Roses are red, violets are blue, but murder comes in every hue

“Terrific news for fans of first-class thrillers.” A murder in a Tehran hotel leaves the London art world spinning. The deceased, beloved at home as a proud dealer in antiquities, now stands accused of smuggling artifacts out of Iran for sale in the West. But despite the triumphal announcements of the secret police, there is something perhaps too tidy in the official report—given that no artifacts have been recovered, no smuggling history discovered, no suspects found. Half a world away, Darius Qazai delivers a stiring eulogy for his departed friend. A fabulously successful financier, Qazai has directed his life and wealth toward philanthropy, art preservation, and peaceful protest against the regime of his native Iran. His fortune, colossal; his character, immaculate. Pleasantly ensconced in the world of the London expatriate elite, Qazai is the last person anyone would suspect of foul play. Yet something ominous is disrupting Qazai’s recent business deals, some rumor from his past so frightening to his American partners that they will no longer speak to him. So Qazai hires a respectable corporate intelligence firm to investigate himself and clear his reputation. A veteran of intelligence work in the former Soviet Union, Ben Webster soon discovers that Qazai’s pristine past is actually a dense net of interlocking half-truths and unanswered questions: Is he a respectable citizen or an art smuggler? Is his fortune built on merit or on arms dealing? Is he, after all, his own man? As he closes in on the truth of Qazai’s fortune—and those who would wish to destroy it—Webster discovers he may pay for that knowledge with the lives of his own family. A vivid and relentless tale of murderous corporate espionage, The Jackal’s Share follows the money through the rotten alleys of Marrakech and the shining spires of Dubai, from the idyllic palaces of Lake Como to the bank houses of London’s City. The Jackal’s Share plunges readers into a Middle East as strange and raw as ever depicted, where recent triumphs rest uneasily atop buried crimes and monumental greed

San Quentin, death-row inmate Darrell Standing, escapes the horror of prison life—and long stretches in a straitjacket—by withdrawing into vivid dreams of past lives, including incarnations as a French nobleman and an Englishman in medieval Korea. Based on the life and imprisonment of Jack London’s friend Ed Morrell, this is one of the author’s most complex and original works. As Lorenzo Carcaterra argues in his Introduction, The Star Rover is “written with energy and force, brilliantly marching between the netherworlds of brutality and beauty

It is the second book in the Richard Blade series. __________________________________________ When a computer transported Richard Blade to Dimension X, he found himself in Mortal danger. Dimension X was a land in peril. The aristocratic Caths, besieged by the Mongs, a cruel and mindless people, were constantly engulfed in wars and violence. Richard Blade was their only hope. But he was a man alone - and time was running out

Easy, Big Fella... Zoo worker Callie Jordan knows something primal when she sees it: take, for instance, the naked man sitting at the foot of her bed. He's the same (naked) guy she saw after hours at the zoo. But now he's in her apartment, and just happens to have turned into a black-as-night jaguar. The average person would be in a blind panic; Callie certainly intends to be—once she finishes processing what this incredibly hot lunatic is telling her... It seems Callie's visitor, the one who prefers skins to shirts, is Prince Rogar—from a place far, far away. Oh, and Callie is from the same place, has the same nifty shapeshifting powers, and is destined to be Rogar's lifemate! It figures the first hot guy ever to show a bit of interest turns out to be certifiable. Then again, Callie's seen Rogar's powers (plus some other choice things) firsthand—and testing her new roomie's powers of persuasion would be the ultimate walk on the wild side

“I did not go to Nicaragua intending to write a book, or, indeed, to write at all: but my encounter with the place affected me so deeply that in the end I had no choice.” So notes Salman Rushdie in his first work of nonfiction, a book as imaginative and meaningful as his acclaimed novels. In The Jaguar Smile, Rushdie paints a brilliantly sharp and haunting portrait of the people, the politics, the terrain, and the poetry of “a country in which the ancient, opposing forces of creation and destruction were in violent collision.” Recounting his travels there in 1986, in the midst of America’s behind-the-scenes war against the Sandinistas, Rushdie reveals a nation resounding to the clashes between government and individuals, history and morality

