Close Out

      Todd Strasser
     Close Out

IMAPCT ZONE The most dangerous part of the waveYou gotta beat it...or you'll eat it. The summer is hot, and so is action out on the line-up. There's a big competition coming up, with some serious burrito money attached. All the brahs are in it for something. Lucas has his career and his reputation on the line. If Kai wins, he might be able to stay in Sun Haven and not have to hit the road again with his sketchy dad. For everyone it's a chance to close out the summer as a champion. Stoked.

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    Don't Stop Now

      Julie Halpern
     Don't Stop Now

On the first day of Lillian's summer-before-college, she gets a message on her cell from her sort-of friend, Penny. Not only has Penny faked her own kidnapping, but Lil is the only one who figures it out. She knows that Penny's home life has been rough, and that her boyfriend may be abusive. Soon, Penny's family, the local police, and even the FBI are grilling Lil, and she decides to head out to Oregon, where Penny has mentioned an acquaintance. And who better to road-trip across the country with than Lil's BFF, Josh. But here's the thing: Lil loves Josh. And Josh doesn't want to "ruin" their amazing friendship. Josh has a car and his dad's credit card. Lil has her cellphone and a hunch about where Penny is hiding. There's something else she needs to find: Are she and Josh meant to be together?

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    Alice Bliss

      Laura Harrington
     Alice Bliss

Outside the back window Alice can see the outlines of the garden, some of the furrows visible under the snow, stretching away in long thin rows. She can't imagine doing the garden without her dad. It's his thing; she's always thought of herself as his assistant at best. She can't imagine doing anything without her dad and she starts to feel like she can't breathe. And then she looks at him. Just looks at him as he watches the fire with muffin crumbs on his lap.'I'll write to you.''I know, sweetheart.''Every day.'"—From Alice BlissWhen Alice Bliss learns that her father, Matt, is being deployed to Iraq, she's heartbroken. Alice idolizes her father, loves working beside him in their garden, accompanying him on the occasional roofing job, playing baseball. When he ships out, Alice is faced with finding a way to fill the emptiness he has left behind.Matt will miss seeing his daughter blossom from a tomboy into a full-blown teenager. Alice will learn...

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    So Over My Head (2010)

      Jenny B. Jones
     So Over My Head (2010)

Newly single, stalked by a killer, and in desperate need of some chic clown shoes--Bella is one skinny mocha frapp away from total meltdown.When the Fritz Family Carnival makes its annual appearance in Truman, Bella's keen reporter instincts tell her the bright lights hide more than they reveal. Her suspicions are confirmed when one of the stars is murdered. Though the police make an immediate arrest, Bella doubts this case is quite that simple.She needs her crime-solving boyfriend, Luke, more than ever. Problem is, his ex-girlfriend has moved back to town, giving Bella some murderous thoughts of her own. Then again, there's no time for a relationship crisis when Bella's doing her best to derail her father's wedding and stay one step ahead of a killer.Is God sending her a message in all of this madness? With a murderer on the loose and her boyfriend's ex on the prowl, this undercover clown has never had more to juggle--or more to risk.About the AuthorJenny B. Jones writes Christian Fiction with equal parts wit, sass, and untamed hilarity. When she’s not writing, she’s living it up as a high school teacher in Arkansas. Since she has very little free time, she believes in spending her spare hours in meaningful, intellectual pursuit such as watching E!, going to the movies and inhaling large buckets of popcorn, and writing her name in the dust on her furniture.

