A JAKE EATON MYSTERY A strange letter, signed "William," sets in motion a series of gruesome events that paralyzes the island of Nantucket—terrorizing both island families and summer tourists. The Fourth of July is William's deadline—the day he promised to exact his final revenge. Private detective Jake Eaton has two days to stop him. Who is William, and why does he hate Nantucket? How has he chosen his victims, and why has he targeted Gloria Gorham, headstrong heiress and manager of the exclusive Island Basin marina? What is the key to his warped mind? As fear grips the island, Eaton and his canine partner Watson search for answers—answers that lie hidden beneath 200 years of Nantucket's history, back to its days as a whaling port. In the pulse-pounding conclusion, the entire island is held prisoner, at the mercy of one man—a man who has no mercy. The action moves at breakneck speed in this compelling debut mystery novel, an inventive blend of fiction and historical fact. Steeped in the nautical lore of old Nantucket, the novel also paints a vivid picture of the island today—a place where trendy clashes with quaint, and deep resentment bubbles beneath an idyllic surface. Nantucket Revenge launches a series of mysteries starring detective Jake Eaton and canine sleuth Watson set in New England. Nantucket Revenge is the first novel. "Attention mystery fans! There's a hot new P.I. in the game with a most unique partner, a big, black, wondrous, mixed-breed canine. Jake Eaton and his dog, Watson, are destined for a spot at the top of the genre. Nantucket Revenge gets off to a fast start and keeps up the pace, with one surprise after another, becoming impossible to put down until the reader reaches the totally satisfying climax. All of the many characters are well drawn and completely believable, and every background detail about Nantucket rings with authenticity."—Stanley Cohen, author of Angel Face "In writing so vivid you smell the sea, Larry Maness infuses Nantucket with mystery and murder. His Cambridge-based investigator, Jake Eaton, is my kind of P.I.—tender, tough, and with a past. A terrific debut!"—Dave Daniel, author of The Heaven Stone and The Skelly Man "A thrilling combination of Robert Parker and Alistair Maclean! Maness mixes detection and action into a 'literally' explosive cocktail, and this page-turner cranks up the velocity like the summer-movie crowd pleaser it's bound to become!"—Austin Tichenor, scriptwriter, Reduced Shakespeare Company "Nantucket Revenge is a fascinating murder mystery that everyone should enjoy. I hope to see a lot more from Larry Maness!"—Lucy Freeman, author of Fight Against Fears

Author of the Howard Moon Deer Mysteries “A brilliant, engaging and wholly unpredictable story of courage, survival and self-reinvention . . . I was completely taken by it . . .Interesting, complicated and wholly engaging characters. [Westbrook] is obviously a born storyteller and a bit of a magician.”–Ally Sheedy TORCH SINGER is an epic drama of Hollywood in its Golden Age: the rise and fall of Sonya Saint-Amant, a singer who schemes her way to fame and riches, breaking all the rules. An Overnight Sensation, Book One, starts in 1956 with a scandalous love nest murder, then rewinds to Sonya at the age of 17 in 1940, a dreamy girl in the Royal Box of the Krakow Opera. When Sonya’s mother is hanged by the Nazis, she must grow up quickly. Using her wits and beauty, Sonya escapes Poland with the help of partisan fighters and makes her way to London during the Blitz. In 1943, she finagles a passage to America on the Mauretania, a dangerous North Atlantic crossing on a troop ship full of men. As the ship steams north into Arctic waters evading enemy submarines, Sonya almost wins at a high-stakes game of love . . . only to arrive in New York alone and desperate, determined to outwit fortune and become a star. An Overnight Sensation is a dark comedy of manners: a tale of murder, blackmail, fortune-hunters and dreamers, and the price paid for living large.

Eddie Gianelli is helping Joey Bishop's TV wife, Abby Dalton, get out from under a blackmailer, when the news comes through that JFK has been assassinated. Frank Sinatra was a close friend of JFK, and the Rat Pack—including Eddie—rally round Frank to give him moral support. His buddies are the only ones who can really offer Frank any real comfort and after a while they all drift back to making their new movie. Eddie returns to his case, but then he soon hears that Sinatra's son, Frank Jr, has been kidnapped. Eddie continues to search for the blackmailer while trying to help Frank get through his second—and intensely more personal—traumatic experience, all of which eventually leads to murder . . . PRAISE FOR RAT PACK MYSTERY NOVELS “If you remember the Rat Pack era fondly . . . then you won’t stop smiling.”—Booklist on I’m A Fool To Kill You “This breezy caper is unalloyed fun.”—Booklist on I’m A Fool To Kill You “Randisi gives a lively sense of Vegas’s glitz and the glittering, feckless people who flourished in the spotlight.” —Publishers Weekly on I’m A Fool To Kill You

A strange visitor to Nantucket sets in motion a series of bizarre events that paralyzes the islands families and summer tourists. The Fourth of July is this strange visitors deadlinethe day he promised to exact his final revenge. Jake Eaton has two days to stop him. As fear grips the island, Eaton searches for answers and finds them hidden beneath 200 years of Nantuckets history.