A triumph of the New Space Opera: fast, complicated, wonder-filled! Hugo Award finalist and Robert A. Heinlein Award–winning SF writer Michael Flynn now turns to space opera with stunningly successful results. Full of rich echoes of space opera classics from Doc Smith to Cordwainer Smith, The January Dancer tells the fateful story of an ancient pre-human artifact of great power, and the people who found it. Starting with Captain Amos January, who quickly loses it, and then the others who fought, schemed, and killed to get it, we travel around the complex, decadent, brawling, mongrelized interstellar human civilization the artifact might save or destroy. Collectors want the Dancer; pirates take it, rulers crave it, and they’ll all kill if necessary to get it. This is a thrilling yarn of love, revolution, music, and mystery, and it ends, as all great stories do, with shock and a beginning

Ruth Galloway is called in to investigate when builders, demolishing a large old house in Norwich to make way for a housing development, uncover the bones of a child beneath a doorway – minus the skull. Is it some ritual sacrifice or just plain straightforward murder? DCI Harry Nelson would like to find out – and fast. It turns out the house was once a children's home. Nelson traces the Catholic priest who used to run the home. Father Hennessey tells him that two children did go missing from the home forty years before – a boy and a girl. They were never found. When carbon dating proves that the child's bones predate the home and relate to a time when the house was privately owned, Ruth is drawn ever more deeply into the case. But as spring turns into summer it becomes clear that someone is trying very hard to put her off the scent by frightening her half to death…

Рассказ вошёл в сборники: Dark Carnival (Тёмный карнавал) The October Country (Октябрьская страна) The Stories of Ray Bradbury (И грянул гром: 100 рассказов)

Jo Nesbø is known the world over as a consummate mystery/thriller writer. Famed for his deft characterization, hair-raising suspense and shocking twists, Nesbø’s dexterity with the dark corners of the human heart is on full display in these inventive and enthralling stories. A detective with a nose for jealousy is on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin; a bereaved father must decide whether vengeance has a place in the new world order after a pandemic brings about the collapse of society; a garbage man fresh off a bender tries to piece together what happened the night before; a hired assassin matches wits against his greatest adversary in a dangerous game for survival; and an instantly electric connection between passengers on a flight to London may spell romance, or something more sinister. With Nesbø’s characteristic gift for outstanding atmosphere and gut-wrenching revelations, The Jealousy Man confirms that he is at the peak of his abilities

A dying assassin is given one last assignment and one last chance for survival. The job: to find God Almighty and destroy Him. The payment: eternal life. With the aid of a beautiful lady gambler, an ancient Hollywood witch, and a telepathic smartass of a girl, Dell Ammo breaches the gates of Heaven and Hell to pull the Cosmic Trigger. Self-consciously styled after a hard-boiled detective novel, this is a most unusual and entertaining work of satirical SF. An assassin by trade, Dell Ammo works in a bombed-out section of Los Angeles that has been irradiated by a nuclear explosion. Terminally ill, Ammo is offered immortality by a millionaire evangelist if he will do one job: kill God. Accepting the assignment, Ammo embarks on a bizarre hunt through postnuclear L.A., assisted by Ann Perrine, a woman claiming to be an accountant but whose skills are considerably more interesting, and a nymphet with powerful, sexually telepathic abilities. In his search for God, Ammo encounters a powerful group of clerics eager to protect God, the source of their power, whether he exists or not. In other hands this could be pretentiously silly, but Koman carries it off with wit and energy

