"Preparing you for an education you'll never forget, this introduction to The McMasters Conservatory, dedicated to the consummate execution of homicidal arts, follows students as they prepare for graduation by getting away with the perfect murder of someone whose death will make the world a much better place to live"--

Early on the morning of May 6, 1840, the elderly Lord William Russell was found in his London house with his throat so deeply cut that his head was nearly severed. The crime soon had everyone, including Queen Victoria, feverishly speculating about motives and methods. But when the prime suspect claimed to have been inspired by a sensational crime novel, it sent shock waves through literary London and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. Could a novel really lead someone to kill? In Murder by the Book, Claire Harman blends a riveting true-crime whodunit with a fascinating account of the rise of the popular novel and the early battle for its soul among the most famous writers of the day.

Two-time Edgar Award winner Rupert Holmes–author of the critically acclaimed Where the Truth Lies and creator of the Tony Award—winning musical whodunit The Mystery of Edwin Drood–now fuses gripping suspense and evocative music in an innovative novel of intrigue set in 1940, during the very heart of the Big Band era. Jazz saxophonist and arranger Ray Sherwood, touring with the Jack Donovan Orchestra, is haunted by personal tragedy. But when a beautiful and talented Berkeley student named Gail Prentice seeks his help in orchestrating a highly original composition called Swing Around the Sun, which is slated to premiere at the Golden Gate Exposition on the newly created Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, Ray finds himself powerfully drawn to the beguiling coed. Within moments of first setting eyes on her, Ray also witnesses a horrifying sight: a young woman plunging to her death from the island’s emblematic Tower of the Sun. As the captivated Ray learns more about Gail and her unusual family, he finds himself trapped in a tightening coil of spiraling secrets– some personally devastating, all dangerous and deadly– in which from moment to moment nothing is certain, including Gail’s intentions toward him and her connection to the dead woman who made such a grisly impact upon the stunning island. As events speed toward a shocking climax, Ray must use all his physical daring and improvisational skills to unlock an ominous puzzle whose sinister implications stretch far beyond anything he could imagine.

A New York Times bestseller! From Edgar Award–winning novelist, playwright, and story-songwriter Rupert Holmes comes a diabolical thriller with a killer concept: The McMasters Conservatory for the Applied Arts, “a fantasy academy laid out like a combination of Hogwarts, Downton Abbey, and a White Lotus–style resort” (Los Angeles Times) dedicated to the art of murder where students study how best to “delete” their most deserving victim. Who hasn’t wondered for a split second what the world would be like if a person who is the object of your affliction ceased to exist? But then you’ve probably never heard of The McMasters Conservatory, dedicated to the consummate execution of the homicidal arts. To gain admission, a student must have an ethical reason for erasing someone who deeply deserves a fate no worse (nor better) than death. The campus of this “Poison Ivy League” college—its location unknown to even those who study there—is where you might find yourself the practice target of a classmate…and where one’s mandatory graduation thesis is getting away with the perfect murder of someone whose death will make the world a much better place to live. Prepare for an education you’ll never forget. A “fiendishly funny” (Booklist) mix of witty wordplay, breathtaking twists and genuine intrigue, Murder Your Employer will gain you admission into a wholly original world, cocooned within the most entertaining book about well-intentioned would-be murderers you’ll ever read.

Dying on the Job is the first book on workplace violence to focus exclusively on workplace murder. While some perpetrators are certainly mentally impaired, many workplace murders are committed by people considered to be “normal.” Brown explores the various motives and drives that spark workplace murder, and answers hundreds of questions that are usually asked only after a workplace murder rampage has already occurred. Are men or women more likely to commit workplace homicide? How can people more easily spot those likely to commit workplace murder? What are some of the warning signs? How often is "suicide" used as workplace revenge? The answers to these questions and more are based on more than 350 actual cases of workplace murder, and the answers are often surprising. Brown also addresses different areas of prevention, counseling, and rehabilitation, and analyzes different approaches to gun control for both management and employees to make their job a safer place to work.

