At just twenty-three years old, Shauna Reid weighed 351 pounds. Spurred into action by the sight of her enormous white knickers billowing on the clothesline, she created the hugely successful blog "The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl." Hiding behind her Lycra-clad, roly-poly alter-ego, her transformation from couch potato to svelte goddess began.Today, eight thousand miles, seven years, and 175 pounds later, the gloriously gorgeous Shauna is literally half the woman she used to be. Hysterically funny and heart-wrenchingly honest, The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl includes travel tales from Australia to Paris to Red Square, plus romance when she meets the man of her dreams in a Scottish pub. This is the uplifting true story of a young woman who defeated her demons and conquered her cravings to become a real-life superhero to inspire us all.

A fake suitcase bomb discovered in suburban Tel Aviv turns out to be only the first strand in an all-too- real web of deceit and malevolence.A witness sees a man with a limp abandon a suitcase near a suburban Tel Aviv daycare center. The explosive device it contains turns out to be a dud, but a few hours after the discovery, the daycare receives a phone call: The suitcase is only the beginning.Although the police are quick to finger a known felon as a suspect, Detective Avraham Avraham is not convinced after he volunteers to conduct the interrogation. So he returns to the quiet streets of this family-friendly neighborhood in his search for answers, treating no one—not the teacher, not the children's parents—above suspicion.Despite his colleagues' dismissals, Avraham keeps coming back to one man. A father of two, Avraham's person of interest does not seem like the criminal type . . . until he suddenly vanishes, and jagged holes start appearing in his story. Much to Avraham's frustration, each development appears to take him further and further away from the answers he so desperately seeks.Told from alternating perspectives, A Possibility of Violence is the heart-pounding story of one man on the run with a tenacious and persistent police detective in pursuit.

The only thing I felt was a strong hand around my neck, another around my waist, and -- before I could cry out -- I smelled the thick, sweet scent of a mandrake-soaked cloth. Unforgiving hands clapped it against my face, and all went dark.Ala?s, the king of France's sister, is abducted while on her mission for the wily Eleanor of Aquitaine, the former Queen of England, to retrieve hidden letters that, in the wrong hands, could bring down the English king. In exchange, the French princess was to receive long-heldand dangerous information. Now Ala?s, along with help from the very intriguing leader of the Knights Templar, must unravel a tangled web of family secrets and lies.Filled with intrigue and peopled with compelling legendary figures, The Canterbury Papers is an "electrifying journey into the past" (Booklist).

Some secrets belong to the past. Others refuse to stay there . . .In 1959, in an underground laboratory in a remote region of West Virginia, a secret government experiment went terribly awry. Half a dozen scientists mysteriously disappeared, and all subsequent efforts to rescue them failed. In desperation, President Eisenhower ordered the lab sealed shut and all records of its existence destroyed. Now, fifty-four years later, something from the lab has emerged.When mysterious events begin occurring along the New River Valley in West Virginia, government agents Mike Califano and Ana Thorne are sent to investigate. What they discover will shake the foundations of science and religion and put both agents in the crosshairs of a deadly, worldwide conspiracy. A powerful and mysterious force has been unleashed, and it's about to fall into the wrong hands. To prevent a global catastrophe, Califano and Thorne must work together to solve a biblical mystery that has confounded scholars for centuries. And they must do so quickly, before time runs out . . . forever.

They call it pulling the trigger.Not by a killer in the night, but by a judge on the bench.Twenty years ago, Judge Ray McMullin proved to the people of San Francisco that he could pull that trigger by sentencing Israel Dominguez to death for a gangland murder. But it meant suppressing his own doubts about whether the punishment really did fit the crime. Now, as the execution date nears, the conscience-wracked judge confesses his unease to former homicide detective Harlan Donnally on a riverbank in far Northern California. And after immersing himself in the Norte?o and Sure?o gang wars, which left trails of bullets and blood crisscrossing the state, and in the betrayals of both cops and crooks alike, Donnally is forced to question not only whether the penalty was undeserved but the conviction itself.Soon those doubts and questions double back, for in the aging judge's panic, in his lapses of memory and his confusions, Donnally begins to wonder whether he's chasing the facts of the case or just phantoms of a failing mind. But there's no turning back, for the edge of night is fast closing in on Dominguez, on McMullin, and on Donnally himself.

