Since its beginning, the St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Contest has succeeded in discovering many amazing new mystery authors. Stephen Santogrossi joins that long, proud tradition with A Stranger Lies There. On a very hot morning in Southern California, Tim Ryder brings his coffee out to the front porch. Before he can take a sip, he sees the dead body of a young man laid out on his lawn. Neither Tim nor his wife, Deirdre, has ever seen the man before, but the youth's death stirs up unhappy memories of the lives they were living twenty years earlier. Up to this point, they had done a good job of leaving behind their troubled pasts. Deirdre overcame her drug addiction and now worked in a clinic helping other addicts to climb out of their private hells. Tim was just a college student when he and his friends were led astray by an older man named Turret. They thought they were protesting the Vietnam War, but Turret was manipulating them in order to rob a local bank. The attempt went awry and both Turret and Tim ended up in jail. Tim's sentence was considerably shorter since he accepted a deal and testified against Turret. When a detective shows up at Tim's house, all these years later, and tells him that Turret has just been released from prison, Tim is certain that the dead body on his lawn is some kind of revenge. And maybe it's only the beginning. Tim is determined to learn who the boy is, and, in turn, what else Turret has planned. But his search will require more of him than he ever imagined.

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

When Charlotte married the wealthy widower Paul, it caused a ripple of gossip in their small lakeside town. They have a charmed life together, despite the cruel whispers about her humble past and his first marriage. But everything starts to unravel when she discovers a young woman’s body floating in the exact same spot where Paul’s first wife tragically drowned. At first, it seems like a horrific coincidence, but the stranger in the lake is no stranger. Charlotte saw Paul talking to her the day before, even though Paul tells the police he’s never met the woman. His lie exposes cracks in their fragile new marriage, cracks Charlotte is determined to keep from breaking them in two. As Charlotte uncovers dark mysteries about the man she married, she doesn’t know what to trust — her heart, which knows Paul to be a good man, or her growing suspicion that there’s something he’s hiding in the water. ‘Spellbinding. Another outstanding novel by Kimberly Belle, masterfully written to lure you in and never let go.’ — Samantha Downing, USA Today bestselling author of My Lovely Wife

Explains how to deal with strangers in public places, on the telephone, and in cars, emphasizing situations in which the best thing to do is run away or talk to another adult.

A Stranger in My Bed takes you inside Debbie Sprague’s life for an intimate view of a love story disrupted by the invasion of PTSD—thirty years after the Vietnam War. The cycle moves from love to fear, anger, and despair. Stories unfold of her husband’s battle with PTSD, displaying typical behaviors, triggers, and moods. Those familiar with this world will be comforted: “That sounds just like my life, and I thought I was the only one.” Others will find a new awareness: “I had no idea it was like that.” You will watch a family and marriage almost be destroyed by the contagious effects of PTSD. Yes, PTSD is “contagious”—the family can take on the symptoms, even to the point of full-blown PTSD. Debbie was one of those people. As Debbie began to discover resources and find solutions for her problems, she realized sharing those solutions was her life purpose—what she had been preparing for her entire life. Debbie’s gift to you is A Stranger in My Bed: 8 Steps to Taking Your Life Back From The Contagious Effects Of Your Veteran’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

"At a time when the forces of administrative despotism are on the march and Winfreyesque rhetoric passes for moral leadership and intellectual sophistication, Brian Danoff and L. Joseph Hebert, Jr., have assembled a compelling collection of timely essays on the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville, that liberal thinker of the first rank who endeavored to see f̀urther than the parties' without any pretense to post-partisanship, who understood that more democracy is not always the answer to every problem of democracy, and who concerned himself with educating democratic peoples so that they may live together as free citizens rather than exist independently as dependent subjects. This fine collection situates Tocqueville within the history of ideas, ancient and modern, and examines the significance of his observations, predictions, and prescriptions as they pertain to a wide variety of topics with contemporary relevance. The chapters in this volume articulate the proper relationship between political theory, political science, and political practice, emphasizing the necessity for genuine republican statesmanship while honestly wondering about its chances given the trajectory of late modern America."--Travis D. Smith. Concordia University, Montreal.