Rick DeMarinis

The year is 1953, that peculiar pocket of time between Eisenhower's inauguration and the advent of tail fins and rock and roll. The place is southern California, sunny and swollen with Cold War-driven prosperity. The prescribed cultural attitude is a grimly clenched optimism. "Everybody in the land was under one mandate: Be happy!" observes the irresistible hero of The Mortician's Apprentice, eighteen-year-old and appealingly clueless Ozzie Santee. Just about to graduate from high school, Ozzie understands his marching orders perfectly, and they scare him to death. The fact that he may not have a future doesn't diminish his energetic, if unfocused, attempts to escape it. . The future presents itself most insistently, though, in the person of Colleen Vogel, the beautiful daughter of San Diego's most successful undertaker. The archetypal tender trap, Colleen represents everything Ozzie knows he should want: energetic sex, well-padded domesticity, assembly-line reproduction, and especially lifetime prosperity. There's a place reserved for Ozzie Santee at the Vogel-Darling Funeral Home as a mortician's apprentice, putting him in a working relationship with death. As Ozzie careens between flights into the ecstasy of hard bop jazz, which "burned gaping holes all the way through the dismal shit that passed itself off as the world" and drunken adventures with his buddies in Tijuana, followed by fitful attempts to get with the program, a whole era is magically invoked. Rick DeMarinis refracts through his young hero's post-adolescent angst all the patriotic fever, nuclear anxiety, political paranoia, and raw capitalist cupidity that fueled the psychology of the fifties. If you crossed James Thurber's hilariously affectionate and deadpan feel for Americana with the black comedy of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, you might come up with the unique charm and poignance of The Mortician's Apprentice. But only if you were very, very lucky.

In the middle of the night, a controversial U.S. senator is found murdered in bed in his Georgetown pied-a-terre. The police turn up only one clue: a mysterious rhyme signed "Jack and Jill" promising that this is just the beginning. Jack and Jill are out to get the rich and famous, and they will stop at nothing until their fiendish plan is carried out.Meanwhile, Washington, D. C., homicide detective Alex Cross is called to a murder scene only blocks from his house, far from the corridors of power where he spends his days. The victim: a beautiful little girl, savagely beaten--and desposited in front of the elementary school Cross's son, Damon, attends.Could there be a connection between the two murders? As Cross tries to put the pieces together, the killer- or killers - strike again. And again. No one in Washington is safe - not children, not politicians, not even the President of the United States. Only Alex Cross has the skills and the courage to crack the case-but will he discover the truth in time?A relentless roller coaster of heart-pounding suspense and jolting plot twists, Jack and Jill proves that no one can write a more compelling thriller than James Patterson-the master of the nonstop nightmare.

"When aging bodybuilder Uriah Walkinghorse runs afoul of the corrupt El Paso elite, he finds himself pursued by narco traficantes, a suburban dominatrix, his ex-wife, tenants of his sleazy apartment building, and bankers. Behind this noir-inflected border tale of a good man in bad trouble lurks a touching meditation on the tenacity of life in the face of all odds"--Page 4 of cover.

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth's fate hinges on one girl. . . . Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She's a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister's illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai's, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, but mostly a forbidden love, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world's future.

A study of political manners and debauchery masquerading as pulp fiction, this novel shows us a world inhabited by the likes of Luther Penrose, a 290-pound, drug-dependent novelist with marital fidelity problems, and Luther's old army buddy, J.P. Morgan, an insurance fraud investigator who has reluctantly agreed to lend his friend a hand. Given the tumultuous, bloody, and unpredictable events that follow, it's a decision that Morgan will come to ruefully regret.