Literary Humor

When Maud Marsh flings herself into George Bevan's cab in Piccadilly, he starts believing in damsels in distress. George traces his mysterious travelling companion to Belpher Castle, home of Lord Marshmoreton, where things become severely muddled. Maud's aunt, Lady Caroline Byng, wants Maud to marry Reddie, her stepson. Maud, meanwhile, is known to be in love with an unknown American she met in Wales. So when George turns up speaking American, a nasty case of mistaken identity breaks out.

What drives someone to murder? Logan McRae's personal history is hardly squeaky clean, but now that he works for Professional Standards he's policing his fellow officers. When Detective Inspector Bell turns up dead in the drivers seat of a crashed car, it's a shock to everyone. Because Bell died two years ago. They buried him. Or they thought they did. As an investigation is launched into Bell's stabbing, Logan digs into his past. Where has he been all this time? Why did he disappear? And what's so important that he felt the need to come back from the dead?

Young, wealthy Arabella is obsessed with French romances: brought up by a reclusive widowed father in an isolated castle, she has educated herself through their pages, and been led to believe that their dramas and absurdities are reality. She blindly adheres to their example and interprets her everyday life through their lens, thinking that life consists of uncontrollable passions and murderous violence, and that any man would die for her. Thus she embarks on a series of hilarious misadventures, insistent on the reality of her imaginary world, like Don Quixote before her.

Meet June Parker. She works for L.A. Rideshare, adores her rent-stabilized apartment in Santa Monica, and struggles with losing a few pesky pounds. But June's life is about to change.

VINE VOICE: "Peggy A. Edelheit couldn't have chosen a better title." VINE VOICE: "A journey to uncover mysteries, begat more mysteries." "A gripping mystery!" "This engaging cozy mystery, ingeniously weaves layers of clever lies, laced with wit & style; grips readers from page one to a startling end." "The author has a gift for veiling characters with a subtle but lingering suspicion. I wish I could say I figured it out, but the hallmark of a great mystery is to be kept guessing until the last page, and that's what happened here." "I loved it!" "Well done!" Not satisfied by the authorities'...

After his mother, a theologian and best-selling author, dies in a fiery explosion,49-year-old Calvin Bledsoe's heretofore uninspired life is upended. A stranger shows up at the funeral, claiming to be Calvin's aunt Beatrice, and insists that Calvin accompany her on a trip to Europe, immediately. As he and Beatrice traverse the continent, it quickly becomes apparent that his aunt's clandestine behavior is leading him into danger.

Gerald, a mid-level employee of a New York-based public relations firm, has been uploaded into the company’s internal Slack channels - at least his consciousness has. His colleagues assume it’s an elaborate gag to exploit the new work-from-home policy, but now that Gerald’s productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists his coworker Pradeep to help him escape and to find out what happened to his body.

If you’ve done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Which is exactly what the crew of the

Heart of Gold plan to do. There’s just the small matter of escaping the Vogons, avoiding being taken to the most totally evil world in the Galaxy and teaching a space ship how to make a proper cup of tea. And did anyone actually make a reservation?

The Core Four have been friends since college: four men, four women, four couples. They got married around the same time, had kids around the same time, and now, fifteen years later, they’ve started getting divorced around the same time, too. With three of the Core Four unions crumbling to dust around them, Jessica and Mitch Butler take a long, hard look at their own marriage. Can it be saved? Or is divorce, like some fortysomething zombie virus, simply inescapable?

For almost four decades Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City has blazed its own trail through popular culture - from a groundbreaking newspaper serial to a classic novel, to a television event that entranced millions around the world. The first of nine novels about the denizens of the mythic apartment house at 28 Barbary Lane, Tales is both a sparkling comedy of manners and an indelible portrait of an era that changed forever the way we live.

When Jimmy Pitt bets an actor friend that any fool could burgle a house, a feat which he offers to demonstrate that very night, he puts his reputation on the line. Although he hires the services of a professional burglar, the difficulty is increased when he has the misfortune to select Police Captain McEachern's house.

Obsessed with the iconic '60s classic Easy Rider, encyclopedic Floridaphile, lovable serial killer, and movie buff extraordinaire Serge A. Storms devises his wildest plan yet: finish the journey begun by his freewheeling heroes, Captain America and Billy, tragically cut short by some shotgun-wielding rednecks.

LONELINESS IS A KILLER, so people have said... and Martha is lonely, even though a neurological quirk makes her see familiar faces everywhere. To the extent that she has to hold down tricky conversations with jostling, self-important dollar bills, go lip-to-lip with a Hollywood icon, and ride a warhorse with a stiff and spectacular General, all within the same square mile. Neil Baker doesn’t even have quirks to break through his monotonous existence but don’t let us the readers be guilty of overlooking him too. Though exhaustion makes his soul invisible. Martha and Neil don't meet. But ...

When Andrei Kaplan’s older brother, Dima, insists that Andrei return to Moscow to care for their ailing grandmother, Andrei must take stock of his life in New York. His girlfriend has stopped returning his text messages. His dissertation adviser is dubious about his job prospects. It’s the summer of 2008, and his bank account is running dangerously low. Perhaps a few months in Moscow are just what he needs. So Andrei sublets his room in Brooklyn and moves into the apartment that Stalin himself had given his grandmother, a woman who has outlived her husband and most of her friends.

The exciting conclusion of the Philosophical Detective Trilogy: The Philosophical Detective’s Last Case The fabulist and detective who calls himself Jorge Luis Borges returns to New England for three final adventures, as recollected by his assistant Nick Martin almost fifty years later. Struggling with cognitive issues of his own, Nick recounts Borges’s encounter with the conundrums of memory and identity in the amnesia ward of a Boston hospital, the perplexities of modern science at a conference of physicists in New Hampshire, and the ironies of fate at a media mogul’s suburban ...

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Here is a big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous best-selling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

When grandmother Maureen Phelan is surprised in her home by a stranger, she clubs the intruder with a Holy Stone. The consequences of this unplanned murder connect four misfits struggling against their meager circumstances. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father, Tony, whose feud with his next-door neighbor threatens to ruin his family. Georgie is a sex worker who half-heartedly joins a born-again movement to escape her profession and drug habit.

When three-year-old Harry goes missing, the whole of America turns its attention to one small town. Everyone is eager to help. Everyone is a suspect. Desperate mother Jess' grief is driving her to extreme measures. Newcomer Jared, with an easy charm and a string of broken hearts in his wake is also a suspect. Photographer Jerry is a suspect who is determined to break away from his controlling mother once and for all. And investigating them all is a police chief with a hidden obsession of his own....

Deputy sheriff Constance Kopp is outraged to see young women brought into the Hackensack jail over dubious charges of waywardness, incorrigibility, and moral depravity. The strong-willed, patriotic Edna Heustis, who left home to work in a munitions factory, certainly doesn't belong behind bars. And 16-year-old runaway Minnie Davis, with few prospects and fewer friends, shouldn't be publicly shamed and packed off to a state-run reformatory. But such were the laws - and morals - of 1916.

This is the third book in the Old Filth trilogy ( Old Filth, The Man in the Wooden Hat, Last Friends). Last Friends depicts the marriage of Edward Feathers and Betty as seen through the eyes of Edward’s friend and Betty's lover Terry Veneering.