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The story of two sisters who have become recluses after the arsenic poisoning of four members of their family.

Life history of a demented murderer

Hester Cameron Glenn, a proud, well-bred southern aristocrat, is the self-appointed guardian of her family's and her community's heritage. When a young black man is chained to a tree and stoned to death, Hester deplores the brutality of the act. Slowly she comes to suspect, and finally to know, who his real murderer is, and she decides what whe must do to protect the family honor

From the author of Mariette in Ecstacy--soon to be a major motion picture--comes an ingenious murder mystery set on the Caribbean coast of Mexico, and revolving around the love of a father for his son. When Colorado rancher Atticus Cody receives word that his son has committed suicide, he travels down to Mexico to recover the body. But what he finds there convinces Atticus that his son was murdered.
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In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother - and himself. In "My Dark Places, " our most uncompromising crime writer - author of "American Tabloid" and "White Jazz" - tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten - and to reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is an epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence.
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Set in a small Polish village, the novel revolves around the aftermath of a violent death in the woods beyond the town. As events unfold - mystery threatens the fabric of Leszek's community, and so he must search deep into the past to answer questions about his people, the Holocaust and himself.
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Set in a small Polish village, this novel revolves around the aftermath of a violent death in the hushed woods beyond the town. It tells of one town, one death and one man's tireless search for the truth, presenting a portrait of contemporary Poland and the secrets which lie buried in its history.
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When best-selling novelist Sam Boyd starts to write a book about the death of a teenage beauty, Pauline Ostrova, called "the beehive", the journey into his past becomes a terrifying jolt into the reality of the present. For many of the people close to him, this leads to devastating consequences.
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Aaron Roy Evan's startling, imagistic debut takes its cue from a true event: In 1936, in a small town near Charlottesville, Virginia, an aging black caretaker and his sister shot dead a white sheriff acting on orders to turn them off their land, In, BLOODROOT, Even explores the circumstances leading up to this violent standoff and the tragedy that followed as seen through the eyes of Elsa, a young county employee fresh out of school and filled with aspiration and illusion, and those of Wesley, the 50-year old caretaker of a vanished family's estate. While Elsa struggles to retain her authority and self-respect, Wesley is haunted by past concessions and his sister's attachment to the land. When he stands in the way of a proposed turpentine plant by refusing the county's purchase offer, both Elsa and Wesley find themselves moving relentlessly toward an end neither wants to reach. The novel's title is taken from the flower: native to Virginia, its tie to the land is so strong that its roots bleed red when cut.
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New England, 1887, a millionaire is murdered and the sole witness, his grandchild, promptly disappears. In Switzerland, 18 years later, a man with no memory is recognised as Richard Knight, the missing child. One man's obsession leads him to the truth and the killer.
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Dinky is the son of an incarcerated drug king and is trying to distance himself from his father's reputation. Jose hasn't got over being dumped by a high-maintenance girlfriend. Together, the two boys are the secret masterminds behind the "Buddha Book, " an underground comic book that tells outrageous-but true-tales about their life in the Bronx. Their already turbulent world begins to unravel when Jose, in a fit of rage, murders his ex. With no witnesses, it's a perfect crime, but one that Jose can't live with. Plagued with guilt, he searches for a way to confess. So Dinky and Jose decide to produce one final issue of the "Buddha Book"...
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A play about the darker side of the American experience. Fifteen-year-old Lisa swaps an Alabama trailer-trash existence with her prostitute mother for marriage to an abusive psychopath. We meet her at 18, for the last time, after she has been convicted of multiple murders, .
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'any narrative of human action and adventure - whether we call it history or Romance - is certain to be a fragile handiwork, more easily rent than mended' The fragility - and the durability - of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the 'Marble Faun', Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy. Hawthorne's 'International Novel' dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the 'authentic' and the 'fake', in life as in art. The author's evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favourite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society.
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• Green grow the lilacs
• The Cherokee night
• Out of dust.

