Check It Out List

A collection of essays, lectures, and observations on the art of writing fiction from Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award and unmatched "virtuoso of language and image" (Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe)

What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the bestselling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer and teacher of writing.

From technical advice (“check that your verbs aren’t burdened by unnecessary hads and woulds”) to setting the bar (“I expect the fiction I read to carry with it the conviction that it is written with no other incentive than that it must be written”), from the demands of readers (“they’d been given a story with a baby in it, and they damn well wanted that baby accounted for”) to the foibles of public life (“I’ve never subscribed to the notion that a film adaptation is the final imprimatur for a work of fiction, despite how often I’ve been told by encouraging friends and strangers, ‘Maybe they’ll make a movie of your novel,’ as if I’d been aiming for a screenplay all along but somehow missed the mark and wrote a novel by mistake”), McDermott muses trenchantly and delightfully about the craft of fiction.

She also serves throughout as the artful conductor of a literary chorus, quoting generously from the work of other great writers (including Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Morrison, and Woolf ), beautifully joining her voice with theirs. These stories of lessons learned and books read, and of the terrors and the joys of what she calls “this mad pursuit,” form a rich and valuable sourcebook for readers and writers alike: a deeply charming meditation on the unique gift that is literature.

Create beautiful buttercream flowers and leaves using piping and palette knife painting techniques.

Master the art of decorating cakes with buttercream flowers in this stunning book from cake artist and tutor Neetha Syam. Neetha's strong, vibrant style and novel techniques make her designs really stand out from the crowd. In particular, she has developed a unique way of working that involves painting the flowers onto the cake using a palette knife, and the book will include both this and the more traditional piping technique to show how to create a multitude of flowers and how to decorate 10 glorious cakes.

The book includes a materials and tools section and some basic cake recipes, as well as sections on making and colouring buttercream, preparing piping bags, covering and stacking cakes. Projects range from cupcakes to one, two and three-tiered cakes, featuring Neetha's stunning piped and palette-knife painted flowers, leaves and embellishments.

Whether you are a home baker or experienced cake decorator, Neetha's designs will not fail to inspire you to create cakes that look as mouth-wateringly delicious as they taste!

Renowned Beatles expert Ken Womack and music historian Jason Kruppa explore Harrison and Clapton's musical and personal collaboration, friendship, and rivalry

George Harrison and Eric Clapton embarked upon a singular personal and creative friendship that impacted rock's unfolding future in resounding and far-reaching ways. All Things Must Pass Away: Harrison, Clapton, and Other Assorted Love Songs traces the emergence of their relationship from 1968 though the early 1970s and the making of their career-defining albums, both released in November 1970.

Authors Womack and Kruppa devote close attention to the climax of Harrison and Clapton's shared musicianship--the creation of All Things Must Pass, Harrison's powerful emancipatory statement in the wake of the Beatles, and Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Clapton's impassioned reimagining of his art via Derek and the Dominos--two records that advanced rock 'n' roll from a windswept 1960s idealism into the wild and expansive new reality of the 1970s.

All Things Must Pass Away reveals the foundations of Harrison and Clapton's friendship, focusing on the ways their encouragement and support of each other drove them to produce works that would cast long shadows over the evolving world of rock music.

A murder in the local hospital is raising everyone's temperature in the latest book in the New York Times bestselling Cackleberry Club series.

Suzanne Dietz, co-owner of the Cackleberry Club Café, is visiting her fiancé, Dr. Sam Hazelet, when a masked gunman bursts into the emergency room. He shoots two people and would probably have done more damage had Suzanne not brained him with a thermos full of chili. Still, the gunman manages to escape.

Now the ladies of the Cackleberry Club are determined to find the killer before he finds them.

