When an ecological disaster strikes a major U.S. state, it is up to a team of scientists, engineers, and politicians, to find out what went wrong before the problem spreads across the country. The problems mount as internal tensions rise to the surface and cracks threaten to break up both the team as well as the land. . .“The Road to Hell” collects four stories by Paul Levine, the Edgar-nominated author of the bestselling Jake Lassiter series. Levine's heroes travel dark and dangerous paths as they confront devilish and powerful villains. In “El Valiente en el Infierno,” (The Brave One in Hell), a 13-year-old Mexican boy tells his own story as he makes a treacherous midnight crossing into California in search of his father. The boy’s courage is tested when he runs into two gun-toting American vigilantes. “Development Hell” imagines a pitch session in which a bedraggled Edgar Allan Poe squares off with a slick Hollywood producer who wants to make a cheesy slasher flick out of “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Bookgasm praised the story as “going straight to the funny bone.” In “A Hell of a Crime,” a prosecutor prepares for a homicide trial while being pestered by his domineering mother, a famous lawyer herself. Just what role did she play in the murder? And how is the prosecutor’s enigmatic wife involved in the case? Two of the author’s best-loved characters, Steve Solomon and Victoria Lord, appear in “Solomon & Lord: To Hell and Back.” The ethically-challenged Steve Solomon and the very proper Victoria Lord are mismatched Miami law partners. Steve says he's going fishing with Manuel Cruz, a sleazy con man. Victoria knows that Cruz is an unlikely fishing buddy. So just what is Steve up to now? Something between mischief and murder. The "Solomon and Lord" novels have been nominated for the Edgar, Macavity and International Thriller Awards, as well as the James Thurber Humor Prize. “Remarkably fresh and original with characters you can't help loving and sparkling dialogue that echoes the Hepburn-Tracy screwball comedies. A hilarious, touching and entertaining twist on the legal thriller." – Chicago Sun-TimesThe book also contains an excerpt from "Solomon vs. Lord," the first novel of the bestselling series of legal thrillers. A quick synopsis: Victoria Lord follows all the rules. Steve Solomon makes up his own. When they defend an accused murderer, they'll either end up in ruin, in jail...or in bed. Here's what number one bestselling author Harlan Coben had to say: "Hiaasen meets Grisham in the court of last retort. A sexy, wacky, wonderful thriller with humor and heart."Finally, an excerpt of “Mortal Sin,” one of the award-winning Jake Lassiter novels, is included. This time, the linebacker-turned-lawyer has a dangerous conflict of interest. He’s sleeping with Nicky Florio’s wife...and defending the mob-connected millionaire in court. Florio has hatched a scheme deep in the Florida Everglades that oozes corruption, blood, and money. One false move, and Jake will be gator bait. “Recalling the work of Carl Hiaasen, this thriller races to a smashing climax.” – Library Journal. PRAISE FOR THE FICTION OF PAUL LEVINE“Mystery writing at its very, very best.” – Larry King, USA TODAY"Irreverent...genuinely clever...great fun." – The New York Times Book Review"Just the remedy for those who can't get enough Spenser and miss Travis McGee terribly." – St. Petersburg Times“Genuinely chilling.” – Washington Post Book World “Take one part John Grisham, two parts Carl Hiaasen, throw in a dash of John D. MacDonald, and voila!” – Tulsa Sun“Wildly entertaining blend of raucous humor and high adventure.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch“Cracking good action-mystery...funny, sardonic, and fast-paced.” – Detroit Free PressABOUT THE AUTHORThe author of 17 novels, Paul Levine won the John D. MacDonald fiction award and was nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, International Thriller, and James Thurber prizes. A former trial lawyer, he also wrote 20 episodes of the CBS military drama “JAG.” His most recent novel is "Last Chance Lassiter." Look for "State vs. Lassiter," coming soon. More info at www.paul-levine.com.

It's Christmas Eve and Santa's in a fix; all his elves have food poisoning, so who will help him load his sleigh? Sure, there's a vampire coven just over the ridge, but... is he really *that* desperate?I have given some tips how to force the other person to utter ‘Oh my God, you are killing me’ or similar sentences. In the last chapter, I have given some tips to become unpopular among different groups of people. What I advise to do if you add only a ‘not’ or ‘no’ in most of my tips it will be your father’s advices to become a good human being. While going through the book, you may identify some of your mistakes while dealing with people. If one can avoid those mistakes, one can be a popular person and make your near and dear happy. So it is up to you whether you want to add a ‘not’ or ‘no’ in all my tips or just take as it is

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Dean Koontz's The City. "Koontz is brilliant in the creation of his characters and in building tension." CHICAGO SUN-TIMES In Los Angeles, a hot Hollywood director, high on PCP, turns a city street into a fiery apocalypse. Heroic LAPD officer Jac McGarvey is badly wounded and will not walk for months. His wife and his child are left to fend for themselves against both criminals that control an increasingly violent city and the dead director's cult of fanatic fans. In a lonely corner of Montana, Eduardo Fernandez, the father of McGarvey's murdered partner, witnesses a strange nocturnal sight. The stand of pines outside his house suddenly glows with eerie amber light, and Fernandez senses a watcher in the winter woods. As the seasons change, the very creatures of the forest seem in league with a mysterious presence. Fernandez is caught up in a series of chilling incidents that escalate toward a confronation that could rob him of his sanity or his life--or both. As events careen out of control, the McGarvey family is drawn to Fernandez's Montana ranch. In that isolated place they discover their destiny in a terrifying and fiercely suspenseful encounter with a hostile, utterly ruthless, and enigmatic enemy, from which neither the living nor the dead are safe.

