What if you could disappear forever? Pretense Abdicator is whip-smart, socially awkward and angry. When passed over for a well-deserved promotion at the prestigious financial firm of Crawford Spectrum, she hatches a get-even plan. Embezzle money from her wealthiest clients, assume a new identity, and flee the country. With over $2 million stashed in an offshore bank account under an alias, Pretense is certain she has pulled off the perfect crime. Only one more money transfer and she is home free. But on September 11, 2001, she is summoned to her manager's office on the eighty-ninth floor of the World Trade Center. As her boss and the FBI are confronting her with ironclad evidence of embezzlement, a passenger plane hits the North Tower and Pretense makes a run for it. Left with only the clothes on her back and the master key tucked inside the locket dangling from her neck, she must escape the burning building before it’s too late. Can she make it? Inspired by the real-life tragedy of 9/11, this fascinating tale of deception and redemption will hold you in its grip as the story beautifully unfolds along the path of self-discovery.

Modernity's Pretenses undermines modernity's authority through a cultural and historical examination of texts and thinkers from the Enlightenment to post-Stalinist Europe. Racevskis argues that modernity's elaborate designs for rationalizing the world have mainly functioned as covers and alibis (i.e., pretenses). Modernity's promise to liberate humanity from superstition, injustice, and want has been a tactic for making exploitation seem noble and for lending barbarism an aura of progress. Racevskis examines the mechanisms and history of the pretending that mark the modern world and surveys the critical approaches that have proven most effective in dispelling the credibility of pretenses.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Catherine Coulter’s first contemporary suspense novel: the explosive story of how one woman survives the destruction of her perfect life—and the dubious intentions of three mysterious men... A famous concert pianist married to a wealthy international business tycoon, Elizabeth Carleton is the envy of all—until the night her husband is stabbed in the chest with an ice pick and everything falls apart. Accused of murder, Elizabeth has little hope of being exonerated until a surprise witness appears to give her an airtight alibi. The jury finds her not guilty. The only thing is: She’s never met the man who testified on her behalf. Free and completely bewildered, Elizabeth must now cope with the financial empire her husband left behind and his family, who want to destroy her. Then three men suddenly appear in her life. Can she trust any of them? Or is one of them a murderer?