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    The Lower River

      Paul Theroux
     The Lower River

Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again.Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people. They remember him—the White Man with no fear of snakes—and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap?Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain about which no one has ever written better than Theroux.Review"What we have finally is a relentless tale of suspense adroitly presented. Theroux’s practiced hand in the matter of dialogue and scene-making is strongly in evidence. No one will nod off reading The Lower River...It’s a particular kind of frightening fun to watch evil flexing and spreading its leathery wings, and really feel it. The Lower River gives the reader just that." -- The New York Review of Books  " ‘The Lower River’ is riveting in its storytelling and provocative in its depiction of this African backwater, infusing both with undertones of slavery and cannibalism, savagery and disease. Theroux exposes paternalism in Hock’s Peace Corps nostalgia, his ‘sense of responsibility, almost a conceit of ownership.’ That sense of responsibility, and Hock’s modest contribution to the welfare of a people he was once genuinely fond of, has been replaced by a harsher mode of operation, run by coldhearted contractors living apart in impregnable compounds. ‘I have to leave,’ Hock pleads. ‘I’m going home.’ To which the village headman replies, with chilling menace, ‘This is your home, father.’ " -- New York Times Book Review"In this hypnotically compelling fiction, [Theroux] wrestles with questions of good intentions and harsh reality...A gripping and vital novel that reads like Conrad or Greene—in short, a classic." -- Booklist, starred"Theroux successfully grafts keen observations about the efficacy of international aid and the nature of nostalgia to a swift-moving narrative through a beautifully described landscape." -- PW, starred"Extraordinary...The suspense is enriched by Theroux’s loving attention to local customs and his subversive insights...Theroux has recaptured the sweep and density of his 1981 masterpiece The Mosquito Coast. That’s some achievement." -- Kirkus, starred"Theroux's latest can be read as straight-up suspense, but those unafraid of following him into the heart of darkness will be rewarded with much to discuss in this angry, ironic depiction of misguided philanthropy in a country dense with natural resources yet unable to feed its people." -- Library JournalAbout the AuthorPAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

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    New Avengers: Breakout Prose Novel

      Alisa Kwitney
     New Avengers: Breakout Prose Novel

Fantasy/romantic fiction/comics author Alisa Kwitney (A Flight of Angels, Moonburn) reveals the secret backstory of Avengers couple Hawkeye and the Black Widow. Under secret orders to assassinate the Widow, the roughedged marksman finds himself caught up in a violent prison break that releases some of the world’s most vicious and powerful criminals. Defying his superiors, Hawkeye joins forces with the sultry Russian spy - and with a mismatched group of personalities that include Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, Captain America and Iron Man. Unexpected betrayals and shocking revelations will lead the team from Manhattan’s top security Raft prison to the untamed jungle of the Savage Land in a dramatically different take on Brian Michael Bendis’ blockbuster Avengers comics debut. Learn the sizzling backstory of your favorite big-screen heroes in this adaptation, inspired by the best of page and screen!

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    Angel of Darkness

      Cynthia Eden
     Angel of Darkness

Review"Motorcycle chases, bar fights, and Keenan's discovery of lust drive this crisp, heart-pounding, smart thriller." - Publishers Weekly on ANGEL OF DARKNESSFrom the Back CoverAs an angel of death, Keenan's job is to collect the souls on his list. He's carried out his duty for two thousand years and never faltered once. Until he meets Nicole St. James. When the moment of death comes, Keenan hesitates, and instead of taking Nicole, Keenan touches the vampire who's attacking her.Cast out of heaven for disobedience, Keenan plummets to earth. Six months later, he finally manages to track Nicole to a bar in Mexico. He's stunned to discover that the woman he remembers has undergone a dramatic change--she's become a vampire. And when he realizes that she's the target of all manner of enemies--other vampires, demons, even shifters--he'll do whatever it takes to protect her, even if all hell breaks loose...

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    Rabid

      Monica Murphy
     Rabid

An engrossing, lively history of a fearsome and misunderstood virus that binds man and dog The most fatal virus known to science, rabies—a disease that spreads avidly from animals to humans—kills nearly one hundred percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. In this critically acclaimed exploration, journalist Bill Wasik and veterinarian Monica Murphy chart four thousand years of the history, science, and cultural mythology of rabies. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh and often wildly entertaining look at one of humankind's oldest and most fearsome foes.

