When Private Matt Duffy wakes up in an army hospital in Iraq, he's honored with a Purple Heart. But he doesn't feel like a hero. There's a memory that haunts him: an image of a young Iraqi boy as a bullet hits his chest. Matt can't shake the feeling that he was somehow involved in his death. But because of a head injury he sustained just moments after the boy was shot, Matt can't quite put all the pieces together. Eventually Matt is sent back into combat with his squad—Justin, Wolf, and Charlene—the soldiers who have become his family during his time in Iraq. He just wants to go back to being the soldier he once was. But he sees potential threats everywhere and lives in fear of not being able to pull the trigger when the time comes. In combat there is no black-and-white, and Matt soon discovers that the notion of who is guilty is very complicated indeed. National Book Award Finalist Patricia McCormick has written a visceral and compelling portrait of life in a war zone, where loyalty is valued above all, and death is terrifyingly commonplace.

A wry romp through 1930s mores, social and sexual Progressive for its time as well as ours, The Friendly Young Ladies is a deftly witty comedy set in England between the wars. At eighteen, Elsie has had enough of life at her bickering parents’ Cornwall home. She decides to join up with her bohemian older sister, Leo, in the city. Leo’s life is full of surprises—not least her significant other, Helen, a beautiful nurse. As Elsie gets acquainted with Leo’s world, new characters—including a novelist and a doctor deluded enough to chase all three women at once—come into play. With acid humor and a supremely light touch, The Friendly Young Ladies colors in an unseen dimension of the 1930s.

Victoria Clarke can’t believe what she’s about to do. Desperate for a friend, the Canadian romance novelist mails a letter to a prison inmate in Pennsylvania—a man she found on a prisoner pen-pal website while exploring ideas for a book.Trapped in a loveless marriage, Victoria is seeking someone who can relate to her feelings of isolation. Joshua Larson, who is serving ten years for a murder he claims he committed in self-defense, seems like the perfect confidant.Through letters and phone calls, the two slowly develop a caring relationship and share all their deepest secrets. Or at least, Victoria shares hers…But Joshua’s holding something back, and Victoria doesn’t find out until she leaves her husband and travels across the border to meet Joshua in person. Has she just made the stupidest move of her life? Or the wisest?

Fury 161 is a wretched planet -- a penal colony and industrial complex manned by violent prisoners. When an escape pod from the USS Sulaco crash-lands there, Ellen Ripley appears to be the only passenger left alive. Then inmates begin to die, all at the hands of another survivor. A creature which encounters Ripley, and spares her life! Desperate to know why, she seeks out an answer -- and discovers terror unlike any she's ever known. Science fiction master Alan Dean Foster returns to the Alien universe to reveal the ultimate destinies of Ellen Ripley and her eternal foe, the xenomorph known as the Alien.

Rabbitlike aliens from outer space colonize Earth during humankind's Second World War in a delightfully funny and thought-provoking science fiction adventure The Quozl just need somewhere to call home. A gentle race of extraterrestrial rabbits, they have a propensity for reproduction that has left their home planet, Quozlene, dangerously overpopulated, and in their search for greener and less-crowded pastures, they have discovered the perfect place to start over: the third planet away from a healthy, warming sun. What they don't realize is that this world they call Shiraz is already inhabited by a species of violent sentient creatures known as humans. But there's no going back now. In the midst of the brutal and helpfully distracting global conflict the Shirazians call World War II, the colony ship lands undetected, and the space rabbits immediately go into hiding. But a secret like the Quozl can be concealed for only so long, especially when their...

In 1950, Katherine Proctor leaves Ireland for Barcelona, determined to escape her family and become a painter. There she meets Miguel, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and begins to build a life with him. But Katherine cannot escape her past, as Michael Graves, a fellow Irish émigré in Spain, forces her to reexamine all her relationships: to her lover, her art, and the homeland she only thought she knew. The South is a novel of classic themes--of art and exile, and of the seemingly irreconcilable yearnings for love and freedom--to which Colm Tóibín brings a new, passionate sensitivity.

