When Jack Foley, a career bank robber, surfaces after tunneling out of a medium-security penitentiary in Florida, he comes face to face with Karen Sisco, a beautiful federal marshal. Though the barrel of her shotgun is pointed right at his face, she doesn't shoot, and Foley's accomplice, Buddy, overpowers her and puts her in the trunk of a car. Foley gets in with her and the car takes off, the escapee seemingly home free. In the cramped darkness of the trunk, the criminal and marshal find they have much in common and by the time the car reaches its destination, the two have become infatuated with each other. After Karen manages to escape, she and Foley try to reconnect outside the confining roles of kidnapper and victim.

As he did in Laguna Heat, T. Jefferson Parker once again combines his atmospheric style and unforgettable images of California to create a spellbinding mystery that continually anticipates your very thoughts, a novel in which each new revelation comes to you with the force and intimacy of a returning memory.

Pacific Beat begins on a May night in Newport Beach’s Back Bay, when the discovery of a brutally murdered woman with roses bound to her body sets off the kind of manhunt the police and their families dread. The victim, Ann Weir Cruz, is one of their own — and so, it appears, is her killer.

Ann was eight weeks pregnant with a child she and her police lieutenant husband, Ray Cruz, wanted desperately. The only clue to the outrage seems worse than no lead at all: A patrol car was spotted near the scene, disappearing into the fog.

Against a backdrop of corrupt city politics, the delicate and dangerous undercover investigation of the police department falls to the victim’s brother, former detective Jim Weir, who left the force respecting its many secrets and now must expose them one by one. Jim’s understandably fierce pursuit of his sister’s tormentor is a perfect cover, something credible to the cops he is secretly probing. But it is also his genuine debt to Ann. And soon it becomes an agonizing race against Ray, his ex-partner and brother-in-law — because Ray is trying to find the killer first, and execute him.

Nobody writes novels like Elmore Leonard, with his crackling dialogue, breathless pacing, and hilarious hard-luck, unfailingly human characters. In his sizzling new novel, the New York Times best selling author crosses continents to tell an adrenaline-charged story of crime and retribution-where double crosses become triple crosses, revenge is where you find it, and absolution is just around the corner.Father Terry Dunn hears a lot of strange confessions. After all, he's the only priest for miles in the lingering aftermath of the worst massacre Rwanda has ever seen. And Fr. Terry, who has forty- seven bodies in his church that need burying, has just heard one confession too many. After exacting from them a chilling penance, Fr. Terry has to get out of Africa-pronto.Now Terry is coming home to Detroit, where a five-year-old tax-fraud indictment is hanging over him. Is Terry Dunn really a priest? He certainly doesn't act like one. A fugitive felon on two continents, Terry is being pursued by a cigarette-smuggling cohort, who rolled over on Terry to save jail time-yet still demands his share of the money. But Debbie Dewey has other plans for Terry. She's just been sprung from a three-year fall at Saw- grass Correctional for aggravated assault…and is now trying to make it as a stand-up comic. Debbie and Terry hit it off beautifully. They have the same sense of humor and similar goals:Both of them want to raise a whole lot of cash. Terry, for the children of Rwanda; Debbie, to score off a guy who owes her sixty-seven thousand dollars. It's Debbie who keeps prying, until she learns the bizarre truth about Terry; Debbie who sells him on going in together for a much bigger payoff than either could manage alone. That is unless the priest is working a con of his own.With an unforgettable cast of oddballs and schemers-including a mob boss on trial, an unlikely assassin called Mutt, an ex-con con artist who dreams of doing stand-up, and a priest who may not be a priest- Pagan Babies is Elmore Leonard at his double-dealing best. In the hands of this master, the stakes are always life and death. Crime fiction doesn't get any better.ELMORE LEONARD is the author of thirty-six novels, including such bestsellers as Be Cool, Cuba Libre, Out of Sight, Riding the Rap, Pronto, Rum Punch, Maximum Bob, Get Shorty, and numerous screenplays. He and his wife, Christine, live in a suburb of Detroit.Visit the Elmore Leonard website at www.elmoreleonard.com.

Called upon by the Hammond Museum and renowned art scholar Dr. Ashton Prince, Spenser accepts his latest case: to provide protection during a ransom exchange — money for a stolen painting.

The case becomes personal when Spenser fails to protect his client and is unable to recover the valuable painting. Convinced that Ashton Prince played a bigger role than just ransom delivery boy, Spenser enters into a daring game of cat-and-mouse with the thieves. But this is a game he might not come out of alive...