Set in a four-hundred-year-old boys' boarding school in London, a chilling gothic thriller by the author of the critically acclaimed A Good and Happy Child . . .A fierce and jealous ghost . . .A young man's fight for his life . . .The Harrow School is home to privileged adolescents known as much for their distinctive dress and traditions as for their arrogance and schoolboy cruelty. Seventeen-year-old American Andrew Taylor is enrolled in the esteemed British institution by his father, who hopes that the school's discipline will put some distance between his son and his troubled past in the States.But trouble—and danger—seem to follow Andrew. When one of his schoolmates and friends dies mysteriously of a severe pulmonary illness, Andrew is blamed and is soon an outcast, spurned by nearly all his peers. And there is the pale, strange boy who begins to visit him at night. Either Andrew is losing his mind, or the house legend about his dormitory being haunted is true. When the school's poet-in-residence, Piers Fawkes, is commissioned to write a play about Byron, one of Harrow's most famous alumni, he casts Andrew in the title role. Andrew begins to discover uncanny links between himself and the renowned poet. In his loneliness and isolation, Andrew becomes obsessed with Lord Byron's story and the poet's status not only as a literary genius and infamous seducer but as a student at the very different Harrow of two centuries prior—a place rife with violence, squalor, incurable diseases, and tormented love affairs. When frightening and tragic events from that long-ago past start to recur in Harrow's present, and when the dark and deadly specter by whom Andrew's been haunted seems to be all too real, Andrew is forced to solve a two-hundred-year-old literary mystery that threatens the lives of his friends and his teachers—and, most terrifyingly, his own.

What goes unsaid can sometimes speak the loudest . . .What makes up a familyFor Casey it's sharing a house with her fiancé, Michael, and his three children, whom she intends to nurture more than she ever took care of herself. But Casey's plans have come undone. Michael's silences have grown unfathomable and deep. His daughter Angel seethes as only a teenage girl can, while the wide-eyed youngest, Jewel, quietly takes it all in.Then Michael's son, Dylan, runs off, and the kids' mother, a woman never afraid to say what she thinks, noisily barges into the home. That's when Casey decides that the silences can no longer continue. She must begin speaking the words no one else can say. She'll have to dig up secrets—including her own—uncovering the hurts, and begin the healing that is long overdue. And it all starts with just a few tentative words. . . .

Eleven-year-olds Nora and Charlotte were best friends. When their teenage babysitter, Rose, disappeared under mysterious circumstances, the girls decided to “investigate.” But their search—aided by paranormal theories and techniques gleaned from old Time-Life books—went nowhere.Years later, Nora, now in her late twenties, is drawn back to her old neighborhood—and to her estranged friend—when Rose’s remains are finally discovered. Upset over their earlier failure to solve the possible murder, Charlotte is adamant that they join forces and try again. But Nora was the last known person to see Rose alive, and she’s not ready to revisit her troubled adolescence and the events surrounding the disappearance—or face the disturbing secrets that are already beginning to reemerge.

When a home health attendant, Paulette Williamson, appears at Homicide South in Manhattan, she's introduced to the NYPD's Detective Darlene O'Hara and skeptically reports the confession of a senior citizen struggling with Alzheimer's. Gus Henderson, a former junkie and petty criminal, claims he murdered and buried his former partner-in-crime in a park off Avenue B more than a decade ago, a lowlife who fell off the grid and hasn't been seen since. The city agrees to excavate the alleged scene of the crime, and the police find a body—just not the one they were looking for. The cops unearth the skeleton of a ten-year-old boy, neatly dressed and buried ceremoniously with a comic book, a CD, some pot, and booze. Instead of an easy open-and-shut case, O'Hara is faced with finding the murderer of a child, and the pressure is on the newly promoted detective to prove herself. The trail takes O'Hara from the seediest corners of the city and its cast of misguided players—a coven of preteen potheads in Tompkins Square Park, a sleazy art house photographer in Chelsea—to a retirement community in South Florida. Driving headlong into the dark urban underbelly to find a killer, O'Hara uncovers a tribe of criminals who brazenly prey on the weakest members of the population, and she must stop the cycle before yet another child is lost to the depths of the city.

