As Word War II comes to a close, a Manhattan detective uncovers a link between a series of brutal murders and a Nazi propogandist. Lawrence Lariar was one the most popular cartoonists of the twentieth century. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, he also crafted a line of lean and mean detective and mystery novels under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France. Lariar now gets his due as a leading artist in hardboiled crime fiction. To cartoonist and sleuth Homer Bull it looks like random murders: one man stabbed near an isolated lake in Red Hook, another taken out on a city street, and a woman slashed to death in her Queens apartment. There’s only one common thread: a bizarre hulk with a schnoz like a gnarled fist seen nosing around the crime scenes. The next time Homer and his fellow artists of the Comic Arts Club converge it’s to discuss the fiend’s latest victim: their much-hated newspaper editor, Earl Chance, knifed like the others. But Homer smells something fishy: Chance’s past. It not only reeks, it’s connecting the victims, that hovering proboscis, and most alarmingly, the members of Homer’s club. And it’s drawing the lot of them into nothing as common as spree killings. It’s more like an insidious conspiracy to corrupt the entire nation. The Man with the Lumpy Nose is the 3rd book in the Homer Bull & Hank MacAndrews Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

The sudden death of one of Hollywood’s most famous producers looks pretty sketchy to a comic book artist turned amateur sleuth. Lawrence Lariar was one the most popular cartoonists of the twentieth century. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, he also crafted a line of lean and mean detective and mystery novels under his own name as well as the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight, Michael Lawrence, and Marston La France. Lariar now gets his due as a leading artist in hardboiled crime fiction. Illustrators Homer Bull and his partner, Hank MacAndrews, have hit the big time. As new employees of Dick Piper, the head of the greatest animation studio in the world, their future looks colorful. But no sooner do the backlot newbies settle in than they discover that a career at the giggle factory isn’t exactly family friendly. Someone’s been amassing dirty secrets—professional and personal—to leak to the scandal-mongering press. Even worse, contract negotiations are just around the corner. As every gagman, story editor, and animator knows, it’s time for the great purge. And it begins with an exec found shot to death in the projection room. Homer and Hank are betting it won’t end there. But in a land of illusion, it’s not going to be easy to recognize the killer, or even guess the next victim—or real motive. He Died Laughing is the 2nd book in the Homer Bull & Hank MacAndrews Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

In a trance-like state, Albert walks-from Bordeaux to Poitiers, from Chaumont to Macon, and farther afield to Turkey, Austria, Russia-all over Europe. When he walks, he is called a vagrant, a mad man. He is chased out of towns and villages, ridiculed and imprisoned. When the reverie of his walking ends, he's left wondering where he is, with no memory of how he got there. His past exists only in fleeting images. Loosely based on the case history of Albert Dadas, a psychiatric patient in the hospital of St. André in Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, The Man Who Walked Away imagines Albert's wanderings and the anguish that caused him to seek treatment with a doctor who would create a diagnosis for him, a narrative for his pain. In a time when mental health diagnosis is still as much art as science, Maud Casey takes us back to its tentative beginnings and offers us an intimate relationship between one doctor and his patient as, together, they attempt to reassemble a lost life. Through Albert she gives us a portrait of a man untethered from place and time who, in spite of himself, kept setting out, again and again, in search of wonder and astonishment.

Now that David Alders knows time travel is possible inside The Hollows, his mind is set on one goal—to save his wife Elise. He has one chance to get it right and decides to try changing the past on a test subject. A nightmarish spate of child killings known as the Wetzel Murders occurred in the 70s, and David believes he can erase them from history. But The Hollows has other plans…

When an advert appears in the newspaper for children to take part in a secret mission, children everywhere sit a series of odd tests. In the end, just Reynie, Kate, Sticky and Constance succeed. They have three things in common: they are honest, talented and orphans. They must go undercover and work as a team to save themselves, but also the world.

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins is a recklessly witty, outrageously honest novel about sex, love and artificial intelligence. 'Tremendous, big, clever. Every once in a while a novel comes along and speaks to a generation ... has much to say about what it means to live, love and lose in the twenty-first century' Guardian Silicon Valley: home of online start-ups, couture coffee, sexual meditation, and the future. In its midst, Neill Bassett is helping to build the world's first artificial intelligence - a computer that talks, thinks, lies, and if all goes to plan, feels bad about it too. But when the experiment swerves in an unexpected direction, Neill is forced to confront a few buried feelings of his own - for his ex-wife, for his dead father, for his twenty-first-century life, and for a very twenty-first-century woman called Rachel, who might just hold the answer to it all... 'Electrifying. Clever, funny and very entertaining' The New York Times 'Worthy of Chuck Palahniuk ... Hutchins's satirical take on 21st-century existence is sharply observed' Independent 'Touching and extremely funny, Neill Bassett is a disenchanted bachelor for the Noughties generation. Brilliantly achieved' GQ 'Inventive, intelligent, hilarious. One of the pleasures here is Hutchins' terrific grasp of the zeitgest' San Francisco Chronicle 'Terrific. Throughout, Hutchins hits that sweet spot where humour and melancholy comfortably coexist' Entertainment Weekly 'Mixes the everyman likeability of Nick Hornby with a splash of the offbeat intellect of Douglas Coupland' Metro Scott Hutchins teaches at Stanford University, California. His work has appeared in StoryQuarterly, The Rumpus, The New York Times and Esquire. This is his first novel.

FBI agent Manny Tanno thought he had left his tribe and the Pine Ridge Reservation behind him years ago. But now with a cold case unearthed in the hot plains sun, he knows that the past never really goes away. In Badlands National Park, there is a desolate area the Lakota refer to as the Stronghold. General Custer called it hell on earth. During World War II, the Army Air Corps used it as a bombing range. At the end of the war, many unexploded ordnances were swallowed up in its sweltering sands. But that’s not all that’s buried there… Sixty-five years after the war, the Sioux tribe has contracted an ordnance removal company to defuse any remaining ammunition in the Stronghold. When the company finds a human arm near a live bomb, Tanno and the Tribal police are called to investigate. As the body is exhumed, two more are discovered. The remains are close together, but the murders were decades apart—and the story behind them is about to blow up…

Instruction on how to tell stories. Includes 12 tales from other countries.