Eliza Benedict cherishes her peaceful, ordinary suburban life. But her tranquility is shattered when she receives a letter from the last person she ever expects to hear from: Walter Bowman. There was your photo, in a magazine. I'd know you anywhere. In the summer of 1985, when she was fifteen, Eliza was kidnapped by Walter. He had killed at least one girl and Eliza always suspected he had other victims as well. Now on death row for the rape and murder of his final victim, Walter seems to be making a heartfelt act of contrition. Having wondered why Walter had let her live, she cautiously makes contact with him. Yet as Walter presses her for more and deeper contact, it becomes clear that he is after something greater than forgiveness. He wants Eliza to remember what really happened that long-ago summer. He wants her to save his life. And Eliza, who has worked hard for her comfortable life, will do anything to protect it – even if it means finally facing the terrible truth she's kept buried inside

Cynthia Eden returns to the realm of the Other, where the supernatural bounty hunters of Night Watch work hard and play harder… Sandra “Dee” Daniels is a vampire’s worst nightmare. Sure, she couldn’t get up to five-six in the highest heels money can buy—not that she ever wears heels. But the monsters in her past and the stake in her boot are enough to keep most bloodsuckers interested in staying undead out of Baton Rouge. But there are changes afoot on her turf. Rumors of a Born Master in town—a vampire so powerful he can make the streets run with blood. And a new face in Dee’s dive bars and alleyways—Simon Chase, a strong, sexy shadow with a haunted past of his own. Simon knows a lot about the dark side of Dee’s work. He knows even more about how to make her body spark with desire. But the hot lust shimmering between them is only the beginning. Because Simon also knows a secret that will change Dee’s life—if she can live long enough to uncover it

In her bewitching 30th novel, I'll Take You There, Joyce Carol Oates returns again to neurotic female post-adolescence. The unnamed narrator attends an upstate New York university in the early 1960s. In those times of tightly prescribed femininity, she joins a sorority in a bald attempt to become part of the sisterhood of normalcy. It doesn't work. She reads philosophy, she works for a living, she's asexual, she's an orphan, she's a Jew: "I was a freak in the midst of their stunning, stampeding, blazing female normality." Booted from the sorority, she falls hard for a thirtyish black philosophy student who seems to her to live on a higher plane than the rest of humanity. In the final section, she is called west to the deathbed of someone she thought was lost to her forever. Oates brings together some of her strongest trademark qualities: She writes her character's life as though it were a fairy tale. She sells her material, bringing dramatic tension to the very first page: "They would claim I destroyed Mrs. Thayer… Yet others would claim that Mrs. Thayer destroyed me." And she writes with tender care about the intellectual life of her young protagonist. Some find Oates's obsession with nascent womanhood claustrophobic, but in this heroine she finds a vein of integrity and intellectual probity peculiar to those who are not quite adult. Most writers treat college life as comedy or romance. Oates, on the other hand, seriously explores an age when we are most terribly ourselves. She seems to find something deeply human and pleasingly dramatic in this time wedged between childhood and adulthood

What is Clare Wingate doing? One minute she's suffering in a pretty-in-pink gown she'll never wear again, and the next thing she knows it's morning… and she has the nastiest hangover of her life. To make matters worse, she's wearing nothing but a spritz of Escada and lying next to Sebastian Vaughan… her girlhood crush turned sexy, globe-hopping journalist. Somewhere between the toast and the toss of the bouquet she'd gotten herself into a whole lot of trouble. Clare had the right to go wild-;after all, she'd been knocked off her dyed-to-match shoes after finding her own fiancé in a compromising position with the washing machine repairman. Clearly her society wedding is off. But Sebastian pushed all the wrong buttons-;and some of the right ones, too. Clare is in no mood for love-;not even for lust-;and wants to forget about Sebastian and his six-pack abs ASAP. But he isn't in the mood to go away, and his kiss is impossible to forget

“A writer without mercy. . this book is like a wire stretched across the throat.” —Oliver Stone In an epic novel that does for Hollywood what Nashville did for Nashville, I’m Losing You follows the rich and famous and the down and out as their lives intersect in a series of coincidences that exposes the “bigger than life” ferocity of Hollywood — and proves that Bruce Wagner is a talent to be reckoned with. Wagner, author of the novel Dead Stars, examines the psychological complexities of Hollywood reality and fantasy, soaring far beyond the reaches of Robert Stone's Children of Light and Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust

A dark secret keeps Chicago assistant state's attorney Kristen Mayhew as tightly wound as the springy red curls she works to pin down. Meals at the nearby diner, sleepless nights renovating her empty house and days in court where the bad guy more often than not doesn't face justice make up her life-until she finds the bodies of three criminals she failed to convict in the trunk of her car. Each dead body comes accompanied by a sinister letter, the writer informing "Dearest Kristen" that justice has been done on her behalf. An unusual twist for a suspense novel, to be sure, but because the murderer preys on rapists, gang members and pedophiles, Rose'strademark tentacles of fear never fully extend (as they did in her earlier books, Don't Tell and Have You Seen Her). Instead, this book's greatest strength lies in the romance between Kristen and handsome detective Abe Reagan, who's still reeling from the death of his wife. Abundant side characters, including Abe's entire jovial clan, clutter the plot and diminish the story's tension, especially when minor players suddenly step forward to play major roles. But readers will appreciate Rose's sensitive portrayal of Kristen's hesitancy to trust and Abe's gentle perseverance in uncoiling the vibrant woman within