When his old friend Blake Peters calls in some overdue favors. Garrett feels like he’s committed himself to a corps of corpses. Someone is trying to kill Blake's wealthy, retired General Stantnor, in a most lingering, painful, and maybe poisonous way. Can Garrett keep the general above ground? But Stantnor's mansion holds a host of surprises for a human detective who thought he'd seen it all. For while the general is dying slowly, his employees are losing their lives at a far speedier rate. And when some of the not-long-departed try to enlist their comrades in the growing legions of the dead, Garrett knows it's time to call in his own troops—in the person of Morley Dotes, the toughest half-elf around. With Morley guarding his back, Garrett's got to handle—or gets his hands on—both the killer and the mansion's two elusive beauties, who seem invisible to everyone but Garrett!
She was tall, blonde, and offering Garrett an irresistible fee to take a case that seemed open and shut. But in a town of elves and humans, thugs and swindlers—a place where magic and religion could prove an all-too potent mix—Garrett had learned to take a long, hard look before saying yes. Garrett’s doubts are confirmed when the Grand Inquisitor comes looking for his help in the lovely lady’s wake. But even a hard-boiled detective like Garrett, with a Dead Man for an ally and the toughest half-elf in town guarding his back, can find that it’s too late to say no. Turns out Garrett’s been fingered as the latest sacrifice to a long-dead god—and his only chance to save his neck is to solve the case.
Blood-soaked blades have been taking their toll among the luscious lovelies in Garrett’s home city of TunFaire. And though Garrett can be as civic-minded as the next guy—unless the next guy is Captain Block of the Watch—the private eye isn’t sure he really wants to take on a serial killer psycho who does too good a carving job and never leaves any of the blood behind. Still, having Block pay him for his services with lots of ill-gotten government funds, and having his own partner, the Dead Man, strenuously urge him to take the case, prove an irresistible combination for Garrett. And so he begins a search that would take him from the lowest slums to the highest estates, from confrontations with magic-spitting enemies to run-ins with the king of crime’s wayward daughter, to a final encounter with an ancient evil that has once again been loosed on his unsuspecting town.
Garrett’s having a pretty good morning until, five minutes in, he finds a strange child named Penny Dreadful poking around his apartment. Before he can figure out who the mysterious urchin really is, he’s hired to investigate how an old crime boss ended up in a coma—leaving his beautiful, criminally insane daughter to run the family business. The boss’s daughter has some lascivious designs on Garrett—and some deadly ones, too. But she’s not the only one dreaming up ways to finish off the endangered private eye—who now has to figure out why everyone is suddenly after him...
With the breadth and cumulative force of a novel, Mother of Sorrows presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post—World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sunstruck, treeless lawns, a world of initial hopefulness from which shame and loss have seemingly been banished. This is the story of two adolescent brothers whose father has suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, a mother whom the younger son worshipfully imagines as “Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings . . . Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes . . . Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness . . . Our Mother of Sudden Anger.” This is the brother who narrates these tales as he looks back thirty years later, the only remaining survivor of a world he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever, a world of sorrow that has held him spellbound even as he has attempted to create a life of his own. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows introduces us to a voice that is urgent, contemplative, elegant, angry, revelatory, and like no other in contemporary fiction.
A damsel in a dress was Garrett’s weakness, especially when she had equipment in all the right places. Still, Garrett wasn’t sure it was worth his life to take on Maggie Jenn, the ex-king’s ex-mistress, as his client. Not in a kingdom where the biggest con artists weren’t human, magic could beat any weapon, and the local killers were built like tanks. It seemed like a simple missing person’s case: a vanished teenage daughter, a distraught mother trying to track her down. But when a guy as well-connected as the Rainmaker was gunning to see Garrett permanently removed from the case, he knew he’d have to call in some big favors just to keep his head on his shoulders, let alone to find a kid who probably didn’t want to be found.
It should have been a simple job. But for Garrett, a human detective in a world of gnomes, tracking down the woman to whom his dead pal Danny left a fortune in silver is no slight task. Even with the aid of Morley, the toughest half-elf around, Garrett isn't sure he'll make it out alive from a land where magic can be murder, the dead still talk, and vampires are always hungry for human blood.
In the stunning tradition of Lisa See, Maeve Binchy, and Alice Hoffman, The Tin Horse is a rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bond sisters share and the dreams and sorrows that lay at the heart of the immigrant experience. It has been more than sixty years since Elaine Greenstein’s twin sister, Barbara, ran away, cutting off contact with her family forever. Elaine has made peace with that loss. But while sifting through old papers as she prepares to move to Rancho Mañana—or the “Ranch of No Tomorrow” as she refers to the retirement community—she is stunned to find a possible hint to Barbara’s whereabouts all these years later. And it pushes her to confront the fierce love and bitter rivalry of their youth during the 1920s and ’30s, in the Los Angeles Jewish neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Though raised together in Boyle Heights, where kosher delis and storefront signs in Yiddish lined the streets, Elaine and Barbara staked out very different personal territories. Elaine was thoughtful and studious, encouraged to dream of going to college, while Barbara was a bold rule-breaker whose hopes fastened on nearby Hollywood. In the fall of 1939, when the girls were eighteen, Barbara’s recklessness took an alarming turn. Leaving only a cryptic note, she disappeared. In an unforgettable voice layered with humor and insight, Elaine delves into the past. She recalls growing up with her spirited family: her luftmensch of a grandfather, a former tinsmith with tales from the Old Country; her papa, who preaches the American Dream even as it eludes him; her mercurial mother, whose secret grief colors her moods—and of course audacious Barbara and their younger sisters, Audrey and Harriet. As Elaine looks back on the momentous events of history and on the personal dramas of the Greenstein clan, she must finally face the truth of her own childhood, and that of the twin sister she once knew. In The Tin Horse, Janice Steinberg exquisitely unfolds a rich multigenerational story about the intense, often fraught bonds between sisters, mothers, and daughters and the profound and surprising ways we are shaped by those we love. At its core, it is a book not only about the stories we tell but, more important, those we believe, especially the ones about our very selves. Praise for The Tin Horse “Steinberg, the author of five mysteries, has transcended genre to weave a rich story that will appeal to readers who appreciate multigenerational immigrant family sagas as well as those who simply enjoy psychological suspense.”—BookPage
A young boy's dreams of glory and war turn into a bitter nightmare as his father's kingdom is overrun by an invading army. Lost and alone in the woods, he finds an ancient sword that promises him the ability to claim his vengeance. As he begins to take that vengeance, he comes to realize the price that the sword will demand of him. Enemies soon become allies and strange bedfellows abound as the prophesies of an age swirl into chaos.
The world grows colder with each passing year, the longer winters and ever-deepening snows awaking ancient fears within the Dengan Packstead, fears of invasion by armed and desperate nomads, attack by the witchlike and mysterious Silth, able to kill with their minds alone, and of the Grauken, that desperate time when intellect gives way to buried cannibalistic instinct, when meth feeds upon meth. For Marika, a young pup of the Packstead, loyal to pack and family, times are dark indeed, for against these foes, the Packstead cannot prevail. But awakening within Marika is a power unmatched in all the world, a legendary power that may not just save her world, but allow her to grasp the stars themselves. From Glen Cook, author of the Black Company and Dread Empire novels, comes Darkwar, collecting for the first time, the stunning science fantasy epic that originally appeared as Doomstalker, Warlock, and Ceremony.