The second novel from the author of the bestselling Loaded and The Slap The Jesus Man tells the story of three brothers, Dominic, Tommy and Louie, who come from a Greek-Italian family haunted by its history. When Tommy is made redundant from work and can't find another job, he finds the voices in his head becoming louder and louder as he sinks inexorably into pornography, violence and madness. Tommy snaps and murders someone who may or may not be a serial sex killer of children, and then castrates and kills himself, leaving his family numb with grief and incomprehension and at the mercy of the ensuing media feeding frenzy. The Jesus Man is told from the point of view of Louie, the youngest brother, who is struggling to make sense of Tommy's death and the kind of world in which such tragedies are commonplace. Written with the remorseless, page-turning urgency of a thriller, The Jesus Man is an uncompromising and timely examination of the hell that is life for many people; a...

Introducing the second book in the The Enchanted Files! Told in diary entries and more, it's a new magical, modern-day comedy series by the master of funny fantasy and bestselling author of My Teacher is an Alien: Bruce Coville! Meet Gerald. Gerald is a griffin—a creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. According to the Code of the Griffins, that means he should be: 1. Brave and fierce in all situations! 2. A guardian of a great treasure! 3. Completely and totally hidden from the human realm! But what if a Griffin ISN'T brave or fierce? What if he's NEVER found a great treasure (or ANY treasure for that matter)? What if he feels like such an embarrassment that the only thing left to do is run away? And what if the only place no one will look for him is . . . the human world? This laugh-out-loud adventure, full of humor and heart, is ideal for fans of Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's...

Biografi is an imaginative melding of travelogue and fable that sparked controversy on its release.When Lloyd Jones visited Albania in 1991, six years after the death of dictator Enver Hoxha, he heard rumours of a village dentist who looked like the dictator and had been forced to give up his identity and become his public double. Jones' quest to find Petar Schapallo gives shape not only to an intriguing traveller's tale, but a story about identity-changed, lost or falsified-in a country where identity was strictly controlled.Part travel narrative, part imaginative fiction, Biografi is an inquiry into the nature of identity itself.'A fine piece of work, rich in startling detail.' Age

It's a whole new ride from master of horror and bestselling author R.L. Stine—with a story so fiendish that it can't be contained to just one book! Britney Crosby thinks her cousin Ethan is pretty weird—and she happens to be right. Ethan won't stop tormenting Britney with an old ventriloquist's dummy. And the puppet has plans for Britney, too! Next, someone will be offered a vacation at a popular "scream park." An entire week for free? You'd have to be a real dummy to refuse that! But some guests aren't allowed to escape HorrorLand after just six days and seven frights...

Lieutenant Alex Cruz eats, sleeps and breathes law enforcement. He's tough and brusque, and cops and criminals alike tremble before him. And that's the way he likes it. Until he meets Caitlin Summers-and decides he wants her trembling beneath him. The beautiful scholar is doing dissertation research in his cop shop, and seriously messing with his head. His self-imposed sexual abstinence comes to a screeching halt in Caitlin's ratty hotel room and dies a permanent death in his bed. . .and his kitchen. . .and his living room. Caitlin is also intelligent and funny, kind and generous, her smile a burst of warmth in his cold, austere life. And that scares the crap out of him. With his head and heart fighting a battle of wills, Alex can barely concentrate on work. And that's too bad-because his dangerous job and his newfound love are about to clash in the worst way possible. Publisher Note: A Fine Specimen was previously released by another publisher under the title Taming Nick.

