When Kurt Wicklow disappears was it a case of an investment advisor absconding with his client's money or was foul play involved? And when the wife of Foxport's former chief of police and a "good friend" of Wicklow's turns up dead, things begin to add up. And Quint finds himself trying to prove the innocence of a man who has just moved in with Elaine, Quint's former lover.

Tori Baylor is a dancer and an animal lover. Or is she an animal lover and a dancer? On the first day of school, she discovers that her class will dissect a frog this year, and she gathers her courage to tell the forbidding Mrs. Stengle she doesnt want to take part. The new science teachers rudeness comes as a shock, and Tori wishes she had a close friend to laugh it off with. Dance classes six days a week, however, leave little time for friends. Tori wonders if she should forget her dream of a ballet career and plan to work with animals instead. Her mothers arthritis is worsening, and Tori feels guilty seeing her limp off to work to pay for her lessons. Shed love to be an animal rights activist, if she could be brave enough. But not to dancehow could I bear it? she asks herself. Her mother, who once hoped to become a dancer, has always told Tori and her sister, Be sure to have a second string to your bow, meaning a second career choice. I do have two strings, Tori thinks,...

Longarm tangles with some bad Samaritans when he goes undercover!Longarm goes undercover to lead a group of Christian Cherokee down Mexico way in search of some missionaries rumored to be stranded there. He reckons it won’t be easy, what with nosy Texas Rangers, banditos, and the Mexican police on his trail. But with a comely assortment of church ladies along for the ride, this adventure could turn out to be a religious experience…

Fred Findhorn has just landed on an unstable Arctic iceberg to dig through the wreckage of a 1944 Russian military aircraft. His mission: to recover the frozen body of brilliant atomic scientist Lev Petrosian and a briefcase, containing top-secret documents about the clandestine meeting to which he was headed before the crash …But, as Findhorn is about to discover, there are other scientists, government officials, and rogue operatives who will do anything to learn Petrosian’s secrets—and are willing to kill to keep them buried.

A moving story of a brother, a sister and a swallow, and how all are in some way victims of the horrors of landmines.Olly’s brother Matt wants to go and work with children who have been made orphans, through war, in Africa. He wants to be a clown and make them laugh. His mother and sister want him to stay in England and go to university.Hero, a swallow, has a journey to make too. He must fly to Africa for the winter to join all the other swallows. His journey is difficult and fraught with danger.Three separate stories are woven into one powerful and moving novel whose central theme not only exposes the horrors of war and of landmines, but also the endurance of the human spirit. Michael divides his time between his writing and running Farms for City Children, a charity which each year takes up to 3,000 children to a working farm for a week. Michael and his wife Clare were awarded MBEs this year for their work with the charity. Before the first farm opened 22 years ago, Morpurgo was a teacher and his knowledge of children’s experiences, plus his experience of Farms enrich his writing enormously.Michael Morpurgo has won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, and the Smarties Book Prize.

Romantic suspense, originally published by Silhouette Intimate Moments. The last book in the Mackenzie Family series focuses on Chance Mackenzie, a feral, homeless adolescent until rescued and adopted by Wolf and Mary Mackenzie. The stunning and aloof half-breed has built a career in undercover ops, first as a Naval Intelligence Officer, then as a private consultant. However, one particularly vile terrorist has always eluded the law. Chance and brother Zane find a way to lure Crispin Hauer in: They'll use his daughter Sonia as bait. First step: Make Sunny fall in love with Chance. What could be simpler? Content: Explicit sex, violence, swearing

This is an evocation of the woman who married Chairman Mao and fought to succeed him. The unwanted daughter of a concubine, she refused to have her feet bound, ran away to join an opera troupe and eventually met Mao Zedong in the mountains of Yenan.

