After being released from the Elmira reformatory Mitch (the central character of Cry Tough ) has two ways to go. He could return to his family who loved him dearly, find a job and marry the girl who loved him. His other choice is the flashy, dangerous life as a hood with big risks and big rewards- cars, women, rich food and fancy apartments. Would he settle for the security of a job and family or would he take the road from which there was no turning back? In a classic story, Irving Shulman presents the struggle of one man. The allure of his life in the underworld, the sobering reality of his home life, what he really loves, what he really wants and how each element in his fragmented reality draws on him.

Lieutenant Colonel Nick Harmon, USAF fighter pilot, is a warrior with no war to fight; a consummate professional whose single-word credo, WIN, has left his personal life in shambles, and now threatens to destroy what he values most, his military career. Desert Storm/Desert Shield may offer him a last glistening chance at resurrecting not only his career, but more importantly, himself as a man. For the beautiful Christine Campbell, too, the war is a golden chance. Already a celebrated television journalist, her planned exclusive interview with Saddam Hussein will propel her to the very peak of her profession. And she is determined to allow nothing, not love, not even the possibility of betraying one of her own countrymen, to stand in the way of her success. To Adnan Dulaimi, the Iraqi army officer who already knows the tragedy and futility of war, this new war is a nightmare come true - more so when he finds himself enmeshed in a plot to overthrow Saddam, thereby forcing him to make a choice no soldier should be faced with: allowing ruin to fall upon his beloved country - or dishonoring his oath of loyalty to the leader of that country, the man responsible for bringing ruin to his people and his land. And for the reservist recalled to active duty, U.S. Army helicopter pilot Major Elaine Nelson, the war represents both personal achievement and personal failure. She, who has struggled so hard to overcome the prejudices of a male-dominated military hierarchy, may find that her success in securing a slot in the regular army may very well be at the cost of her fine marriage to her civilian husband. The profound effect of the Persian Gulf War on the lives of these four is played out in thedeath-filled skies over Baghdad, in the byzantine intrigues of the White House and the Palace at Riyadh, in the paranoia of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, and in the bloody streets of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait City.

Fay invented a world of fantasy where she could dwell in happiness. Her friends in this perfect world were Belle and Persa, Enlai and Flor. She visited them on the edge of sleep, shaping their lives to suit herself. "I dream better than other people. More efficiently and effectively," she explained to herself. Her dreams were a flicker away from reality. After Gilbert turns up in her refuge, undesigned, unheralded, and disturbing, Fay's dream world shatters. But are her dreams really dreams, and should she leave her friends behind and live in the real world?

The Big Fix by Ed Lacy Author of the 1958 Edgar Award-winning novel Room to Swing! On the night Irish Tommy Cork's murder was planned, nothing very much out of the ordinary happened. Tommy was in the ring, taking a pasting-as usual. Back to the ropes, almost sitting on the second strand, Tommy crouched, gloved hands up in front of his face like a leather fence. He was fighting a strong youngster who was now whaling away with both hands in a moment of wild enthusiasm. Most of his blows were blocked, or ducked by Tommy's weaving head, but those few that didn't miss landed with loud thud sounds on the kidneys, head, or in the stomach, visibly shaking up the pale "old man."

The Trap and A Dance in the Sun bring together Jacobson's initial two novels - stories of racial confrontation and social injustice on the South African veld. In The Trap, relations between the white farmers and their black workers are brought on to a sinister and harrowing conclusion whilst A Dance in the Sun sees two young innocent bystanders becoming embroiled in a long-standing family saga. These stories have retained their freshness and their power to move the reader.

After sending her résumé to the CIA on a whim, New Yorker Selena Keller is contacted by an Agency recruiter, who asks her how she would feel about convincing another human being to commit treason. Despite her checkered past, Selena passes the background investigation and a battery of bizarre aptitude tests. Living under cover as a government budget analyst, she begins her education in espionage at the Farm, the CIA's covert facility. All CIA officers must survive a demanding training program, and it is there that Selena becomes romantically involved with Stan, a brilliant but darkly paranoid fellow student with presidential ambitions. What happens next is a fascinating inside portrait of the Agency--how spies are recruited, how they are trained, who they meet, where they go, and most important . . . what happens when they fall in love, and begin spying on one another.