In this alternately chilling and hilarious sequel to The Atrocity Archives (2004) from Hugo-winner Stross, Bob Howard is a computer übergeek employed by the Laundry, a secret British agency assigned to clean up incursions from other realities caused by the inadvertent manipulation of complex mathematical equations: in other words, magic. In 1975, the CIA used Howard Hughes's Glomar Explorer in a bungled attempt to raise a sunken Soviet submarine in order to access the Jennifer Morgue, an occult device that allows communication with the dead. Now a ruthless billionaire intends to try again, even if by doing so he awakens the Great Old Ones, who thwarted the earlier expedition. It's up to Bob and a collection of British eccentrics even Monty Python would consider odd to stop the bad guy and save the world, while getting receipts for all expenditures or else face the most dreaded menace of all: the Laundry's own auditors. Stross has a marvelous time making eldritch horror appear commonplace in the face of bureaucracy

Arriving home disillusioned from the Crusades, Hugh discovers that his village has been ransacked and his wife abducted by knights in search of a relic worth more than any throne in Europe. Only by taking on the role of a jester is he able to infiltrate his enemy's castle, where he thinks his wife is captive. With the unstoppable pace and plot of a page-turning Alex Cross novel, THE JESTER is a breathtakingly romantic, pulse-pounding adventure-one that could only be conjured by the mind of James Patterson. Everyone who has ever hoped for good to defeat evil or for love to conquer all will not be able to stop turning the pages of this masterful novel of virtue, laughter-yes, laughter-and suspense

Russia, 1910. Young Valentina Ivanova charms St Petersburg's aristocracy with her classic Russian beauty and her talent as a pianist. She scandalises society when she begins a romance with Jens Friis, a Danish engineer. He brings to her life a passion and an intimacy she has never known. Unbending in their opposition, her parents push her into a loveless engagement with a Russian count. Valentina struggles for independence and to protect her young sister from the tumult sweeping the city, as Russia is bound for rebellion. The Tsar, the Duma and the Bolsheviks are at each other's throats. Valentina is forced to make a choice that changes her life for ever…

For Oxford, the arrival of twenty-seven American tourists is nothing out of the ordinary. until one of their number is found dead in Room 310 at the Randolph Hotel. It looks like a sudden — and tragic — accident. Only Chief Inspector Morse appears not to overlook the simultaneous theft of a jewel-encrusted antique from the victim’s handbag. Then, two days later, a naked and battered corpse is dragged from the River Cherwell. A coincidence? Maybe. But this time Morse is determined to prove the link

Whether poor Stella had been a good girl or a bad one, what mattered most was the fact that she was now awfully dead

Donna Leon has won heaps of critical praise and legions of fans for her best-selling mystery series featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. With The Jewels of Paradise, Leon takes readers beyond the world of the Venetian Questura in her first standalone novel. Caterina Pellegrini is a native Venetian, and like so many of them, she's had to leave home to pursue her career. With a doctorate in baroque opera from Vienna, she lands in Birmingham, England. Birmingham, however, is no Venice. When Caterina gets word of a position back home, she jumps at the opportunity. The job is an unusual one. After nearly three centuries, two locked trunks, believed to contain the papers of a baroque composer have been discovered. Deeply-connected in religious and political circles, the composer died childless; now two Venetians, descendants of his cousins, each claim inheritance. Caterina's job is to examine any enclosed papers to discover the "testamentary disposition' of the composer. But when her research takes her in unexpected directions she begins to wonder just what secrets these trunks may hold. From a masterful writer, The Jewels of Paradise is a superb novel, a gripping tale of intrigue, music, history and greed

The new novel by the internationally acclaimed author — "a farce of nuclear proportions"(Vanity Fair) Arnon Grunberg is one of the most subtly outrageous provocateurs in world literature. The Jewish Messiah, which chronicles the evolution of one Xavier Radek from malcontent grandson of a former SS officer, to Jewish convert, to co- translator of Hitler's Mein Kampf into Yiddish, to Israeli politician and Israel's most unlikely prime minister, is his most outrageous work yet. Taking on the most well-guarded pieties and taboos of our age, The Jewish Messiah is both a great love story and a grotesque farce that forces a profound reckoning with the limits of human guilt, cruelty, and suffering. It is without question Arnon Grunberg's masterpiece

