Conceived as a murder mystery, a political reportage, a personal odyssey of a man who refuses to succumb to the need to define himself and his Baghdad in terms of one identity. First published in Arabic in 2008, "The Tobacco Keeper" relates the investigation of the life of a celebrated Jewish Iraqi musician who was expelled to Israel in the 1950s. Having returned to Iraq, via Iran, the musician is thrown out as an Israeli spy. Returning for the third time under a forged passport, he is murdered in mysterious circumstances. Arriving in Baghdad's Green Zone during the US-led occupation, a journalist writing a story about the musician's life discovers an underworld of fake identities, mafias and militias. Even among the journalists, there is a secret world of identity games, fake names and ulterior motives. This is a novel written as investigative journalism, including apparently authentic sources, meticulously researched in Baghdad, Teheran, Istanbul and Damascus

"The adventures of a former Sydney detective from 21 Division who, in his prime, collared some of the most murderous criminals in Australian history yet, on retiring to the Gold Coast in Queensland, along with half of the criminal milieu he once pursued, is shot, king-hit, tortured, and thrown from buildings in his relentless pursuit of justice. With his trademark wit, warmth and humour, Matthew Condon takes us on a crazy ride - in boats, Kombis, Peugeots and window-washing platforms - through art galleries, libraries, swampy islands and caravan parks to illustrate that we are never too old for adventures." -- Publisher description

mc: mind control mf: male/female sex ff: female/female sex md: male dominant Ashley takes an intense interest in learning about the limits of DJ’s remarkable powers of persuasion

The future of a reckless and adventure-loving captain of the Dragoon Guards appeared very hum-drum and tedious in those days when Waterloo was both a recent, glorious victory and an end to the joys of soldiering. Big, handsome Captain John Staple left the Army because he feared boredom, and was immediately plunged into the kind of exciting hazards his temperament demanded. John Staple soon found himself involved in perilous activities in which participated such varied and colourful personalities [some extremely honest—others less so] as Jeremy Chirk the highwayman, Gabriel Stogumber the Bow Street Runner, and Nell Stornaway with whom the Captain's heart was soon deeply entangled

Much to the chagrin of his girlfriend, Gia, Repairman Jack doesn’t deal with appliances. He fixes situations—situations that too often land him in deadly danger. His latest fix is finding a stolen necklace which, unknown to him, is more than a simple piece of jewelry. Some might say it’s cursed, others might call it blessed. The quest leads Jack to a rusty freighter on Manhattan’s West Side docks. What he finds in its hold threatens his sanity and the city around him. But worst of all, it threatens Gia’s daughter Vicky, the last surviving member of a bloodline marked for extinction

From the author of THE HUNT FOR ATLANTIS, comes an electrifying new novel – prepare yourself for an adrenalin-fuelled ride. An ancient warrior For archaeologist Nina Wilde it's the opportunity of a lifetime. Her studies of an ancient text have convinced her that a tomb containing the remains of legendary warrior Hercules may actually exist. If she can locate it, it will be the most important historical find ever to be unearthed. An incredible treasure As Nina and Eddie Chase, her ex-SAS bodyguard, begin their search it's clear that others want to find the tomb – and the unimaginable riches contained within. Then Chase's attention is diverted by the re-appearance of a face from his past! A lethal enemy Nina and Chase are soon following a violent trail of corruption and conspiracy around the globe. FromSwitzerland toShanghai,Botswana toLondon, it's a race against time to find the Tomb of Hercules before it falls into the most evil of hands!

Husband-and-wife team Sam and Remi Fargo are intrigued when an archaeologist friend requests their help excavating a top secret historical site.  What they find will set them on a hunt for a prize greater than they could ever imagine.  The clues point to the hidden tomb of Attila the Hun, the High King who was reportedly buried with a vast fortune of gold and jewels and plunder . . . a bounty that has never been found.  As they follow the trail through Hungary, Italy, France, Russia, and Kazakhstan—a trail that they discover leads them not to one tomb, but five—the Fargos will find themselves pitted against a thieving group of amateur treasure hunters, a cunning Russian businessman, and a ruthless Hungarian who claims direct descent from Attila himself . . . and will stop at nothing to claim the tombs’ riches as his own

Who was the man we know as Jesus? In The Tongues of Men or Angels, Jonathan Trigell performs an act of literary resurrection. After the crucifixion, Jesus’ brother James and his right-hand man Peter remained devout Jews, vigorously opposed to Roman occupation. But a rival faction emerged, led by the charismatic itinerant Paul of Tarsus. While the Judeans were being massacred in their millions, Paul’s followers desperately tried to prove that their Messiah was peaceful: and in doing so they began telling stories which would transform a small sect of Judaism into a world religion. Over time, those stories turned to stone — while other truths vanished, crushed beneath the heel of orthodoxy, altered by the passing of years. So who was Jesus — the warrior or the pacifist? The Tongues of Men or Angels is a dazzling act of imagination and learning. It is a literary resurrection, unsealing a tale that has been waiting through long ages

