From the award-winning author of The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker—a novel at once heartfelt and thrilling about parenthood, friendship and secret identities, about heroes of both the super and the everyday kind. “An irresistible delight, something like Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand as played by James Bond.” —The Washington Post Sergeant Lester Ferris is a good man in need of a rest. After a long career of being shot at, he's about to retire. The mildly larcenous, backwater island of Mancreu, a former British colony in legal limbo, belching toxic clouds of waste and facing imminent destruction by an international community afraid for their own safety, is the ideal place to serve out his time. There is an illicit Black Fleet lurking in the bay: spy stations, arms dealers, offshore hospitals, drug factories and torture centers. Lester's brief, however, is to sit tight and turn a blind eye, so he drinks tea and befriends a brilliant, Internet-addled street kid with a comic-book fixation. When Mancreu’s fragile society erupts in violence, Lester must be more than just an observer: he has no choice but to rediscover the man of action he once was, and find out what kind of hero the island—and the boy—will need.

A unique and addictive anthropomorphic mystery with an intricate plot and a fantastic cast of characters.

Designing Bridges to Burn is filled with often hilarious, sometimes poignant stories about the last quarter of the 20th century of American architecture with its architects' conceits, foibles and missteps that only an outsider could have engaged in.

James Patrick Lyons abandoned his family for a life on Kansas City’s skid row. A town drunk, he was arrested eighty times for public intoxication. On the night of his last arrest, he was taken to the city jail and held in solitary confinement. The next morning he was dead. Officials said it was natural causes—yet they could not explain his broken neck. When Richard Serrano learned of the grandfather he had never known, the longtime journalist embarked upon a search that led him deep into the city’s wide-open and ignoble past. He stumbled upon his maternal grandfather’s death certificate from 1948 and discovered that the evidence pointed to murder in that basement cell. That revelation triggered a blizzard of questions for Serrano and provided the impetus for this engrossing story. Part memoir, part historical mystery, My Grandfather’s Prison takes readers back to a crossroads year for Kansas City. The Great Depression and World War II were over, yet vestiges still lingered from the corrupt Pendergast political machine. The city jail itself was a throwback to the old lockups and rock piles of popular fiction, while the sheriff’s office was dishonest and inept—and tried to cover up the death. Much has been written about Tom Pendergast and the iron hand with which he ruled Kansas City until his fall. Serrano’s personal journey into that time takes the story further into those crucial years when the city tried to shake off the yoke of machine politics and political corruption and step into a new era of reform. In his quest to uncover the details of his grandfather’s life, Serrano re-creates the flavor of mid-twentieth-century Kansas City. He shows us real-life characters who broaden our understanding of the city’s history: sheriffs and deputies, political bosses and coroners. And he also discovers a city filled with lost souls like James Lyons: the denizens of Kansas City’s skid row, a neglected area near the river bottom that once housed the city’s gilded community but now was home to derelicts and drunks. As Serrano gradually comes to terms with the darker side of his family history, he traces a parallel reconciliation of the city with its own sordid past. James Lyons died just as the old ways of the city were dying, and this spellbinding account shows how one town in one time struggled with its past to find a brighter future.

This collection of essays, most previously unpublished, spans the course of Tigerman's career. Included are writings on the history of Chicago architecture, architectural theory, and commentary on contemporaries.

In 1963, 28-year-old Australian Captain Barry Petersen was sent to Vietnam as part of the 30-man Australian Training Team, two years before the first official Australian troops arrived. Seconded to the CIA, he was sent to the remote Central Highlands to build an anti-communist guerrilla force among the indigenous Montagnard people. He was sent o...