When Dr. George Pritchard asked Phoebe to marry him, she hadn't needed much persuading. The recent death of her aunt had left her penniless and without a job. Besides, she did like him. So what if he'd made it plain that he wasn't in love with her—at least she knew where she stood. It wasn't until after the wedding that she began to wonder if liking was going to be enough….
"Like Ripley, [Highsmith's characters] burn in a reader's memory."—Susan Salters Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review In unmistakable Highsmithian fashion, Small g, Patricia Highsmith's final novel, opens near a seedy Zurich bar with the brutal murder of Petey Ritter. Unraveling the vagaries of love, sexuality, jealousy, and death, Highsmith weaves a mystery both hilarious and astonishing, a classic fairy tale executed with a characteristic penchant for darkness. Published in paperback for the first time in America, Small g is at once an exorcism of Highsmith's literary demons and a revelatory capstone to a wholly remarkable career. It is a delightfully incantatory work that, in the tradition of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, shows us how bizarre and unpredictable love can be.
In the small, sleepy town of Idyll, Connecticut, Police Chief Thomas Lynch assists police officer Michael Finnegan to uncover clues to his sister's disappearance two decades ago. Charleston, Massachusetts, 1972: Rookie cop Michael Finnegan gets a call from his mother. His youngest sister, Susan, has disappeared, the same sister who ran away two years earlier. Anxious not to waste police resources, Finnegan advises his family to wait and search on their own. But a week turns into two decades, and Susan is never found. Idyll, Connecticut, 1999: In the woods outside of town, a young woman's corpse is discovered, and Detective Finnegan seems unusually disturbed by the case. When Police Chief Thomas Lynch learns about Finnegan's past, he makes a bargain with his officer: He will allow Finnegan to investigate the body found in the woods--if Finnegan lets the bored Lynch secretly look into the disappearance of his sister. Both cases reveal old secrets--about the murder, and about the men inside the Idyll Police Station and what they've been hiding from each other their whole careers.
Before the "new journalism" of Wolfe, Talese, and Kubrick, before the Brave Gonzo World of Hunter S. Thompson, there was legendary cult writer Terry Southern. This widely recognized underground classic is a collection of Southern's short pieces--two dozen hilarious, well-observed sketches which expose the hypocrisy of American social mores.
When a fireman dies in the explosion of a secret weapons cache, German detective Louise Boni investigation reveals connections with both neo-Nazis and illegal arms dealers. "Bristles with invention." — Guardian.
Police Chief Thomas Lynch investigates the disappearance of a six-year-old boy with a serious medical condition while coping with disrespect from townspeople and colleagues who don't like the fact that he's gay. It’s two weeks before Christmas 1997, and Chief Thomas Lynch faces a crisis when Cody Forrand, a six-year-old with a life-threatening medical condition, goes missing during a blizzard. The confusing case shines a national spotlight on the small, sleepy town of Idyll, Connecticut, where small-time crime is already on the rise and the police seem to be making mistakes left and right. Further complicating matters, Lynch, still new to town, finds himself the target of prank calls and hate speech that he worries is the work of a colleague, someone struggling to accept working with a gay chief of police. With time ticking away, Lynch is beginning to doubt whether he’ll be able to bring Cody home safely . . . and whether Idyll could ever really be home.
A seventeen-year-old boy and girl learn long-held secrets about their pasts as they overcome their initial antipathy toward one another on a Michigan nature preserve dedicated to her dead father.