The Mongol nation that used to rule a half of the world for about five hundred years is on decline for the last couple hundred years. The old prophecy states that, when everything is just right, someone of the different blood would come and save the nation from the financial disaster. A new archeological dig of the burial from the time when Mongols roamed the world presents the last resting place of Batu Khan — the conqueror of Eastern Europe. There is a diary written by Batu Khan that hints that Khazars — the Jews of the Central Asia were completely integrated into Mongol society. More, many, including Batu Khan himself, were married to the Jews for generations, thus they were Jews more often than the Mongols. Mongols could be another lost Jewish tribe and the nation was — The Jewish Nation of Mongols. Now, the Mongols have to fulfill the prophecy and find the person that would save the country. That takes them to the Jewish community of Williamsburg, NY

When everything's going right, it's a sure sign that things are about to go very, very wrong. Rachel Benjamin's life might look glamorous but she has worked into the early morning on more nights, canceled more weekend plans and slept in more Holiday Inns in small industrial towns than she cares to count. (Standard practice in the business of mergers and acquisitions.) And that picture of her on the recent cover of Fortune? It inspired a reprise of her grandmother's favorite lecture, the one titled "You don't want to be one of those career gals, do you?" (Other popular hits include "Have you met anyone nice?" and "I just want to go to a wedding before I die.") But this week Rachel's job is taking her to Boston, where in between work obligations she plans to squeeze in quality time with her promising new boyfriend. They've just hit the six-month mark and things are going so well, Rachel's not even worried anymore that she'll jinx it. There are just a few little problems: Her friend's been attacked and a serial killer is on the loose – and the two might actually be related. Oh, and her promising new boyfriend? He seems to be squeezing in quality time with his new gazelle-like, model-material colleague… Now Rachel's making like Miss Marple again, trying to track down her friend's assailant – not to mention get a clue about her relationship. When she stopped worrying about jinxing things, did she jinx everything?

While the millionaire Stratford Harlow is in Princetown, not only does he meet with his lawyer Mr. Ellenbury, but he gets his first glimpse of the beautiful Aileen Rivers, niece of the actor and convicted felon, Arthur Ingle. When Aileen is involved in a car accident on the Thames Embankment, the driver is James Carlton of Scotland Yard. Later that evening Carlton gets a call. It is Aileen. She needs help

When Helga Rolfe flies into Nassau to join her elderly millionaire husband, Herman, she finds plenty of bad news awaiting her. Crippled, suspicious Herman has long suspected she’s been playing around since their marriage, and is proposing to write some nasty-looking terms into his will. Herman is right, of course — Helga’s weakness is for handsome, sexy men like Harry Jackson, whom she meets on the beach the day she arrives. But Harry is not quite what she thinks — and because of him she suddenly finds herself in a nightmare world of blackmail, voodoo and violence

Who are the jokers? The jokers are the government, and the biggest joker of all is the governor, a bug-eyed, strutting, rapacious character of unequaled incompetence who presides over the nameless Middle Eastern city where this effervescent comedy by Albert Cossery is set. The jokers are also the revolutionaries, no less bumbling and no less infatuated with the trappings of power than the government they oppose. And the jokers are Karim, Omar, Heykal, Urfy, and their friends, free spirits who see the other jokers for the jokers they are and have cooked up a sophisticated and, most important, foolproof plan to enliven public life with a dash of subversive humor. The joke is on them all

Supposedly a true story framed in the format of a novel, The Jonah Watch is based on Jack Cady’s experiences while serving on a Coast Guard cutter off the coast of Maine. Trapped on an icebound cutter, the crew of the Adrian are haunted by apparitions, and the resulting terror and paranoia make for a claustrophobic tale of initiation and survival

