Twelve-year-old Aaron Broom is protecting his father's car from repossession when he witnesses a jewelry store robbery gone wrong. To Aaron's shock, his father, a struggling salesman in the wrong place at the wrong time, is fingered as the prime suspect in the murder. Aaron--precocious, plucky, not a little naïve--must seek out gangsters, diamond dealers, bootleggers, and street kids in order to prove his father's innocence. In his search for justice, Aaron draws upon the resources of a world-weary paperboy, an aspiring teen journalist, and a kindly lawyer. As they dig into the details of the case, these unconventional detectives reveal a cover-up that goes much deeper than a jewelry-store heist gone sour. Through it all, Aaron's optimism and resourcefulness shine through. Hotchner's latest is a rollicking ride through St. Louis at its lowest, as seen through the eyes of his most lovable narrator to date.

John and Eleanor Midway appear to preside over a happy family. But when outgoing daughter Jenny disappears, the Midway clan starts to unravel. In an about-face, the members of the Midway family start to repel each other, as anger, blame and hatred rage among them. Against undaunting odds, Detective Superintendent Hilary Catchpole is called to uncover the truth.

Hailed by Publishers Weekly as "an A-1 satire on urban living," William Herrick's Bradovich is now available as a New Directions paperbook. Stephen Bradovich--sculptor, widower, former pro ball player, sometime brawler. Why would this complexly human, anarchist protagonist receive a visit from two impassive, square-shouldered operatives with the alarmling news: "You are under surveillance pending review, that's the message The Authority sends you"? Praised for the compassion, humanism, and "truth-seeking" of his earlier novels, Herrick in Bradovich steps beyond the "lean and muscular prose" of his terrorist trilogy (Shadows & Wolves, Love & Terror, Kill Memory) and beyond the working-class realism that won The Present Tense/Joel H. Cavior Award for That's Life (in 1985) to a surreal--if still recognizable--New York where suddenly not only the improbable but the impossible can happen.

Dr Reggie Lee, newly arrived at the National Gallery, is putting together a small exhibition around three Caravaggios depicting 'St Cecilia and the Angel'. One is at the Getty, one at the Louvre, and she hopes it won't be too hard to track down the third. But a series of inexplicable obstacles keep getting in her way - and then, unexpectedly, a fourth Caravaggio turns up. One of them must be a fake. But which? When people start to die, it seems clear that someone doesn't want Reggie's show to go ahead. Why, she can't imagine. But her career is at stake, and she'd damned if she'll let herself be intimidated and bullied by these unseen forces. So Reggie investigates and her research takes her from Surrealist suicides to shady Italian art dealers, from seventeenth-century painting techniques to modern French politics in a viciously-fought Presidential election year. By the end it seems as though nobody in the opaque and ill-defined world of art can really stay incorruptible - perhaps not even Reggie herself.

ANATOMY OF A KILLER Sam Jordan never lets emotion interfere with his work. He is a precise and ruthless killing machine, dealing out death for hire. But his last job had ended wrong for Jordan, and now Sandy is sending him out again--without a break, yet--to take care of someone named Kemp. Hell, he even has to case the job himself. The whole thing feels jinxed. That's when Jordan meets Betty, who works at the diner. To her he is Mr. Smith, a button salesman. But to Jordan, Betty is a sweet moment in his life, a safe haven. And that's where he makes his first mistake--he allows himself to feel human. A SHROUD FOR JESSO Jack Jesso knows that Gluck wants him out of the syndicate. Still, when Gluck sends him on an errand to find a missing guy named Snell for a shady client of his, Johannes Kator, Jesso doesn't figure it to be anything more than a test. He finds the guy alright--sick and rambling--but Gluck double-crosses him, and tosses Jesso onto a Europe-bound steamer with Kator's crew, their orders to kill him. Jesso quickly realizes that he holds the key to a big money deal in Snell's ramblings, information that Kator desperately needs. All he has to do to stay alive is keep Kator interested. It's a simple enough scheme--until Jesso meets Kator's beautiful sister, Renette.

