After a trip home to Moravia reveals that his father is not a businessman but actually a great composer, unsuccessful musician Leib Goldkorn returns to New York to launch a production of his father's opera "Rubezahl" to disastrous results.

The film Casablanca opens with the words, “With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.” Leslie Epstein’s Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events—most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942—coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein—the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca—was born to write.

A gripping standalone thriller by the New York Times bestselling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY LOS ANGELES TIMES AND SUSPENSE MAGAZINE In a shadowy antiques shop in Rome, violinist Julia Ansdell happens upon a curious piece of music—the Incendio waltz—and is immediately entranced by its unusual composition. Full of passion, torment, and chilling beauty, and seemingly unknown to the world, the waltz, its mournful minor key, its feverish arpeggios, appear to dance with a strange life of their own. Julia is determined to master the complex work and make its melody heard. Back home in Boston, from the moment Julia’s bow moves across the strings, drawing the waltz’s fiery notes into the air, something strange is stirred—and Julia’s world comes under threat. The music has a terrifying and inexplicable effect on her young daughter, who seems violently transformed. Convinced that the hypnotic strains of Incendio are weaving a malevolent spell, Julia sets out to discover the man and the meaning behind the score. Her quest beckons Julia to the ancient city of Venice, where she uncovers a dark, decades-old secret involving a dangerously powerful family that will stop at nothing to keep Julia from bringing the truth to light. Praise for Playing with Fire “Compelling . . . I defy you to read the first chapter and not singe your fingers reading the rest.”—David Baldacci “One of the best and most original thrillers of the year.”—Providence Journal “[A] novel brimming with emotion, literary description, and psychological suspense.”—The Huffington Post “Will make readers drop everything to immerse themselves in its propulsive dual narrative.”—Los Angeles Times

This volume intertwines science, history, philosophy, theology, and politics in fresh and fascinating ways to solve the multifaceted riddle of what religion means - and what it means to science.

From the author of "King of the Jews" and "San Remo Drive" comes a new novel that strikingly reimagines Fascist Italy.

In the fall of 1846, young medical student Adolph Pinto witnesses a demonstration of anesthesia and sets off on a lifelong quest to bring "life without pain" to the masses. A darkly comic and sweeping novel in which Pinto endures every tribulation with hope. This ironic comedy by the author of the acclaimed Leib Goldkorn series and King of the Jews follows Pinto, a Hungarian Jew and former medical student, who takes the wrong ship and winds up out West during the craze of the California Gold Rush. Never discouraged, he tries to bring scientific enlightenment to a band of boys from the local Modoc Indian tribe. But strikes and explosions erupt at the nearby gold mine where the Modocs have been enslaved, turning his attempt at utopia into Dante's hell. "A greathearted saga of ambition, hope and loss... Pinto and Sons is a fantastic epic of the heroic age of applied science, a fit book to put on the shelf with the great tall tales of American expansion.... Only lengthy quotation would do justice to the hilarity, the excitement, the passion of this enterprise." — New York Times Book Review "A wild wacky, wonderful novel.... The wonderful affirmation of this novel gives it its final power." — Kevin Starr, Boston Globe