The year is AD 7000. The human species is nearly extinct—for the fourth time—due to its fragile nature. Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, believes that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye. He’s correct: Krina and Ana each possess half of the fabled Atlantis Carnet, a lost financial instrument of unbelievable value—capable of bringing down entire civilizations. Krina doesn’t know that Count Rudi suspects her motives, so she accepts his offer to get her to Shin-Tethys in exchange for an introduction to Ana. And what neither of them suspects is that a ruthless body-double assassin has stalked Krina across the galaxy, ready to take the carnet once it is whole—and leave no witnesses alive to tell the tale…

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Richard Marsh, also known as Richard Bernard Heldmann, was a prolific British author in the Edwardian period. Marsh's best known work is The Beetle , a supernatural thriller novel.

Based on an intriguing alternative history hypothesis, this novel imagines a world where the Moors never left Southern Spain after their 800-year reign but instead expanded their empire across Europe. This fascinating premise is explored through the chaotic lens of a bumbling film crew in the Sahara desert. The director, lost in a haze of Moroccan kif, has embraced the local culture a little too enthusiastically. With the scriptwriters gone and the leading actor in a perpetual sulk inside his Airstream, the production is at a standstill. Enter Tinctorio Indigolin, a bitcoin billionaire on the run from a Shakespeare-quoting Irish assassin. In a bid to leverage a tax loss, Indigolin acquires the film rights, injecting a new lease of life into the project. Mysteriously, a captivating screenplay begins to appear on set, page by page, night after night. Penned by an enigmatic writer, the script proposes a world where the Moors didn't just resist expulsion in 1492 but went on to dominate Spain, France, and Italy, creating an Islamic State of Europe. As the screenplay unfolds, it transforms the lives of everyone involved in the film. The narrative weaves through a labyrinth of twists, assassinations, and narrow escapes, employing the most unexpected methods, only to culminate in the most uplifting conclusion you'll encounter this year.

MURDER ME FOR NICKELS Walter Lippit makes music all over town. He owns the juke boxes that play the tunes that keeps the bars and the diners hopping. Jack St. Louis works for Lippit, smoothing the customers and keeping the nickels coming. But then along comes Benotti and the Chicago syndicate to louse up the operation. It's everything Jack can do to stay one step ahead. One step ahead of Benotti's gang, Lippet--and Lippit's willing wife Patty, who wants to be a singer and is convinced that Jack can make that happen too. And maybe he can. It's all in a week's work. BENNY MUSCLES IN Benny Tapkow has worked as crime boss Pendleton's chauffeur for seven years, but he's itching to get ahead. He feels like he deserves a piece of the action, but Pendleton won't budge. So Benny strikes a deal with Big Al Alverato to kidnap Pendleton's daughter Pat to get him in with the rival gang. But the snatch doesn't come off as planned, and now Benny is stuck with Pat, a hellion with a temper and plenty of mood swings. Pendleton's men are after him and he has to dope her just to keep her in line. The last thing he figured on was falling in love.

Ray Tompkins is the kind of person you never get to know. He's the security guard, the factory worker, the man working the midnight shift. Nobody really understands Ray - not his coworkers, not his family, and certainly not the women in his life. There is a rage building inside Ray Tompkins and Los Angeles is the fuel - the sick obsession with celebrity mixed with the vacuousness of everyday life. Against this backdrop, Ray Tompkins finds a way to vent his anger. He, too, will be known.

"An eerie novel . . . an unbeatable combination of suspense, sex and the supernatural . . . highly recommended." - Baton Rouge Advocate "The worthy successor to Rosemary's Baby " - San Francisco Examiner "A horror masterpiece " - Camden Courier Post It starts out innocently enough, when reporters Tony Dumont and Robin Shepherd are sent to interview teenager Mark Elias, a scientific genius, about a scholarship he has won. But it is quickly clear that there is something very strange about the Elias family. Mark and his sister Shirley spend long hours behind closed doors conducting weird and inscrutable experiments involving electricity and a tape recorder. And then there is old Mrs. Elias, the children's grandmother, who died recently and whom the family seems terrified to discuss. The two journalists believe there may be a more serious news story than the one they were sent to cover, but they have no idea how serious - until people begin to die . . . Arch Oboler (1907-1987) was a major figure in the Golden Age of Radio whose weekly horror show Lights Out terrified listeners in the 1930s and '40s. In House on Fire (1969), his only novel, Oboler delivers a page-turning chiller that is effective both as an eerie tale of supernatural horror and as an examination of the nature of evil. This edition features a new introduction by Christopher Conlon

