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Stone Barrington investigates the secrets of a CIA officer's suicide in this next thriller in the bestselling series.

Stuart Woods's newest bestseller, Dark Harbor, brings us the perfect mix of sexy intrigue and swift suspense that have earned him legions of fans over the years. In this latest thriller, Stone enters the picturesque town Dark Harbor off the coast of Maine, where the shocking deaths of three people have cast a long shadow over this island haven-a locale as mysterious as it is exclusive.

Stone Barrington hasn't heard from his cousin, Dick Stone, in years-though he has fond memories of a teenage summer spent at his house in Maine. Then, Lance Cabot of the CIA interrupts an otherwise pleasant meal at Elaine's with news of Dick's death-apparently by his own hands. It seems that Dick Stone, a quiet family man who doubled as a CIA agent, methodically executed his wife, daughter, and then himself-or did he? What would cause a loving father and husband to murder his family as they slept? Before his death, Dick had appointed Stone executor of his will, giving him full control of the disposition of a sizable family estate. Was Dick preparing for his suicide, or forewarning Stone of his murder?

With the help of his ex-partner, Dino, and his friend Holly Barker, Stone must settle the estate and piece together the elusive facts of his cousin's life and death as a CIA operative. At every step Stone knows he is being watched by Dick's family-and one of them just may be a killer.

From Publishers Weekly

The Edgar Award-winning author of Chiefs (basis of a TV miniseries) and the bestselling Deep Lie now offers a highly readable if somewhat overheated thriller-cum-gothic that includes murder, drug smuggling, faith healing, hallucinations, revenants and incest. A one-time ace reporter rents a cabin in a backwoods Georgia town, then stumbles upon and determines to solve the town mystery, which involves a seemingly affable sheriff, an autocratic town father and an incest-ridden family whose once-prosperous farm now lies under a lake. He joins forces with a plucky female reporter bent on proving that the sheriff is "dirty," and there's never a dull moment as the story surges toward its exciting climax. The conclusion is a little too far-fetchedbut by that time readers have had more than their money's worth. Major ad/promo; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates.

Que peuvent nous envier les fourmis? L'humour, l'amour, l'art. Que peuvent leur envier les hommes? L'harmonie avec la nature, l'absence de peur, la communication absolue.Après des millénaires d'ignorance, les deux civilisations les plus évoluées de la planète vont-elles enfin pouvoir se rencontrer et se comprendre? Sans se connaître, Julie Pinson, une étudiante rebelle, et 103e, une fourmi exploratrice, vont essayer de faire la révolution dans leur monde respectif pour le faire évoluer.Les Fourmis était le livre du contact, Le Jour des fourmis le livre de la confrontation. La Révolution des fourmis est le livre de la compréhension.Mais au-delà du thème des fourmis, c'est une révolution d'humains, une révolution non violente, une révolution faite de petites touches discrètes et d'idées nouvelles que nous propose Bernard Werber.À la fois roman d'aventures et livre initiatique, ce couronnement de l'épopée myrmécéenne nous convie à entrer dans un avenir qui n'est peut-être pas seulement de la science-fiction…La Révolution des fourmis appartient au domaine des livres enchanteurs où Von apprend et où l'on se distrait. Ne perdez pas une seconde pour lire ce prodige.Annette Colin-Simard, Le Journal du Dimanche.Site internet de l'auteur: www.werber.imaginet.fr<

Those who know little to nothing about Chinese culture will receive an eye-opening experience of how China was and how China is now through Annie Wang’s novel The People’s Republic of Desire.

Wang takes readers on a journey with four cosmopolitan women learning to live life in the new China. Niuniu, the book’s narrator, is a Chinese American woman, who spent seven years living in the States obtaining her degree in journalism. In the book, Niuniu is now considered a “returnee” when she goes back to China to get over a broken heart. What she meets upon return to her homeland is not the traditional Confucian values she left, but a new modern China where Western culture seems to have taken over – to an extreme.

Niuniu, the narrator of the book, is called a “Jia Yangguiz” which means a “fake foreign devil” because of her Westernized values. Her friend Beibei is the owner of her own entertainment company and is married to a man who cheats, so Beibei deals with his infidelity by finding her own young lovers. Lulu is a fashion magazine editor who has been having a long-term affair with a married man, and thinks nothing of having several abortions to show her devotion to him. CC, also a returnee, struggles with her identity between Chinese and English.

In The People’s Republic of Desire the days of the 1989 idealism and the Tiananamen Sqaure protests seem forgotten to this new world when making a fast yuan, looking younger, more beautiful, and acting important seems to be of the most concern to this generation.