Increasingly in the last decade, macropolitics--a consideration of political transformations at the level of the state--has become a focus for cultural inquiry. From the macropolitical perspective afforded by contemporary postcolonial studies, the essays in this collection explore the relationship between politics and culture by examining developments in a wide range of nineteenth-century writing. The dozen essays gathered here span the entire era of colonization and discuss the British Isles, Europe, the United States, India, the Caribbean, and Africa. Addressing the works of Wordsworth, Shelley, Dickens, Melville, Flaubert, Conrad, and Charlotte Brontë, as well as explorers' reports, Bible translations, popular theater, and folklore, the contributors consider such topics as the political function of aesthetic containment, the redefinitions of nationality under the pressure of imperial ambition, and the coexistence of imperial and revolutionary tendencies. New historical data and new interpretive perspectives alter our conception of established masterpieces and provoke new understandings of the political and cultural context within which these works emerged. This anthology demonstrates that the macropolitical concept of imperialism can provide a new understanding of nineteenth-century cultural production by integrating into a single process the well-established topics of nationalism and exoticism. First published in 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press), Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature is now available in paperback. Offering agenda-setting essays in cultural and Victorian studies, it will be of interest to students and scholars of British and American literature, literary theory, and colonial and postcolonial studies. Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Chris Bongie, Wai-chee Dimock, Bruce Greenfield, Mark Kipperman, James F. Knapp, Loren Kruger, Lisa Lowe, Susan Meyer, Jeff Nunokawa, Harriet Ritvo, Marlon B. Ross, Nancy Vogeley, Sue Zemka

"Fans of traditional mysteries will welcome Axelrod's entertaining fifth outing for Nantucket police chief Henry Kennis...That Henry believes in an 'old school low-tech version of police work' allows the reader to readily follow the clues." —Publishers Weekly The fifth Henry Kennis mystery takes us into the closed, gossip-riddled, back-stabbing world of Nantucket's community theater. Horst Refn, the widely disliked and resented Artistic Director of the Nantucket Theater Lab, has been found stuffed into the meat freezer in his basement. Most of the actors, all the technical crew, and quite a few of the Theater Lab Board members, whom Refn was scamming and blackmailing, are suspects in his murder. The island's Police Chief Henry Kennis has to pick his way through a social minefield as he searches for the killer. At the same time, daughter's new boyfriend, football star Hector Cruz, has been accused of sexting her. Carrie knows the offending pictures didn't come from him, and Henry has to prove it before the boy gets suspended, which means probing into the family secrets of Hector's father, a firebrand agitprop playwright, who happens to be a prime suspect in Refn's murder. Every story is a fiction, every identity proves false, and every statement a lie. The counterfeit bills found at the scene of the crime are the most obvious symbol of the deceptions and distractions that obscure the investigation. The truth lies buried in the past, in Refn's earlier crimes and the victims who came to Nantucket seeking revenge. When the culprit has been revealed, the last masks torn off, and final murder foiled—live, on stage, during the opening night of Who Dun It, the eerily prescient opening drama of the Theater Lab Season—Jane says to Henry, "Is everything counterfeit?" He smiles. "Almost."

A JAKE EATON MYSTERY New England-based private investigator Jake Eaton and his canine sidekick Watson return in another fast-paced mystery—this time set in the beautiful mountainside town of Winslow, New Hampshire. Mildreth Gibbon Preston's generous decision to bequest 20,000 acres of mountainous forest to the state of New Hampshire in honor of her late husband sets off a series of events that shatters the peace and threatens the prosperity of a lovely New England town. The aerial surveyor whom Mrs. Preston hires to map the pristine property mysteriously disappears, and Eaton is called in by the elderly woman to unravel what he thinks will be a quick and easy missing-persons case. Jake has second thoughts, however, when his investigation reveals the undercurrents of a sinister plot involving dirty politics, laundered payoffs, and worst of all, the deadly threat of toxic waste dumping. Then, a slick, senior executive from a company that is thought of by the public as the country's most innovative manager of toxic waste tries to put Jake on the corporate payroll, the PI realizes that the stakes are higher than he ever imagined. Ultimately, if the conspiracy goes unexposed, it will threaten not only the environmental health and well-being of Winslow and its surroundings, but much of New England. And the race is on. Jake must unravel the tangled skein of deceit and treachery before the evidence, and the witnesses, are eliminated forever.

This book highlights obedience as an American cultural motif by examining the ways in which citizens understand and dramatize the struggle between autonomy and allegiance. Willing Obedience tells the story of Americans who worked out the simultaneous demands of liberty and obedience in fiction, military memoir, and political writing from the Revolution through the nineteenth century. In contrast to the European model of a subject's blind obedience to a monarch, Americans imagined an allegiance that preserved autonomy even as they consented to the constraints of a new republic. In particular, the book considers the case of the soldier, whose surprisingly complex relationship to authority is in fact representative of the situation of all citizens in a republic.

A JAKE EATON MYSTERY New England-based private detective Jake Eaton and his canine sidekick Watson return in their third fast-paced mystery thriller. One of the most disturbing criminals of the twentieth century was the Boston Strangler. Although Albert DeSalvo was convicted for the killings of thirteen Boston women, many have never been satisfied that DeSalvo was the real killer. The murder of DeSalvo in prison forever sealed his lips. Acclaimed mystery writer Larry Maness revisits this crime, speculating that the true killer, a person who might have had ties to a politically powerful Massachusetts family dynasty was allowed to escape. Fast forward thirty years: female Harvard research assistants are being killed. Is it The Strangler or a demented copycat? Boston is in a panic and Jake Eaton fears someone he is close to may be the next victim.