The passing of the Hungarian prime minister before he could realize his dream of a fascist state has little effect on crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon. Life—and death—go on in the bustling old city, and a late-night tip soon leads him to a crime scene where a young woman lies dead, a Jewish prayer book in her purse. Disturbed by the bizarre circumstances—the corpse of a beautiful, well-groomed, religious victim abandoned in one of Budapest's seedier neighborhoods—Gordon is determined to unravel the mystery of her demise, especially after her shocking identity is revealed. The investigation will lead him deep into the city's dark underbelly—a shadow world of pornographers, crime syndicates, and Communist cells—and to the highest echelons of power, where one of Hungary's most influential executives plans to make an economic killing through his strong political ties to Germany's leaders...if he can somehow keep secret the fact that he was, at one time, Jewish.A gripping and evocative thriller, brimming with suspense and breathtaking political intrigue, Vilmos Kondor's Budapest Noir is a richly atmospheric tale of murder and betrayal from a remarkable new voice in noir detective fiction.

In Ten Storey Love Song, over the course of a single dynamite paragraph, we follow Bobby the Artist's rise to stardom and horrific drug psychosis, as Johnnie attempts to stop thieving and start pleasing Ellen in bed and forty-year-old truck driver Alan Blunt spends a worrisome amount of time patrolling the grounds of the local primary school. And when Bent Lewis, a famous art dealer and mover-shaker from London, appears, Bobby and friends are quickly swept away on a sweaty adventure of self-discovery, hedonism, and violence.Ten Storey Love Song is a cutting but characteristically charismatic portrait of a deeply dysfunctional, creative, and drug-sodden world, delivered with great beauty and abandon.

The prizewinning author of Dirt, Caribou Island, and Legend of a Suicide returns with a searing, morally complex novel about families, violence, regret, and shattered faith.In the fall of 1978, on a 640-acre family ranch on Goat Mountain in Northern California, an eleven-year-old boy joins his grandfather, his father, and his father’s best friend on the family’s annual deer hunt.Every fall they return to this dry, yellowed landscape dotted with oak, buckbrush, and the occasional stand of pine trees. Goat Mountain is what this family owns and where they belong. It is where their history is kept, where their memories and stories are shared. And for the first time, the boy’s story will become part of their narrative, if he can find a buck. Itching to shoot, he is ready. When the men arrive at the gate to their land, the father discovers a poacher and sights him through the scope of his gun. He offers his son a look—a simple act that will explode in tragedy, transforming these men and this family, forcing them to question themselves and everything they thought they knew.David Vann creates a haunting and provocative novel, in prose devastating and beautiful in its precision, that explores our most primal urges and beliefs, the bonds of blood and religion that define and secure us, and the consequences of our actions—what we owe for what we’ve done.