Wang uses these four woman to make humorous and sometimes sarcastic observations of the new China and accurately describes how Western culture has not only infiltrated China, but is taken to the extreme by those who have experienced a world outside the Confucian values. What was once a China consumed with political passions, nepotism, unspoken occurrences, and taboos is now a world filled with all those things once discouraged – sex, divorce, pornography, and desire for material goods. It’s taken the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” to an all-time high.

Wang offers a glimpse of modern day Beijing and what it would take for any woman – returnee or otherwise – to move forward and conquer dilemmas in the fast-moving Chinese culture. The characters joke that “nowadays, the world is for bad girls” and all the values of their youth have been lost to this new modern generation of faking their identity, origin, and accent. It seems that such a cultural shock would be displeasing to those who knew the old China, but instead these young women seem to be enjoying the newfound liberties.

If you’re looking for a quick read with a plot, you won’t find it in The People’s Republic of Desire. Each of the 101 chapters read like individual short stories, separate stories about friends, family, and other individuals who Niuniu is acquainted with or meets and through which Wang weaves a humorous and often sarcastic trip into Beijing, China.

The book is filled with topics of family, friends, Internet dating, infidelity, rich, poor, and many of the same ideals most cultures worry themselves about. Many of the chapters end with popular phrases that give the reader an insight into Chinese culture and language. Wang does seem to use Niuniu’s journalistic background to intertwine the other characters and come to a somewhat significant conclusion.

As the press release states, “Wang paints an arresting portrait of a generation suffocating in desire. For love. For success. For security. For self actualization. And for the most elusive aspiration of all: happiness.”

With The People’s Republic of Desire, Wang does just that. She speaks not only of the new culture but also of the old ways and how China used to be. She may have educated readers about the new China with her knowledge of the Western and Chinese culture, but also Wang hits the nail on the head when it comes to showing most people’s needs. After all, aren’t most human beings striving for many of these same elusive dreams?

Joanne D. Kiggins

***

From Publishers Weekly

As Wang reveals in intimate detail, today's affluent Beijing women – educated, ambitious, coddled only children enamored of all things Western – are a generation unto themselves. The hyperobservant narrator of this fascinating novel (after Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen) is 20-something Niuniu, a journalist who was born in the United States but grew up in China and returned to America for college and graduate school. Now she's back in Beijing nursing a broken heart and discovering "what it means to be Chinese" in a money- and status-obsessed city altered by economic and sexual liberalization. Supporting Niuniu – and downing a few drinks with her – are her best buddies: entrepreneurial entertainment agent Beibei, sexy fashion mag editor Lulu and Oxford-educated CC. Sounds like the cast of Sex in the Forbidden City, but the thick cultural descriptions distinguish the novel from commercial women's fiction. A nonnative English speaker, Wang observes gender politics among the nouveau riche in careful, reportorial prose. Though Niuniu's romantic backstory forms a tenuous thread between the chapters, and the novel – based on Wang's newspaper column of the same title – doesn't finally hold together, this is a trenchant, readable account of a society in flux.

‘THE NOBEL FOUNDATION OF STOCKHOLM IS PLEASED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU HAVE TODAY BEEN VOTED THIS YEARS NOBEL PRIZE STOP THE AWARD CEREMONY WILL TAKE PLACE IN STOCKHOLM’… Six people receive the cable of notification; men and women for whom the only common factor is the Nobel citation-‘for researches in support of humanitarian ideals’.

These are the major actors in Irving Wallace’s exciting, behind-the-headlines story of the Nobel Prize, five men and a woman elected to receive the supreme palm of mankind’s honours, to be fêted as almost superhuman beings, their achievements to be discussed and applauded, their private lives to be spotlighted in the blinding glare of international publicity. As they converge on Stockholm, The Prize evolves into an explosive evocation of the maze of political intrigue and personal conflict that surrounds and seeks to influence the awards; of the pressures brought to bear on the juries that decide the awards; of international ploy and counter-ploy for prestige in the Cold War; of men and women with their own private stakes in the greatest prize of all.

Telling Tales Shiloh Walker Sheriff Kellan Grant has been dreaming of Darci Law for a very long time. Wild, sexy dreams. But he was badly burned once, and is interested in only one thing when it comes to women. Kellan knows that Darci will make him want more than one night in her arms, so he keeps his distance. Darci's dreams about Kellan are so intense that they leave her shaking and feeling obsessed. She can't stop thinking about the sexy sheriff-the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he. But he never so much as looks in her direction. So when Kellan shows up at her front door, she is understandably a little confused, but ready to take advantage of any opportunity to finally get close to the man who haunts her dreams. Hot, liquid excitement swamps her system as midnight images rush through her head. He is finally within reach. Then Kellan tells her why he has come. There has been a murder. And she is his number one suspect.<

Wildly praised by readers and critics alike, Robert Charles Wilson's Spin won science fiction's highest honor, the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Now, in Spin's direct sequel, Wilson takes us to the "world next door"—the planet engineered by the mysterious Hypotheticals to support human life, and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world—and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when an infall of cometary dust seeds the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world will become very alien indeed—as the nature of time is once again twisted, by entities unknown.

