A Collection of Suspense by Joan Hall Hovey Includes 5 short stories and a novella. “Joan Hall Hovey knows suspense. She keeps it simmering in every scene she writes and knows just the right moments to turn up the heat. She also knows character creating richly layered people to populate her stories, sometimes with no more than a single sentence stocked with perfectly chosen description words or phrases... terrific suspense ..v. James Hankins, author of Brothers and Bones..." “Taut plotting, great characters, and chilling suspense. Abook you can’t put down, exhibits a master’s touch. Alfred Hitchcock would be smiling. - Book Pleasures Review, Steve Moore

A weary coach struggles across a merciless landscape, fighting the relentless bitterness of the wind. It is a land of endless grey bogs, of mud-sucked hills, of twisted and impenetrable forest. A land of sin. A land of death. This is where Odalric and Clithanus and the Graue Blutengel, the Grey Leech, hold sway. Battered and wind-whipped and coated in dust, the men of God inside the laboring coach are every bit as grim as the country that seeks to engulf them. They endure. They must. Shadowed at all times by the Other Wolves, haunted by the Way Home, defended by purity and American Winchester rifles, their resolve is their greatest strength in the nightmare that surrounds them. For their mission is paramount, and it must not be permitted to falter. Joe Pulver's latest masterpiece is as uncomfortable as it is oneiric, a hypnagogic trek through a blasted piece of world, surrounded at all times by hatred and bitterness and evil. As claustrophobic as it is relentless, A Long, Dark, Grim Road will cling to you, and you will never escape its clutches.

In this gripping account of the murder of James Byrd, Jr., and its aftermath, Ainslie builds an unprecedented psychological profile of Bill King that provides the fullest possible explanation of how a man who was not raised in a racist family could end up on death row for viciously killing a black man.

From one of world literature’s most courageous voices, a novel about the human cost of China’s one-child policy through the lens of one rural family on the run from its reach Far away from the Chinese economic miracle, from the bright lights of Beijing and Shanghai, is a vast rural hinterland, where life goes on much as it has for generations, with one extraordinary difference: “normal” parents are permitted by the state to have only a single child. The Dark Road is the story of one such “normal” family—Meili, a young peasant woman; her husband, Kongzi, a village schoolteacher; and their daughter, Nannan. Kongzi is, according to family myth, a direct lineal descendant of Confucius, and he is haunted by the imperative to carry on the family name by having a son. And so Meili becomes pregnant again without state permission, and when local family planning officials launch a new wave of crackdowns, the family makes the radical decision to leave its village and set out on a small, rickety houseboat down the Yangtze River. Theirs is a dark road, and tragedy awaits them, and horror, but also the fierce beauty born of courageous resistance to injustice and inhumanity. The Dark Road is a haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty. While Ma Jian wrote The Dark Road, he traveled through the rural backwaters of southwestern China to see how the state enforced the one-child policy far from the outside world’s prying eyes. He met local women who had been seized from their homes and forced to undergo abortions or sterilization in the policy’s name; and on the Yangtze River, he lived among fugitive couples who had gone on the run so they could have more children, that most fundamental of human rights. Like all of Ma Jian’s novels, The Dark Road is also a celebration of the life force, of the often comically stubborn resilience of man’s most basic instincts.

Detective Dirk Gently investigates after a passenger at Heathrow airport erupts into a mysterious ball of flames. Mystery, hilarity, and the fantastical are combined in this title from the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. -- HPL Readers Advisor.

Kim Yong shares his harrowing account of life in a labor camp a singularly despairing form of torture carried out by the secret state. Although it is known that gulags exist in North Korea, little information is available about their organization and conduct, for prisoners rarely escape both incarceration and the country alive. Long Road Home shares the remarkable story of one such survivor, a former military official who spent six years in a gulag and experienced firsthand the brutality of an unconscionable regime. As a lieutenant colonel in the North Korean army, Kim Yong enjoyed unprecedented privilege in a society that closely monitored its citizens. He owned an imported car and drove it freely throughout the country. He also encountered corruption at all levels, whether among party officials or Japanese trade partners, and took note of the illicit benefits that were awarded to some and cruelly denied to others. When accusations of treason stripped Kim Yong of his position, the loose distinction between those who prosper and those who suffer under Kim Jong-il became painfully clear. Kim Yong was thrown into a world of violence and terror, condemned to camp No. 14 in Hamkyeong province, North Korea's most notorious labor camp. As he worked a constant shift 2,400 feet underground, daylight became Kim's new luxury; as the months wore on, he became intimately acquainted with political prisoners, subhuman camp guards, and an apocalyptic famine that killed millions. After years of meticulous planning, and with the help of old friends, Kim escaped and came to the United States via China, Mongolia, and South Korea. Presented here for the first time in its entirety, his story not only testifies to the atrocities being committed behind North Korea's wall of silence but also illuminates the daily struggle to maintain dignity and integrity in the face of unbelievable hardship. Like the work of Solzhenitsyn, this rare portrait tells a story of resilience as it reveals the dark forms of oppression, torture, and ideological terror at work in our world today.

This 2-volume book features the sketches written during a cruise to the West Indies and the Spanish Main in the winter and spring of 1901. The author's intention was not to write a West Indian guide-book, but rather to give preference to the human side of the picture through glimpses of the people and their ways of life and thought. With this idea it was thought best to give attention only to such of the ports visited as were full of human interest and typical of the life about the Caribbean Sea. The author believed that it might be of interest to remember as well that at no time since could this voyage have been made under the same conditions: by the publishing of this book in 1903, several ports have become dangerous because of fever and plague; proclamations in French and pronunciamientos in Spanish have adorned West Indian street corners; Haiti has reverted to its almost chronic state of riot and revolution; the Dominican republic has again chosen a President whose nomination came from a conquering army; Venezuela has been full of alarms and intrigues; while already the Germans were beginning to show their hand in the Caribbean; Martinique and St. Vincent have been desolated by volcanoes then thought to be practically extinct; and of delicious St. Pierre there remained but a sadly memory._x000D_ Contents:_x000D_ The Voyage_x000D_ Port-au-Prince, Haiti_x000D_ Santo Domingo_x000D_ San Juan, Puerto Rico_x000D_ Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas_x000D_ Martinique_x000D_ Martinique, "Le Pays des Revenants"_x000D_ Island of Trinidad, Port of Spain_x000D_ Island of Trinidad, "Iere"_x000D_ Island of Trinidad, La Brea_x000D_ The Spanish Main_x000D_ In Venezuela, Caracas_x000D_ In Venezuela, Caracas to Puerto Cabello_x000D_ Curaçao, City of Willemstad_x000D_ The Southern Cross_x000D_ Kingston, Jamaica_x000D_ "Cuando Salide La Habana"_x000D_ A Memory of Martinique