Widowed writer Loring Neiman, a respected member of the Kingsborough Beach community, tries to borrow money from his wealthy neighbors, gets turned down, but comes up with a scheme to pay off his debts

Octavius Gaye, founder and creator of the hugely successful magazine empire, Plain Man Enterprises, saw himself as the original 'plain man'. The truth however was rather different and Gaye was an unscrupulous tycoon with a strangely captivating nature who surrounded himself by a series of weak-willed puppets that he manipulated to his heart's content. One such puppet was Francie Lake and as the plot unfolds, Symons reveals how and why Francie simply had to die.

THE STORY: Raymond Shaw is a young American hero, the first Congressional Medal of Honor winner since Vietnam. Decorated for saving his troops in a peacekeeping mission in the Middle East, he has returned to the U.S. and a career as a journalist in

Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp, the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox himself a survivor of the camp can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown "war babies." As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.

Frank Kalinyak, disgraced ex-cop, returns to Pittsburgh, Pa., "Iron City", his hometown, from Tucson where he has been living a desperate existence since the death of his young daughter. He has been summoned home by Bobby Mack, an Assistant D.A., to find out who murdered an old high school friend. Kalinyak is swept into a whirlpool of bizarre killings, religious fanaticism, church duplicity, hustlers, cops, junkies, old friends gone bad. Amid the fractured landscape of Iron City, rusting mills, rotting industry, he struggles to find sense in his life. Ultimately he must ask: who is he and can he survive? "David Scott Milton can write like an angel... a writer hell bent on fulfilling the legacy of John Steinbeck, carrying on the tradition of James Jones and exploring his own heights." -- Alabama Journal "It was my misfortune to have missed 'The Quarterback', and thus be unaware of this fine, unflinching writer. He does not prettify, embroider, ornament of otherwise offend against the utter dignity of his hard, enduring characters; out of their meanness, and misery, he has made a story which I envy, in prose as clean and businesslike as a switchblade. Make sure everybody hears about this book; it's not about a gambler and a broad and a fighter at all-it's about the human condition, and it's beautiful." -- George V. Higgins, author of The "Friends of Eddie Coyle"

At first it was just a lark--bribing the stewards to steal food, bribing the conductors to steal blankets, raiding the club car, becoming a trainful of drunks. But then--then they began stealing morphine, and after that they began swapping mates, and after that... Finally the lights went out. And a modern-day miracle of streamlined engineering was turned into a cage of evil, human beings become beasts, and for three days the meaning of civilization was forgotten, and carnality ruled!

A truly great story about two master arms makers--one Russian, one American--both with the same girl friend, and both wanting to retire. The only problem is they know too much, so their employers want them dead. Their only hope is to look out for each other.

The next caper in the Sister Pelagia mystery from the bestselling author of THE WINTER QUEEN. Returning from the Synod in St Petersburg - and an official rebuke of her crime-fighting ways - Sister Pelagia finds herself aboard a steamer dodging pickpockets, zealots and a sinister man with a detachable eye. But a brutal murder in the next cabin spells the end of her sleuthing retirement, and the start of an investigation that will take her to the Holy Land and far beyond. Pelagia's journey is peppered with tales of miracles and roosters, and caves that act as portals to other worlds. But an assassin is closing in, pursuing the sister to the land of the Gospels where her criminal enquiry becomes a spiritual enquiry as she sets down her knitting needles to question the very foundations of her faith...

In this next thrilling story from Alan Gold and Mike Jones, we meet Shalman, a freedom-fighter turned peacenik and archaeologist, and his young beautiful wife, Judit, a refugee from the horrors of Stalin's USSR. As the Second World War draws to a close, and the world begins to learn the truth about Hitler's genocide, the foundation of the State of Israel as a permanent home for what's left of the Jewish people becomes increasingly urgent. In Palestine, Arab and Jewish forces fight each other and the British for supremacy and the right to own the land, causing a nightmare environment of hatred and suspicion. But a deeply buried global conspiracy, which has its origin in Stalin's Russia, seeks to undermine Israel's future as an independent nation. A plot to fashion the fledgling nation as a puppet of the Soviet Union rests upon a handful of committed Jewish Communists, led secretly by Judit. But is she a heartless assassin, a disciple of the evils of Beria and the Kremlin, or a committed fusion of Zionist and Communist? And in the darkest recesses of ancient history, we meet Shalman's ancestors, themselves descendants of the builders of Solomon's Temple. As the family escapes the nightmare of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, it witnesses the glories of the Islamic renaissance in Baghdad and the rampages of the Crusaders through the region. Another exciting instalment in this story of the births of nations and of the strength of their people.

