Nancy investigates the kidnapping of Caterina Reigert by posing as the writer of the girl's father's autobiography.

The classic fantasy trilogy of Elmer Elevator and the flying baby dragon has delighted children and their parents for generations. Now, on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, Random House is proud to bring the three timeless tales together in one beautiful commemorative edition, complete with the original delightful illustrations.  A Newbery Honor Book and an ALA Notable Book, My Father's Dragon is followed by Elmer and the Dragon ("rich, humorous, and thoroughly satisfying") and The Dragons of Blueland ("ingenious and plausible, the fantasy well-sustained").  Each story stands alone, but read in succession, they are an unforgettable experience.*Library Journal, starred review             From the Hardcover edition.

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works. This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1954-1964. These fascinating stories include Service Call, Stand By, The Days of Perky Pat, and many others. Contents: Autofac -- Service call -- Captive market -- The mold of Yancy -- The minority report -- Recall mechanism -- The unreconstructed M -- Explorers we -- War game -- If there were no Benny Cemoli -- Novelty act -- Waterspider -- What the dead men say -- Orpheus with clay feet -- The days of Perky Pat -- Stand-by -- What'll we do with Ragland Park? -- Oh, to be a Blobel! -- "A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection" -- Kirkus "The collected stories of Philip K. Dick is awe inspiring". -- The Washington Post "More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds". -- Wall Street Journal

The body was lying in the snow near the river, almost naked and definitely dead. It's not only the murder that has police detective Jake Hines concerned. His girlfriend, Trudy, the crime scene expert with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who ought to be at the scene, is stuck in a snowdrift somewhere. When a second body is discovered with a similar wound, a picture starts to emerge, an image etched in passion, betrayal, and fear. With the publication of Triple Play and Par Four, the first book in the Jake Hines series, Elizabeth Gunn was praised for her handling of character, plot, and procedure. In Five Card Stud, she deals a perfect hand.

In 1994, the Marines test a new missile. After launch it mysteriously disappears. If it reaches civilian areas they'll be in big trouble. Carol Dawson, a journalist, is alerted by an unusual sight of whales in the Miami area & decides to write about it. Armed with equipment provided by her friend, Dr. Dale Michaels from the Miami Oceanographic Institute, she goes to investigate the rumors of a missing missile that could be behind the mysterious whale behavior. She hires the services of Nick Williams & Jefferson Troy, boat owners, so she can get to the Mexican Gulf to investigate. They find an unknown artifact. They have doubts about its nature, hoping it's part of a lost treasure. Old friends of Williams & Troy notice their discovery & want to steal it. In the story's background, the authors describe a submarine snake civilization on a planet called Canthor, & how they struggled to stay alive despite threats to their ecosystem. It's revealed that the artifact is actually a cradle that contains seeds with altered superhumans extracted from Earth millions of years ago & altered so they could live with other species--including the submarine snakes--on Earth. The spaceship that carries the cradle is manned by robots/cyborgs & has hidden itself on the ocean floor to make repairs. Dawson, Williams & Troy are asked to gather materials so the ship can be repaired & return to its mission. The ship...

Born to whites, but raised by the Comanches, Golden Hawk had a single-minded mission to rescue his golden-haired sister Annabelle from savage captivity and sexual enslavement. But now Golden Hawk was at the crossroads, faced by cruel choices. A wagon train he had to save from sure death was headed by a cotton-mouthed preacher he hated. The Indians he had to battle were led by a warrior chief he had to respect. And the beautiful Indian Singing Wind and the gorgeous auburn-haired Alice Gentry, who both wanted him, were hard to choose between, as each worked her special brand of sexual sorcery. Golden Hawk had never met an enemy he could not outfight or a woman he could not satisfy—but now he had to decide fast on which foe and which female he should take on ...

War has always been a strong theme in speculative fiction, especially science fiction. An imagined war holds for writer and reader alike a fascination about its possible effects on humankind. The technology of warfare—wargaming, battle planning, weapons —and the possible settings offer unlimited possibilities for speculation. Perhaps science fiction writers create these stories to work out their anxieties about war. Certainly, by imagining for us the unimaginable, they also warn us that we cannot ignore the all-too-real possibilities of armed conflict.Battlefields Beyond Tomorrow is an all-new anthology that offers twenty-five science fiction stories about war by top writers in the genre. The stories collected here cover all the facets of imagined warfare—landscape, time frame, technology, and, of course, the human factor. There are in these pages stories about the prelude to and aftermath of armed conflict and about battles of every kind. They describe wars fought on earth, on other planets, in space; fought hand to hand, spaceship to spaceship, mind to mind; via computer, by proxy, by adults, by children, by machine.“Ender’s Game” by Orson Scott Gard, winner of both the 1986 Hugo and Nebula awards, is a gripping tale of war between civilizations which has gone on for generations. Earth has been engaged in battle for so long that now children are trained to fight. And then a very young recruit begins a meteoric rise in the military, and his genius changes the course of history.In “The Machine that Won the War,” Isaac Asimov proves that no computer, no matter how advanced, can replace human intuition, ingenuity, and inventiveness.

