Random House Inc.

Rant is the oral history of one Buster 'Rant' Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, detractors, lovers and relations have their say on the man who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. Rant is a darkly glittering anti-hero whose recreational drug of choice is rabies, and whose own personal Viagra is the venom of a black widow spider. He soon leaves his half-feral hometown for the big city, where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. On designated nights, the Party Crashers chase each other in cars in the hope of a collision, and all the while Rant, the 'superspreader', transmits his lethal disease...

In Special Assignments, Erast Fandorin, nineteenth-century Russia's suavest sleuth, faces two formidable new foes: One steals outrageous sums of money, the other takes lives. The Jack of Spades is a civilized swindler who has conned thousands of rubles from Moscow's residents-including Fandorin's own boss, Prince Dolgorukoi. To catch him, Fandorin and his new assistant, timid young policeman Anisii Tulipov, must don almost as many disguises as the grifter does himself. The Decorator is a different case altogether: A savage serial killer who believes he cleans the women he mutilates and takes his orders from on high, he must be given Fandorin's most serious attentions.

Haruki Murakami, the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, plunges us into an urbane Japan of jazz bars, coffee shops, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles to tell this story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited loves. A college student, identified only as K, falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to an untidy writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments-until she meets Miu, an older and much more sophisticated businesswoman. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, K is solicited to join the search party and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous, haunting visions. A love story combined with a detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart ultimately lingers in the mind as a profound meditation on human longing.

In the four long stories in this collection, Marlowe is hired to protect a rich old guy from a gold digger, runs afoul of crooked politicos, gets a line on some stolen jewels with a reward attached, and stumbles across a murder victim who may have been an extortionist.

From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Remains of the Day comes this stunning work of soaring imagination. Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him. Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one's past.

Toward that end the cynical Shunsuke enlists the beautiful young Yuichi, who is irresistible to women but is just coming to realize that he loves only men. As the boy embarks on a loveless marriage and equally loveless adulteries, he enters the gay underworld of postwar Japan — a world where he is as helpless as any of the women he preys on.

Follows the lives and fortunes of members of the Gradov family of Moscow through the turbulent years of 1928 to 1945, through Stalins rise in the 1930s and the terror of World War II. Reprint.

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes Moor Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

Nabokov's first novel. A tale of youth, first love and nostalgia. In a Berlin rooming house, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future relives his first love affair.

In Breakfast of Champions, one of Kurt Vonnegut's most beloved characters, the aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. What follows is murderously funny satire, as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

When his brief, passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, young psychologist Jeremy Carrier is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover's grisly demise and warily eyed by police still seeking a prime suspect in the unsolved slaying. To escape the pain, he buries himself in his work at City Central Hospital — only to be drawn deeper into a waking nightmare when more women turn up murdered in the same gruesome fashion as Jocelyn... and the suspicion surrounding Jeremy intensifies. Now, the only way to prove his innocence and put his torment to rest is to follow the deadly trail of a modern-day Jack the Ripper.

AN ANCHOR PAPERBACK ORIGINAL From the Nobel Prize laureate and author of the acclaimed Cairo Trilogy, a beguiling and artfully compact novel set in Sadat's Egypt. Mahfouz] is not only a Hugo and a Dickens, but also a Galsworthy, Zola and a Jules Romain. Edward Said The time is 1981, Anwar al-Sadat is president, and Egypt is lurching into the modern world. Set against this backdrop, The Day the Leader Was Killed relates the tale of a middle-class Cairene family. Rich with irony and infused with political undertones, the story is narrated alternately by the pious and mischievous family patriarch Muhtashimi Zayed, his hapless grandson Elwan, and Elwan's headstrong and beautiful fiancee Randa. The novel reaches its climax with the assassination of Sadat on October 6, 1981, an event around which the fictional plot is skillfully woven. The Day the Leader Was Killed brings us the essence of Mahfouz's genius and is further proof that he has, in the words of the Nobel citation, formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind.

Contents. Caligula. The misunderstanding. State of siege. The just assassins.

The bestselling author of Fight Club, Choke, and Lullaby continues his 21st-century reinvention of the horror novel in this scary and profound look at mankind's quest for some sort of immortality. Diary takes the form of a coma diary kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt.

In this mesmerizing new novel, Anne Rice demonstrates once again her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of myth and magic, as she weaves together two of her most compelling worlds those of the Vampire Chronicles and the Mayfair witches.

A rich evocation of Nabokov's life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including LOLITA, PNIN, DESPAIR, THE GIFT and others.

