AEM Library - Publishers

Violin

Amazon.com Review

If neatness counts for you, don't count on Anne Rice's musical-ghost novel Violin. It is an eruption of the author's personal demons, as messy as the monster bursting from that poor fellow's chest in the movie Alien. Like Rice, the heroine Triana lives in New Orleans, mourns a dead young daughter and a drunken mother, and is subject to uncanny visions. A violin-virtuoso ghost named Stefan time-trips and globetrots with Triana, taunting her for her inability to play his Stradivarius--which echoes composer Salieri's jealousy in Amadeus and possibly Rice's jealousy of her successful poet husband Stan Rice in the years before her own florid, lurid writing made her famous. The storytelling here is too abstract, but the almost certainly autobiographical emotions could not be more visceral. At one point, the narrator exclaims, "Shame, blame, maim, pain, vain!" But Rice's dip in the acid bath of memory was not in vain--she packs the pain of a lifetime into 289 pages.

From

Advice to Rice: don't write so much. She could have easily skipped her latest novel. She simply doles out hackneyed Rice themes and motifs and expects them to fly. They don't. In her New Orleans home, 54-year-old Triana Becker attends her partner Karl's death by AIDS; despite her focus on this horrible experience transpiring before her eyes, she is distracted by a violin-playing figure stepping in and out of shadows. Triana, in adolescence, had wanted to be a concert violinist, but the dream never materialized. Now she is seduced by this elusive figure's playing, and his seductiveness draws her into his netherworld, where she must encounter not only troubled memories but also the apparition's troubled past. But his violin--in her hands, will it give her the star-musician status she always dreamed of possessing? By the time that question is answered, the reader is weary of Rice's clumsy prose style and her lack of inventiveness in terms of plot. But she has fans galore, so be prepared for high demand. Brad Hooper

Gone Tomorrow

Lee Child

Amazon.com Review

Book Description
New York City. Two in the morning. A subway car heading uptown. Jack Reacher, plus five other passengers. Four are okay. The fifth isn’t.

In the next few tense seconds Reacher will make a choice--and trigger an electrifying chain of events in this gritty, gripping masterwork of suspense by #1 New York Times bestseller Lee Child.

Susan Mark was the fifth passenger. She had a lonely heart, an estranged son, and a big secret. Reacher, working with a woman cop and a host of shadowy feds, wants to know just how big a hole Susan Mark was in, how many lives had already been twisted before hers, and what danger is looming around him now.

Because a race has begun through the streets of Manhattan in a maze crowded with violent, skilled soldiers on all sides of a shadow war. Susan Mark’s plain little life was critical to dozens of others in Washington, California, Afghanistan . . . from a former Delta Force operator now running for the U.S. Senate, to a beautiful young woman with a fantastic story to tell–and to a host of others who have just one thing in common: They’re all lying to Reacher. A little. A lot. Or maybe just enough to get him killed.

In a novel that slams through one hairpin surprise after another, Lee Child unleashes a thriller that spans three decades and gnaws at the heart of America . . . and for Jack Reacher, a man who trusts no one and likes it that way, it’s a mystery with only one answer–the kind that comes when you finally get face-to-face and look your worst enemy in the eye.

Amazon Exclusive Essay: Lee Child on Gone Tomorrow

My career as a writer has been longer than some and shorter than others, but it happens to span the internet era more or less exactly. My first book,

A year or so later I actually got e-mail, and a year or so after that I got a web site, and a couple of years after that I got broadband, and over the following few years I got into the habit of starting the day internet surfing, reading the news and the gossip.

But it is not until now that I can say that one of my books--the thirteenth Reacher thriller, Gone Tomorrow--is truly and exclusively a product of the internet age.

I started the surfing years in a sensible, structured manner, but I eventually learned that the best stuff comes randomly. I started to follow links on a whim, bouncing from place to place, Googling other people’s references, following the maze, looking for rabbit holes.

I found an anonymous police blog from Britain.

It was apparently hosted by a London copper, and because it was secure and anonymous it was uninhibited. The people who posted there said all kinds of things. There were complaints and there was bitching, of course, but also there was a frank and unexpurgated view of police work from behind the lines. I got there in the summer of 2005, just after the suicide bombings on London’s transportation system, and just after a completely innocent Brazilian student had been shot to death by London police, who were under the mistaken impression that the guy had been involved.

