Trav helps his old Coast Guard buddy find a mysterious box that has been hidden away for nineteen years in a cave embedded in the cliffs along that very coast. This discovery places the unwitting Trav and Carol in the crosshairs of the notorious and ruthless Al Kemp, whose resources and cunning put any would-be adversaries at a decided disadvantage. Can Carol and Trav stop terrorists from using the contents of that mysterious box to exterminate the entire population of San Francisco? This dynamic duo saved the Golden Gate Bridge and Ingall's Shipyard from terrorist attacks, but this time it's more than the old battle of good and evil, it's a race against Doomsday. Facing two deadly opponents, including the KGB and a unique, world-threatening weapon, Trav and Carol will not come away unscathed.
The riveting new Clay Edison thriller from the bestselling, acclaimed father-son duo who write “brilliant, page-turning fiction” (Stephen King) Cut loose from his former life at the coroner’s office, Clay Edison has set up shop as a private investigator. It’s steady, safe work. Until it isn’t. The trouble begins when a young man, tasked with managing his grandmother’s estate, hires Clay to examine some minor financial discrepancies. What starts off as a case of simple fraud rapidly explodes into a web of deception, an elaborate con game stretching back decades and involving countless victims. All the evidence points to a tiny town on California’s rugged, remote Lost Coast. Good luck getting there, though. And Clay’s reward for surviving the journey is a trigger-happy welcoming committee, ready to guard their secrets with lethal force. Navigating this landscape of savage waves and savage lies brings Clay into collision with a host of other players: a grieving mother, an enigmatic teenager, a reclusive military veteran, a foul-mouthed PI pursuing her own agenda. And the price of truth will turn out to be higher—and deadlier—than Clay could have imagined. From the minds of Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman comes a heart-stopping tale of deception and redemption—bursting with action, suspense, and unforgettable characters.
As energy passing through matter organizes matter, so years of intimacy with the ocean and its waves organizes and alters the perceptions of the surfer. The lulls, sets, and rogue waves; the briny stew in which they tumble and struggle; the continual oscillations of reflective surfaces under shifting skies; the lurking presence of "The Landlord" -- all of this alters the senses while it educates the surfer, revealing the laws of the universe on a scale that can be engaged and understood. This collection of stories will pull you into the world of the surfer -- capturing your emotion and engaging your mind. As varied as the patterns of waves, these stories reveal the joy, fear, longing, and ever-present questions of human emotion and existence. Book jacket.
When Moses Wine's college-age son, Simon--a radical environmentalist--is accused of killing a logger in Northern California, the detective must ally himself with his hostile ex-wife to find the killer . . . whether it's Simon or someone else.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER When his passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, young psychologist Jeremy Carrier is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover’s grisly demise—and eyed warily by police still seeking a prime suspect in the slaying. “An unnerving, highly cinematic plot . . . [Kellerman has] headed off into different terrain . . . with striking success in this . . . quick-witted outing.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times To escape the pain, he buries himself in his work at City Central Hospital—only to be drawn deeper into a walking nightmare when more women are murdered in the same gruesome fashion as Jocelyn. As the suspicion surrounding Jeremy intensifies, the only way for him to prove his innocence and put his torment to rest is to follow the deadly trail of a modern-day Jack the Ripper. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Jonathan Kellerman's Guilt.
The Lost Promise is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students. The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well-funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened. Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.
One of the most important themes in US history is the series of struggles that transformed the Southwest from a Spanish to an American possession: the Texas Revolution of 1836 and the Mexican–American War of 1845. But what if historians have been overlooking a key event that led to these wars—another war almost entirely unknown—that took place on what is now US soil and dramatically shaped the development of the American Southwest to this day? The true story of this war, presented in The Lost War for Texas: Mexican Rebels, American Burrites, and the Texas Revolution of 1811, is only now being revealed by never-before-published research, which will challenge paradigms and reshape much of what we know about United States, Texas, and even Mexican history. In the early 1800s, the impact of the Napoleonic Wars rippled across the Atlantic. Within weeks of the United States’s declaration of war on England in 1812, hundreds of western militia forces rallied to a flag and marched boldly to war—but not for the United States. They instead invaded the province of Texas to make common cause with Mexican rebels who had launched their struggle against the Spanish monarchy the year before. The resulting war changed the Southwest forever. Author James Aalan Bernsen places a spotlight on division and separatism at this pivotal moment of the “second revolution” of the United States. The Lost War for Texas, by revealing the forgotten war of 1811–1812 will profoundly change how we understand the birth of the American Southwest.
