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Gabrielle Cody has accepted her destiny as God's warrior, charged to destroy all evil, but she wasn't prepared to see Detective Luther Cross ever again. He's the beacon of reality in her life, the one thing that makes her feel human, like a real woman.

 But Gaby must resist involvement with Luther now, for she is protecting streetwalkers. Her life of retribution is far too dangerous, and this time, it's not just their hearts that won't come out unscathed.

Gabrielle Cody is a paladin—God's enforcer on earth. But she's not sure she can endure the life of a holy warrior. Her relationship with Detective Luther Cross is under constant strain already, and its going to get worse.

 There is a monster feeding off of human blood, flesh, and souls and Gaby must stop him. But her passion for Luther distracts her from the terrible connection she has with her quarry—and the creature's desire to devour her.

Usually, this is where the rhapsody would begin; strings would swell; breasts would be clasped with great feeling: The short story isn't dead; it lives!

I will abstain. If you're interested in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 at all, you're already an adherent of short prose, and know that it's alive and flourishing (as long as you can track it down on the smaller and smaller presses to which it's often relegated).

If the short story's cachet has evinced some decline over the course of the past century, it's a decline in public exposure and lucrative potential, not in quality. In terms of sales and public profile, the short story collection can't keep apace with the novel or pop nonfiction, but it's still absolutely kicking poetry's ass on all fronts, and, like poetry, remains in general more adventurous, fluid, and vitally modern than its novelistic big brother.

To review these stories in terms of their quality seems redundant – that they're terrific is a no-brainer. Entering its eighty-fifth year, The O. Henry Prize Stories consistently collects – I won't say the finest short fiction, but it collects inarguably exquisite short fiction published in the U.S. and Canada. We'll concede that there may be better stories out there, simmering under the radar or even (gasp!) unpublished, which does nothing to detract from the eminence of the ones collected here. This is a damn good read.

This year's edition was edited and introduced by Laura Furman, with a jury consisting of celebrated writers Cristina Garcia, Ann Patchett and Richard Russo. It's dedicated to Chekov upon the centenary of his death, which is forgivably predictable, given his pervasive influence on the short form. Besides illuminating notes from the writers on their work, the 2005 edition contains an essay by each of the judges on their favorite story, and a glossary of literary journals big and small that will be a valuable resource for writers and readers alike.

If quality is a given, it seems the best utility a review of the The O. Henry Prize Stories can have is to pick out the affinities between them and see (a) what writers were compelled to write about in the past year, (b) what editors were compelled to publish, and (c) which literary organs are currently in vogue. Word to the wise: If you'd like to win an O. Henry Prize, relentlessly submit to the New Yorker, which originally published no less than six of the twenty stories here, comfortably vanquishing silver-medallists The Kenyon Review and Zoetrope, who clock in with an admirable (if measly by comparison) two stories apiece.

No less than four stories in the volume revolve around music, all of which are deeply appreciative, none entirely trusting. Michael Palmer's atmospheric tale, "The Golden Era of Heartbreak", is haunted by a lovelorn trucker's song that carries everywhere in a town flattened by the departure of the narrator's wife. "My house filled to the eaves with this song," he states in his spare, lyrical tone, and the story is filled with it as well: The prose, like the town, is "flat as an envelope," and the trucker's song stretches spectrally across it.

A personal favorite of mine, Ben Fountain's "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers", is an elliptical, richly detailed character sketch in the vein of Millhauser or Hemon, about the intertwined destinies of two eleven-fingered pianists in nineteenth century Vienna, steeped in all the paranoia, political and ethnic tensions, and obsolete superstitions of the day.

In Timothy Crouse's "Sphinxes", a remarkably confident and unclassifiable tale, piano lessons, love affairs and subtle emotional maneuvering are braided together with increasing complexity until they become indistinguishable. In each of these stories, music is salvation and undoing, pure force and calculated metaphor: a paradox, a chimera, a sphinx.

And Gail Jones's "Desolation" is about a primal, alienating sexual encounter at a Death in Vegas concert, although it cross-references with the second type of story that heavily informs this year's volume, the community / exile story, which we're coming to just now.

Many stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 revolve around issues of community, but not the traditional, fixed community – these stories are about the provisional communities that arise in times of crisis, and the communities forged by travelers, strangers, souls in spiritual and physical exile.

