unfolds. For their son has found something savagely evil ... and it's coming for Stevie next.
Between the Bridge and the River
Craig Ferguson - 2006
Two childhood friends from Scotland and two illegitimate half-brothers from the American South suffer and enjoy all manner of bizarre experiences which, as it turns out, are somehow interconnected and, surprisingly enough, meaningful. An eclectic cast of characters includes Carl Jung, Fatty Arbuckle, Virgil, Marat, Socrates, and Tony Randall. Love, greed, hope, revenge, organized religion, and Hollywood are alternately tickled and throttled. Impossible to summarize and impossible to stop reading, this is a romantic comic odyssey that actually delivers and rewards.
Hunt For Justice
Diane Capri - 2018
Carly knows too much about a powerful Tampa conspiracy. When Carly becomes the number one suspect in the murder of a prominent plastic surgeon, Willa risks everything to uncover the conspiracy and keep Carly alive. Can she do it? Twisted Justice — War hero General Randall Andrews has been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court and Willa's husband George Carson leads the fight to defeat him. Until George is arrested for Andrews' murder and Willa pulls out all the stops to free her husband. Can Willa defeat the powerful forces against him or will her beloved George die on death row? Open this set and you'll agree with fans of Sue Grafton, Margaret Maron, William Kent Krueger, Louise Penny, John Grisham, Lee Child, and more. Grab your copy now and start reading today!
Dalva
Jim Harrison - 1988
Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam -- and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.
The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes
Stephen Marlowe - 1991
Marlowe gives it to us. The backdrop is Renaissance Europe, a world alive with creative ferment, triple-crossing intrigue, and the passionate quest for novelty. Lofty tragedy and lyric poetry still reign as queens of the literary arts, but young writers heady with ambition seek live action to give substance to their teeming imaginations. It is scoundrel time, and the novel is in gestation. To enter Cervantes's world we cross a threshold that is Shakespearean and quixotic into a metaphysical wonderland where time expands to become space and vast vaulted distances bend back on themselves, where the threads of fiction and the strands of history shuttle back and forth in the great loom of the artist's imagination. Marlowe's Cervantes is a towering creation: flesh and blood and living legend, actor in and creator of the events in his own fantastical life story. He not only survives war, prison, torture, and poverty, he survives death itself, growing inexorably toward the writing of Don Quixote, which would bring both him and his character immortal fame.