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Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin must help a rich old woman whose husband is getting money in a most mysterious way. But when the case leads Wolfe to the most dangerous man in the U.S., he knows that if he wants to live, he will have to do the one thing that he has never contemplated — run and hide.

Humphrey Van Weyden, rescued by the crew of the Ghost, becomes an unwilling sailor under the command of Wolf Larsen.

This volume contains six zany, outrageous, out-of-this-world adventure stories by bestselling author Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; Young Zaphod; and Mostly Harmless.

Educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, Vittorio inhabits a world of courtly splendor and country pleasures — a world suddenly threatened when his entire family is confronted by an unholy power. In the midst of this upheaval, Vittorio is seduced by the beautiful and sinister vampire Ursula — setting in motion a chilling chain of events that will mark his life for eternity. Against a backdrop of the wonders — both sacred and profane — and the beauty and ferocity of Renaissance Italy, Anne Rice creates a passionate and tragic legend of doomed young love and lost innocence.

Simon Steinberg, a major movie producer, and Blaire Scott, an award-winning television writer, are among the most respected couples in Hollywood. They have defied the cliches, keeping their marriage together for decades. Their children — Samantha, Scott, and Allegra — are successful and happy, but must face challenges we fear for our own children as well. As an attorney for the stars, twenty-nine-year-old Allegra Steinberg is used to negotiating major movie deals, and fielding phone calls at all hours of the day and night. But she has little time for private life — until a chance encounter with a New York writer turns her life upside down. Suddenly, Allegra finds herself planning a wedding at her parents' Bel Air home. As preparations begin for a September ceremony, surprise announcements and ever-increasing anxiety bring out the best and worst in everyone. But as couples in each generation of the Steinberg family struggle with broken vows and new hopes, the real meaning of Allegra's wedding emerges. For the bride, the ceremony is a bridge between her past and her future. For her parents, it is a reminder of the bond that holds them all together. And for both families, it is an opportunity for reconciliation, and new hope. In a compelling portrait of real people on an unreal world, Danielle Steel uses Hollywood as a backdrop to reveal the dreams, the fears, and the expectations of a ceremony that unites us all and changes lives forever...

This is a narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, «Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World» is the tour de force that expanced Haruki Murakami's international following, tracking one man's descent into the kafkaesque underworld farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy. The result is a wildly inventive fantasy and a meditation on the many uses of the mind.

When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire — to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.

Gertrude has lost her husband and Anne, an ex-nun, her God. They plan to live together and do good works. Tim is a different sort of soldier. He plans to live off rich friends. Who will judge whom in this story?

The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with two weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist high to my father, almost over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a «good crop». Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks, they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven year old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever. «A Painted House» is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience.

This is the story of nine people, each of whom is looking for love, and the resulting complex relationships between them. Impelled by affection, lust, lost scruple, illusion and disillusion, wanting to be free yet needing to be involved, these characters perform the linked figures of their destiny.

In the bestselling “Italian Neighbours”, Tim Parks explores the idiosyncrasies and nuances of Italian culture. When Parks moved to Italy he found it irresistible; this book is a testament to his love of Italy and his attention to the details of everyday Italian life. “Italian Neighbours” is travel writing at its best; infused with an objective passion and an eye for the details and the peculiarities of culture.

Marian Taylor, who has come as a 'companion' to a lonely woman in a remote castle, becomes aware that her employer is a prisoner, not only of her own obsessions, but of an unforgiving husband. Hannah, the Unicorn, seemingly an image of persecuted virtue, fascinates those who surround her, some of whom plan to rescue her from her dream of redemptive suffering. But is she an innocent victim, a guilty woman, a mad woman, or a witch?

The long title story is about a man whose life, in a sense, is a book. There are shelves in every room, packed with titles which Ambrose Ribbon has checked pedantically for mistakes of grammar and fact. Life for Ribbon, without his mother now, is lonely and obsessive. He still keeps her dressing table exactly as she had left it, the wardrobe door always so that her clothes can be seen inside, and her pink silk nightdress on the bed. There is one book too that he associates particularly with her — volume VIII of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Piranha to Scurfy. It marked a very significant moment in their relationship.In the other stories, Ruth Rendell deals with a variety of themes, some macabre, some vengeful, some mysterious, all precisely observed. The second novella, «High Mysterious Union», explores a strange, erotic universe in a dream-like corner of rural England, and illustrates very atmospherically what range Ruth Rendell has as a writer.

After coming home at the end of World War II, Walter Mosca finds himself too restless for his civilian role in America. So he returns to Germany to find the woman he had once loved — and to start some kind of life in a vanquished country. But ahead of Walter stretches a dark landscape of defeat and intrigue, as he succumbs to the corrupting influences of a malevolent time. Now he enters a different kind of war, one in which he must make a fateful decision–between love and ambition, passion and greed, life and death...