The author of numerous plays and film scripts, including Green Grow the Lilacs, later made into the hit musical Oklahoma!, Lynn Riggs (1899-1954) is recognized as one of America's most engaging dramatists and was the only active American Indian dramatist during the first half of the twentieth century. This new collection of Riggs's plays features the never-before-published drama Out of Dust, as well as The Cherokee Night and Green Grow the Lilacs. A mixed-blood Cherokee, Riggs wrote about the people, places, and events of the Oklahoma he knew so well. A cattle rancher's son, Riggs was born in the Verdigris Valley south of Claremore in Indian Territory. He first gained recognition as a poet in the early 1920s while attending the University of Oklahoma and later moved to New York, where he worked on and around Broadway. In 1927 Riggs was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and while in France on that fellowship, he began writing Green Grow the Lilacs, which Rodgers and Hammerstein made into the Broadway musical Oklahoma! in 1943. By the end of his life, Riggs had written some thirty plays and scripts for fourteen films produced between 1930 and 1955. In their 1939 Handbook of Oklahoma Writers, Mary Hays Marable and Elaine Boylan observe: "Lynn Riggs hitched his wagon to Pegasus and rode into the theatre with an output of poetic and regional plays that has brought him outstanding success.".
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Vic and Melinda Meller's loveless marriage is held together by an arrangement which allows Melinda to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic tries to win her back by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder - one that soon comes true.
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Abigail Mather was always a woman of enormous appetites. Her twin sister Dorcas couldn't be more different. But they love each other and each eccentric in their own ways they somehow fit into their New England community. But Conrad Lowe views the sisters as a challenge.
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When we meet Katherine, the winning-and rather disturbing-twenty-three-year-old narrator of A Carnivore's Inquiry, she has just left Italy and arrived in New York City, but what has propelled her there is a mystery. Katherine's occasional allusions to a frighteningly eccentric mother and tyrannical father suggest a somberness at the center of her otherwise flippant and sardonic demeanor. Soon restless, she begins journeying from literary New York to rural Maine and Mexico City, trailed, everywhere she goes, by a string of murders. As the ritualistic killings begin to pile up, Katherine comforts and inspires herself by meditating on cannibalism in literature, art, and history. The story races toward a hair-raising conclusion, while Katherine, and the reader, close in on the reasons for both her and her mother's fascination with aberrant, violent behavior.This is a novel of ideas, a shocking and enlightening modern Gothic, and a brilliantly subtle commentary on twenty-first-century consumerism and Western culture's obsession with new frontiers. Told in highly intelligent prose reminiscent of Patrick McGrath or Angela Carter, A Carnivore's Inquiry is a sly, unsettling exploration of the questionable appetites that lurk beneath the veneer of North American civilization.
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Brian uses basketball to block out memories of his girlfriend and her family who were gunned down a year ago, but the upcoming murder trial and a high school history assignment force him to face the past and decide how far he should go to see justice served. Includes facts about miscarriages of justice in American history.