First entry in a new urban fantasy saga by the creator of the popular Tinker contemporary fantasy/SF series. A young American expat writer in Japan suffering from OCD tries to figure out if she’s crazy or not while solving a murder that may be part of a war among Japanese deities.A contemporary fantasy of mystery and death as American expats battle Japanese gods and monsters to retrieve an ancient artifact that can destroy the world.On Saturday afternoon, Nikki Delany thought, "George Wilson, in the kitchen, with a blender." By dinner, she had killed George and posted his gory murder to her blog. The next day, she put on her mourning clothes and went out to meet her best friend for lunch to discuss finding a replacement for her love interest.Nikki is a horror novelist.  Her choice of career is dictated by an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that forces her to write stories of death and destruction.  She can't control it, doesn't understand it, but can use it to make money anywhere in the world. Currently "anywhere" is in Japan, hiding from her mother who sees Nikki's OCD as proof she's mentally unstable.  Nikki's fragile peace starts to fall apart when the police arrest her for the murder of an American expatriate. Someone killed him with a blender.    Reality starts to unravel around Nikki.  She's attacked by a raccoon in a business suit.  After a series of blackouts, she’s accompanied by a boy that no one else can see, a boy who claims to be a god.  Is she really being pursued by Japanese myths—or is she simply going insane?  What Nikki does know for sure is that the bodies are piling up, her mother has arrived in Japan to lock her up for the rest of her life—and her novels always end with everyone dead.About Wen Spenser:“Wit and intelligence inform this off-beat, tongue-in-cheek fantasy…. Furious action…good characterization, playful eroticism and well-developed folklore…lift this well above the fantasy average …. Buffy fans should find a lot to like in the book's resourceful heroine.”—Publishers Weekly on series debut Tinker“Spencer's intertwining of current Earth technology and otherworldly elven magic is quite ingenious.” –Booklist on the Elfhome seriesAbout the AuthorJohn W. Campbell Award Winner Wen Spencer resides in paradise in Hilo, Hawaii with two volcanoes overlooking her home.  Spencer says that she often wakes up and exclaims "Oh my god, I live on an island in the middle of the Pacific!"  According to Spencer, she lives with "my Dali Llama-like husband, my autistic teenage son, and two cats (one of which is recovering from mental illness).  All of which makes for very odd home life at times." Spencer's love of Japanese anime and manga flavors her writing. Her novel Tinker won the 2003 Sapphire Award for Best Science Fiction Romance and was a finalist for the Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Fantasy Novel. Her Wolf Who Rules was a Top Pick by Romantic Times and given their top rating of four and a half stars.  Other Baen books include space opera thriller Endless Blue and Elfhome, third entry in the Tinker series.

A superspy meets her match in New York Times bestselling author Lilith Saintcrow's latest romance! As a genetically enhanced assassin for a secret agency, Cal has one mission: to recapture the sultry rogue superspy who calls herself Trinity. Yet when he finds her, Cal will risk everything to keep her out of his superiors' deadly hands. Despite a computerlike brain and the ability to heal herself, Trinity has no memory of her life before the agency. She's desperate to uncover her identity. Every bit of trust she places in gorgeous, sexy Cal seems to bring back a little of her humanity. But her secrets might destroy them both, before the agency even gets a chance.

Lisa Jackson's Bentz & Montoya Bundle: Hot Blooded, Cold Blooded, Shiver, Absolute Fear, Lost Souls, Malice, & an Exclusive EXTENDED Excerpt from DeviousHot BloodedA First One Dead Body...A prostitute lies strangled in a seedy French Quarter hotel room. Miles away, in a rambling plantation house on the sultry shores of Lake Ponchartrain, popular late-night radio host Dr. Samantha Leeds receives a threatening crank call. All in a day's work for a celebrity. Who would think to link the two?Then Another...A second hooker's corpse turns up. Samantha's ominous caller persists, along with a mysterious claiming to be a woman from her past—a woman who's been dead for years. With Detective Rick Bentz convinced that the serial killer prowling the shadowy streets of New Orleans is somebody close to Samantha, she doesn't dare trust anyone. Especially not Ty Wheeler, her seductive new neighbor who seems to know more about her than a stranger should....And Another...