Autumn Franklin is an awkward, biracial girl growing up in a suburb of Detroit. Already disconnected from her peers at an early age because of her background, she becomes even more withdrawn when her young parents divorce. Ever changing but stubbornly tenacious, she survives the cards she's been dealt by playing them against the odds. Hurt her and she will not hesitate to "kill you off," making it easier to walk away. Transplanting herself from her factory-driven hometown to the alluring City of Angels, she has but one goal: to find herself. Struggling to make solid connections with those around her, Autumn swallows her reservations and pushes limits to the extreme as she transitions between two drastic career changes: from the bowels of the adult entertainment industry to her rebirth as a mortician. There amongst the dead, she learns what it is to live, love, and to allow others inside, finally landing in her most comfortable place of all: her own skin.

General manager of a radio station on the Caribbean island of St. Chris, Kelly Ryan is delighted by her new life in paradise, until she stumbles upon the corpse of a tourist, a loud-mouthed woman found impaled by a spear.

Hot on the trail of a killer in Manhattan, FBI Special Agent Pendergast must face his most brilliant and dangerous enemy: his own brother. Two brothers. One a top FBI agent. The other a brilliant, twisted criminal. An undying hatred between them. Now, a perfect crime. And the ultimate challenge: Stop me if you can...

Erin and Darcy, answering personal ads as research for a TV show, discover a whole new New York sub-culture - adulterers, con men, the shy and frankly weird, all looking for love. And one man looking for something darker . . . A serial killer who has just got away with murder for fifteen years, and has promised himself just two more . . .

London, 1893: Private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn are called in to protect Tsesarevich Nicholas from nefarious forces as he travels to England for a royal wedding—inDance with Death, the next mystery in Will Thomas’s beloved series. In June of 1893, the future Nicholas II travels to London for a royal wedding, bringing with him his private security force and his ballerina mistress, Mathilde Kchessinska. Rumored to be the target of a professional assassin known only as La Sylphide, and the subject of conspiracies against his life by his own family who covet his future throne, Nicholas is protected by not only private security, but the professional forces of both England and Russia. All of these measures prove inadequate when Prince George of England is attacked by an armed anarchist who mistakes him for Nicholas. As a result, Barker and Llewelyn are brought in to help track down the assassin and others who might conspire against the life of the tsesarevich . The investigations lead them down several paths, including Llewelyn's old nemesis, the assassin Sofia Ilyanova. With Barker and Llewelyn both surviving separate attempts on their lives, the race is on to find both the culprit and the assassin they hired. Taking them through high society (including a masked ball at Kensington Palace) and low, chasing down motives both personal and political, Barker and Llewelyn must solve the case of their life before the crime of the century is committed.

Challenging conventional understandings of time and memory, Christopher T. Nelson examines how contemporary Okinawans have contested, appropriated, and transformed the burdens and possibilities of the past. Nelson explores the work of a circle of Okinawan storytellers, ethnographers, musicians, and dancers deeply engaged with the legacies of a brutal Japanese colonial era, the almost unimaginable devastation of the Pacific War, and a long American military occupation that still casts its shadow over the islands. The ethnographic research that Nelson conducted in Okinawa in the late 1990s—and his broader effort to understand Okinawans’ critical and creative struggles—was inspired by his first visit to the islands in 1985 as a lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps. Nelson analyzes the practices of specific performers, showing how memories are recalled, bodies remade, and actions rethought as Okinawans work through fragments of the past in order to reconstruct the fabric of everyday life. Artists such as the popular Okinawan actor and storyteller Fujiki Hayato weave together genres including Japanese stand-up comedy, Okinawan celebratory rituals, and ethnographic studies of war memory, encouraging their audiences to imagine other ways to live in the modern world. Nelson looks at the efforts of performers and activists to wrest the Okinawan past from romantic representations of idyllic rural life in the Japanese media and reactionary appropriations of traditional values by conservative politicians. In his consideration of eisā, the traditional dance for the dead, Nelson finds a practice that reaches beyond the expected boundaries of mourning and commemoration, as the living and the dead come together to create a moment in which a new world might be built from the ruins of the old.

Hal's summer affair with Barry Goldman ends tragically when Hal discovers he is much more committed to the relationship than his friend.