Adult

Kate Malick’s first calling was as a Carmelite nun, a life devoted to prayer and faith. Now she runs a Hollywood security service dedicated to protecting its clients.

Histories of modern art are typically centered in Paris and New York. Los Angeles is relegated to its role as the center of popular culture --- a city of movie stars, tan lines, and surfers --- but lacking the highbrow credentials of the chosen places. Until 1965, there was no art museum, few notable collectors, and --- especially in terms of modern and contemporary work --- even fewer galleries. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s, L.A. witnessed a burst of artistic energy and invention rivaling New York’s burgeoning art scene a half-century earlier. As New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has noted, it was “a euphoric moment,” at a “time when East and West coasts seemed evenly matched.”

OUT OF SIGHT chronicles the rapid-fire rise, fall, and rebirth of the L.A. art scene --- from the emergence of a small bohemian community in the 1950s to the founding of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1980 --- and explains how artists such as Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, and Ken Price reshaped contemporary art. William Hackman also explores the ways in which the L.A. art scene reflected the hopes and fears of postwar America --- both the self-confidence of an increasingly affluent middle class, and the anxiety produced by violent upheavals at home and abroad. Perhaps most of all, he pays tribute to the city that gave birth to a fascinating and until now overlooked moment in modern art.

This pair of never-before published Thin Man novellas --- AFTER THE THIN MAN and ANOTHER THIN MAN --- features the classic Hammett characters Nick Charles, a retired private investigator, and his former debutante wife, Nora. In these two stories, Nick and Nora become involved in a deadly game of cat and mouse when they find Nora's family gardener murdered.

Secret service agent Ethan Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a clear mission: locate and recover two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. But within minutes of his arrival, Ethan is involved in a violent accident.

Era Tom is leading a double life. Desperate to find her father --- a Chinese immigrant who has been promised US citizenship in exchange for serving in the Union army --- she agrees to work as a nurse at a Confederate camp while spying for the Union. But when she falls in love with a Confederate cavalryman, her loyalties are divided between the father she adores in the North and the love that sustains her in the South.



What the killer does to his victims is unthinkable. Homicide detective turned P.I. Frank Quinn has seen this M.O. before. It's the work of Daniel Danielle, a notorious serial killer who blurs the line between male and female, human and monster. Danielle disappeared 10 years ago. Is a copy cat repeating the crimes? Or has Danielle made a deadly return?

Joyce Carol Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory, from a maximum-security prison to the inner landscapes of two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles: Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe.

An awkward, curious girl growing up in a foreign country, Stephanie LaCava finds solace and security in strange and beautiful objects. When her father's mysterious job transports her and her family to the Parisian suburb of Le Vesinet, the young American embarks on a life of discovery. Tasting the enchantments of Paris, she makes friends with her peers at a wildly unconventional international school and faces terrorism. But Stephanie's wonder gives way to anxiety and a deep depression brought on by a series of circumstances.

More than 200 years ago, a group of British colonists in America decided that the conditions under which they were governed had become intolerable. Angry and frustrated that King George III and the British Parliament ignored their lawful complaints and petitions, they decided it was time to take action.