“It is always a treat to read a Nero Wolfe mystery. The man has entered our folklore.”—The New York Times Book Review Introduction by David Handler It wasn’t Leonard Dykes’s writing style that offended. But something in his unpublished tome seemed to lead everyone who read it to a very unhappy ending. Now four people are dead, including the unfortunate author himself, and the police think Nero Wolfe is the only man who can close the book on this novel killer. So the genius sleuth directs his sidekick to set a trap . . . and discovers that the truth is far stranger—and far bloodier—than fiction. A grand master of the form, Rex Stout is one of America’s greatest mystery writers, and his literary creation Nero Wolfe is one of the greatest fictional detectives of all time. Together, Stout and Wolfe have entertained—and puzzled—millions of mystery fans around the world. Now, with his perambulatory man-about-town, Archie Goodwin, the arrogant, gourmandizing, sedentary sleuth is back in the original seventy-three cases of crime and detection written by the inimitable master himself, Rex Stout.

Society columnist Nora Blackbird is thrust into the world of celebrity tabloid gossip when a billionaire buys the farm…. Nora’s assigned to write a profile on billionaire fashion designer Swain Starr, who recently retired to build a high-tech organic farm with his new wife, Zephyr, a former supermodel. But before Nora can get the story, the mogul is murdered. And now her boss wants her to snap up an exclusive on who killed Starr before the cops do. But solving this murder won’t be easy with a family as colorful as Nora’s. Mick, her sort-of husband, is associating with unsavory characters from his past. Her sister Libby is transforming into a stage mom for her diabolical twins. And Emma, the youngest Blackbird, is mysteriously kicked out of the house by Mick. Nora’s home life may be hogging the spotlight, but there’s also a matter of Starr’s missing pig, which just might be the key to solving this mystery and the way Nora can bring home the bacon….

"Accomplice begins as a straightforward English thriller in a country house. A sex-starved wife and her lover plan to murder her stuffy husband. The husband is murdered on stage, but reappears, This is actually a dress rehearsal for an out of town try out and the murder victim is the playwright and director. He, however, is plotting to murder his wife, the leading lady in his play, so that his affair with her leading man can proceed unimpeded. A surprise character comes out of the audience, revealing that something entirely different is actually going on: a cast member is being brilliantly and effectively set up in retaliation for his cruel actions which caused the suicide of a friend."--Publisher.

From the Printz Award-winning author of Satellite comes a compelling new novel about a girl who must brave the elements to help a lost child with an otherworldly secret. Sixteen-year-old Emily is on the run. Between her parents and the trouble she's recently gotten into at school, she has more than enough reason to get away. But when she finds a little boy named Aidan wandering in the woods, she knows she needs to help him find his way home. But getting home is no easy matter, especially when Emily finds out that Aidan isn't even from Earth. When their plane crashes into the side of a snowy mountain, it's up to Emily to ensure Aidan and their pilot, Bob, make it off the mountain alive. Pursued by government forces who want to capture Aidan, the unlikely team of three trek across the freezing landscape, learning more about each other, and about life, than they ever thought possible. "I love Nick Lake's writing. I would read anything he wrote--grocery list, email, etc.--because his writing, always, is so real and brave. He takes on subjects other writers might avoid, and he writes the hell out of them." --New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Niven on Nick Lake

From the New York Times bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” (The New York Times) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America—and that’s all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret life. She was a prescription drug addict. She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep. This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. It continues to New York, where we follow Marnell’s amphetamine-fueled rise from intern to editor through the beauty departments of NYLON, Teen Vogue, Glamour, and Lucky. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no. Combining “all the intoxicating intrigue of a thriller and yet all the sobering pathos of a gifted writer’s true-life journey to recover her former health, happiness, ambitions, and identity” (Harper’s Bazaar), How to Murder Your Life is mesmerizing, revelatory, and necessary.