Middling historian Lucas Paige visits St. Louis to give a sparsely attended reading—nothing out of the ordinary. Except among the yawning attendees is someone he did not expect: Lola Faye Gilroy, the “other woman” he has long blamed for his father’s murder decades earlier.   Reluctantly, Luke joins Lola Faye for a drink. As one drink turns into several, these two battered souls relive, from their different perspectives, the most searing experience of their lives. Slowly but surely, the hotel bar dissolves around them and they are transported back to the tiny southern town where this defining moment—a violent crime of passion—is turned in the light once more to reveal flaws in the old answers. As it turns out, there is much Luke doesn’t know. And what he doesn’t know can hurt him. Trapped in an increasingly intense emotional exchange, and with no place to go save back into his own dark past, Luke struggles to gain control of an ever more threatening conversation, to discover why Lola Faye has come and what she is after—before it is too late.   A taut literary thriller in the gothic tradition of Master of the Delta.

In the afterglow of a clean triumph--her widely celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, "Beloved" --Toni Morrison moves to even higher ground. "Jazz, " is spellbinding for the haunting passion of its profound love story, and for the bittersweet lyricism and refined sensuality of its powerful and elegant style. It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one...At last, at last, everything's ahead...Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise.Joe Trace--in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband--shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, 18-year-old Dorcas ("Everything was like a picture show to her"). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser--who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds--tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice--whose identity is a matter of each reader's imagination--weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its "blues" are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend, reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex humanity, of black urban life at a moment inour century we assumed we understood. "Jazz" is an unprecedented and astonishing invention, a landmark on the American literary landscape--a novel unforgettable and for all time.

Obsessed with a boss whom she first met in Beijing during her childhood, Justine Laxness embezzles money from her employer to help an old college flame, screenwriter James Nutter, a decision that has unforeseen ramifications. A first novel. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Combining elements of a nineteenth-century epic with the intimacy of contemporary storytelling, the author traces the doomed romance between an aide to the governor of Tennessee and a beautiful but ultimately unfaithful woman. Reprint.

Whan a local pastor's wife and daughter move in with Shiny Parker's family after a fire burns down the parsonage and leaves the pastor seriously injured, anxiety-ridden Shiny struggles with the new imbalances in his home.

An award-winning thriller in the English style features Helen West, a prosecutor in domestic violence cases, who discovers that her cleaning woman is being abused by her husband and that her brother has just been murdered. Reprint.

The Reiser family finds their seemingly perfect new life in rural Hyland, New Hampshire, shattered when their teenaged son, Jacob, is implicated in the brutal murder of another teenager. Reprint.

Caught in a crisis of faith in herself, her job, and the law itself, Crown Prosecutor Helen West becomes embroiled in the private and legal life of a battered woman, whose situation is so bad that it may serve to excuse a horrible crime. Tour.