Zelmont Raines was once a Super Bowl-winning wide receiver. But recurring injuries, a self-destructive lifestyleand too many run-ins with the law have submarined his career. Back in L.A. after bombing out of the European League, his one last chance is the expansion team in town, the Barons. Unfortunately for Zelmont, the roar of the crowds and the adulation of the fans-not to mention the money and the honeys that go with it-are no longer his for the taking. Bumped, the bitter athlete falls in with Wilma Wells, the smart (and fine) lawyer for the Barons. She's got ideas Zelmont likes…and not just in the bedroom. Soon he and his friend, the switch-hitting ex-pro defensive tackle Napoleon Graham, throw in with Wells to rip off the mobbed-up owner of the Barons. It's only then that Zelmont discovers that no matter how fast he can jook, no matter how tough he can fake, trouble is closing in on him way too fast. Mix elements of Jim Thompson with the street-smart verve of Donald Goines, add a couple of dashes of the compact delivery of Richard Stark, and you get The Jook: a crime novel where football and venal ambitions collide in the end zone. *** "Gary Phillips wries tough and gritty parables about life and death on the mean streets." – Michael Connelly

"Sergio Pitol is not only our best active storyteller, he is also the bravest renovator of our literature." — Álvaro Enrigue, Letras Libres Pitol is unfathomable; it could almost be said that he is a literature entire of himself." — Daniel Saldaña Paris, author of Among Strange Victims "Pitol is probably one of Mexico's most culturally complex and composite writers. He is certainly the strangest, most unfathomable, and eccentric. . [His] voice. . reverberates beyond the margins of his books." — Valeria Luiselli, author of Faces in the Crowd "Reading him, one has the impression. . of being before the greatest writer in the Spanish language in our time." — Enrique Vila-Matas The Journey features one of the world's master storytellers at work as he skillfully recounts two weeks of travel around the Soviet Union in 1986. From the first paragraph, Sergio Pitol dislocates the sense of reality, masterfully and playfully blurring the lines between fiction and fact. This adventurous story, based on the author's own travel journals, parades through some of the territories that the author lived in and traveled through (Prague, the Caucasus, Moscow, Leningrad) as he reflects on the impact of Russia's sacred literary pantheon in his life and the power that literature holds over us all. The Journey, the second work in Pitol's remarkable "Trilogy of Memory" (which Deep Vellum is publishing in its entirety), which won him the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 2005 and inspired the newest generation of Spanish-language writers, represents the perfect example of one of the world's greatest authors at the peak of his power

A major literary event: the first-ever English translation of a lost masterpiece of Holocaust literature by acclaimed author and survivor H. G. Adler. The story behind the story of The Journey is remarkable in itself: Award-winning translator Peter Filkins discovered an obscure German novel in a Harvard Square bookstore and, reading it, realized that it was a treasure unavailable to English speakers. It was the most powerful book by the late H. G. Adler, a survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, a writer whose work had been praised by authors from Elias Canetti to Heinrich Böll and yet remained unknown to international audiences. Written in 1950 after Adler’s emigration to England, The Journey was not released in Germany until 1962. After the war, larger publishing houses stayed away from novels about the Holocaust, feeling that the tragedy could not be fictionalized and that any metaphorical interpretation was obscene. Only a small publisher was in those days willing to take on The Journey. Yet Filkins found that Adler had depicted the event in a unique, truly modern, and deeply moving way. Avoiding specific mention of country or camps — even of Nazis and Jews—The Journey is a lyrical nightmare of a family’s ordeal and one member’s survival. Led by the doctor patriarch Leopold, the Lustig family finds itself “forbidden” to live, uprooted into a surreal and incomprehensible circumstance of deprivation and death. This cataclysm destroys father, daughter, sister, and wife and leaves only Paul, the son, to live again among those who saved or sacrificed him. The Journey reveals a world beset by an “epidemic of mental illness. . As a result of the epidemic, everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late.” Linked by its innovative style to the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, The Journey is as much a revelation as other recent discoveries on the subject as the works of W. G. Sebald and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Francaise. It is a book proving that art can portray the unimaginable and expand people’s perceptions of it, a work anyone interested in recent history and modern literature must read