Conspiracies are everywhere. they are the lifeblood of politics, business and our daily lives. this truly international and all-embracing encyclopedia explains the details of the world's major popular conspiracies, listing them chronologically under subject matter and cross-referencing them continually (because so many conspiracy theories interact on some level). Conspiracies are often international in their sweep and their impact. the brutal stabbing of Julius Caesar (the conspiracy which has defined political assassinations ever since) plunged the Roman Empire into civil war, which then engulfed much of the known western world. More recently the Cambridge spies (Philby, Blunt, MacLean and Burgess) helped Russia throughout WWII and then re-defined the Cold War afterwards, Philby's defection casting a 30-year shadow over CIA/Anglo-American relations. though conspiracies define our everyday lives, there is no body of serious academic research to understand their role, nature or defining characteristics. Most historians prefer to adhere to the cock-up theory of history, in which everything happens by accident or incompetence. Although this view is favoured by academics and historians, it is rejected by a large part of the general public who prefer the evidence of their own lives. However they consume their media, what they see is a mesh of conspiracies that define the texture of their everyday lives, often for the worst. Most people believe that there is a grain of truth in most theories about conspiracies. this book is for them.
Immediately following the Civil War, and for many years thereafter, southerners proclaimed a “New” South, implying not only the end of slavery but also the beginning of a new era of growth, industrialization, and prosperity. Time has shown that those declarations—at least in terms of progress and prosperity—were premature by several decades. Life for an Alabama tenant farmer in 1920 did not differ significantly from the life his grandfather led fifty years earlier. In fact, the South remained primarily a land of poor farming folks until the 1940s. Only then, and after World War II, did the real New South of industrial growth and urban development begin to emerge. Jack Temple Kirby’s massive and engaging study examines the rural southern world of the first half of this century, its collapse, and the resulting “modernization” of southern society. The American South was the last region of the Western world to undergo this process, and Rural Worlds Lost is the first book to so thoroughly assess the profound changes modernization has wrought. Kirby painstakingly charts the structural changes in agriculture that have occurred in the South and the effects these changes have had on people both at work and in the community. He is quick to note that there is not just one South but many, emphasizing the South’s diversity not only in terms of race but also in terms of crop type and topography, and the resultant cultural differences of various areas of the region. He also skillfully compares southern life and institutions with those in other parts of the country, noting discrepancies and similarities. Perhaps even more significant, however, is Kirby’s focus on the lives and communities of ordinary people and how they have been transformed by the effects of modernization. By using the oral histories collected by WPA interviewers, Kirby shows firsthand how rural southerners lived in the 1930s and what forces shaped their views on life. He assesses the impact of cash upon traditional rural economies, the revolutionary effects of New Deal programs on the rich and poor, and the forms and cultural results of migration. Kirby also treats home life, recording attitudes toward marriage, and sex, health maintenance, and class relationships, not to mention sports and leisure, moonshining, and the southerner’s longstanding love-hate relationship with the mule. Rural Worlds Lost, based on exceptionally extensive research in archives throughout the South and in federal agricultural censuses, definitively charts the enormous changes that have taken place in the South in this century. Writing about Kirby’s previous book, Media-Made Dixie, Time Magazine noted Kirby’s “scholarship of rare lucidity.” That same high level of scholarship, as well as an undeniable affection for the region, is abundantly evident in this new, path-breaking book.
California Gothic explores the California dream and its dark inversion as a nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all, the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics and ecological disaster. This book explores a rich Gothic tradition that exposes the repressed past and imagines the fates awaiting a failed California.
