In the Pathology Department it was always night. This was one of the things Quirke liked about his job…it was restful, cosy, one might almost say, down in these depths nearly two floors beneath the city's busy pavements. There was too a sense here of being part of the continuance of ancient practices, secret skills, of work too dark to be carried on up in the light. But one night, late after a party, Quirke stumbles across a body that shouldn't have been there…and his brother-in-law, eminent paediatrician Malachy Griffin – a rare sight in Quirke's gloomy domain – altering a file to cover up the corpse's cause of death. It is the first time Quirke encounters Christine Falls, but the investigation he decides to lead into the way she lived – and the reason she died – disturbs a dark secret that has been festering at the core of Dublin's high Catholic society, a secret ready to destabilize the very heart and soul of Quirke's own family…

Richard Russo—from his first novel, Mohawk, to his most recent, Straight Man—has demonstrated a peerless affinity for the human tragicomedy, and with this stunning new novel he extends even further his claims on the small-town, blue-collar heart of the country.

Dexter County, Maine, and specifically the town of Empire Falls, has seen better days, and for decades, in fact, only a succession from bad to worse. One by one, its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan (presided over by the last scion’s widow) now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. The working classes, meanwhile, continue to eke out whatever meager promise isn’t already boarded up.

Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom from the Empire Grill, an opportunity of his youth that has become the albatross of his daily and future life. Called back from college and set to work by family obligations—his mother ailing, his father a loose cannon—Miles never left home again. Even so, his own obligations are manifold: a pending divorce; a troubled younger brother; and, not least, a peculiar partnership in the failing grill with none other than Mrs. Whiting. All of these, though, are offset by his daughter, Tick, whom he guides gently and proudly through the tribulations of adolescence.

A decent man encircled by history and dreams, by echoing churches and abandoned mills, by the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors, Miles is also a patient, knowing guide to the rich, hardscrabble nature of Empire Falls: fathers and sons and daughters, living and dead, rich and poor alike. Shot through with the mysteries of generations and the shattering visitations of the nation at large, it is a social novel of panoramic ambition, yet at the same time achingly personal. In the end, Empire Falls reveals our worst and best instincts, both our most appalling nightmares and our simplest hopes, with all the vision, grace and humanity of truly epic storytelling.

From the Hardcover edition.

New York Times bestselling author William Lashner returns with a brilliantly twisty tale that probes the dark side of the law – and man.

A beautiful young woman is dead, her husband convicted of the murder. In seeking a new trial for the husband, defense attorney Victor Carl must confront not only a determined prosecutor and a police detective who might have set up his client, but also a strange little busybody named Bob.

Bob has the aspiration, one could even say compulsion, to help those around him. And it usually works out well for all concerned, except when it ends in blood. But Victor doesn’t know that… yet.

Thanks to Bob, Victor is suddenly dressing better, dating a stunning woman, and both his economic prospects and his teeth are gleaming. It’s all good, until Victor finds a troubling connection between Bob and the murdered wife. Is Bob a kind of saint or is this obsessive Good Samaritan, in reality, a murderer?

Filled with the keen wit, deep poignancy, twisting suspense, and dark realism that has entranced readers, impressed reviewers, and made William Lashner’s previous novels bestsellers, Falls the Shadow is a riveting novel sure to leave readers eager for more.

Spanning the waning years of vaudeville and the golden age of Hollywood, Niagara Falls All Over Again chronicles a flawed, passionate friendship over thirty years, weaving a powerful story of family and love, grief and loss. In it, McCracken introduces her most singular and affecting hero: Mose Sharp — son, brother, husband, father, friend… and straight man to the fat guy in baggy pants who utterly transforms his life.

To the paying public, Mose Sharp was the arch, colorless half of the comedy team Carter and Sharp. To his partner, he was charmed and charming, a confirmed bachelor who never failed at love and romance. To his father and sisters, Mose was a prodigal son. And in his own heart and soul, he would always be a boy who once had a chance to save a girl’s life — a girl who would be his first, and greatest, loss.

Born into a Jewish family in small-town Iowa, the only boy among six sisters, Mose Sharp couldn’t leave home soon enough. By sixteen Mose had already joined the vaudeville circuit. But he knew one thing from the start: “I needed a partner,” he recalls. “I had always needed a partner.”

