Fred Van Lente’s brilliant debut is both a savagely funny homage to the Golden Age of Mystery and a thoroughly contemporary show-business satire. As the story opens, nine comedians of various acclaim are summoned to the island retreat of legendary Hollywood funnyman Dustin Walker. The group includes a former late-night TV host, a washed-up improv instructor, a ridiculously wealthy “blue collar” comic, and a past-her-prime Vegas icon. All nine arrive via boat to find that every building on the island is completely deserted. Marooned without cell phone service or wifi signals, they soon find themselves being murdered one by one. But who is doing the killing, and why? A darkly clever take on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and other classics of the genre, Ten Dead Comedians is a marvel of literary ventriloquism, with hilarious comic monologues in the voice of every suspect. It’s also an ingeniously plotted puzzler with a twist you’ll never see coming!

Fred Van Lente’s brilliant debut is both a savagely funny homage to the Golden Age of Mystery and a thoroughly contemporary show-business satire. As the story opens, nine comedians of various acclaim are summoned to the island retreat of legendary Hollywood funnyman Dustin Walker. The group includes a former late-night TV host, a washed-up improv instructor, a ridiculously wealthy “blue collar” comic, and a past-her-prime Vegas icon. All nine arrive via boat to find that every building on the island is completely deserted. Marooned without cell phone service or wifi signals, they soon find themselves being murdered one by one. But who is doing the killing, and why? A darkly clever take on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and other classics of the genre, Ten Dead Comedians is a marvel of literary ventriloquism, with hilarious comic monologues in the voice of every suspect. It’s also an ingeniously plotted puzzler with a twist you’ll never see coming!

The tenth edition of Buzz Books captures the excitement of Winter Institute and takes it much further: start off a year of new reading discoveries: excerpts from 40 talked about Buzz Books due to be published in the months ahead. Be among the first to get a taste of new fiction from major bestselling authors including Dennis Lehane, Nora Roberts, The Rosie Project author Graeme Simsion, Karen Dionne, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You author Courtney Maum’s anticipated follow-up, and Don Winslow’s latest thriller. The new Buzz Books shines a light on 15 promising debuts. Memoirist (Don’t Let’s Go To The Dogs Tonight) Alexandra Fuller’s first fiction joins Laurel Davis Huber’s fictionalized account of The Velveteen Rabbit’s author. Literary reimaginings include Sarah Schmidt looking through the eyes of Lizzie Borden’s troubled sister and Sarah Shoemaker writing from the vantage point of Charlotte Bronte’s Mr. Rochester. Award-winning journalist Omar El Akaad describes the “second” American Civil War in a novel set in 2074. Other debuts span an inspiring range, from dystopian to utopian, from a Norse trilogy about Norway’s first king to a scattered family from Palestine. Among our always fascinating nonfiction, novelist Richard Ford remembers his parents in a memoir; Roxane Gay’s long-awaited Hunger follows her bestselling Bad Feminist; and Kate Moore’s Radium Girls is an expose of pioneering working women, who were poisoned by radium paint in the 1920s. Start reading the bestsellers and big discoveries of tomorrow right now, and then share the bounty: anyone can download this free edition of Buzz Books at all major ebookstores or at buzz.publishersmarketplace.com. For still more pre-publication samples, check out Buzz Books 2017: Young Adult Spring/Summer, also available now, for excerpts from the some of the best of publishing’s hottest genre.

From the team behind The Comic Book History of Comics comes the perfect companion piece telling the story of the triumphs and tragedies of the filmmakers and beloved animated characters of the past century and a half—essential for hardcore fans of the medium and noobies alike! It's all here, from Aardman to Zoetrope, Disney to Miyazaki, Hanna-Barbera to Pixar, and everything in-between! Begin in the early 1900s with J. Stuart Blackton and the first American cartoon, Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur, and Felix the Cat! Find out about Margaret Winkler, the most powerful person in early animation, and Walt Disney, who revolutionizes cartoons with sound and color! Discover how Fleischer Studios teaches us to sing "Boop-boop-a-doop" and eat our spinach, and how Warner Bros' Looney Toons rivaled Disney's Silly Symphonies! Plus, icons of animation including Hanna-Barbera, Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones, and Ruby-Spears; the Plastic Age of toy-based TV shows including G.I. Joe, Transformers, and He-Man; and the new Golden Age of TV animation launched by The Simpsons! And go abroad to France with Émile Cohl's dynamic doodles in Fantasmagorie; to Japan, where the Imperial Navy debuts the first full-length anime as propaganda, Divine Sea Warriors, and Osamu Tezuka conquers TV as he conquered manga; and to Argentina, which beat out Snow White for the first feature length animated movie by two decades! And finally, Jurassic Park and the computer animation revolution! Post-Little Mermaid Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli conquer the world! If you’ve ever wanted to know more about the history of animation but were afraid to ask, this book is especially for you!

Los Angeles, circa 1998, Sam Seitz is a mildly successful comedian with five Tonight Show appearances who is actively trying to lose his religion so that he might “pursue the mindless goal of becoming famous for the sake of fame, without hindrance, setting aside the truth that so easily besets” him. Coming from a family of the most famous evangelicals in the country, apostatizing is no small task. After all, his family has been called “the Kennedys of the evangelical world.” For the first time in his life he feels like unbelief is within reach, until he notices that Jesus is following him. Literally. Not to mention the demons he starts seeing, but they might be with the drug dealer who happens to be his stripper girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. And let’s not leave out the night God tells him in a dream that he only has twenty-four hours to live. Thus begins his quest to find a way to reverse this proclamation, but hopefully one that doesn’t involve repentance, since he’s trying to deconvert and all. The End Times Comedy Show is a satire of the evangelical landscape that is filled with kindness, faith, and warmth for its characters. Blending magical realism and dark humor, Ramsey takes the theological subject of “crucified with Christ” to parabolic and hilarious extremes, all while avoiding heresy.

A wildly entertaining debut about a Brooklyn Heights wife and mother who has embezzled a small fortune from her children's private school and makes a run for it, leaving behind her trust fund poet husband, his maybe-secret lover, her two daughters, and a school board who will do anything to find her. Marion Palm prefers not to think of herself as a thief but rather "a woman who embezzles." Over the years she has managed to steal $180,000 from her daughters' private school, money that has paid for European vacations, a Sub-Zero refrigerator, and perpetually unused state-of-the-art exercise equipment. But, now, when the school faces an audit, Marion pulls piles of rubber-banded cash from their basement hiding places and flees, leaving her family to grapple with the baffled detectives, the irate school board, and the mother-shaped hole in their house. Told from the points of view of Nathan, Marion's husband, heir to a long-diminished family fortune; Ginny, Marion's teenage daughter who falls helplessly in love at the slightest provocation; Jane, Marion's youngest who is obsessed with a missing person of her own; and Marion herself, on the lam--and hiding in plain sight.

A Civil War–era historical novel featuring the first female agents in the Pinkerton National Police Agency, who work to foil an assassination attempt on President Lincoln’s life. The year is 1861, the eve of Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration. For Kate Warn, the first female private detective in American history, the only assignment tougher than exposing a conspiracy to assassinate the new president is training her new mentee, Hattie MacLaughlin, in the art of detection. The two women’s mission to save the president takes them from the granges of rural Maryland to the heart of secessionist high society, and sets them on a collision course that could alter the course of history. When Kate’s cover is blown, Hattie must choose between saving her new friend, and her country. Based on a true story.