Epub (my conversion)Thirteen tales of murder and intrigue by authors such as Isaac Asimov, Ed McBain, Simon Brett, Sara Paretsky, and Jonathan Gash

The luminous novella and stories in The Age of Grief explore the vicissitudes of love, friendship, and marriage with all the compassion and insight that have come to be expected from Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of A Thousand Acres. In “The Pleasure of Her Company,” a lonely, single woman befriends the married couple next door, hoping to learn the secret of their happiness. In “Long Distance,” a man finds himself relieved of the obligation to continue an affair that is no longer compelling to him, only to be waylaid by the guilt he feels at his easy escape. And in the incandescently wise and moving title novella, a dentist, aware that his wife has fallen in love with someone else, must comfort her when she is spurned, while maintaining the secret of his own complicated sorrow. Beautifully written, with a wry intelligence and a lively comic touch, The Age of Grief captures moments of great intimacy with grace, clarity, and indelible emotional power. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Breathlessly action-packed and boasting a winning combination of thrills, humour and mysticism, the Destroyer is one of the bestselling series of all time.

From Publishers WeeklyIn this accomplished new novel that confirms the promise of Nunn's first book, Tapping the Source, the heat of the Mojave Desert not only curls the hairs on a driver's arm; it also makes the few isolated settlements tremendously lonely, the inhabitants rambunctious and vulgar, and faith a cross between beliefs that began long ago in another desert halfway across the world and kooky ideas about extraterrestrials as gods. Into this desert comes Obadiah Wheeler, a preacher trying to escape the Vietnam draft, who has been asked to lead a group of missionaries into this previously unassigned territory in barren Nevada. A man of shaky principles, he is separated from the sect elder and comes upon a ramshackle museum built around a manufactured space oddity. He encounters the trampy half-sister of the museum operator with whom he goes wandering among the desolate outposts while considering mysteries whose solution may yield either great truths or nonsense. Nunn writes with a keen portentousness about the warped people in this wasteland, creating what might be described as a western gothic. His examination of cultish thought is respectful, intriguing and funny, in a narrative that never loses dramatic momentum.From Library JournalObadiah Wheeler is a draft-dodger pretending to be a preacher. When he travels from Pomona to the Mojave Desert, he enters "unassigned territory"an area so sparsely inhabited by members of his sect that it is open to evangelistic efforts. As with Conrad's Heart of Darkness , Nunn's title refers not just to a physical place but also to an uncharted realm of confused moral values. During his sojourn in the wildernessa blend of picaresque wandering and spiritual pilgrimageWheeler discovers some varieties of religious experience far more exotic than his own. He steals a fake monster, tries to sell it to a man named Dr. Verity, gets involved in four murders, and finds true love. Nunn's outlandish characters, though skillfully developed, are like sideshow freaks: they have the power to fascinate, but they are not always credible.From the inside flap"Kem Nunn here takes his preoccupation with evil one giant step further. if you're up for a cast of characters out of a Nathanael West novel set in the High Desert, you'll love Unassigned Territory."—Carolyn See, author of Golden Days and Rhine MaidensKem Nunn's debut novel, Tapping the Source, was one of the three American Book Award nominees for Best First Work of Fiction in 1984. Hailed for his natural storytelling ability, Nunn now returns with a stunning evocation of the Mojave Desert and the unusual people who choose to live in "those terrible miles of nothing."Obadiah Wheeler, raised in a strict fundamentalist father, is fast losing his way. To keep his religious draft deferment, he is supposed to be preaching and teaching Bible study; instead, he's been hanging out in a seedy hotel, thinking up ways to lose his virginity.So, way behind in his quota of teaching hours, Obadiah agrees to go into unassigned territory—Nye County, Nevada, where there are scarcely enough people, let alone Friends, to form a congregation. And as his Brothers and Sisters are concerned with not only the quantity but the quality of Obadiah's work, they've asked Circuit Rider Harlan Low, a missionary whose spiritual strength is legend among the Friends, to go along for the ride.Unassigned Territory is the story of Obadiah and Harlan's exile. There Obadiah, craving a woman's touch, takes up with Delandra, and with her steals the Mystery of the Mojave, a terrifying creature that may or may not have been the creation of Delandra's father. And it is in the desert that Harlan, in hopes of saving Obadiah, endures a trial of spirit far greater than any he has ever known.In Unassigned Territory, Kem Nunn has created the kind of suspense that caused critics to compare him favorably the first time around with Hammett, Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. But in his poetic portrayal of the truths people confron in the arid emptiness of the American Southwest, Nunn Should also be compared to the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard.

In The Mirror of Her Dreams, the dazzling first volume of Mordant’s Need, New York Times bestselling author Stephen R. Donaldson introduced us to the richly imagined world of Mordant, where mirrors are magical portals into places of beauty and terror. Now, with A Man Rides Through*, Donaldson brings the story of Terisa Morgan to an unforgettable conclusion. . . . ***Aided by the powerful magic of Vagel, the evil Arch-Imager, the merciless armies are marching against the kingdom of Mordant. In its hour of greatest need, two unlikely champions emerge. One is Geraden, whose inability to master the simplest skills of Imagery has made him a laughingstock. The other is Terisa Morgan, transferred to Mordant from a Manhattan apartment by Geraden’s faulty magic. Together, Geraden and Terisa discover undreamed-of talents within themselves—talents that make them more than a match for any Imager . . . including Vagel himself. Unfortunately, those talents also mark them for death. Branded as traitors, they are forced to flee the castle for their lives. Now, all but defenseless in a war-torn countryside ravaged by the vilest horrors Imagery can spawn, Geraden and Terisa must put aside past failures and find the courage to embrace their powers—and their love—before Vagel can spring his final trap.

In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth--but lives on, underground.