A relief from the recent. The Nylon Pirates, this takes its story from the mid-nineteenth century and the East, on a possible island, Makassang, in the Java Seas. Richard Marriott has wandered ten years as a disillusioned freebooter after his father's death in England has revealed him a pauper and a bastard and lost him the woman he had loved; now his ""private"" warship with its trained crew of fighting seamen has gone aground on a reef off Makassang. Richard is summoned to the Rajah whose threats and promise of money cause Richard to accept the offer to drive out insurgents under an old enemy, Black Harris. Successful, he is adopted by the Rajah and given his daughter, Princess Sunara, in marriage. Two more victories in other uprisings and the birth of a son keep Richard in favor but when restiessness and inactivity spur him to plan for a model kingdom he is accused of treason and ostracized. An immediate threat to his life is averted when HM warship arrives with Richard's half-brother in command and, through his support, when the Rajah is killed, Richard becomes the new Rajah with the chance of fulfilling his dreams for his little country. Eastern backgrounds, issues of the past that echo today, romance and torture, keep this popular on all counts

When Foster Lanier and Ben Phelps are released from a professional baseball team in 1904, it is the only experience they have in common, until they meet a runaway -- a girl-woman named Lottie Parker -- on the train that takes them from Augusta, Georgia, and away from their dreams of greatness. Foster will marry her and father her son. Ben will escort her home. And Lottie will change the lives of everyone she meets, from the day she runs away until she finally finds the place where she belongs.

It started long ago, in a tower at the Eye of Time, as a war between the shadowy Immortals who came long ago. Tristen is a Shaping, both more and less than human, who turned back sorcery's tides in the legendary battle of Lewenbrook that brought his friend Cefwyn the burden of a kingdom, and the light of love. Now the Lines that hold the world in place are shifting once again, and Cefwyn's peril is Tristen's call to arms. But even Tristen's double-edged sword cannot cut through the knot of this new challenge, for he is facing more than a mere pretender to his friend's throne.

fiction , poetry

In the tradition of The Tortilla Curtain, T.C. Boyle blends idealism and satire in a story that addresses the universal questions of human love and the survival of the species. In the year 2025 global warming is a reality, the biosphere has collapsed, and 75-year-old environmentalist Ty Tierwater is eking out a living as care-taker of a pop star's private zoo when his second ex-wife re-enters his life. Both gritty and surreal, A Friend of the Earth represents a high-water mark in Boyle's career-his deep streak of social concern is effortlessly blended here with genuine compassion for his characters and the spirit of sheer exhilarating playfulness readers have come to expect from his work.

Time and again, Tom Clancy's novels have been praised not only for their big-scale drama and propulsive narrative drive but for their cutting-edge prescience in predicting future events. In The Bear and the Dragon, the future is very near at hand indeed. Newly elected in his own right, Jack Ryan has found that being President has gotten no easier: domestic pitfalls await him at every turn; there's a revolution in Liberia; the Asian economy is going down the tubes; and now, in Moscow, someone may have tried to take out the chairman of the SVR--the former KGB--with a rocket-propelled grenade. Things are unstable enough in Russia without high-level assassination, but even more disturbing may be the identities of the potential assassins. Were they political enemies, the Russian Mafia, or disaffected former KGB? Or, Ryan wonders, is something far more dangerous at work here? Ryan is right. For even while he dispatches his most trusted eyes and ears, including black ops specialist John Clark, to find out the truth of the matter, forces in China are moving ahead with a plan of truly audacious proportions. If they succeed, the world as we know it will never look the same. If they fail...the consequences will be unspeakable. Blending the exceptional realism and authenticity that are his hallmarks with intricate plotting, razor-sharp suspense, and a remarkable cast of characters, this is Clancy at his best--and there is none better.

A muse in the flesh...at least to the shapeshifter who so desperately needs her help. Only one problem: Cathy's creativity is gone. Kaput. Dead in the water. Without it, she's a shell of the woman that she once was, lost and bitter without the one thing that makes her who she truly is. Reynard is the trickster king, a shapeshifter of the first order whose purpose is to help bring his kind into the human world. Cathy is a friend of his family, but more than that, he and the rest of his kind need her art and creativity to aid the plan to convince humanity to accept them. Without it, his people will be forced back to the world where they have been exiled for so long. The greater good is reason enough for Reynard to help Cathy regain her creativity, but as they get to know one another more, he realizes that perhaps he is more personally invested. Without Cathy, the plan to rejoin the human world will die, but without her creativity, Cathy will wither,...