Fiction-Psychological Suspense
Move over, Dickens--America's favorite storyteller has written a gift, "a delightful Christmas story to be shared by the whole family" (Kirkus), destined to become as treasured as A Christmas Carol.
At Christmastime, a family of three are missing someone dear to them. Until unexpected guests begin to arrive at their empty house, filling it with Christmas memories in the making. Listening to the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is a beloved holiday tradition. Now comes a new one: Reading James Patterson's instant classic, The Twelve Topsy-Turvy, Very Messy Days of Christmas.
A collection of the year's best short stories, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer and series editor Heidi Pitlor.
Andrew Sean Greer, "an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy" (Washington Post), selects twenty stories out of thousands that represent the best examples of the form published the previous year.
"Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it's as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work--what a treat." --Stephen King
"One of the finest writers of our time." --Jonathan Ruppin, The Independent The Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood, a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleidoscopic insight into what drives us to survive.Birnam Wood is on the move . . .
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam's founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He's intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they're poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine and the group might have enemies in common. But can Birnam trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another? A gripping psychological thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton's Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. A brilliantly constructed study of intentions, actions, and consequences, it is a mesmerizing, unflinching consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
Michael and Megan Fitzgerald are siblings who share a terrifying past. Both adopted, and now grown--Michael is a long-haul truck driver, Megan a college student majoring in psychology--they trust each other before anyone else. They've had to. Their parents are public intellectuals, an Ivy League clinical psychologist and a renowned psychiatrist, and they brought up their adopted children in a rarefied, experimental environment. It sheltered them from the world's harsh realities, but it also forced secrets upon them, secrets they keep at all costs. In Los Angeles, Detective Garrett Dobbs and FBI Agent Jessica Gimble have joined forces to work a murder that seems like a dead cinch. Their chief suspect is quickly identified and apprehended--but then there's another killing just like the one they've been investigating. And another. And not just in Los Angeles--the spree spreads across the country. The Fitzgerald family comes to the investigators' attention, but Dobbs and Gimble are at a loss--if one of the four is involved, which Fitzgerald might it be? From coastal California to upstate New York, Dobbs and Gimble race against time and across state lines to stop an ingenious and deeply deranged killer--one whose dark and twisted appetites put them outside the range of logic or experience.
Who am I?
I've forgotten the answer to that question long ago. Ever since I ran from that house, so desperate to escape, I left with only the clothes on my back and socks on my feet. After that day, I've only ever walked in stolen shoes.
Could I be a girl who is searching for the meaning of life in faceless men? They were all so forgettable. Until he came along. He took me under a waterfall and made me forget my name, and in return, I took his instead.
Enzo Vitale.
An enigmatic man that will only ever love the deep sea. Or rather the predators that inhabit it. Turns out, he's not so different than the monsters he feeds. He lured me onto his boat like a fish in the ocean, seeking vengeance for my crime. Had I realized his intentions, and that a massive storm would leave us shipwrecked, I would've run.
Now, I'm a girl who's seeking refuge in a decrepit lighthouse with a man who loathes me almost as much as he craves me. He wants to hurt me, but the old caretaker of the abandoned island may have intentions far more sinister.
It's no longer a question of who I am, but rather, will I survive?
When Orlando is awakened by an alarm in his old lab, he discovers that not only have all his computers, equipment, and notes been stolen, but the robbers have also taken over a million tabs of HEAT that he'd left behind for future experiments--tabs that he had sworn to his family he would destroy. Dr. Brandi Richardson is one of the most brilliant research chemists in the world, but her propensity for cutting corners led to her firing from both Dow Chemicals and Dupont. She's now working at CVS as a clerk, but things are about to change for her in a big way. Billionaire Alexander Cora is known as the Moor by business associates and enemies. His company, Cora International, is a publicly traded EU defense contractor. It is also a front for one of the largest weapons, drugs, and illegal contraband smuggling rings in the world. For some reason, he has set his sights on the Duncan family. That can't be good, because Alexander plays for keeps, and he has not been known to lose. Niles Monroe, the handsome hit man and Paris Duncan's one true love, is back from the dead, and it's only a matter of time before he comes looking for her. These rich and powerful people are on a collision course. When the dust settles, who will still be alive, and who will be on top?
Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation's most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club's estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.