Completed the year before the author passed away, Painted Ladies is Spenser and Robert B. Parker at their electrifying best.

Tush Bannon was in the way. It wasn’t anything he knew or anything he had done. He was just there, in the wrong spot at the wrong time, and the fact that he was a nice guy with a nice wife and three nice kids didn’t mean one scream in hell to the jackals who had ganged together to pull him down.

And they got him, crushed him to hamburger, and walked away counting their change. But one thing they never could have figured...

Tush Bannon was Travis McGee’s friend.

A reporter who was prying into the cocaine trade in the central Massachusetts town of Wheaton has been murdered, and Spenser is called in to investigate. When he’s rebuffed by the police and threatened by a Colombian produce dealer who may be the cocaine kingpin, it’s apparent that Wheaton isn’t just another small town, but a major center for the cocaine trade in the Northeast.As Spenser digs deeper for evidence, he meets three women on whom the case seems to turn: Emmy Esteva, the wife of the reputed cocaine kingpin; Juanita Olmos, a young woman who’d been involved with the murdered reporter; and Caroline Rogers, the wife of the Wheaton Police Chief.After another murder is committed and an attempt is made on Spenser’s life, he turns for help to Hawk, whose special skills keep them all alive, and to Susan, whose psychological insights are more and more necessary as the chase moves away from cocaine and appears to hinge more on older and more basic problems — jealousy, passion, and hate.Pale Kings and Princes, the fourteenth Spenser novel, takes us into the cutthroat, multibillion-dollar cocaine business, where drugs are valued above all and human life is frighteningly dispensable.

Dr. Adam Bloom has the perfect life. He's financially secure and lives in a luxurious house with his wife, Dana, and their twentytwo- year-old daughter, Marissa, a recent college graduate. Late one night, his daughter wakes him up and says, 'Somebody's downstairs.' Adam uses his gun to kill one of the unarmed intruders, but the other escapes. From that moment on, everyone's life in the Bloom household will never be the same. Adam doesn't feel safe, not with the other intruder out there somewhere, knowing where he lives. Dana suggests moving but Adam has lived in the house all his life and he doesn't want to run away. As the family recovers from the break-in and the Bloom's already rocky relationship rapidly falls apart, Marissa meets a young, talented artist named Xan. Adam feels that something's not quite right with Xan, but his daughter ignores his warnings and falls ever deeper in love with him. When suspicious things start happening to the Blooms all over again, Adam realizes that his first instinct about Xan was probably dead on. With Panic Attack, Jason Starr is at his best, crafting a harrowing page-turner that will blow readers away.

Jack Lennox is broke and fleeing both himself and the wrath of his ex-wife. He is traveling on an interstate bus, and when the driver finds that he is riding on an expired ticket, he is put off at Del’s Oasis, a way stop in the middle of a great southwestern desert area, Lennox has had nothing to eat in two days, so the offer of odd-job work by Al Perrins, the owner of the Oasis, is a godsend. He accepts it.

Next morning he witnesses the cold blooded murder by contract of Perrins by two well-dressed men.

Lennox manages to escape into the surrounding desert, but is seen by the assassins.

In the midst of his flight, Lennox stumbles upon Jana Hennessey, a writer of children’s books. Jana has made a mistake in her life which has destroyed all her inner peace, and she has come to the desert ostensibly to research her latest book. Lennox convinces her to give him a lift to the small nearby town of Cuenca Seco. He doesn’t know that it has become an ambush arranged by Harry Vollyer, the coldly methodical and deadly leader of the assassin team.

Lennox and Jana barely manage to survive as they run still deeper into the desert. Dehydrating heat, desolate terrain, lack of food and water — and the relentless pursuit of Vollyer and his partner — combine to make escape seem impossible. And yet, unknown to the runners, there is in Cuenca Seco a deputy sheriff, Andy Brackeen, whose former big-city training refuses to allow him to ignore various clues and hunches connected with the murder of the Oasis owner.

The novel moves inevitably toward the confrontation among the five principals in Panic! The climax is brutal, in keeping with the harsh natural elements in which it takes place. And yet it forces Jana and Lennox and Brackeen to come to terms with their own weaknesses and fears. Panic! is a story of survival, terror and individual revelation. It will be a completely satisfactory reading experience for all Pronzini fans.

He looked at her, at her fine grave face and too elegant gestures. He thought tiredly that this one was nearly gone, that she would go on drinking too much gin and sleeping in too many beds, that she would remember nothing between the beds and the bottles.

The worst of it was that he liked her. She had a face he would remember. And for a long time he would think of her and wonder just what had become of her, whether she was alive or dead...