Judge favorite "Mudlavia", a coming of age tale by Elizabeth Stuckey-French, finds a young boy and his mother in a health resort filled with questionable, exciting characters of colorful mien and shady provenance – slowly, away from their domineering father and husband, we watch them come alive to their own desires, desires that this alien context was necessary to draw out.

Another judge favorite, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's period piece "Exile in London", evokes the faded aura of postwar London by way of the young narrator's recollections of the ragged diaspora in her aunt's boarding house. And Nell Freudenberger's "The Tutor" details the tensions, both sexual and cultural, between a prototypically American teenager in Bombay and her native Indian tutor.

But the finest story in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 has to be Sherman Alexie's "What You Pawn I Will Redeem", which describes the plight of a homeless, admittedly "crazy" Spokane Native American as he embarks on a day-long quest to raise one-thousand dollars to buy back his Grandmother's tribal regalia from a pawn shop. That the story's themes are large and poignant is obvious; what's remarkable is that it manages funny, hopeful, angry, and redemptive at once. The narrator's refusal to lapse into self-pity or misanthropy at his pathetic plight is counterintuitive yet rings true, and by the time the story reaches its conclusion, not-at-all inevitable and uncommonly generous of spirit, one feels every inch of his joy.

In the end, this is the short-story function that trumps all the others: The ability to vault the reader into realms of unanticipated joy. While not all the stories in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005 achieve this as viscerally as Alexie's fable, each one loudly debunks any nonsense about the short story's obsolescence.

The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 contains twenty unforgettable stories selected from hundreds of literary magazines. The winning tales take place in such far-flung locales as Madagascar, Nantucket, a Midwestern meth lab, Antarctica, and a post-apocalyptic England, and feature a fascinating array of characters: aging jazzmen, avalanche researchers, a South African wild child, and a mute actor in silent films. Also included are essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winners on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines.<

Desde Rusia con amor es la quinta novela de James Bond escrita por Ian Fleming. La inteligencia soviética planea un golpe contra la inteligencia occidental, para esto han escogido como blanco al agente 007 de MI6. La agente Tatiana Romanova es inducida por la coronel Rosa Klebb para que le ofrezca a Bond un decodificador soviético a cambio de que él la lleve a Inglaterra. El agente Grant se asegurará de que no falle la misión. Bond será ayudado por Kerim Bey, un musulmán que se encubre bajo la identidad de un vendedor de tapetes. El desenlace final será que Kerim Bey morirá a manos de Grant en el Expreso de Oriente, Grant será eliminado por Bond y Rosa Klebb será arrestada, no sin antes herir a Bond con un cuchillo escondido en su zapato. El desenlace de esto se ve en la novela Dr. No, en donde Bond se cura.<

Fairstein, former chief of the Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, returns with her ninth legal thriller starring prosecutor Alexandra Cooper. The author's own expertise again adds to the credibility of her fiction, in terms of courtroom banter, pacing, and those small "you couldn't make this up" details, such as the fact that shopping carts are the current favored receptacles for attorneys' case files. Her plotting is steady if formulaic. The big flaw in Fairstein's writing is that she has a tin ear when it comes to how people talk; her dialogue, often progressing in parallel phrases and clauses that are highly unlikely to occur in normal speech, is weighed down with backstory. Because she wants dialogue to do the work of narrative, she puts all manner of improbable words in her characters' mouths, thereby revealing motive and emotions. This tale starts with the trial of an upscale Manhattanite accused of murdering his wife. An explosion in the tunnels underneath the city interrupts the trial. Not surprisingly, the defendant is connected to the disaster. Again not surprisingly, Cooper must search within the tunnel system to find the answers. What works about this overly manipulative plot device, however, is that it gives Fairstein the opportunity to present some genuinely fascinating historical and engineering facts about the "city of death" far below Manhattan. Clunky in style but strong on procedural detail and background material.<