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    Eureka

      William Diehl
     Eureka

Eureka. It’s what you say when you strike gold. It’s also a town in California where the truth might be buried forever.In New York Times bestselling author William Diehl’s thrilling, accomplished new novel, the seamy past of America’s most glamorous state lies in this deceptively peaceful area, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles. It was the lawless place from which young, rugged Thomas Culhane escaped to fight World War I. Now it’s a place where, two decades later, police detective Zeke Bannon investigates a death that seems a sad accident.Until you look a bit closer.The year is 1941. Verna Wilensky has been electrocuted in her bathtub, leaving a lower-middle-class life, no survivors, and a bank account packed with almost a hundred thousand dollars. Mysterious checks have consistently come to her for more than twenty years, most drawn from a bank in San Pietro, a town once known as Eureka.Eureka was a town that used to be a bootlegger’s paradise and a gangster’s dream. Now it is the rebuilt metropolis where Sheriff Thomas Culhane is launching a bid to be the golden state’s next governor. But something just might threaten his ambitions. As Bannon digs deeper into Wilensky’s demise, he unearths a decades-old secret that starts in a shootout, builds to a bloodbath, and could end up within the upper echelons of California’s elite, forever changing the destiny of a state.Rich in historical detail, complex in its connection between past and present, and filled with the nonstop action that are the hallmarks of this modern master, Eureka is an epic achievement of storytelling and suspense–William Diehl’s most extraordinary novel yet.From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com ReviewWilliam Diehl clearly understands the three essentials of any bestselling 1940s-era crime thriller: gangsters, gunplay, and guilty secrets. But Eureka isn't just another noirish shoot-'em-up, as shallow and forgettable as a stoolie's grave. It's a combustible, epic-aspiring saga about long-ago violence and the limits of justice, about revenge and redemption and two rivalrous lawmen drawn together by common ideals.Most of the action centers around Zeke Bannon, a young L.A. cop whose probing into the murder of a mysterious widow--electrocuted in her own bathtub--leads him to the once-sinful town of Eureka, now called San Pietro. It's from there that she'd been receiving anonymous cashier's checks over the last two decades, money Bannon figures she earned by her silence. Was she helping to cover up the truth about a 1921 shootout that caused the death of Eureka's frontier-style sheriff? Nobody in modern San Pietro will talk, least of all Thomas "Brodie" Culhane, a World War I hero who cleaned up the town and is now running for governor of California. Torn between admiring Culhane and trying to link him to the widow's killing, Bannon ignites historical enmities that threaten to express both men to their graves.Although Diehl offers ample cinematic violence here, there's little true menace, and a romantic subplot involving Bannon with a gorgeous banker is neither credible nor effectively exploited. Still, Eureka is a polished work, full of careful character studies and drama, with a gasp-provoking solution that few readers will anticipate. --J. Kingston PierceFrom Publishers WeeklyHFollowing a four-year hiatus after the somewhat lackluster Reign in Hell, the third volume of the Martin Vail thriller series, legions of this bestselling author's readers will herald this triumphant comeback as his best novel ever. Combining the psychological chiaroscuro of L.A. Confidential with the dramatic sweep and stylish noir of Chinatown, this labyrinthine, multigenerational epic scrolls across the still-lawless frontier landscape of California. At the turn of the 20th century, Eureka, the railhead Sodom and Gomorrah of Southern California, is replete with whorehouses, gambling, dark political intrigues and steamy liaisons. Fast-forwarding through WWI to the last days of WWII, the plot examines the coming of age of this seedy patch. Recovering in 1945 from WWII wounds that earned him a Silver Star, LAPD Det. Zee Bannon is handed a briefcase containing files concerning a mysterious woman found dead in her bathtub. The case was left unresolved in 1941, just before he went off to war, and Bannon is unable to discover the victim's history before her move to L.A. in 1924. But her sizable bank account and a trail of anonymous cashier's checks eventually lead back to Eureka (since renamed San Pietro), where now legendary Sheriff Thomas Culhane's bid for state governor is at stake. Infidelity, murder, murky secrets, a deeply affecting love story and an old-fashioned showdown will keep fans spellbound right up to the fully satisfying if not so surprising denouement. Vividly cinematic, rich in atmosphere and peopled with believable characters, this novel serves notice that Diehl is one of the best thriller writers working today. (Mar.)Forecast: Expect this winner to hit bestseller lists early and hard. Southern regional author appearances and a teaser chapter in the mass market reissue of Primal Fear will further spur sales.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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    Murder in Orbit

      Bruce Coville
     Murder in Orbit

A young scientist discovers a zero-gravity homicide onboard a space station Rusty McPhee was born on Earth, but he hasn't been on solid ground for so long that he hardly remembers what it's like. He was raised on the space station known as ICE-3, and he knows the ins and outs of this floating research platform better than anybody. He's working in the waste disposal unit, watching garbage dissolve and be recycled, when he sees something terrifying: a dead body, half decomposed, face down in the muck. Before he can tell anyone what he's found, the machines finish processing the body, and he's left without any evidence that a murder ever happened. Not one of ICE-3's twenty-five thousand inhabitants is missing—so where did the body come from? As he tracks the zero-G killer, danger lurks around every airlock, and it will take just one misstep for Rusty to fall from the sky. This ebook features an illustrated personal history of Bruce...

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