"This is a bawdy tale. Herein you will find gratuitous shagging, murder, spanking, maiming, treason, and heretofore unexplored heights of vulgarity and profanity, as well as nontraditional grammar, split infinitives, and the odd wank . . . If that's the sort of thing you think you might enjoy, then you have happened upon the perfect story!"Verily speaks Christopher Moore, much beloved scrivener and peerless literary jester, who hath writteneth much that is of grand wit and belly-busting mirth, including such laurelled bestsellers of the Times of Olde Newe Yorke as Lamb, A Dirty Job, and You Suck (no offense). Now he takes on no less than the legendary Bard himself (with the utmost humility and respect) in a twisted and insanely funny tale of a moronic monarch and his deceitful daughters—a rousing story of plots, subplots, counterplots, betrayals, war, revenge, bared bosoms, unbridled lust . . . and a ghost (there's always a bloody ghost), as seen through the eyes of a man wearing a codpiece and bells on his head.FoolA man of infinite jest, Pocket has been Lear's cherished fool for years, from the time the king's grown daughters—selfish, scheming Goneril, sadistic (but erotic-fantasy-grade-hot) Regan, and sweet, loyal Cordelia—were mere girls. So naturally Pocket is at his brainless, elderly liege's side when Lear—at the insidious urging of Edmund, the bastard (in every way imaginable) son of the Earl of Gloucester—demands that his kids swear their undying love and devotion before a collection of assembled guests. Of course Goneril and Regan are only too happy to brownnose Dad. But Cordelia believes that her father's request is kind of . . . well . . . stupid, and her blunt honesty ends up costing her her rightful share of the kingdom and earns her a banishment to boot.Well, now the bangers and mash have really hit the fan. The whole damn country's about to go to hell in a handbasket because of a stubborn old fart's wounded pride. And the only person who can possibly make things right . . . is Pocket, a small and slight clown with a biting sense of humor. He's already managed to sidestep catastrophe (and the vengeful blades of many an offended nobleman) on numerous occasions, using his razor-sharp mind, rapier wit . . . and the equally well-honed daggers he keeps conveniently hidden behind his back. Now he's going to have to do some very fancy maneuvering—cast some spells, incite a few assassinations, start a war or two (the usual stuff)—to get Cordelia back into Daddy Lear's good graces, to derail the fiendish power plays of Cordelia's twisted sisters, to rescue his gigantic, gigantically dim, and always randy friend and apprentice fool, Drool, from repeated beatings . . . and to shag every lusciously shaggable wench who's amenable to shagging along the way.Pocket may be a fool . . . but he's definitely not an idiot.

The acclaimed Asylum Tales continueWizard and tattoo artist Gage escaped the dread Ivory Towers, but no one can outrun his past forever. The wizards know Gage is using forbidden magic, and they will stop at nothing—even destroying cities—to stop him?.?.?.?and the nascent human uprising.

Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams.

An ambitious and startling debut novel that follows the lives of four women at a resort popular among slaveholders who bring their enslaved mistresseswench 'wench n. from Middle English "wenchel," 1 a: a girl, maid, young woman; a female child.Tawawa House in many respects is like any other American resort before the Civil War. Situated in Ohio, this idyllic retreat is particularly nice in the summer when the Southern humidity is too much to bear. The main building, with its luxurious finishes, is loftier than the white cottages that flank it, but then again, the smaller structures are better positioned to catch any breeze that may come off the pond. And they provide more privacy, which best suits the needs of the Southern white men who vacation there every summer with their black, enslaved mistresses. It's their open secret.Lizzie, Reenie, and Sweet are regulars at Tawawa House. They have become friends over the years as they reunite and share developments in their own lives and on their respective plantations. They don't bother too much with questions of freedom, though the resort is situated in free territory–but when truth-telling Mawu comes to the resort and starts talking of running away, things change.To run is to leave behind everything these women value most–friends and families still down South–and for some it also means escaping from the emotional and psychological bonds that bind them to their masters. When a fire on the resort sets off a string of tragedies, the women of Tawawa House soon learn that triumph and dehumanization are inseparable and that love exists even in the most inhuman, brutal of circumstances–all while they are bearing witness to the end of an era.An engaging, page-turning, and wholly original novel, Wench explores, with an unflinching eye, the moral complexities of slavery.

Recounting the story of her life, Oei plunges us into the colorful world of nineteenth-century Edo, in which courtesans rub shoulders with poets, warriors consort with actors, and the arts flourish in an unprecedented moment of creative upheaval. Oei and Hokusai live among writers, novelists, tattoo artists, and prostitutes, evading the spies of the repressive shogunate as they work on Hokusai’s countless paintings and prints. Wielding her brush, rejecting domesticity in favor of dedication to the arts, Oei defies all expectations of womanhood—all but one. A dutiful daughter to the last, she will obey the will of her eccentric father, the man who created her and who, ultimately, will rob her of her place in history.Vivid, daring, and unforgettable, The Printmaker’s Daughter shines fresh light on art, loyalty, and the tender and indelible bond between a father and daughter.