Paris, 1878: Eccentric antiquarian Lord Littleby and his ten servants are found murdered in Littleby's mansion on the rue de Grenelle, and a priceless Indian shawl is missing. Police commissioner Papa Gauche recovers only one piece of evidence from the crime scene: a golden key shaped like a whale. Gauche soon deduces that the key is in fact a ticket of passage for the Leviathan, a gigantic steamship soon to depart Southampton on its maiden voyage to Calcutta. The murderer must be among its passengers.

Stefan Lindman, a young police officer on extended sick leave, hears about the murder of his former colleague and decides to investigate it himself. Lindman's inquiry becomes increasingly complex and dangerous as he uncovers the links between Herbert Molin's death and a global web of neo-Nazi activity.

Naples, Italy, during four fateful days in the fall of 1943. The only people left in the shattered, bombed-out city are the lost, abandoned children whose only goal is to survive another day. None could imagine that they would become fearless fighters and the unlikeliest heroes of World War II. They are the warriors immortalized in Street Boys, Lorenzo Carcaterra's exhilarating new novel, a book that exceeds even his bestselling Sleepers as a riveting reading experience.

An elderly butler is on a five-day motoring trip through the West Country in the 1950s. The climax of his journey is to be a reunion with his former housekeeper. This 1989 Booker Prize-winner attempts to capture a period in British history and draw a portrait of a man in old age.

Six shots. Five dead. One heartland city thrown into a state of terror. But within hours the cops have it solved: a slam-dunk case. Except for one thing. The accused man says: You got the wrong guy. Then he says: Get Reacher for me. And sure enough, from the world he lives in — no phone, no address, no commitments-ex-military investigator Jack Reacher is coming. In Lee Child's astonishing new thriller, Reacher's arrival will change everything — about a case that isn't what it seems, about lives tangled in baffling ways, about a killer who missed one shot-and by doing so give Jack Reacher one shot at the truth... The gunman worked from a parking structure just thirty yards away-point-blank range for a trained military sniper like James Barr. His victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But why does Barr want Reacher at his side? There are good reasons why Reacher is the last person Barr would want to see. But when Reacher hears Barr's own words, he understands. And a slam-dunk case explodes. Soon Reacher is teamed with a young defense lawyer who is working against her D.A. father and dueling with a prosecution team that has an explosive secret of its own. Like most things Reacher has known in life, this case is a complex battlefield. But, as always, in battle, Reacher is at his best. Moving in the shadows, picking his spots, Reacher gets closer and closer to the unseen enemy who is pulling the strings. And for Reacher, the only way to take him down is to know his ruthlessness and respect his cunning-and then match him shot for shot...

Her worst nightmare brought back to life, she risks everything for a second shot at justice. For thirty years, FBI scientist Olivia St. Martin has lived with guilt and one abiding certainty-that while she wasn't able to save her sister's life, she did testify and helped to convict the rapist and killer. When shocking new evidence exonerates the man Olivia is sure she saw abduct her sister, she breaks every rule in the book to uncover the truth. Driven by the possibility that she put the wrong man behind bars, Olivia discovers that a serial killer has been at large all these years. Believing that the monster has just struck again in Seattle, Olivia leaves her lab and poses as a field agent, sharing her unofficial investigation with a hardworking Seattle cop. Olivia doesn't want to lie to detective Zack Travis. And she certainly doesn't want to fall in love. But as the investigation intensifies, Olivia and Zack find that they're rapidly losing control-over their hearts, their secrets, and a case that threatens to consume them.

Rick Dockery was the third-string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns. In the AFC Championship game, to the surprise and dismay of virtually everyone, Rick actually got into the game. With a 17-point lead and just minutes to go, Rick provided what was arguably the worst single performance in the history of the NFL. Overnight, he became a national laughingstock — and was immediately cut by the Browns and shunned by all other teams. But all Rick knows is football, and he insists that his agent find a team that needs him. Against enormous odds, Rick finally gets a job — as the starting quarterback for the Mighty Panthers... of Parma, Italy. The Parma Panthers desperately want a former NFL player — any former NFL player — at their helm. And now they've got Rick, who knows nothing about Parma (not even where it is) and doesn't speak a word of Italian. To say that Italy — the land of fine wines, extremely small cars, and football americano — holds a few surprises for Rick Dockery would be something of an understatement...

Jo Edwards never planned to live on a barge. She's not even sure she likes boats. But when her husband trades her in for a younger model, she finds her options alarmingly limited. Dora Hamilton never planned to run out on her own wedding. But as The Big Day approaches, her cold feet show no signs of warming up — and accepting Jo's offer of refuge aboard The Three Sisters seems the only alternative. As Jo and Dora embark on reorganising their muddled lives, they realise they both need a practical way to keep themselves afloat. But, despite their certainty that they've sworn off men for good, they haven't bargained for the persistent intervention of attractive but enigmatic Marcus, and laid-back, charming Tom, who both seem determined to help them whether they like it or not...