In Mandarin Gate, Edgar Award winner Eliot Pattison brings Shan back in a thriller that navigates the explosive political and religious landscape of Tibet. In an earlier time, Shan Tao Yun was an Inspector stationed in Beijing. But he lost his position, his family and his freedom when he ran afoul of a powerful figure high in the Chinese government. Released unofficially from the work camp to which he'd been sentenced, Shan has been living in remote mountains of Tibet with a group of outlawed Buddhist monks. Without status, official identity, or the freedom to return to his former home in Beijing, Shan has just begun to settle into his menial job as an inspector of irrigation and sewer ditches in a remote Tibetan township when he encounters a wrenching crime scene. Strewn across the grounds of an old Buddhist temple undergoing restoration are the bodies of two unidentified men and a Tibetan nun. Shan quickly realizes that the murders pose a riddle the Chinese police might in fact be trying to cover up. When he discovers that a nearby village has been converted into a new internment camp for Tibetan dissidents arrested in Beijing's latest pacification campaign, Shan recognizes the dangerous landscape he has entered. To find justice for the victims and to protect an American woman who witnessed the murders, Shan must navigate through the treacherous worlds of the internment camp, the local criminal gang, and the government's rabid pacification teams, while coping with his growing doubts about his own identity and role in Tibet.

Respected raconteur Joe Hayes is built for tall tales—he’s got the world’s longest legs! And Joe—who travels all over the United States telling stories to kids—says that The Gum-Chewing Rattler is the perfect tall tale for kids because it combines so many familiar experiences—chewing lots of bubblegum, getting in trouble in school, driving your mom crazy—with the wild, impossible claim that a certain rattlesnake chewed gum and blew a bubble with it. Couple that with kids’ natural fascination with poisonous snakes, and The Gum-Chewing Rattler turns out to be one of Joe’s most requested stories. Joe’s been telling this wild story for years, since before 1980, when he took those long legs of his out on the road. But now, that old gum-chewer is here for the first time in a picture book with full-color illustrations by Antonio Castro L. Here’s how Joe’s story goes: When Joe was a boy, he chewed lots of bubblegum, his mom got so mad because the gum in his shirt pocket made a terrible mess in the wash! But this wad of bubblegum just happened to save Joe from a rattlesnake’s fangs! Really!! Don’t worry—his mother didn’t believe the story either.

Ten years have passed since Stephen Thorn's fiancee vanished without a trace, and he has grown into a prominent, if bitter, victim's rights crusader. Despite the cold trail and lack of leads, he stubbornly refuses to give up the search. And then he begins to hear her voice in the strangest of places. Pursued by his own organization and questioning his sanity, Stephen embarks on a grisly journey to save his long-lost love. As he unravels the truth of her disappearance, the body count rises and Stephen finds himself ensnared in a trap that had been set for him long ago. Brutal, terrifying, and devastating The Rattler is sure to be one of the very best things youÍll read all year. Nick Nafpliotis Adventures in Poor Taste

Rattler One-Seven puts you in the helicopter seat, to see the war in Vietnam through the eyes of an inexperienced pilot as he transforms himself into a seasoned combat veteran. At the age of twenty, Chuck Gross spent his 1970-71 tour with the 71st Assault Helicopter Company flying UH-1 Huey helicopters. He inserted special operations teams into Laos and participated in Lam Son 719, a misbegotten attempt to assault and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, during which his helicopter was shot down and he was stranded in the field.

“Gabriel Kruis is a really formidable poet. Acid Virga is rather terrifying, also a tour de force and a formal breakthrough. . . a blend of narrative and lyric the way the mind is. . . ” —ALICE NOTLEY “As wildly visionary as it is linguistically alive, Gabriel Kruis’s Acid Virga drills down into the bedrock of American life to produce a book unparalleled in its exploration of how visionary experience and social upheaval collide in ways that are both transformative and annihilating.” —TOM SLEIGH “If you’ve ever been conscious, and felt a little disturbed about it, of life as ancient and ephemeral or that falling apart is an integral force, this is a book to read over and over.” —STACY SZYMASZEK “. . .a great affliction and affection inform Acid Virga, fast-moving with strophes like brisk moving cloud banks over the mind in your heart.” —MAJOR JACKSON “Meanwhile, in el mal pais, leaned out on mucinex, mixing dexy cocktails in the haloed pharmacy of the car...” An unusually assured debut, Acid Virga is a memoir in verse cutting between a vivid Southwest upbringing and modern O’Hara hustle in New York City, deeply and seriously reckoning with the psychedelic heritage of religion and the psychological clarity of chemical consciousness. It is both thrillingly propulsive and dense enough to read again and again, always offering up something new. Language is boundlessly specific, evocative of states internal and external, reading at times like a melancholy memoir stuck between stations, an epic poem or even a philosophical tract, always a true and important record of our American lives as lived now—an endless and reliable ticker tape of the soul.

When a headless corpse turns up on a Tibetan mountainside, inspector Shan Tao Yun is released from prison to investigate the crime, and he quickly uncovers a conspiracy involving American mining interests, corrupt Party officials, and Tibetan sorcerers.