Daniel Stashower, the Edgar Award-winning author of the highly acclaimed Arthur Conan Doyle biography "Teller of Tales, " delivers a gripping true story of murder and media mania--including the controversial involvement of Edgar Allan Poe--in 1840s New York. Halftone photos throughout.
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In addition to the definitive UVA text of Brown's seminal novel, this edition includes an introduction setting the work in its historical, literary, and intellectual contexts. Selections from William Godwin's "Inquiry Concerning Political Justice" (1793), Erasmus Darwin's "Zoonomia" or "The Laws of Organic Life" (1794), Benjamin Franklin's "A Narrative of the Late Massacres" (1764), and Thomas Barton's "The conduct of the Paxton-men" (1764) are included here, as are several of Brown's lesser-known but revealing writings on such subjects as somnambulism and the uses of history in fiction.
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Acclaimed author Sarah Schulman (Rat Bohemia, Shimmer) returns with an absorbing novel about a teenager convicted of murder after seeing his online lover charged with pedophilia. Structured like a classic novel of legal suspense, The Child explores what happens when Stew, a lonely fifteen-year-old boy, looks for and finds an adult boyfriend online. In short order his lover is arrested in an Internet pedophilia sting and Stew's world is turned upside down. He's exposed to his family and community, leaving the outcast to fend for himself against forces intent on his destruction. Desperate and enraged, the confused Stew murders his nephew in a panic. Schulman's novel considers the impact of these events on all those involved from the parents of the murdered child, to Stew's staunchly Catholic parents, and the attorneys working on his case. Carefully untangling the actions of an isolated teenager denied a natural outlet for his feelings during a critical time in his life, The Child is a haunting meditation on isolation and the prejudices of culture and family.
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This bold new novel from Walter Mosley startles in both its rawness and its honest portrayal of a man on a quest for sexual redemption in midlife. When Cordell Carmel catches his longtime girlfriend with another man, the act that he witnesses seems to dissolve all the boundaries he knows. In that instant, the calm existence of this middle-aged New York City man becomes something unrecognizable: he wants revenge, but also something more. "Killing Johnny Fry "is the story of Cordell's dark, funny, soulful, and outrageously explicit sexual odyssey in search of a new way of life. His guide is a mysterious woman named Sisypha, who leads him deep into the erotic heart of the city. "Killing Johnny Fry" marks new territory for Walter Mosley, bestselling author of "Devil in a Blue Dress" and many other books in different genres: sci-fi, politics, literary fiction. It will surprise, provoke, inspire, and make you blush. Above all, it is about a man questioning the rules we take for granted--and the powerful and sometimes disturbing connections that occur between people when these rules are removed.
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Set on a plantation in Northern Peru, against the backdrop of El Nino and the resulting storms and floods, "Meeting the Dead" tells the story of two young Americans who get caught up in a blood feud between two powerful Peruvian families. The plot revolves around John Hauser, a Texan who accompanies his friend David Leroy on a journey of discovery to South America. John must decide whether to sell the ranch his father has left him or to keep a deathbed promise to his father and return home to work the land. While in Peru, John forges a relationship with local landowner Heim Ulmson and gets involved in Heim's struggle to keep his plantation from being stolen by a prominent banker, Don Enrique de la Cruz. As John finds himself drawn into the fight between the Ulmson and de la Cruz families, he becomes romantically involved with Heim's beautiful neighbor, Linda de la Piedra. David also pursues Linda, causing a rift between the two best friends. As the storms worsen and the floodwaters rise, John discovers supernatural elements to the blood feud between Heim and Don Enrique, and finds himself being forced to commit murder by a means he never imagined possible.
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Gay P.I. Donald Strachey is hired to investigate the death of Paul Haig, whom his mother believes was murdered by his lover, Larry. Donald learns that Larry also believes that Paul was murdered--by controversial gay conversion therapist Vernon Crockwell. -- Adapted from Novelist

The brilliantly original new novel from Michael Chabon, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning 'The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a 'temporary' safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful and complex frontier city that moves to the Yiddish beat. Now, after sixty years of federal neglect, the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. But homicide detective Meyer Landsman has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life -- and also his worst nightmare. And then someone's got the nerve to commit a murder in the flophouse Landsman calls home. Out of habit, obligation and a half-cocked shot at redemption, he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, and soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil and salvation that are his heritage -- and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears. At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
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An influential classic of American gothic and urban literature, Charles Brockden Brown's "Arthur Mervyn; Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793" (1799-1800) memorialises the epic Philadelphia Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 and connects it to the upheavals of the revolutionary era and the murderous financial networks of Atlantic slavery. This edition of Brown's widely-read novel offers selections from key contemporary texts - including Richard Allen and Absalom Jones' "Narrative" (1794) defending the city's Free Black community, Godwin's "Enquiry Concerning Political Justice" (1793), Laurence Sterne's "Sentimental Journey" (1768), 1790s abolitionist tracts by members of Brown's circle, and popular poetry on the slave trade and imperial commerce - as well as excerpts from Brown's own writings on slavery, race, and the uses of history in fiction.
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