Then, an ebullient, self-destructive comedian named Rocky Carter came crashing into his life — and a thirty-year partnership was born. But as the comedy team of Carter and Sharp thrived from the vaudeville backwaters to Broadway to Hollywood, a funny thing happened amid the laughter: It wasMose who had all the best lines offstage.

Rocky would go through money, women, and wives in his restless search for love; Mose would settle down to a family life marked by fragile joy and wrenching tragedy. And soon, cracks were appearing in their complex relationship… until one unforgivable act leads to another and a partnership begins to unravel.

In a novel as daring as it is compassionate, Elizabeth McCracken introduces an indelibly drawn cast of characters — from Mose’s Iowa family to the vagabond friends, lovers, and competitors who share his dizzying journey — as she deftly explores the fragile structures that underlie love affairs and friendships, partnerships and families.

An elegiac and uniquely American novel, Niagara Falls All Over Again is storytelling at its finest — and powerful proof that Elizabeth McCracken is one of the most dynamic and wholly original voices of her generation.

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Jernigan introduced David Gates as a novelist of the highest order. "Full of dark truths and biting humor," wrote Frederick Exley, "a brilliant novel [that] will be read for a long time."

After that blackly comic handbook of self-destruction-whose antihero shoulders up to such crucial American figures as Bellow's Herzog, Updike's Harry Angstrom, Heller's Bob Slocum, Percy's Binx Bolling and Irving's Garp-Gates's new novel investigates the essential truths of a marriage à la mode. Doug and Jean Willis fit the newly classic, recognizable and seemingly normal variety: struggling against a riptide of the daily commute, the mortgages, the latchkey child-rearing and the country house, as well as the hopes and desires from which all of this grew.

In accordance with their long-standing agreement, Doug embarks from their Westchester home on a leave of absence from the PR job that had ineluctably become his life, while Jean contends with both her own job and their two children. Over a two-month period he'll spruce up the family's alternative universe up north in rural Preston Falls; she'll deal with her end of the bargain, and her worries about the survival of the family. But then domesticity hits the brick wall of private longings and nightmarish twists of fate.

A surprising, comic, horrifying and always engrossing novel, charged with the responsibilities of middle age and with the abiding power of love, however disappointed-told with great artistry, pitch-perfect understanding and fierce compassion.

"A novel that's the funniest, sharpest, most strangely exciting book about men and women in a long time."

— Tom Prince, Maxim

Frey is the captain of the Ketty Jay, leader of a small and highly dysfunctional band of layabouts. An inveterate womaniser and rogue, he and his gang make a living on the wrong side of the law, avoiding the heavily armed flying frigates of the Coalition Navy. With their trio of ragged fighter craft, they run contraband, rob airships and generally make a nuisance of themselves. So a hot tip on a cargo freighter loaded with valuables seems like a great prospect for an easy heist and a fast buck. Until the heist goes wrong, and the freighter explodes. Suddenly Frey isn't just a nuisance anymore—he's public enemy number one, with the Coalition Navy on his tail and contractors hired to take him down. But Frey knows something they don't. That freighter was rigged to blow, and Frey has been framed to take the fall. If he wants to prove it, he's going to have to catch the real culprit. He must face liars and lovers, dogfights and gunfights, Dukes and daemons. It's going to take all his criminal talents to prove he's not the criminal they think he is . . .

From the national bestselling author of PLAIN TRUTH comes an acclaimed, richly atmospheric novel about a teacher undone by a disturbing modern-day witch hunt.

Tall, blonde and handsome, Jack McBride was once a beloved teacher and football coach at a girl's school, until a student's crush sparked a powder-keg of accusation and robbed him of his career and reputation. Now after a devastatingly public ordeal that left him with an eight-month jail sentence and no job, Jack resolves to pick up the pieces of his life; taking a job washing dishes at Addie Peabody's diner, and slowly forming a relationship with her. But just when it seems like his life is back on track, Jack finds himself the object of fresh accusations of rape brought on by a coven of bewitching teenage girls from Salem Falls, and history repeats itself as Jack's hidden past catches up with him.

In a sleepy hamlet haunted by enduring love and wicked deceit, Picoult masterfully leads readers toward a truly shocking finale.

A wooden doll in a tiny coffin and an Internet role-playing game are the only clues Inspector John Rebus has to follow when his investigation of a student's disappearance leads him on a trail that stretches back into Edinburgh's past.