“Few authors write about espionage, terrorism, and clandestine hit squads as well as Taylor does.”—Houston Press 

Pike Logan is on the desperate hunt for a man who is about to betray his country—and ignite a horrific new world war—in this pulse-pounding thriller from New York Times bestselling author and former special forces officer Brad Taylor

Pike Logan and Jennifer Cahill are enjoying a sunny vacation down under when they get disturbing news: their friend and colleague Clifford Delmonty is in serious trouble. While working as a contractor at an Australian F-35 facility, the former Taskforce member—callsign Dunkin—saw something he shouldn’t have, and now he’s on the run from Chinese agents. 

Pike and Jennifer soon discover that Dunkin’s attackers are a dangerous link to a much larger scheme that could launch a full-on conflict between China and Taiwan. In its quest for dominance, China is determined to reclaim Taiwan—a pivotal ally the United States has sworn to protect. Pike learns that the Chinese have a devious plan to bait the island nation into all-out war by destabilizing the government and manipulating an artificial intelligence defense system. 

As the threat reaches a boiling point, Pike alone realizes that what they’re seeing isn’t actually real. A soldier who has always been trained to fight and win, Pike must now track down and neutralize the missing man who holds the key. With the help of Jennifer, the Taskforce team, and a brave Taiwanese intelligence agent, he races to prevent a catastrophic conflict from consuming a whole region of the world.

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner, a propulsive thriller featuring an ordinary woman who will stop at nothing to find the missing people that the rest of the world has forgotten

Frankie Elkin is an average middle-aged woman, a recovering alcoholic with more regrets than belongings. But she spends her life doing what no one else will--searching for missing people the world has stopped looking for. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never paid attention, Frankie starts looking.

A new case brings her to Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood with a rough reputation. She is searching for Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who vanished from her high school months earlier. Resistance from the Boston PD and the victim's wary family tells Frankie she's on her own--and she soon learns she's asking questions someone doesn't want answered. But Frankie will stop at nothing to discover the truth, even if it means the next person to go missing could be her.

A serial killer crashes Detective Michael Bennett's wedding.
Weeks before NYPD Detective Michael Bennett is to marry his longtime love, Mary Catherine, an assassin announces his presence in the city with a string of grisly murders. Each victim is a young woman. And each has been killed in a manner as precise as it was gruesome.

Tasked with working alongside the FBI, Bennett and his gung-ho new partner uncover multiple cold-case homicides across the country that fit the same distinctive pattern -- proving the perpetrator they seek is as experienced at ending lives as he is at evading detection.

Bennett promises Mary Catherine that the case won't affect their upcoming wedding. But as Bennett prepares to make a lifetime commitment, the killer has a lethal vow of his own to fulfill.

“Sister” Jane Arnold and her hounds must sniff out a thief with expensive taste when a string of missing paintings leads to murder in this exciting foxhunting mystery from New York Times bestselling author Rita Mae Brown.

Spring is peeking through the frost in Virginia, and though the hunting season is coming to a close, the foxes seem determined to put the members of the Jefferson Hunt Club through their paces. Sister and her friends are enjoying some of the best chases they’ve had all season when the fun is cut short by the theft of Crawford Howard’s treasured Sir Alfred Munnings painting of a woman in hunting attire riding sidesaddle. When another painting goes missing five days later—also a Munnings, also of a woman hunting sidesaddle—Sister Jane knows it’s no coincidence. Someone is stealing paintings of foxhunters from foxhunters. But why?

Perhaps it’s a form of protest against their sport. For the hunt club isn’t just under attack from the thief. Mysterious signs have started to appear outside their homes, decrying their way of life. stop foxhunting: a cruel sport reads one that appears outside Crawford’s house, not long after his painting goes missing. no hounds barking shows up on the telephone pole outside Sister’s driveway. Annoying, but relatively harmless.

Then Delores Buckingham, retired now but once a formidable foxhunter, is strangled to death after her own Munnings sidesaddle painting is stolen. Now Sister’s not just up against a thief and a few obnoxious signs—she’s on the hunt for a killer.

Faye Kellerman returns with an atmospheric, fast-paced mystery set in bucolic upstate New York, full of unexpected twists and turns that build to a shocking and surprising end--the latest thrilling entry in her New York Times bestseller Decker/Lazarus series.



