Family catastrophe

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Julianna Baggott

West Virginia, 1924: Alma works in a hosiery mill where the percussive roar of machinery has far too long muffled the engine that is her heart. When Alma's husband decides that they should set out to find their fortune in Florida, Alma has little choice but to leave her three children and ailing mother behind. But when Alma is then abandoned at a Miami dock, she is suddenly forced to make her own way in the world. With the help of a gentle giantess and an opium-addicted prostitute, Alma reclaims her children from the orphanage and forges ahead with an altogether new sort of family. As an act of survival, she chooses to run a house of prostitution, a harvest that relies on lust and weakness in men, of which "the world has a generous, unending supply." The Madam is the story of a house of sin. It is here where Alma's children will learn everything there is to know about "love and loss, sex and betrayal." Based on the real life of the author's grandmother, The Madam is a tale of epic proportions, one that will haunt readers long after its stunning conclusion.

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TJ Moore

"In San Francisco, CSI Photographer Cameron Frost spends his nights capturing evidence from the latest crime. And he's good at it. So when San Francisco citizens start disappearing, Cameron and his team jump on the case. But the trail of missing people leads Cameron straight into the den of a self-proclaimed mastermind bent on one terrifying goal. Cameron and his team must outwit the evil at the center of this crime web before time runs out. TJ Moore tells a gripping and thought-provoking story of manipulation and twisted motives in this beat-the-clock thriller." --

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Jay Watson

Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom!, and The Reivers.^ Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels - Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun - form what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen.^ Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combining the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.

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T.M. Doran

"Dennis Cole and his three best buddies from childhood gather for a weekend reunion. On the first night, one of the men is murdered-or is he? A professor of engineering by day and a writer of detective fiction by night, Cole and the other survivors try to piece together the mysterious fate of their friend. The suspenseful story moves back and forth between the unfolding reunion gone bad and childhood events that involved these friends who grew up on the same street. Looming largest in the memory of Dennis is the striking character of his widowed father, T.A.-Marine veteran of the Korean War and blue-collar philosopher. In his interactions with T. A, Dennis tries to make sense out of life; but instead of simple answers, puzzling questions of evil, human freedom, and the possibility of transformation are all T.A. seems to provide. These questions follow Dennis through young adulthood and beyond; they finally catch up to him in the surprising and thrilling climax of this novel. A murder mystery and a coming of age story, both with many twists and turns, Terrapin is about man's potential for doing either good or evil, his tendency to do the latter, and his response to the consequences of his actions."--Publisher's website.