In Ravka, just because you avoid one trap, it doesn’t mean you’ll escape the next. This story is a companion folk tale to Leigh Bardugo’s upcoming novel, Siege and Storm, the second book in the Grisha Trilogy. This story is also included in Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition

Peter Diamond, head of the Criminal Investigation Division in scenic Bath, England, is investigating the murder of a young woman whose body has been found in the canal, the only clue to her identity a tattoo of a music note on one of her teeth. For Diamond, who wouldn’t know a Stradivarius from a French horn, the investigation is his most demanding ever. Meanwhile, strange things are happening to jobbing violist Mel Farran, who finds himself scouted by a very elite classical quartet — one whose previous violist disappeared without a trace. Despite the mystery shrouding the group, the chance to join is too good to pass up, and Mel finds himself in a cushy residency at Bath Spa University with the quartet — and embroiled in the unusually musical murder investigation. As the story unfolds in fugue-like counterpoint, Peter and Mel both learn frightening secrets about fandom and about what it takes to survive in the cutthroat world of professional musicians. Peter Lovesey has been hailed by the critics as ‘superlative’, ‘a master of the genre’, ‘never puts a foot wrong’ and the Peter Diamond series as ‘one of the most enjoyable police series around’. This new case for the much-loved detective will bring new praise and much satisfaction for his legions of fans

Rita Awards Eight years ago, Jessie Bauer's life had changed forever. Now it was about to change back. For the man she had loved with all her heart and soul – the one she had finally learned to live without – was coming home to her at last. Alive and in one piece – or was he? Military pilot Tristan Bauer had spent eight years in a living hell, not sure if he was dead or alive, with only the memory of his beautiful Jessie to keep him going. Now she was in front of him, his for the taking. If only he could. Because in every way that mattered, Tristan knew the husband he'd been had died that day. And left his ghost in his place…

Edgar Award-winning author Lawrence Block returns with another outrageous caper featuring Chip Harrison...a sleuth who always seems to get into trouble with a capital T! Now a man about town working for a famous detective, Chip Harrison finds himselfat a Times Square Club waiting for his latest client, a stripper, to finish a night’s work. When she completes her set, she introduces him toher roommate, a dancer who’s targeted for murder...and killed in the club right before their very eyes! The list of suspects is as long as the line outside the club, and now it will take all of Chip’s street smarts to trap a killer! Lawrence Block is one of the most respected and bestselling authors ofmystery fiction Lawrence Block has won the Edgar Award three times, the Shamus Award four times, the Maltese Falcon Award twice, and was named Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America Previously published under pseudonyms and in omnibus collections, this isthe first time the Chip Harrison novels are being individually published under Lawrence Block’s name The Chip Harrison mystery series also includesMake Out With Murder,Chip Harrison Scores Again, andNo Score

This book is dedicated to the memory of Yakov Aminov murdered in cold blood by Arab terrorist in the international airport of Los Angeles. «This dreadful act took place on July 4, 2002, on Independence Day of the United States». After the bloody incident his sister – the Liza Aminova until the present time can’t become a U.S. citizen. Because one of the supervisors of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Denver city learned that the Liza Aminova is a Jewish. Therefore the supervisor firmly decided: Anyway refuse her request to become a U.S. citizen. Repentance of the Pope of Rome to the people of God

The book represents a unique collection of «Afghan» stories based on the events that occurred during the Afghanistan War (1979-1989). The authors of these true stories — soldiers and officers, who later were classified in Russian literature as “Afghan authors”, directly participated in the military actions in different parts of Afghanistan. Their memoirs became a stepping stone for the emergence of a new kind of Russian literature — “Afghan prose”. This book is a pilot project for the first translation into English of a collection of an anthology of Afghan prose — “The Torn Souls”. Уникальный сборник военной прозы о войне в Афганистане 1979–1989 годов: первый в истории проект подобного рода — ни в СССР ни в постсоветское время не издавалось столь представительной подборки «афганских» авторов. Также сборник уникален собранными под одной обложкой писателями, в своей молодости бывшими реальными участниками Афганской войны — солдатами и офицерами Советской армии

A freak accident causes two couples-a pair of Los Angeles liberals and Mexican illegal's-and their opposing worlds to collide in a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding

When her best friend Heather calls in the middle of the night, Becca assumes it’s the usual drama. Wrong. Heather’s parents have been arrested as dissidents—and Becca’s mother, the dystopian regime’s most infamous torturer, has already executed them for their crimes against the state. To stop Heather from getting herself killed trying to prove her parents’ innocence, Becca hunts for proof of their guilt. She doesn’t expect to find evidence that leaves her questioning everything she thought she knew about the dissidents… and about her mother. When she risks her life to save a dissident, she learns her mother isn’t the only one with secrets—and the plot she uncovers will threaten the lives of the people she loves most. For Becca, it’s no longer just a choice between risking execution and ignoring the regime’s crimes; she has to decide whose life to save and whose to sacrifice. It’s easy to be a hero when you can save the world, but what about when all you can do is choose how you live in it? THE TORTURER’S DAUGHTER is a story about ordinary teenage life amidst the realities of living under an oppressive regime… and the extraordinary courage it takes to do what’s right in a world gone wrong

"The Toss of a Lemon joins the company of the great novels on India." – Yann Martel *** In a fiction debut to rival The God of Small Things, Padma Viswanathan gives us a richly detailed and intimate vision of an India we've never seen. Inspired by her family history, Padma Viswanathan brings us deep inside the private lives of a Brahmin family as the subcontinent moves through sixty years of intense social and political change. At the novel's heart is Sivakami, a captivating girl-child married at ten to an astrologer and village healer who is drawn to her despite his horoscope, which foretells an early death-depending on how the stars align when their children are born. All is safe with their daughter's birth, but their second child, a son named Vairum, fulfills the prophecy: by eighteen, the child bride Sivakami is a widow with two young children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she must don the widow's white sari. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. She dutifully follows custom, except for one act of rebellion: she insists on a secular education for her troubled son. While her choice ensures that Vairum fulfills his promise in a modernizing India, it also sets Sivakami on a collision course with him. Vairum, fatherless in childhood, childless as an adult, rejects the caste identity that is his mother's mainstay, twisting their fates in fascinating and unbearable ways. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic and yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family's doorstep. It is also the debut of a major new voice in world fiction

In the small town of Potter's Field, Wyoming, where the police chief is a man called Slaughter, strange things are happening. Faced by an elemental terror beyond his experience, Slaughter holds the town's life in his hands. High in the night sky, the moon is full

Andrew Jones was once one of the few surgeons in the world to have that rare, God-given ability called The Touch. But after failing to save his young fiancé, Faith, at the scene of a car accident, Jones abandons his gift and shuns the operating room. Lara Blair owns a Chicago-based biomedical engineering company developing a surgical tool that will duplicate precisely the movement of a surgeon’s hands, reducing or eliminating failed surgical procedures. Lara has pursued the best surgeons in the world to test this surgical tool, and all of them have failed. As Lara pursues Jones’s skill for her project, Jones’s stubborn resistance cracks, and he begins to open up to her about the wounds that still haunt him. But when Jones discovers the urgency behind Lara’s work, he must choose to move beyond his past. As each is forced to surrender secret fears, they are bonded together through the lives of the people Jones serves and by the healing secret that Faith left behind

On the surface she's a sexy, sophisticated socialite, at home among the beautiful people of the Las Vegas upper crust. But Joanna Archer inhabits another world: a place ordinary humans cannot see… a dangerous dimension where an eternal battle rages between the agents of Light and Shadow. And Joanna is both. Stalked by an enigmatic doppelganger from a preternatural realm, Joanna can feel the Light failing – which is propelling her toward a terrifying confrontation with the ultimate master of evil, the dark lord of Shadow: her father. Vegas is all about winning big… or losing everything. To save her friends, her future, her worlds, Joanna Archer must gamble it all by fully embracing the darkness inside her

On her last day of high school, Cassandra Devlin walked out of exams and into a forest. Surrounded by the wrong sort of trees, and animals never featured in any nature documentary, Cass is only sure of one thing; alone, she will be lucky to survive. The sprawl of abandoned blockish buildings Cass discovers offers her only more puzzles. Where are the people? What is the intoxicating mist which drifts off the buildings in the moonlight? And why does she feel like she’s being watched? Increasingly unnerved, Cass is overjoyed at the arrival of the formidable Setari. Whisked to a world as technologically advanced as the first was primitive, where nanotech computers are grown inside people’s skulls, and few have any interest in venturing outside the enormous whitestone cities, Cass finds herself processed as a stray, a refugee displaced by the gates torn between worlds. Struggling with an unfamiliar language and culture, she must adapt to virtual classrooms, friends who can teleport, and the ingrained attitude that strays are backward and slow. Can Cass ever find her way home? And after the people of her new world discover her unexpected value, will they be willing to let her leave?