From Publishers Weekly

Reunited with fellow Manhattan crime scene investigators Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, brazen, outspoken Alexandra Cooper, assistant DA for the sex crimes prosecution unit, tackles the case of a murdered dancer with the Royal Ballet. While it was no secret that "world-renowned" Russian ballerina Natalya Galinova had a bad attitude and a cuckolded husband, that she was tossed, undetected, into the cooling unit at the Metropolitan Opera House still comes as a shock, even to a whole slew of suspects, among them her agent, Rinaldo; Broadway kingpin and voyeur Joe Berk; Berk's shady niece Mona; and the Met's slippery artistic director, Chet Dobbis. Varied clues paired with the fascinating theatrical spadework involved in the opera business lead to a sidewalk electrocution and several sabotaged stage sets. As additional suspects are tacked on, concurrent evidence and motives surface and the stage becomes increasingly deadly for everyone involved, especially Alex. Running alongside is a rape subplot involving an elusive Turkish doctor, and an unsolved urban assault case. Despite the overcrowded plot, this whodunit manages to pirouette to a satisfying climax just as the curtain drops. Fairstein (Entombed) fans will undoubtedly demand an encore.

Manhattan ’s top sex crimes prosecutor stares at the shocking headline in the morning newspaper, reading her own obituary. But Assistant D.A. Alexandra Cooper is very much alive. The body found by police on the secluded road leading to Alexandra’s country house on Martha’s Vineyard belonged instead to the internationally acclaimed Hollywood star, Isabella Lascar.

Isabella had borrowed Alex’s home for a quiet holiday. Police found her body tall and slim, like Alex in a car rented in Cooper’s name, without any form of identification, and her face blown away by the shotgun blast that took her life.

When Alexandra tells the police who the victim was, the investigation takes two distinct paths. One makes the assumption that the movie star was the intended target of the killer, while the other recognises that Alex herself may be the next victim of the assassin.

Alexandra’s job is to send rapists and stalkers to jail, and she’s very good at it. So good, in fact, that the list of potential suspects who’d like to see her dead is horrifically long. On the other hand, Isabella had previously suffered the attentions of a stalker, and her fame had attracted an equally long list of obsessive fans. Or is the killer coming from an entirely different direction?

Final Jeopardy is a formidable thriller of intelligence and authenticity, and marks the debut of a character who will be entertaining readers for many years to come.

New York City politics have always been filled with intrigue and shady deals. Assistant DA Alex Cooper and her NYPD colleagues find themselves investigating a shipwreck involving human cargo – illegally trafficked immigrants – at the same time a sex scandal threatens the career of a promising young congressman. When Alex discovers that a young woman who died in the wreck and the congressman's murdered lover have the same tattoo – the brand of the mastermind behind the trafficking operation – she realizes that the city's entire political landscape hangs in the balance.<

Success can never be guaranteed in every case Alexandra Cooper prosecutes, but for once the odds are with her for putting away a serial rapist for a crime he committed over twenty years previously, but outside the courtroom another predator is at large. His first victim was a call-girl, a cat-o-nine-tails discovered near her body, and it seems as though Detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace need to look amongst her clients for the killer, but the discovery of other corpses, the modus operandi remarkably similar to the first, turns the investigation into a hunt for a random and viciously sadistic murderer. A part of his signature is that in the humid heat of summer he leaves his victims' remains in some of the least populated parts of New York – a derelict office building, an abandoned fort on an island below Manhattan. Alex fears it may be another twenty years before they can identify this monster, each day bringing the dread of news of another killing, then she, Chapman and Mercer get lucky and are able to give a name to their target. But that's not the same as putting him safely behind bars: to do that they are going to have to get close to him, much too close for Alex's own safety…<

When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr's apartment on Manhattan 's Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen.

Alex discovers that the apartment belongs to a member of the wealthy Hunt family, longtime benefactors of the New York Public Library. As Alex, Mike, and Mercer meet each member of the eccentric family, they like them less and less. But does that mean they could be capable of murder? The search for the answer leads them to forgotten underground vaults in lower Manhattan where the Hunt patriarch took his greatest secrets to the grave – literally.

In this beguiling mix of history and suspense, the New York Times bestselling author of Killer Heat truly outdoes herself as she takes readers on a breathtaking ride through the valuable first editions, lost atlases, and secret rooms and tunnels of the great New York Public Library.