Love stories. Celestria always spends her summer holiday at Pendrift Hall, the rambling, shabby Cornish mansion adorned with wisteria and clematis that has been home to the Montague family for generations. In the summer of 1958, the highlight is a lavish ball in honour of Archie Montague's fiftieth birthday, and the beautiful girl, on the cusp of womanhood, is looking forward to practising her flirtation skills on the Wilmotte boys. But what is supposed to be a night of celebration ends in catastrophe. As a result, Celestria's grandfather encourages her to play detective, to seek out an explanation for the bewildering events. The quest takes her to the heel of Italy, to the rugged beauty of Puglia and the cool cloisters of the Convento di Santa Maria del Mare. Here Celestria meets an enigmatic stranger and confronts unwelcome truths about her family - and about herself. Once she has done so, she is able to transform herself from selfish girl to mature woman and save the family home.

Someone is brutally murdering men in New York City, and Max Segal, the nervous, sophisticated detective assigned to the case, is struggling to find the killer before even morey observed social satire and side-splitting humor by the author of the bestselling Love Kills.

Vigilante JusticeSpider Webb and her partner Tommy Chan are police detectives on the edge of serious burnout. They've spent too much of their lives and too much energy collaring perps just to watch them slip through gaping holes in the system. So when a vigilante, dubbed "The Fry Guy" by the news media, starts to systematically kill the scum of the city by somehow microwaving their brains, they don't think of him as a "serial killer," they see him as an implement of justice. As far as they're concerned, "The Fry Guy" is doing their job for them and in a way that they never could - a permanent way."Strange Robby is a sharp, satisfying page-turner, a thrilling ride like a cross between N.Y.P.D. BLUE and THE X-FILES. Be smart: Buy your ticket -now-." -Esther M. Friesner"Selina Rosen's 'just like' nothing else. She's a creative soul, a builder in wood and stone and words. Out of this absolute wealth of experience come truly outrageous ideas and a way of looking at the universe with attitude with a capital 'A'. She's one in a million " -C.J. Cherryh"She's a great gal and a damn good storyteller." -Michael Sheard

"For Ellery Queen, there is no puzzle that reason cannot solve. In his time, he has faced down killers, thugs, and thieves, protected only by the might of his brain - and the odd bit of timely intervention by his father, a burly New York police inspector. But when a university professor asks Queen to teach a class, the detective finds there are people whom reason cannot touch: college students. Queen's adventure on campus is only the first of this incomparable collection of short mysteries. In the tales that follow, he tangles with a violent book thief, an assassin of acrobats, and New York's only cleanly shaven bearded lady. And the only thing more dazzling than the mysterious murders he confronts are his brilliant solutions at the end. Ellery Queen was a master of the short mystery, so closely associated with the form that the longest-running magazine for such tales bears his name; the excellent stories in this volume show why he continues to be considered one of the greatest American practitioners of the Golden Age whodunnit"--

He was a tall, cleanly attractive young man, the kind you'd like to have for a neighbor. Press the wrong button and he'd mow you down with the ruthlessness of a Sherman tank. His name was Daniel Port. He was a gangster, the brain and spirit behind the machine that milked the dirty pennies from the city. Now Port wanted out. He had a bellyful of corruption, a one-way ticket to New York, and a dark, shining girl to go along with it. The problem was to get there alive, because the one way out for Daniel Port was over his own freshly dug grave...

A grotesque figure burst into the girl's room. Its head piled with fake curls, its face concealed behind a smiling mask, it wore the rubber gloves of a surgeon or perhaps a mortuary attendant. It seized the girl from behind and chloroformed, suffocated, and finally, decapitated her.