Adult

Reporter Adam Jordan comes across the biggest story of his life when he is first on the scene of the murder of a beauty pageant contestant on the beach near Atlantic City. The story, set in the pulp world of the early 1950s, is the first published book by mystery writer Joseph Koenig in 20 years.

An airborne virus is unleashed on the patrons of a bar, killing 80 people. Surviving witnesses talk about seeing things, and they describe sudden, overwhelming feelings of fear, rage and paranoia. It appears the bar patrons were exposed to a cocktail of chemicals and illegal drugs that could drive anyone to temporary insanity, if not kill them outright. But that doesn’t explain who would unleash such horror --- or why.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.

Elsa Emerson relishes appearing onstage, where she soaks up the approval of her father and the embrace of the audience. But when tragedy strikes her family, her acting becomes more than a child's game of pretend. While still in her teens, Elsa marries and flees to Los Angeles. There she is discovered by Irving Green, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood, who refashions her as a serious, exotic brunette and renames her Laura Lamont.

Tom Harry and his son, Rusty, make an odd kind of family, with Tom’s venerable bar their true home, but they manage just fine. That is, until the summer of 1960, when Rusty turns 12. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom previously knew, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past?

The books that we choose to keep-let alone read-can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In THE IDEAL BOOKSHELF, dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most-books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. With colorful and endearingly hand-rendered images of book spines by Jane Mount, and first-person commentary from all the contributors, this is a perfect gift for avid readers, writers, and all who have known the influence of a great book.

Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to the unsolved killing of a young female photographer during the 1992 L.A. riots. His ballistics match now indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the "black box," the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together.

As Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth struggle to link three gruesome crimes, they learn that there have been similar murders in other cities around the U.S. Piece by piece, evidence accumulates, pointing to a suspect that shocks them to the core, uncovering a motive that puts the entire Midwest on high alert and Monkeewrench in the direct line of fire.

BOTH FLESH AND NOT gathers 15 of David Foster Wallace’s essays never published in book form, including "Federer Both Flesh and Not," considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; "The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2," which deftly dissects James Cameron's blockbuster; and "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young," an examination of television's effect on a new generation of writers.

One night, an aging writer named Nick meets a tantalizing young woman at a bar, and the night that follows is the most extraordinary of his life. Propelled by uncontrollable, primordial desires, he tastes human blood for the first time and is filled with a sexual and spiritual ecstasy. His revival quickly fades, and soon Nick is yearning for another taste of the elusive rapture. There follows a descent into madness and unimaginable hell, and a pursuit of otherworldly revelation.