When Bertram Telemann goes missing from a local diner near Greenbury, the entire community of the small upstate New York town volunteers to search the surrounding woods in hopes of finding him. Bertram had been on a field trip with the staff and fellow residents of the Loving Care Home when he vanished.

When no trace of the man is found, the disappearance quickly becomes an official missing persons case and is assigned to detectives Peter Decker and his partner Tyler McAdams. As their investigation deepens, the seasoned Decker becomes convinced that Bertram hadn't lost his way, but had left with someone he knew. Soon Decker discovers that Elsie Schulung, a recently fired nurse who had worked at the home, seemed to be especially interested in Bertram. But answers proves elusive when Elsie disappears and human blood is found in her kitchen.

But the complications are only beginning. While combing the woods, searchers discover the remains of one of three young men who had vanished during a camping trip. And for Decker, personal problems are adding pressure as well. After a ten-year absence, the biological mother of Decker's and Rina's foster son, Gabriel, has suddenly appeared in New York, children in tow, wreaking emotional havoc on the young man.

Juggling the personal and professional, a hot case and a cold case, Decker and McAdams race to find answers, sifting through cabinets of old files, a plethora of clues and evidence, and discouraging dead ends. As on-going searches for Bertram and the campers' missing remains continue, the frustrated detectives begin to wonder if the woods will ever give up its dark secrets . . . and if these intertwining cases will be solved.

Once You Go This Far is the fourth thrilling mystery from Shamus Award-winning and Anthony and Macavity Award-nominated author Kristen Lepionka.

Junior-high school nurse Rebecca Newsome was an experienced hiker—until she plummeted to her death at the bottom of a ravine in a Columbus metro park. Her daughter, Maggie, doesn't believe it was an accident, and Rebecca's ex-husband is her prime suspect. But he's a well-connected ex-cop and Maggie is certain that's the reason no one will listen to her. PI Roxane Weary quickly uncovers that the dead woman's ex is definitely a jerk, but is he a murderer?

As she pieces together the days before Rebecca died, what Roxane finds doesn't quite add up. From a series of trips to Detroit and across the border to a casino in Windsor, Canada, to strange calls from Rebecca's home to a charismatic political candidate, to a women's health organization, to a secretive church group that seems to have more information about its members than it should, Roxane needs to figure out how everything is connected before a dangerous secret gets someone else killed.

Spencer Quinn's Of Mutts and Men is the latest in the New York Times and USA Today bestselling series that the Los Angeles Times called “nothing short of masterful"...

When Chet the dog, “the most lovable narrator in all of crime fiction” (Boston Globe), and his partner, PI Bernie Little of the desert-based Little Detective Agency, arrive to a meeting with hydrologist Wendell Nero, they are in for a shocking sight—Wendell has come to a violent and mysterious end. What did the hydrologist want to see them about? Is his death a random robbery, or something more? Chet and Bernie, working for nothing more than an eight-pack of Slim Jims, are on the case.

Bernie might be the only one who thinks the police have arrested the wrong man, including the perp’s own defense attorney. Chet and Bernie begin to look into Wendell’s work, a search that leads to a struggling winemaker who has received an offer he can’t refuse. Meanwhile, Chet is smelling water where there is no water, and soon Chet and Bernie are in danger like never before.

This exhilarating FBI thriller by #1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter finds Savich and Sherlock confronting two baffling mysteries.

A young wife is forced to confront a decades-old deadly secret when a medium connects her to her dead grandfather.

A vicious psychopath wants ultimate revenge against Savich, but first, she wants to destroy what he loves most—his family.

A series of three red boxes are delivered personally to Savich at the Hoover Building, each one containing puzzle pieces of a town only FBI agent Pippa Cinelli recognizes. Savich sends in Cinelli to investigate undercover but someone knows who she is.

Savich and Sherlock are up to their eyebrows in danger, but can they figure out the red box puzzle and the young wife’s secret before it’s too late?