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A family epic blending mystery and romance set in the luxurious trappings of London and the turbulent economies of Eastern Europe.
At summer’s end, Urbino Macintyre races to save an innocent life In the sun-blasted expanse of St. Mark’s Square, hundreds of tourists form a slow-moving herd, dragging themselves forward on a tortuous sightseeing expedition. Inside the elegant Caffè Florian, the atmosphere is more refined as Urbino Macintyre shares a conversation with his beloved friend, the Contessa da Capo-Zendrini. Life in Venice is serene, and they are happier than they have ever been—until a murder shatters the peace of the caffè. Three seemingly unrelated deaths catch Macintyre’s attention, and the amateur sleuth throws himself into unraveling their mysteries. But is there a connection, or is the obsessive American expatriate seeing a conspiracy where none exists? In the days leading up to the annual Historical Regatta, Macintyre discovers a plot against an innocent person. To save a life, he will have to discover the ugly truth that lurks beyond the beauty of St. Mark’s Square.
A rock star branded by a demon… A fallen angel with wings black as night… Florian, a fallen angel, on the verge of losing his powers and turning human, meets Seth, an up and coming rock star with a demonic secret, on the roof of a gay bar. They only decide on one night of strictly no-strings-attached fun. It seems like a great idea, until the next morning, when they realise their lives are more intertwined than they expected. But the music industry isn’t kind on rock stars with a preference for men. And how can an angel protect someone, when he has failed so spectacularly before? Can these two men work it out? Or have they been cursed from the start? This is the full five-part serial in one set. It includes: Branded, Stage, Fear, Lost and Winged.
Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an 'anti-tour' of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been 'forgotten'.
This analysis of the genre shows that the fictional world portrayed by the mystery writer parallels the actual world of the reader. Because daily life is so implausible, readers willingly suspend disbelief as they are absorbed by the pages of detective fiction. This apparent unity of the fictional thriller and veritable circumstance produces a code of modernity that is the essence of the genre. In the light of this concept of modernity Mystery Fiction and Modern Life examines works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Tony Hillerman, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Anthony Price, and others.
“[An] exhaustively researched survey of Raymond Chandler’s thorny relationship with Hollywood during the classic period of film noir.” —Alain Silver, film producer and author Raymond Chandler’s seven novels, including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953), with their pessimism and grim realism, had a direct influence on the emergence of film noir. Chandler worked to give his crime novels the flavor of his adopted city, Los Angeles, which was still something of a frontier town, rife with corruption and lawlessness. In addition to novels, Chandler wrote short stories and penned the screenplays for several films, including Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train (1...
The Civil War is over, but the Kent family’s good fortune is suddenly threatened in this novel by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of North and South. The penultimate volume in John Jakes’s stirring Kent Family Chronicles finds America booming in its postwar prosperity. With this newly secured peace comes an opportunity for the Kent family to reconcile and to thrive, both personally and financially. Gideon Kent takes up his father’s vow to reunite the family, but when he brings his father’s widow back into the fold, the repercussions seem insurmountable. Against the backdrop of a recovering nation, the Kents face dramatic challenges and unexpected rifts that could leave the family shattered for years to come. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Jakes including rare images from the author’s personal collection.