The mystery is heating up quickly. The Alien Immigration and Integration Department monitors activities of aliens living on Earth while hiding their presence among us. Junior A.I.I.D. agent Lauren Sage is unexpectedly thrust into the biggest case the Department's had in years. She's sent to work undercover as the assistant on Kerr Dracos's stage act. He's created a home for displaced aliens from all over the galaxy, recreating an old-fashioned sideshow in the Grotesquerie. Humans think it's an illusion, remaining unaware the "freaks" in the show are actually aliens living among them. But someone is using the show as a way to sell illegal and dangerous alien technology. Kerr's brother has been implicated, and he wants the truth to clear Kex. She wants to solve the case and stop dangerous weapons from getting into the hands of amoral thugs. The partnership leads to more than either expected, but the threat of alien technology is growing, and when someone targets Lauren, she begins to wonder if she?ll survive long enough to identify who is moving the dangerous tech. ÿ Please note this is a revised version of a SFR title that?s been modified to remove most of the adult content besides some tension and fade-to-black moments and is more SF than SFR. If you?d prefer the original spicy version, look for ?Fire Lord?s Assistant.?

Double Threat is a new stand-alone thriller from New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson. Daley has a problem. Her 26-year life so far has been unconventional, to say the least, but now she’s got this voice in her head. It claims to be a separate entity that’s going to be sharing her body from now on. At first she thinks she’s schizophrenic, then considers the possibility that maybe she really has been invaded – but by what? Medical tests turn up nothing, yet the voice persists... and won’t stop talking! When she finally she accepts the reality that she has a symbiont, she discovers that together they can cure people of the incurable. Maybe hosting a symbiont isn’t such a bad thing. She retreats to a remote town in the southwest desert to hone her healing skills. But there she runs afoul of the Pendry clan, leaders of an obscure cult that worships the Visitors who inhabited the area millions of years ago. They plan to bring them back but believe Daley is the prophesied “Duad” who will undo all the cult’s efforts. She must be eliminated. You know things are bad when the voice in your head is the only one you can trust. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science. In a backward look at an era now drawing to a close, The Secret Life of Puppets describes a curious reversal in the roles of art and religion: where art and literature once took their content from religion, we came increasingly to seek religion, covertly, through art and entertainment. In a tour of Western culture that is at once exhilarating and alarming, Nelson shows us the distorted forms in which the spiritual resurfaced in high art but also, strikingly, in the mass culture of puppets, horror-fantasy literature, and cyborgs: from the works of Kleist, Poe, Musil, and Lovecraft to Philip K. Dick and virtual reality simulations. At the end of the millennium, discarding a convention of the demonized grotesque that endured three hundred years, a Demiurgic consciousness shaped in Late Antiquity is emerging anew to re-divinize the human as artists like Lars von Trier and Will Self reinvent Expressionism in forms familiar to our pre-Reformation ancestors. Here as never before, we see how pervasively but unwittingly, consuming art forms of the fantastic, we allow ourselves to believe.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Room, a young French burlesque dancer living in San Francisco is ready to risk anything in order to solve her friend’s murder—but only if the killer doesn’t get her first. Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice—if he doesn't track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue's lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other. "Her greatest achievement yet . . . Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music—she shows genius." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life.

Throughout his childhood, Mike O’Connor’s family pretended to be normal. But Mike and his two younger sisters knew that their parents were hiding something–a secret they didn’t dare talk about. The family appeared to be no different from any of their small-town Texas neighbors–that is, until suddenly, the O’Connor’s would flee, leaving with only a few hours’ notice, abandoning houses and pets and possessions and running across the border to Mexico. For all of Mike’s adolescence, O’Connor family life alternated between relative comfort and abject poverty–sometimes within a matter of days. From living in a Texas ranch house to living in two rented rooms in an impoverished Mexican village, the O’Connors never knew what lay ahead–only that they must not draw attention to themselves. Though their parents steadfastly denied it, the children knew that something was chasing them–a past that hovered like an invisible enemy, always waiting to strike, always in pursuit. But it was not until much later, after his parents’ deaths, that Mike O’Connor, now an investigative reporter, was able to uncover the truth about his family’s past. As the secrets were unlocked one by one and the long trail of deception unfurled, Mike faced the heart-wrenching ramifications of his parents’ actions–and made a discovery that shook his family loyalty to its core. Full of incredible details of a life lived on both sides of the border, in near-poverty and near-wealth, Mike O’Connor’s account is a real-life suspense story of childhood mysteries and strange circumstances that will enthrall readers to its very end.

The incredible story of one of rock's most controversial stars, featuring excerpts from her letters and journals, interviews with friends speaking openly for the first time, and dozens of revealing, candid photos.

Susan Orlean’s bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is “a sheer delight…as rich in insight and as varied as the treasures contained on the shelves in any local library” (USA TODAY)—a dazzling love letter to a beloved institution and an investigation into one of its greatest mysteries. “Everybody who loves books should check out The Library Book” (The Washington Post). On the morning of April 28, 1986, a fire alarm sounded in the Los Angeles Public Library. The fire was disastrous: it reached two thousand degrees and burned for more than seven hours. By the time it was extinguished, it had consumed four hundred thousand books and damaged seven hundred thousand more. Investigators descended on the scene, but more than thirty years later, the mystery remains: Did someone purposefully set fire to the library—and if so, who? Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the fire, award-winning New Yorker reporter and New York Times bestselling author Susan Orlean delivers a “delightful…reflection on the past, present, and future of libraries in America” (New York magazine) that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before. In the “exquisitely written, consistently entertaining” (The New York Times) The Library Book, Orlean chronicles the LAPL fire and its aftermath to showcase the larger, crucial role that libraries play in our lives; delves into the evolution of libraries; brings each department of the library to vivid life; studies arson and attempts to burn a copy of a book herself; and reexamines the case of Harry Peak, the blond-haired actor long suspected of setting fire to the LAPL more than thirty years ago. “A book lover’s dream…an ambitiously researched, elegantly written book that serves as a portal into a place of history, drama, culture, and stories” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), Susan Orlean’s thrilling journey through the stacks reveals how these beloved institutions provide much more than just books—and why they remain an essential part of the heart, mind, and soul of our country.