Showing titles in Literature & Fiction

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

Out of bail skippers and rent money, Stephanie Plum throws caution to the wind and follows in the entrepreneurial bootsteps of Super Bounty Hunter, Ranger, engaging in morally corrupt and marginally legal enterprises. So, a scumbag blows himself to smithereens on her first day of policing a crack house and the sheik she was chauffeuring stole the limo. But hey, nobody’s perfect!

When Carlos Manoso, street name Ranger, is caught on video just minutes before the youngest son of international black-market arms dealer Alexander Ramos is shot and killed, he’s instantly identified as suspect number one. He’s at the scene, he’s with the victim, and he’s former special forces turned soldier of fortune. He has a blue-chip stock portfolio and no known address. He moves in mysterious circles. He’s Stephanie’s mentor—the man who taught her everything she knows about fugitive apprehension. And he's more than her friend.

The top 10 list is populated. The sponsorship program is open. The difficulty is ramping up. The first three floors were nothing compared to what Carl and Donut now face. The Iron Tangle. An impossibly complicated subway system built out of the world's subterranean railway systems, all combined and then tied together into a knot. Up is down.

When two childhood best friends blow up their respective romantic relationships, they make a time-sensitive pact: serial-cheater Chuck cannot sleep with anyone as she attends a three-month-long recovery group for cheaters, while sex-deprived Sofia vows to hook up with as many people as possible before recommitting to monogamy and tying the knot with her long-time fiancé. To keep things interesting, Chuck and Sofia decide to revive a past tradition from their summer camp days—also known as the dawning of sluthood.

Separated by 10 years, 3,000 miles, and the unrelenting stresses of adulthood, best friends Janet and Serena plan a 40th birthday girls’ trip to reconnect. But after a massive crash, they’re the only survivors to wash ashore on an uncharted Caribbean Island. Armed with only the clothes on their backs and zero survival skills, they fight to overcome hunger, thirst, deadly wildlife—and most terrifyingly—decades of accrued resentment. Can they find their way home, or will they kill each other first?

Bunny McGarry is back – and he’d really like a nice holiday. Somewhere with hot weather and cold drinks that come with little umbrellas for reasons he never understood. A certain nun has other ideas though and instead, he finds himself dispatched to London to find Sean Malone, a runaway teenager who doesn’t know his mother hasn’t got long left to live. The only leads Bunny has are a last-known address for the deadbeat dad Sean had gone in search of, and some letters the teenager had sent to his mum, one of which included a picture of him with the current heavyweight champion of the world.

Semiretired mob guy Eddie DeCooch is caught trafficking contraband cigarettes through Trenton, New Jersey. When DeCooch fails to show for a court appearance, bond enforcement agent Stephanie Plum is assigned the task of finding him and dragging his decrepit ass back to jail. Not such an easy job, it turns out, since DeCooch has learned a lot of tricks over the years and isn’t afraid to use his gun. He’s already shot Loretta Ricci, an innocent old lady, and left her for worm food in his shed. He wouldn’t mind shooting Stephanie next.

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an artist herself, knows otherwise and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures. Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their difficult home lives by spending their days laughing and telling stories out on a pier.

Trauma nurse Aly Cappellucci doesn’t need any more kinks. She likes the one she’s landed on just fine. To her, nothing could top the masked men she follows online. Unless one of those men was shirtless, heavily tattooed, and waiting for her in her bedroom. She dreams about being hunted by one in particular, of him chasing her down and doing deliciously dark things to her willing body. She never could have guessed that by sending one drunken text, those dreams would become her new reality.

A few years ago, David Alvarez had it all: a six-figure book deal, a loving boyfriend, and an exciting writing career. His debut novel was a resounding success, which made the publication of his second book—a total flop—all the more devastating. Now, David is single, lonely, and desperately trying to come up with the next great idea for his third manuscript, one that will redeem him in the eyes of readers, reviewers, the entire publishing world…and maybe even his ex-boyfriend.

The ratings and views are off the chart. The fans just can't get enough. The dungeon gets more dangerous each day. But in a grinder designed to chew up and spit out crawlers by the millions, Carl and Princess Donut need to work harder than ever just to survive. They call it the Over City. A sprawling, once-thriving metropolis devastated by a mysterious calamity. But these streets are far from abandoned. An undead circus trawls the ruins. Murdered prostitutes rain from the sky. An ancient spell is finally ready to reveal its dark purpose.

Amber is a young videographer who has landed her dream job. She is to produce a web series based on a late-night talk radio show dealing with the unexplained. She is a huge fan of the show, and its host, Jack Owens, who she hopes to help reveal the world’s most cryptic secrets. The first secret she reveals is Jack’s. He doesn’t believe any of this crap. To him, the show is just a cushy job that allows him to support himself and his wife without having to try very hard.

She said yes to Morelli. She said yes to Ranger. Now Stephanie Plum has two fiancés and no idea what to do about it. But the way things are going, she might not live long enough to marry anyone. While Stephanie stalls for time, she buries herself in her work as a bounty hunter, tracking down an unusually varied assortment of fugitives from justice. There’s Eugene Fleck, a seemingly sweet online influencer who might also be YouTube star Robin Hoodie, masked hero to the homeless, who hijacks delivery trucks and distributes their contents to the needy.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all listeners of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

“The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Falls, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he’d take him there after finishing an errand.” Thus begins Fever Beach, with an errand that leads—in pure Hiaasen-style—into the depths of Florida at its most Floridian: a sun-soaked bastion of right-wing extremism, white power, greed, and corruption.

Vienna, 1911. Gustav Klimt, the most famous painter in the Austrian Empire, the darling of Viennese society, spots a woman’s nude body in the Danube canal. He knows he should summon a policeman, but he can’t resist stopping to make a sketch first. And as he draws, the woman coughs. She’s alive! Back at his studio, Klimt and his model-turned-muse Wally tend to the erstwhile-drowned girl. She’s nearly feral and doesn’t remember who she is, or how she came to be floating in the canal. Klimt names her Judith, after one of his most famous paintings, and resolves to help her find her memory.

Just along the coast from Penstowan, the local festival has filled the area. Former Met police officer Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker has agreed to step in and help run the Pie Hard food truck, along with her rather reluctant fiancé, DCI Nathan Withers. As they prepare for a weekend of camping and being elbow deep in shortcrust pastry, Jodie hadn’t bargained on witnessing a fight between members of the lead band. But when the body of one of the band members is found not far from the campsite, Jodie finds it hard to believe it was an accident. Especially when the other members had so much to gain…

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself.

Adventuring is a costly affair, and while the tolls are often paid in blood, gold can drain away just as quickly. The party's trek out of Solium and across the lands of Alcatham has left them with only a handful of gold between them. Fortunately, they have drawn near Camnarael, Alcatham's capital, where all manner of quests - and rewards - await. But all is not as expected in the capital.