A neurosurgeon is sexually assaulted, stabbed and left for dead in her office at the labyrinthine Mid-Manhattan Medical Centre. The police designate her Likely to Die. Alexandra Cooper, head of the district's sex crimes unit, assembles a task force to investigate but finds herself hindered at every turn. Not only has her office prosecuted some of the vast hospital's patients and staff before but the building itself compounds the problem. A vast complex encompassing a medical college and the Stuyvesant Psychiatric Centre, the hospital rises over a network of tunnels now occupied by numberless transients who have easy access to the corridors. Strung out with other cases and mired in the investigation personally when even the man she has begun to date, has a connection to the case, Alex must find the killer – before the killer finds her…<

Following the critically acclaimed and top ten Best Seller The Deadhouse, Linda Fairstein now takes us behind the scenes of some of New York's magnificent and mysterious institutions in her most electrifying Alexandra Cooper thriller yet. The Bone Vault begins in the glorious Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where wealthy donors have gathered to hear plans for a controversial new exhibit. An uneasy mix of scholarship and showbiz. The exhibition has raised fierce opposition from some of the museum's elite: IMAX time trips and Rembrandt refrigerator magnets have no place for them at the Met. Assistant DA Alex Cooper, off duty for the evening, observes the proceedings with bemused interest until the Met director suddenly pulls her aside: the body of a young researcher has been found in an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. Teaming up with cops Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace, Alex must penetrate the silent sentinels comprising New York's museum society, investigating not only at the Met but also at the Museum of Natural History and the Cloisters, to find a killer. Atmospheric, chilling, and shot through with procedural authenticity.<

Lola Dakota had to call in the police several times to restrain her abusive husband, but he always returned, so when they got wind of his plan to hire a hitman to kill her she agrees to play her part in the sting which would see both men arrested. It proves to be a great success, but several hours later and when her husband is under lock and key, Lola is truly dead -and by someone's hand. The police team on the original sting are in disarray, so Alex Cooper and Mike Chapman are swiftly in place to take over. Looking beyond her husband into her professional life, they discover a university department riddled with jealousies, extra-marital affairs, swindled funds and the unexplained disappearance of a student known to be a drug user. The one thing which seems to link all the players with all the misdemeanours is the university's research site on an island off Manhattan where they were investigating the remains of the Victorian isolation hospitals and lunatic asylums and the morgue – the deadhouse. But why Lola's murder is connected to the place is not so easy to prove, nor the identity of her killer.<

Paige Vallis claimed that she gave in to Tripping's sexual demands because he had threatened to harm his son if she didn't. Alexandra Cooper, prosecuting the ex-CIA man, knew she had her work cut out to convince the jury, but before Paige could complete her testimony on the stand she is found dead – strangled in her own apartment building, just hours after she'd confessed to Alex that she had had a relationship with another ex-CIA operative. While the accusation of rape against Tripping is dropped, he has other charges to face, not least abusing his own child. As Tripping's defence team go into overdrive to keep their client out of jail, Alex, Chapman and Mercer set out to discover who so conveniently killed the woman who could have put him behind bars. As they peel back the layers of Paige's life, they discover a decades-old viper's nest of robbery and double-dealing and discover that truth of the adage of money being at the root of all evil – however old and 'respectable' it might be.<

Emerald Carlisle sabía que su padre haría todo lo que estuviese en su mano para impedir que se casara con Kit Fairfax, un joven pintor sin recursos. De hecho, su compromiso no era sino una estrategia para ayudar a Kit a conseguir dinero.

Tom Brodie, como abogado de su padre, sabía que su deber era sobornar al novio y hacer entrar en razón a la hija. Desgraciadamente, Emerald era inteligente aparte de bonita. Ya había conseguido que Tom la ayudara a fugarse alegando que la manera más fácil de seguir a una heredera fugitiva era llevarla adonde quisiera ir. Y, después de pasar unos días con Emerald, Tom estaba empezando a llegar a la conclusión de que podría persuadirlo para llevarlo a cualquier sitio… ¡incluido el altar!

Tenía que luchar por el hijo que hasta hacía poco no había sabido que tenía…

Fleur Gilbert y Matt Hanover se habían casado en secreto, creyendo que el amor que sentían el uno por el otro podría acabar con la disputa que enfrentaba a sus familias. Pero se habían equivocado.

Seis solitarios años más tarde, Fleur había dejado de soñar con volver a ver a Matt. Sin embargo, Matt no había podido olvidarla… ni perdonarla. Y cuando se enteró de que su matrimonio de una sola noche había dado como resultado un hijo al que no conocía, decidió recuperar al niño… ¿Y a su mujer?