His birth was marked by wonder and tragedy. He sees beauty and terror beyond our deepest dreams. His story will change the way you see the world. On the heels of his #1 bestseller «False Memory», Dean Koontz brings together his most compelling themes and an unforgettable cast of characters to create what is perhaps the most thrilling and emotionally powerful work of his critically acclaimed career. Bartholomew Lampion is born on a day of tragedy and terror that will mark his family forever. All agree that his unusual eyes are the most beautiful they have ever seen. On this same day, a thousand miles away, a ruthless man learns that he has a mortal enemy named Bartholomew. He embarks on a relentless search to find this enemy, a search that will consume his life. And a girl is born from a brutal rape, her destiny mysteriously linked to Barty and the man who stalks him. At the age of three, Barty Lampion is blinded when surgeons remove his eyes to save him from a fast-spreading cancer. As he copes with his blindness and proves to be a prodigy, his mother counsels him that all things happen for a reason and that every person’s life has an effect on every other person’s, in often unknowable ways. At thirteen, Bartholomew regains his sight. How he regains it, why he regains it, and what happens as his amazing life unfolds and entwines with others results in a breathtaking journey of courage, heart-stopping suspense, and high adventure.

Do you like green eggs and ham? If so, you'll love them with flaps and stickers! Flip the flaps to see where those green eggs and ham will pop up next! All the fun and charm of the original book is here in this interactive version of Dr. Seuss's classic Green Eggs and Ham!

In this lively and probing book, award-winning author Pete Earley traces the extraordinary evolution of Las Vegas — from the gaudy Mecca of the Rat Pack era to one of the country's top family vacation spots. He revisits the city's checkered history of moguls, mobsters, and entertainers, reveals the real stories of well-known power brokers like Steve Wynn and legends like Howard Hughes and Bugsy Siegel, and offers a fascinating portrait of the life, death, and fantastic rebirth of the Las Vegas Strip. Earley also documents the gripping tale of the entrepreneurs behind the rise and fall and rise again of one of the largest gaming corporations in the nation, Circus — to which he was given unique access. In his trademark you-are-there style, he takes us behind the scenes to meet the blackjack dealers and hookers, the heavy hitters and bit players, the security officers, cabbies, and showgirls who are caught up in the mercurial pace that pulses at the heart of this astounding city.

»Surfing the Edge of Chaos» is a brilliant, powerful, and practical book about the parallels between business and nature — two fields that feature nonstop battles between the forces of tradition and the forces of transformation. It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days.

As the dramatic climax of The Sea of Fertility, The Decay of the Angel brings together the dominant themes of the three previous novels: the meaning and decay of Japan's courtly tradition and samurai ideal; the essence and value of Buddhist philosophy and aesthetics; and, underlying all, Mishima's apocalyptic vision of the modern era, which saw the dissolution of the moral and cultural forces that throughout the ages nourished a people and a world.The time is the late 1960s. Honda, now an aged and wealthy man, discovers and adopts a sixteen-year-old orphan, Toru, as his heir, identifying him with the tragic protagonists of the three previous novels, each of whom died at the age of twenty. Honda raises and educates the boy, yet watches him, waiting.

April 1193. England's King Richard Lionheart languishes in a German prison, and treason scents the air. Richard's younger brother, John, seizes Windsor Castle, and Dowager Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine summons her trusted personal «queen's man», Justin de Quincy, to do the impossible — mediate a truce with her rebel son. Amid such fateful events, the murder of a Welsh peddler's daughter seems small. But the cruel demise of the beautiful Melangell so troubles Justin that not even a threatened French invasion can keep him from investigating her death. Yet can he bring Melangell's craven killer to justice?

After Mario Puzo wrote his internationally acclaimed The Godfather, he has often been imitated but never equaled. Puzo's classic novel, The Sicilian, stands as a cornerstone of his work — a lushly romantic, unforgettable tale of bloodshed, justice, and treachery...The year is 1950. Michael Corleone is nearing the end of his exile in Sicily. The Godfather has commanded Michael to bring a young Sicilian bandit named Salvatore Guiliano back with him to America. But Guiliano is a man entwined in a bloody web of violence and vendettas. In Sicily, Guiliano is a modern day Robin Hood who has defied corruption — and defied the Cosa Nostra. Now, in the land of mist-shrouded mountains and ancient ruins, Michael Corleone's fate is entwined with the dangerous legend of Salvatore Guiliano: warrior, lover, and the ultimate Siciliano.

Random House's completely revised best-selling guide to good English. «Random House Webster's Pocket Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation» is perfect for students, business, and anyone who cares about the correct use of English. Includes: • Clear and concise explanations of English grammar with plenty of examples • Common grammatical and stylistic errors and how to avoid them • Quick reference to commonly misspelled words • User-friendly guide to punctuation and capitalization • Easily confused words and how to tell them apart • Convenient pocket size that fits into backpack, purse, or briefcase

A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s. A Chinese proverb says, «Falling leaves return to their roots». In «Chinese Cinderella», Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving birth to her. Life does not get any easier when her father remarries. She and her siblings are subjected to the disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled. Although Adeline wins prizes at school, they are not enough to compensate for what she really yearns for — the love and understanding of her family. Following the success of the critically acclaimed adult bestseller «Falling Leaves», this memoir is a moving telling of the classic Cinderella story, with Adeline Yen Mah providing her own courageous voice.

Julia Lambert is in her prime, the greatest actress in England. Off stage, however, she is bored with her handsome husband, coquettish and undisciplined. She is at first flattered and amused by the attentions of a shy and eager young fan, but before long Julia is amazed to find herself falling wildly, dangerously, in love.