“SOPHISTICATED AND SUSPENSEFUL . . . TAUTLY WRITTEN . . . Wilentz knows the world she writes about very well, and her descriptions have a solid specificity that lends authority to her fiction.” –The New York Times Book Review “At a closed Israeli checkpoint, Marina, a Palestinian mother, clutches her ailing boy, desperate for access to Jerusalem and its doctors. When a young Israeli soldier waits too long before deciding to disobey orders, a martyr is born. Thus begins a graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East. . . . [Wilentz’s] prose tugs at the reader. . . . The characters are magnetic. . . . [This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution.” –Entertainment Weekly “SO PRECISE, SO STARTLING, SO UNFORGETTABLE. . . . These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live.” –Los Angeles Times “MAGNIFICENT . . . Wilentz writes with a prose style reminiscent of The New Yorker ’s highest ambitions: crystalline, pure, faultlessly communicative. . . . Like the best documentaries, Martyrs’ Crossing allows us unprecedented access to a little-understood and often misrepresented part of the world.” –Chicago Tribune “A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED MEDIDATION ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . . Martyr’s Crossing matches Damascus Gate in the quality of research and the mass of intriguing characters–and yet it remains a lean thriller.” –The New York Observer

Fourteen-year-old Ella Wallis is a typical unhappy teenager. Bullied at school, misunderstood by her family, she just wants to be left alone. But Ella has one thing most teenagers don't: telekinetic powers. Ella doesn't know how she moves things without touching them, or even that she's doing it, but she's soon going to discover that this is only the beginning of her extraordinary gifts - gifts that can be used for good or evil... Combining a natural storytelling talent with his own unique psychic experiences, Uri Geller's debut thriller is an extraordinary exploration of the hidden powers of the mind and the terrifying consequences of unleashing them.

In September 1957 the South is mesmerized by events in Little Rock, Arkansas, whose governor has called out the National Guard as part of his attempt to halt the integration of Central High School. And in Memphis, two white men and a white woman are planning to capitalize on the confrontation between the races by kidnapping the grandson of a wealthy black entrepreneur and pinning the crime on white supremacists. The problem is that Podjo, Rufus, and Reeny have only an amateur's understanding of what a kidnapping entails -- and a total, terrifying incomprehension of their victims. In September September a magisterial historian of the Civil War charts its distant repercussions in the streets of the contemporary South. By turns wryly comic, ribald, and chilling, Shelby Foote's novel is at once a convincing thriller and a powerful tragicomedy of race. September September has been adapted by Larry McMurtry for the Turner Network Television film Memphis, starring Cybill Shepherd.

Death By Deadline is a mystery thriller that takes you deep into the heart of local TV News, with heroes, villains, and a look at how the battle to be first with a story can climax in unbelievable catastrophe. Can local news kill people? That's the essential question as the author takes you through a mosaic of politics. the underworld, government, and the life of a big city as seen through the prism of courageous journalists and their corrupt and devious counterparts. Death by Deadline is a story of murder, mayhem, and hope. accompanied by unforgettable characters, and some of the most unusual newsroom humor that you will ever read. This is not for the fainthearted, but is IS for people who want to walk the fine line between solid reporting and the tragedy of journalistic deceit. The people are not real. Can it happen? Maybe, on some dark day in the future, unless it is too late. "Too late" is a real possibility. But in the meantime, the thread of corruption, sexual tension, heroes and villains fighting an internal struggle, produces a newsroom full of tightrope walkers in a novel with so many surprises, that the reader must be prepared to face the unthinkable.

What do you do when you are staring straight down at the abyss that your life has become? This is the question Anthony Albergo asked himself the night the New York Yankees lost game seven of the 2001 World Series and he had to come up with the $50,000 that he owed local mob boss Frankie Feliciani. A New York Hold'em is the story of a young man who lets his gambling addiction ruin his life. He has lost everything-including his parents, who were brutally murdered-to this vicious habit and now he needs to decide if he wants to walk away from this nightmare or seek revenge against Frankie and his nephew Bull for his losses. There's only one catch; he has just five days to either come up with the money or a plan to settle the score. For all you people out there that think playing Texas Hold'em and gambling for a living is a great life, think again. It is much easier on television and in the movies because in the real world, the house always wins and they want their money-no matter what.

When Harvard Medical graduate Dr. Seth Levin's fiancee Amber dies under mysterious circumstances, Seth's passion to reclaim her becomes an obsession. Intent on cloning his fiancee and armed with a sample of Amber's DNA, Seth travels to the secluded South American estate of a rogue geneticist, unaware that the surrogate he has chosen to carry Amber's embryonic clone has a dangerous secret of her own.