New York Times bestseller Laura Lippman showcases why she is one of today's top crime writers in this acclaimed collection of suspenseful stories featuring fierce women--including one never-before-published novella. "A first-rate collection, an obvious must for the legions of Lippman fans, but also great reading for anyone who savors short crime fiction." -- Booklist (starred review) The award-winning master of psychological suspense is in top form in this collection of diverse and diabolically clever stories. In the never-before-published "Just One More," a married couple--longing for that old romantic spark--creates a playful diversion that comes with unexpected consequences. Lippman's beloved Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan keeps a watchful eye on a criminally resourceful single father in "Seasonal Work," while her mother, Judith, realizes that the life of "The Everyday Housewife" is an excellent cover for all kinds of secrets. In "Slow Burner," a husband's secret cell phone proves to be a dicey temptation for a suspicious wife. A father's hidden past piques the curiosity of a young snoop in "The Last of Sheila-Locke Holmes." Plus seven other brilliantly crafted stories of deception, murder, dangerous games, and love gone wrong--irrefutable evidence that Laura Lippman's riveting fiction will more than satisfy any crime reader.

"Readers can find comfort in the dedication V.I. gives the cries for help she hears from friends, neighbors, and strangers... Very few series authors deliver as masterfully as Sara Paretsky.” — San Francisco Book Review Legendary detective V.I. Warshawski uncovers a nefarious conspiracy preying on Chicago’s weak and vulnerable, in this thrilling novel from New York Ti[Bokinfo]

O, The Oprah Magazine, Time Magazine, Financial Times, Esquire, Bustle, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Library Journal, Brooklyn Based, Avenue BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR New York Times Editors' Choice "Superb. . . . Krauss's depictions of the nuances of sex and love, intimacy and dependence, call to mind the work of Natalia Ginzburg in their psychological profundity, their intellectual rigor. . . . Krauss's stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they're hungry for experience and open to possibilities, and that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions or easy answers." --Molly Antopol, New York Times Book Review "From a contemporary master, an astounding collection of ten globetrotting stories, each one a powerful dissection of the thorny connections between men and women. . . . Each story is masterfully crafted and deeply contemplative, barreling toward a shimmering, inevitable conclusion, proving once again that Krauss is one of our most formidable talents in fiction." --Esquire In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all. The way these stories mirror one other and resonate is beautiful, with a balance so finely tuned that the book almost feels like a novel. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging parents and new-born babies; young women's coming of age and the newfound, somewhat bewildering sexual power that accompanies it; generational gaps and unexpected deliveries of strange new leases on life; mystery and wonder at a life lived or a future waiting to unfold. To Be a Man illuminates with a fierce, unwavering light the forces driving human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, growing older. Profound, poignant, and brilliant, Krauss's stories are at once startling and deeply moving, but always revealing of all-too-human weakness and strength.

"With gimlet eyed cool and razor sharp wit, The Low Desert explores both the depravity and humanity at the heart of Tod Goldberg's critically acclaimed gangster universe, first introduced in Gangsterland, continued in Gangster Nation, and expanded here with all-new and returning characters. The uncle of an FBI agent spends his life as sheriff in different cities, living too close to the violent acts of men; a cocktail waitress moves through several desert towns trying to escape the loss of an adopted daughter who went missing under unexplained circumstances; a drug dealer with a penchant for karaoke and a bullet hole in his foot meets a talkative lawyer and a silent clown in a Palm Springs bar. These surprising and thrilling stories from a master of modern crime fiction elaborate and enrich the dynamic Sal Cupertine/Rabbi David Cohen gangster universe"--

"This volume showcases the nuanced, playful, ever-expanding definitions of the genre and celebrates its current renaissance." --Washington Post Science fiction and fantasy can encompass so much, from far-future deep-space sagas to quiet contemporary tales to unreal kingdoms and beasts. But what the best of these stories do is the same across the genres--they illuminate the whole gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears. With a diverse selection of stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Charles Yu, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 continues to explore the ever-expanding and changing world of SFF today, with Yu bringing his unique view--literary, meta, and adventurous--to the series' third edition.

In this sequel to "Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned", Socrates Fortlow is back in Watts, trying to leave prison in his past, and confronting the most dangerous emotion of all: hope.

Remember Charles Bronson stalking the streets of New York blowing holes in muggers in Death Wish ? Remember Glenn Ford standing off the vicious juvenile delinquents in Blackboard Jungle ? Well, it is more than fifty years and two different worlds from 1955 to now. And something the author of these stories knows that you are scared to admit is that reality and fantasy have flip-flopped. They have switched places. The stories that scare you today are the ones about rapists and thugs, psychos who will carve you for a dollar and hypes who will bust your head to get fixed. Glenn Ford's world was yesterday, and Bronson's is today. And in the stalking midnight of this book, one of America's top writers, Harlan Ellison, invades the shadows of both!

A collection of short stories:I. Ange MarieII. The modern marauderIII. The shrew of MadridIV. An ethical dilemmaV. The fugitive of Adelphie terraceVI. The battling pacifistVII. Mr Brown and the MadonnaVIII. The dancing GentlemanIX. With a dashX. The chateau of phantasies.Major Andrew Forester is a retired British Army officer, of no discernible occupation, who wanders about Europe, England and the United States in the 1920s. He is looking for adventure, but not outside the bounds of the acceptable. He is willing to skirt the law, but not break it. A bachelor, he has been unsuccessful in love, with a limited income. He stays in out-of-the-way hotels, and smaller pensions, and takes an occasional gamble on the tables at Monte Carlo. His peripatetic life style brings him in contact with scam artists, gold-diggers, art thieves, industrial spies,taxi dancers, and flappers. Sometimes he benefits from these associations, but at other times he is their victim. He does this all with style, impeccable clothing, and a humorous tolerance of human failings.

Ten short stories. Miss Mott is a newspaper columnist, offering advice to readers on various personal matters. Is she now to become a consultant on crime? Of course, her uncle does work at Scotland Yard...In the ten cases, Lucie Mott solves only two-inding a missing woman locked in her own house and recognizing that an apparently philandering husband was actually out thieving--and in a third helps rescue her uncle. In five stories she is saved from her own folly by a supposed criminal known as Violet Joe with whom she immediately falls in love. Three strains of action are interwoven throughout the volume: the romance of Lucie and Violet Joe, the maniacal attraction of the criminal gang leader Meredith for Lucie, and Miss Mott's investigative career. All are neatly tied up in the final case.