Now, as a thriller writer, I’m familiar with the idea that cops can be bent or reckless. But I’m equally aware that’s mostly literary license. I know lots of cops, and they’re great people doing a very tough job. Years ago I met a friend’s eight-year-old daughter--a sweet little girl with no front teeth--and she grew up to be a cop. She won a bravery medal for a difficult solo arrest during which she was stabbed and had her thumb broken. She’s tough, but she’s not bent or reckless. So are the other cops I know.

So I was curious: what happened with the Brazilian kid? How was the mistake made?

So I eavesdropped while the coppers on the anonymous site were asking the same question. And I learned something interesting.

Their first consensus explanation was: because of “the list.” The Brazilian boy was showing “all twelve signs.” I thought, what list? What signs? So I clicked and scrolled and Googled, and it turned out that years earlier Israeli counterintelligence had developed a failsafe checklist of physical and behavioral signifiers, that when all present and correct mean you are looking at a suicide bomber. The list had entered training manuals, and after 9/11 those manuals were studied like crazy all over the world. And the response was mandatory: you see a guy showing the signs, you put him down, right now, before he can blow himself up.

And by sheer unlucky coincidence, the Brazilian kid had been showing the signs. A winter coat in July, a recent shave, and so on. (Read Gone Tomorrow if you want to know all twelve, and why.)

All writing is what if? So I tried to imagine that moment of... disbelief, I guess. You see a guy showing the signs, and probably every fiber of your being is saying, “This can’t be.” But you’re required to act.

So for the opening scene of Gone Tomorrow, I had Reacher sitting on a subway train in New York City, staring at a woman who is showing the signs. Reacher is ex-military law enforcement, and he knows the list forward and backward. Half of his brain is saying, “This can’t be,” and the other half is programmed to act. What does he do? What if he’s wrong? What will happen?

That’s where the story starts. It ends hundreds of pages later, in a place you both do and don’t expect. --_Lee Child_

(Photo © Sigrid Estrada)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. All good thriller writers know how to build suspense and keep the pages turning, but only better ones deliver tight plots as well, and only the best allow the reader to match wits with both the hero and the author. Bestseller Child does all of that in spades in his 13th Jack Reacher adventure (after Nothing to Lose). Early one morning on a nearly empty Manhattan subway car, the former army MP notices a woman passenger he suspects is a suicide bomber. The deadly result of his confronting her puts him on a trail leading back to the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and forward to the war on terrorism. Reacher finds a bit of help among the authorities demanding answers from him, like the NYPD and the FBI, as well as threats and intimidation. And then there are the real bad guys that the old pro must track down and eliminate. Child sets things up subtly and ingeniously, then lets Reacher use both strength and guile to find his way to the exciting climax. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Breathless

Dean Koontz

Green

Sam Graham-Felsen

A coming-of-age novel about race, privilege, and the struggle to rise in America, written by a former Obama campaign staffer and propelled by an exuberant, unforgettable narrator.

"A fierce and brilliant book, comic, poignant, perfectly observed, and blazing with all the urgent fears and longings of adolescence."—Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
Boston, 1992. David Greenfeld is one of the few white kids at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School. Everybody clowns him, girls ignore him, and his hippie parents won't even buy him a pair of Nikes, let alone transfer him to a private school. Unless he tests into the city's best public high school—which, if practice tests are any indication, isn't likely—he'll be friendless for the foreseeable future.
Nobody's more surprised than Dave when Marlon Wellings sticks up for him in the school cafeteria. Mar's a loner from the public housing project on the corner of...

Feast of All Saints

Anne Rice

Need to Know

Karen Cleveland

Perfect husband. Perfect father. Perfect liar?
"Terrific."—John Grisham
"Superb."—Lee Child
"Breathtaking, heart-pounding."—Louise Penny
"A fast-paced, relentlessly gripping read."—Chris Pavone
In pursuit of a Russian sleeper cell on American soil, CIA analyst Vivian Miller uncovers a dangerous secret that will threaten her job, her family—and her life. On track for a much-needed promotion, she's developed a system for identifying Russian agents, seemingly normal people living in plain sight.
After accessing the computer of a potential Russian operative, Vivian stumbles on a secret dossier of deep-cover agents within America's borders. A few clicks later, everything that matters to her—her job, her husband, even her four children—is threatened.‎
Vivian has vowed to defend her country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. But now she's facing impossible choices....

