The best-selling mystery writer Lawrence Block proves his point with the twenty outstanding stories he has chosen for this volume. For fans of the traditional mystery, there’s T. Jefferson Parker’s “Easy Street,” in which a brother’s visit uncovers family secrets. In Jeremiah Healy’s “A Book of Kells,” a detective draws on his Irish heritage to solve a crime. And in Clark Howard’s “Under Suspicion,” a detective’s investigation of the murder of his best friend’s daughter hits too close to home. However, many of the stories are concerned more with the personalities and motives surrounding the crime than with the crime itself. In Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Girl with the Blackened Eye,” we...

An anthology of stories edited by Laura Lippman and Otto Penzler "With so many great authors contributing to this fiction collection… it doesn't take detecting skills to discover the gem. And every story dazzles… These stories, in prose both elegant and compelling, get to the heart of why people do what they do." – USA Today The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 will be selected by "writing powerhouse" (USA Today) Laura Lippman. With her popular Tess Monaghan series and her New York Times best-selling standalone novels, Lippman has greatly expanded the boundaries of modern mystery fiction and psychological suspense.

An Omnibus Edition of Three Classic Early Novels from the Critically Acclaimed Author of Cloudsplitter and Affliction. Family Life: Russell Banks's first novel is an adult fairy tale of a royal family in a mythical contemporary kingdom where the myriad dramas of domesticity blend with an outrageous slew of murders, mayhem, coups, debauches, world tours, and love in all guises, transcendent or otherwise. Hamilton Stark: This tale of a solitary, boorish, misanthropic New Hampshire pipe fitter — the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother — is at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England. ...

When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by his parents, out of school and in trouble with the police, he claims for himself a new identity as a permanent outsider; he gets a crossed-bones tattoo on his arm, and takes the name "Bone." He finds dangerous refuge with a group of biker-thieves, and then hides in the boarded-up summer house of a professor and his wife. He finally settles in an abandoned schoolbus with Rose, a child he rescues from a fast-talking pedophile. There Bone meets I-Man, an exiled Rastafarian, and together...

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground. Hannah flees America for West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends of the notorious warlord and ex-president, Charles Taylor. Hannah's encounter with Taylor ultimately triggers a series of events whose momentum catches Hannah's family in its grip and forces her to make a heartrending choice.

With The Angel on the Roof, Russell Banks offers readers an astonishing collection of thirty years of his short fiction, revised especially for this volume and highlighted by the inclusion of nine new stories that are among the finest he has ever written. As is characteristic of all of Bank's works, these stories resonate with irony and compassion, honesty and insight, extending into the vast territory of the heart and the world, from working-class New England to Florida and the Caribbean and Africa. Broad in scope and rich in imagination, The Angel on the Roof affirms Russell Banks's place as one of the masters of American storytelling.

Part love story, part murder mystery, set on the cusp of the Second World War, Russell Banks's sharp-witted and deeply engaging new novel raises dangerous questions about class, politics, art, love, and madness — and explores what happens when two powerful personalities, trapped at opposite ends of a social divide, begin to break the rules. Twenty-nine-year-old Vanessa Cole is a wild, stunningly beautiful heiress, the adopted only child of a highly regarded New York brain surgeon and his socialite wife. Twice married, Vanessa has been scandalously linked to any number of rich and famous men. But on the night of July 4, 1936, at her parents' country home in a remote Adirondack Mountain...

The Relation of My Imprisonment is a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines. Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned primarily as figurative dramatization of the test of faith all true believers must endure. These "relation," framed by scripture and by a sermon explicating the text, were usually read aloud in weekly or monthly installments during religious services. Utterly sincere and detailed recounting of suffering, they were nonetheless highly artificial. To use the form self-consciously, as Russell Banks has done, is not to parody it so much as to argue...

A powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most acclaimed and important writers, Russell Banks's Continental Drift is a masterful novel of hope lost and gained, and a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.

From the critically acclaimed author of Affliction comes a story that begins with a school bus accident that kills 14 children from the town of Sam Dent, New York. A large-hearted novel, The Sweet Hereafter explores the community's response to the inexplicable loss of its children. Told from the point of view of four different narrators, the tale unfolds as both a contemporary courtroom drama and a small-town morality play.