Brown, Larry

Average guy Joe Ransom meets fifteen-year-old Gary Jones and offers him a chance at life.

Hired to collect evidence for a celebrity divorce case, cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington finds himself having to defend his honor when the person he is investigating is murdered.

Ten stories confront the dark side of human life as characters are challenged by crisis and pathology, including how a couple faces the disfigurement of cancer in the bedroom, the rationalizations of a wife beater, or the mind of a teenage killer.

"Set in the low hills just outside Oxford, Mississippi ... is the story of one year in the lives of four men and one little boy. ... There is Cortez Sharp, a farmer with a terrible secret and a newly dug pond he is stocking with catfish. Tommy Bright, from Arkansas, has a fish-stocking business he's all but gambled away. Cleve, a black neighbor down the road, has a daughter who's taken up with a man so unworthy he doesn't deserve to live. Little Jimmy, whose daddy gave him a go-kart, has the bad luck to have been born to that daddy, a man beyond redemption. And then there's Ursula, the mother of all catfish, who has her own secret life near the bottom of Cortez's pond."--Publisher's description.

Welcome to Familyland, an offshoot of Lamaar Studios. Once a small, Southern California animation house, it has grown into an entertainment conglomerate encompassing movies, television, music, video games, and a sprawling theme park.When an actor portraying Familyland's beloved mascot, Rambunctious Rabbit,is brutally murdered on park grounds, Lamaar executives are worried that the idyllic image of '50s America represented in Familyland will be shattered. They ask Mike Lomax and his partner Terry Biggs, the LAPD detectives assigned to solve the case, to keep the circumstances surrounding the death of their mascot quiet.When a second Lamaar employee is killed, Lomax and Biggs uncover a conspiracy to destroy Familyland and settle an unknown vendetta. Still under pressure to keep the case away from the public eye, the detectives are met with a third murder—and an outrageous demand: Anyone who associates with Lamaar—employees, customers, anyone—will be killed.Bringing a fresh duo of cops to the thriller set, The Rabbit Factory is both suspenseful and satiric; a taut mystery wrapped in sharp, comedic prose.