The beloved author of Wicked reimagines Hans Christian Andersen's classic story "The Little Match Girl" for modern readers in this charming, beautifully illustrated gift bookEach year, National Public Radio asks a writer to compose a story with a Christmas theme. In 2008, Gregory Maguire offered a new twist on a classic tale, reinventing the Hans Christian Andersen classic "The Little Match Girl."When the story was first translated from Danish and published in England in the mid-nineteenth century, the match girl's dying visions of lights and a grandmother in heaven were often interpreted as metaphors of religious salvation. In Matchless, Maguire adds a different dimension to the story, intertwining the match girl's tale with that of a young boy, Frederik, whose own yearnings are the catalyst for a better future for himself and his family. Maguire uses his storytelling magic to rekindle Andersen's original intentions and to suggest transcendence, the permanence of spirit, and the continuity that links the living and the dead.

As Egypt's young king is crowned, a vicious killer waits in the shadows. . . . Egypt's next Pharaoh, the young Tutankhamun, is ready to claim his birthright—a vast, powerful, and sophisticated empire. It should be at the height of its glory, but it is troubled by long-lasting foreign wars, public dissent, and internal struggles. With his new wife, Ankhesenamun, the daughter of Nefertiti, Tutankhamun undertakes an audacious plan to consolidate his power and return tolerance and enlightenment to his land. But not everyone wants the ambitious new Pharaoh to succeed, and soon sinister "gifts" begin appearing in the royal palace—evil objects designed to terrify the nineteen-year-old King.Rahotep, the stalwart chief detective of the Thebes division, is summoned to the palace to investigate. As he begins to piece together the clues, he realizes that the mysterious gifts have much in common with a series of sadistic murders plaguing the city. Rahotep's determination to protect the vulnerable King and Queen makes him a target, too, and he is soon enmeshed in a web of intrigue and danger that reaches from the top command of the army to the dark heart of the empire's government. What he discovers will change his life and put everything he loves at risk. In this compelling second novel, set against the dazzling splendor of the golden age of the Pharaohs, Nick Drake takes an imaginative and historically accurate look at one of the most fascinating reigns in ancient history. Drawing on the latest archaeological evidence, he crafts a sophisticated and gripping thriller that explores one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of ancient Egypt—the untimely death of young Tutankhamun.

It has always been Naomi Fontaine’s dream to practice small-town medicine—an ambition that brought her to Cypress Hollow, the charming, tight-knit community her late friend, knitting guru Eliza Carpenter, loved so well. But no matter how hard she tries, Naomi can’t seem to fit in here. Then rugged Rig Keller moves in to take over half of Naomi’s medical practice, and instantly charms everyone in town . . . including Naomi.Rig saw what a broken relationship did to his brother, and has no interest whatsoever in getting serious. But the temptation to play doctor with his new partner is just too strong to resist. Any chance they might have of being truly knit together by love, however, depends entirely on what secrets they are willing to reveal . . . and on Rig’s willingness to risk his heart and Naomi’s desire to open hers completely.

The poignant and unforgettable sequel to the beloved bestseller Lost & Found; a marvelous tale of life-altering surprises and unanticipated guestsPeaks Island, Maine, vibrates with its own special magic, a unique flow to life that knits together the small community that calls it home. The people, the animals, and even the houses have a charm and personality all their own. Just ask Rocky Pelligrino. Devastated by her husband Bob's sudden death, she found hope thanks to a relentlessly loyal black Lab named Cooper. Warm friends and a new job—as the island's animal control warden—have helped Rocky chart a course toward a promising future. She's even ready to try love again with Hill, the gentle and patient archery instructor. And there is an old house haunted by lost love and forgotten secrets that speaks to her soul. But a phone call from a troubled young woman looking for her biological father shakes Rocky's newfound joy. Could this young girl hold a tendril of the man who was the love of her lifeOr could the girl's appearance throw Rocky's world into chaos . . . and shatter her heart again?