Nothing much happens in the village of Hazel Green until a girl goes out for a walk and never comes back. Could her disappearance be linked to security leaks at the nearby Air Ministry experimental station?<

Immediately on her arrival at Ladies’ House, Ione Muir realizes that all is not right with her newly married sister, Allegra. The town of Bleake is charming, but the medieval manor house itself-known by a sinister local legend as Ladies’ Bane-is full of gloomy depths and twisting staircases. Her brother-in-law, Geoffrey Trent, intends to purchase the expensive property, with which he is clearly infatuated, although his wife seems frightened by it. But it is soon obvious that Allegra is under the constant influence of narcotics. Miss Silver, hired by Allegra’s godmother to investigate Geoffrey’s finances, is the first to suspect foul play when his mischevious young ward, Margot, dies in a mysterious accident. Her keen intellect and uncanny understanding of human nature help Miss Silver to reveal the ominous forces that are at work in this strange household.<

Michael Harsch's long years of work were nearly at an end. The following day he was looking forward to handing over his precious formula to the government. But the next morning he was in no fit state to hand over the formula – he was dead. It looked like suicide, but Miss Silver knew it was murder. Michael Harsch's long years of work were nearly at an end. The following day he was looking forward to handing over his precious formula to the government. But the next morning he was in no fit state to hand over the formula – he was dead. It looked like suicide, but Miss Silver knew it was murder.<

When Car Fairfax starts his mysterious new job, his sole duty seems to be to dine in expensive restaurants, but soon some odd coincidences and dangerous deceits open his eyes to the truth.<

When Columba and Janetta Pilgrim think it unwise to leave their ancestral home after their brother suffers a fatal fall only days after talk of selling it, and Roger Pilgrim barely escapes two nearly fatal "accidents," Miss Maud Silver is called in to look into the case.<

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.

Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.

Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune’s orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever’s out there isn’t talking to us. It’s talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.

So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn’t want to meet?

You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won’t be needed, and the fainter one she’ll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.

You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they’ve been sent to find.

But you’d give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them…

New York lawyer and private investigator Stone Barrington comes to the aid of a lovely woman accused of the murder of her missing, wealthy husband.<

An enormous tidal wave on the West Coast of North America has just killed thousands. Lenie Clarke, in a black wetsuit, walks out of the ocean onto a Pacific Northwest beach filled with the oppressed and drugged homeless of the Asian world who have gotten only this far in their attempt to reach America. Is she a monster or a goddess? One thing is for sure: all hell is breaking loose. This dark, fast-paced, hard SF novel returns to the story begun in Starfish: all human life is threatened by a disease (actually a primeval form of life) from the distant prehuman past. It survived only in the deep ocean rift where Clarke and her companions were stationed before the corporation that employed them tried to sterilize the threat with a secret underwater nuclear strike. But Clarke was far enough away that she was able to survive and tough enough to walk home, three hundred miles across the ocean floor. She arrives carrying with her the potential death of the human race, and possessed by a desire for revenge.

Maelstrom is a terrifying explosion of cyberpunk noir by a writer whose narrative, says Robert Sheckley, "drives like a futuristic locomotive."

Lenie Clarke-amphibious cyborg, Meltdown Madonna, agent of the Apocalypse-has grown sick to death of her own cowardice.

For five years (since the events recounted in Maelstrom0, she and her bionic brethren (modified to work in the rift valleys of the ocean floor) have hidden in the mountains of the deep Atlantic. The facility they commandeered was more than a secret station on the ocean floor. Atlantis was an exit strategy for the corporate elite, a place where the world's Movers and Shakers had hidden from the doomsday microbe ßehemoth-and from the hordes of the moved and the shaken left behind. For five years "rifters" and "corpses" have lived in a state of uneasy truce, united by fear of the outside world.

But now that world closes in. An unknown enemy hunts them through the crushing darkness of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. ßehemoth- twisted, mutated, more virulent than ever-has found them already. The fragile armistice between the rifters and their one-time masters has exploded into all-out war, and not even the legendary Lenie Clarke can take back the body count.

Billions have died since she loosed ßehemoth upon the world. Billions more are bound to. The whole biosphere came apart at the seams while Lenie Clarke hid at the bottom of the sea and did nothing. But now there is no place left to hide. The consequences of past acts reach inexorably to the very floor of the world, and Lenie Clarke must return to confront the mess she made.

Redemption doesn't come easy with the blood of a world on your hands. But even after five years in pitch-black purgatory, Lenie Clarke is still Lenie Clarke. There will be consequences for anyone who gets in her way-and worse ones, perhaps, if she succeeds...