“The Tough Guys” contain three Spillane short stories that came out in men’s magazines in the early sixties. All are solid Spillane high caliber yarns , with a guy ready to tackle injustice with violence, always with a clip in the gun and a broad by his side

In these stories we meet the kinds of American Indians we rarely see in literature--the upper and middle class, the professionals and white-collar workers, the bureaucrats and poets, falling in and out of love and wondering if they will make their way home. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to return from the hospital, listening to his father's friends argue over Jesus' carpentry skills as they build a wheelchair ramp. An estranged interracial couple, separated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with forty-two dollars and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy.Alexie's is a voice of remarkable passion, and these stories are love stories — between parents and children, white people and Indians, movie stars and ordinary people. Witty, tender, and fierce, the toughest Indian in the world is a virtuoso performance

In Alex Sherman’s novella of space exploration The Tourist, a young academic travels to a mining outpost on a small planetoid, far from their sun There he studies the culture and music of a small squatter population that lives in total darkness. This is the first time any student has been allowed to travel there. Chocky agrees to show the student around, although he has more pressing things on his mind. Maybe this tour will provide the resources he needs, after all. At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied

Superb new CIA thriller featuring black ops expert Milo Weaver and acclaimed by Lee Child as 'first class – the kind of thing John le Carre might have written' In the global age of the CIA, wherever there's trouble, there's a Tourist: the men and women who do the dirty work. They're the Company's best agents – and Milo Weaver was the best of them all. Following a near-lethal encounter with foreign hitman the 'Tiger', a burnt-out Milo decides to continue his work from behind a desk. Four years later, he's no closer to finding the Tiger than he was before. When the elusive assassin unexpectedly gives himself up to Milo, it's because he wants something in return: revenge. Once a Tourist, always a Tourist – soon Milo is back in the field, tracking down the Tiger's handler in a world of betrayal, skewed politics and extreme violence. It's a world he knows well but he's about to learn the toughest lesson of all: trust no one

Lord Hugh de Courtenay's plan to host a tournament in the spring of 1322 is an opportunity the money-lenders of Oakhampton can't afford to miss. When the defeated knights find themselves unable to pay the traditional ransoms to their captors, they will have only one avenue open to them – and will accrue interest by the hour. But for Benjamin Dudenay – to whom most of the knights in Devon are indebted – the tournament will yield no such riches. A month before the festivities, he is found dead in an alleyway – beaten to death in an attack which tells a tale of bitter hatred. For Sir Baldwin Furnshill, Keeper of the King's Peace, and his friend, Bailiff Simon Puttock, the priority is to complete the preparations for the tournament in time for Lord Hugh's arrival. Not an easy task when Hal Sachevyll and Wymond Carpenter, commissioned to provide the all-important stands, seem more interested in saving on materials than building a safe structure. But when Wymond is found dead, his injuries bearing all the hallmarks of those inflicted by Benjamin's murderer, Sir Baldwin and Simon are faced with an additional problem: whoever killed the money-lender is not simply a debtor desperate to gain financial freedom, but a killer with a far greater and more sinister plan…

This is the incredible suspense novel that inspired the famous movie The Towering Inferno staring Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway and William Holden. The World Communications Center is a glittering skyscraper that is fatally flawed in its design, compromised through dubious means. On opening night the building’s systems fail spectacularly and the structure descends into violence and chaos, trapping the VIP guests of a gala opening celebration. It is up to the assembled governors and mayors, millionaires, government officials and ambassadors to find common cause if they are ever to survive the tower. Master storyteller Richard Martin Stern has crafted a six-hour thrill ride that leaves adrenal glands empty and jaws unhinged—The Tower is a suspense classic that is not easily forgotten

In derelict Dresden a cultivated, middle-class family does all it can to cope amid the Communist downfall. This striking tapestry of the East German experience is told through the tangled lives of a soldier, surgeon, nurse and publisher. With evocative detail, Uwe Tellkamp masterfully reveals the myriad perspectives of the time as people battled for individuality, retreated to nostalgia, chose to conform, or toed the perilous line between East and West. Poetic, heartfelt and dramatic, The Tower vividly resurrects the sights, scents and sensations of life in the GDR as it hurtled towards 9 November 1989

She saw the knight in the mirror at sunset… During the wedding festivities of his king, Cyan Dag, a knight of Gloinmere, is sought out by a mysterious bard and told a terrifying tale: that the king has married a false queen—a lie cloaked in ancient and powerful sorcery. Spurred on by his steadfast honor and loyalty, Cyan departs on a dangerous quest to rescue the real queen from her tower prison, to prevent war, and to awaken magic in a land that has lost its way…