Romance/Suspense/Thriller. 74947 words long.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTUREA gripping novel about a young woman being chased by her violent past, and the flawed father forced to come to her rescueLydia Carson is an accident waiting to happen. Strung out, she's always running from disaster, and more often she's running right into it. Now at seventeen, Lydia has stumbled onto real trouble. Not only has she witnessed a brutal murder perpetrated by her boyfriend, but his minions are out to make sure that she doesn't have a story to tell the police.John Link is a former Hell's Angel, an ex-con, trying to stay clean and sober while running a tattoo parlor from the kitchen of his trailer home. He's also Lydia's long-estranged father, and when both the police and her boyfriend's thugs are hot on Lydia's trail, Link becomes Lydia's only hope.From the highly acclaimed author of Hot Plastic, Blood Father is a gripping novel that confirms Peter Craig's place among the best crime novelists of his generation.

"[A] compulsively readable joy ride."—-Richard North Patterson"As close to the day-to-day workings of modern con men as any sane person would want to get. Hot Plastic is a fascinating look at changing times on the grift."—-Nicholas Pileggi, author of Wiseguy and screenwriter of GoodFellas"Buy an extra copy of Hot Plastic and keep it in mint condition. Peter Craig's novel of outlaw life at the end of the century will be a collector's item. It's a winner."—-Tony Hillerman, author of The Wailing WindKevin's dad, Jerry, is a crook. And he taught his son every trick in the book. Masters of identity theft, Kevin and Jerry move from one seedy motel to another, always trying for the big score. Colette is a runaway who dreams of conning her way into the upper echelons of high society. Just a teenager, she's already a tough and talented grifter, and soon becomes Jerry's girlfriend and accomplice. When...

Far in the future, in a galactic society where humanity is divided between the Aventis and the Regulars, and ruled by the former, a young man awakens to a third existence, a Familiar, and finds himself thrust into a conflict fought in microcosm between rival powers, while struggling to survive as a high-school student at prestigious Academy dominated by Aventis students.

The Pale King has been defeated, his legions decimated. The Dark God Mohg has been destroyed. And the evil corporation, Duratek, has been disbanded, foiled in its efforts to strip-mine the world of Eldh. And for our heroes, three years have passed in relative peace. But only relative, because every one of them know in their hearts that their duties are not yet ended. For perihelion approaches, as the two worlds continue to grow nearer. And bad things are coming in its wake. In the skies over Earth, astronomers have noted an anomaly which seems to be swallowing stars whole. On Eldh, these rifts in the sky are appearing as well--and the dragon Sinfathisar tells Grace Beckett that, if left unchecked, these holes of anti-being will annihilate all of creation forever. He adds that only Travis Wilder--whom the Mournish believe is fated to raise the lost city of Morindu the Dark from the desert sands that hide and hold it--can save the world. But what is the connection between the lost city of the sorcerers and the wounds that rift the heavens? As Grace goes in search of Travis and Travis goes in search of his kidnapped daughter, all the threads of fate begin to pull together, revealing ancient mysteries on both worlds, and connections within connections that carry all the way back through time. With both worlds increasingly wracked by tempests and earthquakes and a palpable sense of hopelessness and despair, and with magic sputtering and dying around them, can our heroes patch together the missing pieces of the puzzle before all of life is annihilated?

Remarkably candid, compulsively readable, renowned chef Cat Cora’s no-holds-barred memoir on Southern life, Greek heritage, same sex marriage, and the meals that have shaped her memories.Before she became a celebrated chef, Cathy Cora was just a girl from Jackson, Mississippi, where days were slow and every meal was made from scratch. Her passion for the kitchen started in her home, where fresh feta and Greek olives filled the kitchen. She spent her days internalizing the dishes that would form the cornerstone of her cooking philosophy incorporating her Greek heritage and Southern upbringing—from crispy fried chicken and honey-drenched biscuits to spanakopita. But outside the kitchen, Cat’s life was volatile. In Cooking as Fast as I Can, Cat Cora reveals, for the first time, coming-of-age experiences from early childhood sexual abuse to the realities of life as a lesbian in the deep South. She shares how she found her passion in the...

A moving, utterly captivating love story: Romeo and Juliet as if told by Chekhov or Dostoevsky. In a remote Russian village a woman waits, as she has waited for almost three decades, for the man she loves to return. Near the end of World War II, nineteen-year-old Boris Koptek left the village to join the Russian army, swearing to the sixteen-year-old love of his life, Vera, that as soon as he returned they would marry. Young Boris, who with his engineering battalion fought his way almost to Berlin, was reported killed in action crossing the Spree River. But Vera refuses to believe he is dead, and each day, all these years later, faithfully awaits his return. Then one day the narrator arrives in the village, a twenty-six-year-old native of Leningrad, who is fascinated both by the still-beautiful woman and her exemplary story, and little by little he falls madly in love with her. But how can he compete with a ghost that will not die? Beautifully, delicately, but always powerfully, Andreï Makine delineates in masterly prose the movements and madness that constitute the dance of pure love.From Publishers WeeklyA sensuously styled, elegiac tale set in the mid-1970s, Makine's latest opens a window onto a generation of post-WWII Russian widows through one mysterious woman's vigil. In the village of Mirnoe on the northern White Sea coast, a young male journalist researching local customs meets an intriguing woman who has waited 30 years for her fiancé, reported killed, to return from the war. Just 16 when her lover was conscripted, Vera devotes herself selflessly to the care of the town's many war widows: she rows out to tend to the widows' graves on a nearby island and lives alone, ever watchful. The narrator, writing in retrospect but 26 at the time of the story, was educated in St. Petersburg; ironic and arrogant, he believes he has Vera's selflessness figured out as a prosaic, idealized vision of womanhood. And yet, he learns, Vera has studied advanced linguistics in St. Petersburg, and returned to Mirnoe by choice. The closer he gets to her, the more he is shamed in the face of her towering presence. Makine, now almost 50 and the author of eight other novels (including Dreams of My Russian Summers), lives in Paris; he transforms a very simple premise into a richly textured story of love and loss. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistThis wonderful novel is set in what is known as the Soviet period of stagnation--the 1970s, or late Brezhnev era. The university-educated narrator wistfully looks back on a few months in mid-decade when he left his cynical and jaded friends in Leningrad to travel to a small provincial town near the White Sea. Ostensibly writing about provincial folk customs, but also hoping to gather material for an anti-Soviet satire, he instead meets Vera, a woman much older than he who has waited 30 years for her lover to return from World War II. Makine, whose previous novels include Dreams of My Russian Summers (1997), presents an elegantly enigmatic tale that explores a number of themes that may seem a little outdated to some readers but which meld seamlessly with the novel's mise-en-scene, including devotion, duty, and the contradiction between perception and truth. The latter is driven home by the complicated relationship between the narrator and Vera, and the brief moment when he all but morphs into her long-lost lover. Frank CasoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Children of Fire come into their Phoenix powers on their fifteenth birthday. For some the change is celebrated but Kayin wakes to a nightmare. His black curls have turned bright red, and fire dances in his eyes. Convinced that he's become a demon, his mother casts him out of his village in Zimbabwe.Feeling confused, scared, and abandoned, Kayin is saved by other Children of Fire, who take him into their family. Now he must learn to control his power and adjust to the energy and excitement of New York City. But will he be able to cope with the aching desire to return to the home he loves?