How can you prove your innocence when you can't remember the crime? ****Being a cop runs in Billy Harney's family. The son of Chicago's Chief of Detectives whose twin sister, Patty, also followed in their father's footsteps, there's nothing Billy won't give up for the job, including his life. After a brutal shooting, Billy is left for dead alongside his tempestuous former partner and an ambitious assistant district attorney out for blood, But somehow Billy survives. He remembers nothing about the events leading up to the shootout and is charged with double murder. Desperate to clear his name, Billy retraces his steps to get to the bottom of what happened. When he discovers the existence of a little black book that everyone who's anyone in Chicago will stop at nothing to get their hands on, Billy suspects it contains the truth that will either set him free... or confirm his worst fears.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinized by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications. Interweaving past with present so that each may tell its own intense story, John le Carré has spun a single plot as ingenious and thrilling as the two predecessors on which it looks back: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a story resonating with tension, humor and moral ambivalence, le Carré and his narrator Peter Guillam present the reader with a legacy of unforgettable characters old and new.

The Kendricks help make the problems of the Washington elite disappear…but some secrets won’t stay buried. For Tess Kendrick, a junior at the elite Hardwicke School in Washington, D.C., fixing runs in the family. But Tess has another legacy, too, one that involves power and the making of political dynasties. When Tess is asked to run a classmate’s campaign for student council, she agrees. But when the candidates are children of politicians, even a high school election can involve life-shattering secrets. Meanwhile, Tess’s guardian has also taken on an impossible case, as a terrorist attack calls into doubt who can—and cannot—be trusted on Capitol Hill. Tess knows better than most that power is currency in D.C., but she's about to discover firsthand that power always comes with a price.

Lucas Davenport confronts a living nightmare, in one of the spookiest Prey novels yet from the number-one bestselling author. The first body is of a young woman, found on a Minneapolis riverbank, her throat cut, her body scourged and put on display. Whoever did this, Lucas knows, is pushed by brain chemistry, there is something wrong with him. This isn't a bad love affair. The second body is found three weeks later, in a farmhouse six miles south. Same condition, same display——except this time it is a man. Nothing to link the two victims, nothing to indicate that the killings end here. "This guy..." Lucas said. He took a deep breath, let it out as a sigh. "This guy is gonna bust our chops." And soon he is going to do far, far worse than that. A suspect emerges early: a man recently released from a prison hospital who now seems to have cut himself free from his court imposed ankle bracelet and disappeared. But the more Lucas investigates, the more he wonders: Is this really the man? Could he really have done this all by himself? And where has he gone, anyway? And meanwhile, a predator waits.

Dave Robicheaux has spent his life confronting the age-old adage that the sins of the father pass onto the son. But what has his mother's legacy left him? Dead to him since youth, Mae Guillory has been shuttered away in the deep recesses of Dave's mind. He's lived with the fact that he would never really know what happened to the woman who left him to the devices of his whiskey-driven father. But deep down, he still feels the loss of his mother and knows the infinite series of disappointments in her life could not have come to a good end. While helping out an old friend, Dave is stunned when a pimp looks at him sideways and asks him if he is Mae Guillory's boy, the whore a bunch of cops murdered 30 years ago. The pimp goes on to insinuate that the cops who dumped her body in the bayou were on the take and continue to thrive in the New Orleans area. Dave's search for his mother's killers leads him to the darker places in his past and solving this case teaches him what it means to be his mother's son. PURPLE CANE ROAD has the dimensions of a classic-passion, murder, and nearly heartbreaking poignancy-wrapped in a wonderfully executed plot that surpises from start to finish. From the Hardcover edition.

Ava, Caitlin, Mackenzie, Julie, and Parker are all driven to be perfect—no matter the cost. At first the girls think they have nothing in common, until they discover that they all hate the same person: handsome womanizer Nolan Hotchkiss, who's done things to hurt each of them. They come up with the perfect plan to murder Nolan—jokingly, of course. They'd never actually go through with it. But when Nolan turns up dead in the exact way they'd discussed, the girls suddenly become prime suspects in his murder. Only, they didn't do it. So who did? Unless they find the real killer, and soon, any one of them may be the next to die….