"Los Angeles has Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, and Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk. The beautiful, resilient city of Beirut belongs to Khoury."-Laila Lalami, Los Angeles Times From the author of Gate of the Sun and "one of the most innovative novelists in the Arab World" (The Washington Post Book World) comes the many-layered story of Little Gandhi, or Abd Al-Karim, a shoe shine in a city fractured by war. Shot down in the street, Gandhi's story is recounted by an aging and garrulous prostitute named Alice. Ingeniously embedding stories within stories, Little Gandhi becomes the story of a city, Beirut, in the grip of civil war. Once again, as John Leonard wrote in Harper's Magazine, Elias Khoury "fills in the blank spaces on the Middle Eastern map in our Western heads."

Joel is fifteen and has left school, wanting to become a merchant sailor and travel far away from his home town in Northern Sweden. But first he must face up to the past and meet his mother who ran off when he was little. After such a long time how will Joel and his dad cope with such a reunion and will Joel ever sail the seas as he dreams...?

Legendary trader and explorer Marco Polo was nicknamed "Marco of the millions" because his Venetian countrymen took the grandiose stories of his travels to be exaggerated, if not outright lies. As he lay dying, his priest, family, and friends offered him a last chance to confess his mendacity, and Marco, it is said, replied, "I have not told the half of what I saw and did." Now Gary Jennings has imagined the half left unsaid as even more elaborate and adventurous than Polo's tall tales. From the palazzi and back streets of medieval Venice to the sumptuous court of Kublai Khan, Marco meets all manner of people, survives all manner of danger, and becomes an almost compulsive collector of customs, languages, and women. Review "He enlivens his picaresque story with wonderfully detailed descriptions of the landscape, climate, flora and fauna Polo encountered along the way. The real energy of Gary Jennings's narrative is devoted to those old standbys lust and bloodlust. His zeal for clinical description of sexual practices is matched only by his enthusiasm for the minutiae of Oriental torture. Pound for pound,The Journeyeris a classic."---Gene Lyons, *Newsweek "A novel of epic proportions."--Library Journal onThe Journeyer*

The Joy Luck Club, published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1989, presents the stories of four Chinese-immigrant women and their American-born daughters. Each of the four Chinese women has her own view of the world based on her experiences in China and wants to share that vision with her daughter. The daughters try to understand and appreciate their mothers' pasts, adapt to the American way of life, and win their mothers' acceptance. The book's name comes from the club formed in China by one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, in order to lift her friends' spirits and distract them from their problems during the Japanese invasion. Suyuan continued the club when she came to the United States -hoping to bring luck to her family and friends and finding joy in that hope. Amy Tan wrote The Joy Luck Club to try to understand her own relationship with her mother. Tan's Chinese parents wanted Americanized children but expected them to think like Chinese. Tan found this particularly difficult as an adolescent. While the generational differences were like those experienced by other mothers and daughters, the cultural distinctions added another dimension. Thus, Tan wrote not only to sort out her cultural heritage but to learn how she and her mother could get along better. Critics appreciate Tan's straightforward manner as well as the skill with which she talks about Chinese culture and mother/daughter relationships. Readers also love The Joy Luck Club: women of all ages identify with Tan's characters and their conflicts with their families, while men have an opportunity through this novel to better understand their own behaviors towards women. Any reader can appreciate Tan's humor, fairness, and objectivity

Pippa Ewell had left behind the dark and forbidding Greystone Manor -- also the memories of Conrad, the handsome stranger who had swept her breathlessly into his arms and heart. But Pippa returned to find the truth behind her sister's mysterious death. And suddenly the fairy-tale kindgom glittered with evil and danger

Operatives of the shadowy covert organization Sigma Force, Dr. Lisa Cummings and Monk Kokkalis search for answers to the bizarre affliction aboard a cruise liner transformed into a makeshift hospital. But a sudden and savage attack by terrorist hijackers turns the mercy ship into a floating bio-weapons lab