With a ruthless sect of humanity intent on wiping out their species, five intrepid heroes must think like their enemies in this epic sci-fi adventure for fans of The Expanse and Battlestar Galactica.
"Frenetic action viewed in a black fun-house mirror."—Kirkus Reviews
The galaxy was once terrorized by the Sturm, a group of "species purists" intent on destroying any human with genetic or cybernetic enhancements. Fashioning themselves as the one true "Human Republic," the Sturm cut a bloody swath across the stars, killing billions before finally being defeated and driven into the far reaches of Dark Space. Centuries of peace bred complacency. Everyone believed the Sturm had died out in the Dark. They were wrong.
The enemy has returned and, with a brutal and decisive attack, knocks out almost all of humanity's defenses. Now on the brink of annihilation, humankind's only hope is a few brave souls who survived the initial attack:...

Without Warning

John Birmingham

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from John Birmingham's After America.

In Kuwait, American forces are locked and loaded for the invasion of Iraq. In Paris, a covert agent is close to cracking a terrorist cell. And just north of the equator, a sailboat manned by a drug runner and a pirate is witness to the unspeakable. In one instant, all around the world, everything will change. A wave of inexplicable energy slams into the continental United States. America as we know it vanishes. From a Texas lawyer who happens to be in the right place at the right time to an engineer in Seattle who becomes his city's only hope, from a combat journalist trapped in the Middle East to a drug runner off the Mexican coast, Without Warning tells a fast, furious story of survival, violence, and a new, soul-shattering reality.

Reset

Ellen Pao

The bold and fearless account of the discrimination case that "has blown open a conversation about the status of women" in the workplace (The New York Times)
In 2015, Ellen K. Pao sued a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm, calling out workplace discrimination and retaliation against women and other underrepresented groups. Her suit rocked the tech world—and exposed its toxic culture and its homogeneity. Her message overcame negative PR attacks that took aim at her professional conduct and her personal life, and she won widespread public support—Time hailed her as "the face of change." Though Pao lost her suit, she revolutionized the conversation at tech offices, in the media, and around the world. In Reset, she tells her full story for the first time.
The daughter of immigrants, Pao was taught that through hard work she could achieve her dreams. She earned multiple Ivy League degrees, worked at top startups, and in...

1873 Press

1983 Viking

A Bantam Spectra Book

A.A. Knopf

ABC Books

Ace Books; Berkley Publishing Group

Acrobat Distiller 4.0 for Windows

Acrobat Distiller 6.0 (Windows)

Acrobat Distiller 6.0.1 (Windows)

Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5 (Windows)

Acrobat PDFWriter 4.0 for Windows

Acrobat Web Capture 7.0

Alfred A. Knopf

Allen & Unwin

anonymous

Archive of Our Own

ARROW

Atom/Little, Brown Book Group

Atria Books

Avon

B E Trice Pub

Baen Books

Baker & Taylor, CATS

Ballantine Books

Bantam Books

Berkley Books

Bloomsbury

Bloomsbury Publishing

Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury USA

Bloomsbury USA Childrens

Bloomsbury_US

Blue Box Press

Bonnier Publishing Fiction

C.J. Archer

Center Point Pub

Century

ChAIR Entertainment Group, LLC

Clarkson Potter/Ten Speed

Corgi Audio

Crafty Games

Crown

Del Rey

Delacorte Press

Disney Hyperion

Diversion Books

Doubleday

Dragonsteel Entertainment, LLC

EgmontUSA

Entangled Publishing

Entangled Publishing, LLC

Entangled Teen

ePub Bud (www.epubbud.com)

ePubLibre

FanFiction.net

Fawcett

Fawcett Gold Medal Books

Flatiron Books

G. P. Putnam's Sons

G. P. Putnam's Son's

G.P. Putnam's Sons

G.P.Putnam's Sons

Gallery / Saga Press

Gallery Books

Gallup Press

Gigantic Weapons Corporation

Gollancz

Grand Central Publishing

GWC

Hachette Book Group USA

Hachette UK

Harlequin

Harper Collins, Inc.

HarperCollins

HarperCollins Publishers

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

HarperCollins US

HarperTorch

HarperVoyager