Decades ago, when he was a young CIA analyst, President Jack Ryan, Sr. was sent on what was supposed to be a simple support mission to investigate the death of an operative who had been looking into suspicious banking activities at a Swiss bank. Ryan's dogged tenacity uncovered not only financial deceit, but also the existence of a KGB assassin, code-named Zenith. He was never able to find the killer. But in the shadowy world of covert operations, nothing stays hidden forever. In the present, a new strongman has emerged in the ever-chaotic Russian republic -- the enigmatic President Valeri Volodin. His rise to power was meteoric, but shrouded in deception and treachery. The foundations of his personal empire are built on a bloody secret from his past, and he will eliminate anyone who comes close to that truth. For he has set in motion a plot to return Russia to its former glory and might, with the rest of the world once again trembling in fear of the mighty Bear. When an old friend of the Ryans is poisoned by a radioactive agent, the trail leads to Russia. And Jack Ryan, Jr. -- aided by his compatriots John Clark and the covert warriors of the secretive Campus -- must delve into an international conflict thirty years in the making, and finish what his father started.

Mark Fallon is an overworked detective investigating a spate of attacks at a string of high profile city centre nightclubs. Scott is a dejected 24 year old struggling to make ends meet working for his brother and supplementing his income with a small-scale drug dealing operation. Angela is an attractive 23 year old, raised by her father, a career criminal and small time drug dealer who supplies Scott with cannabis. This is a chilling tale spanning a few months in the lives of Scott and Angela, where realizations about the present combine with shocking revelations from the past leading to an apocalyptic climax where they no longer know whom they can trust.

In this fiendishly clever and darkly funny novel, Jess Walter speaks deeply to the bonds and compromises we make as children -- and the fatal errors we can make at any moment in our lives. While working the weekend night shift, Caroline Mabry, a weary Spokane police detective, encounters a seemingly unstable but charming derelict. "I'd like to confess," he proclaims. But he insists on writing out his confession in longhand. In the forty-eight hours that follow, the stranger admits to not just a crime, but an entire life: a wry and haunting tale of poverty and politics, of obsession and revenge. And as he writes, Caroline pushes herself to near collapse, racing against the clock to investigate not merely a murder, but the story of two men's darkly intertwined lives.

Dr. Ashe Walters is violently pulled back into the life that he had chosen to walk away from four years before, a life in which he worked with the YPD to hunt down criminals, a life that had led to the savage killing of his lovely wife. As Ashe fights to prove that his only son is innocent of murder, he finds his mental abilities, his beliefs, his sanity, and his overall faith in reality tested.While serving as an outside psychological consultant for the Youngstown Police Department of Youngstown Ohio, Ashe had once assisted Detective Oscar Harrison and the YPD Homicide Division in the investigation and pursuit of many types of criminals, spanning from jealous and vengeful housewives to chaotic and sometimes maniacal serial killers. Some cases would take the psychologist deep down into mud with the filth of society. But it was a duty that he happily juggled with his part-time career at the Wilson Maximum Security Prison. He enjoyed the work. He enjoyed the chase. He enjoyed stopping the so-called bad guys of the world. Until one investigation went horribly wrong leaving his beautiful wife dead and his sturdy family shattered. After choosing to walk away from the YPD and his long-time friend, Ashes decided to take a full-time position at the prison and lock himself away within its thick stone walls. Four years passed since the death of his wife and Dr. Ashe Walters continues to focus his every waking moment on being a Forensic Psychologist for the prison. From his office deep in the dusty catacombs, he spends his days and nights navigating the minds and methods of dangerous criminals, in an attempt at understanding the factors at the root of the madness. It is often a frustrating and demanding career, one that challenges him time after time, but he is content with his niche in life. That is until an unexpected phone call from an old friend forces Ashe to dig up the bones that he had been desperately struggling to keep buried. A new crime has come across the homicide desk, one involving the brutal slaying of a college student, shot to death while asleep in his bed. Ashe wishes he could ignore the case, but the suspect turns out to be his own son, Scott. Even though the relationship between his son and himself had long turned distant and strained, Ashe refuses to believe that his son is capable of such a cold blooded crime. Against the bizarre demands of Detective Harrison, he begins his own investigation, focusing on proving Scott’s innocence. He is immediately swallowed up by questions and doubts. Could his son actually be guilty? Why did the crime resemble that of another, well publicized slaying? And then there is the mysterious pill. What Ashe discovers along the way forces him to travel darkened roads, the ones that lead deep into the lunacy that might exist within us all. As he fights to discover the facts about Scott and the brutal murder, he must also come to terms with his own limitations, as a psychologist and as a father. The possibilities begin to stack up and Ashe finds his mental abilities, his beliefs, his sanity, and his overall faith in reality tested.

On a damp October night, 24-year-old Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley's life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror film director Stanislaus Cordova--a man who hasn't been seen in public for more than thirty years. For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova's dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself. Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova's eerie, hypnotic world. The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more.