Mark Haddon, author of the international bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother, returns with a collection of unsparing short stories.

In the prize-winning story "The Gun," a man's life is marked by a single afternoon and a rusty.45; in "The Island," a mythical princess is abandoned on an island in the midst of war; in "The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear," a cadre of sheltered artistocrats sets out to find adventure in a foreign land and finds the gravest dangers among themselves. These are but some of the men and women who fill this searingly imaginative and emotionally taut collection of short stories by Mark Haddon, that weaves through time and space to showcase the author's incredible versatility.

Yet the collection achieves a sum that is greater than its parts, proving itself a meditation not only on isolation and loneliness but also on the tenuous and unseen connections that link individuals to each other, often despite themselves. In its titular story, the narrator describes with fluid precision a catastrophe that will collectively define its victims as much as it will disperse them — and brilliantly lays bare the reader's appetite for spectacle alongside its characters'. Cut with lean prose and drawing inventively from history, myth, fairy tales, and, above all, the deep well of empathy that made his three novels so compelling, The Pier Falls reveals a previously unseen side of the celebrated author.

In every generation, a Gardella is called to accept the family legacy of vampire slaying, and this time, Victoria Gardella Grantworth is chosen, on the eve of her debut, to carry the stake. But as she moves between the crush of ballrooms and dangerous, moonlit streets, Victoria's heart is torn between London's most eligible bachelor, the Marquess of Rockley, and her enigmatic ally, Sebastian Vioget. And when she comes face to face with the most powerful vampire in history, Victoria must ultimately make the choice between duty and love.

For all the bodies she's encountering, you'd think beat cop Joanne Walker works in Homicide. But no, Joanne's a reluctant shaman who last saved mankind three months ago—surely she deserves more of a break! Yet, incredibly, "Armageddon, Take Two" is mere days away. There's not a minute to waste. Yet when her spirit guide inexplicably disappears, Joanne needs help from other sources. Especially after she accidentally unleashes Lower World demons on Seattle. Damn. With the mother of all showdowns gathering force, it's the worst possible moment for Joanne to realize she should have learned more about controlling her powers.

Miami attorney Jack Swyteck is back in the lightning-paced thriller When Darkness Falls. This time Jack gets more than he bargained for when he defends a homeless man who calls himself Falcon.

Falcon is full of contradictions. He lives in a car but he has access to a lot of cash. And he has an obsession with the Miami mayor’s daughter. First, Falcon threatens to jump from the top of the Bay of Biscayne bridge unless he can talk to Alina Mendoza. He ends up in jail, but surprisingly has the bail money and is on the street again in a few hours, earning Jack the enmity of the powerful and vindictive mayor.

Then Falcon strikes again. Hours after his release, the body of a brutally murdered woman is found in the trunk of Falcon’s car. Then Falcon crashes Jack’s car into a motel and takes hostage the woman inside, plus Theo, in the process killing one policeman and injuring another. Now Jack’s in a pulse-pounding race to save Theo and the woman but what Jack doesn’t know is that the deadly scenario that’s unfolding is much bigger than Falcon, much bigger than he could possibly imagine.

When the body of a retired Sheriff is discovered in his grand house in the New Town of Edinburgh, Detective Sergeant Alice Rice finds herself hunting his killer. The search leads her to an unfamiliar world where wind farm developers – with millions of pounds at stake – and protestors face each other with daggers drawn. And just as Alice thinks an answer is beginning to emerge, the Sheriff's lover is killed in an apparent hit-and-run accident. It's an unlikely coincidence, and the investigation widens as she now seeks a double murderer.

Самостоятельная, яркая, веселая Джоди всегда была тихоне Перл идеальной старшей сестрой, настоящим кумиром и образцом для подражания. Но для родителей, оказывается, гораздо ценней другие качества. Им бы хотелось, чтобы Джоди стала послушней, лучше училась и не дерзила. И не влияла дурно на Перл. Может, переезд в другое место и учеба в пафосном колледже помогут Джоди образумиться? Да и Перл это пойдет на пользу, она ведь по-настоящему любит учиться. Итак, решено – семья едет в Мельчестер Колледж! Новый город, новый дом и новая школа! А еще новые друзья. Но все ли смогут ими обзавестись?