7881 books

Stink and the Freaky Frog Freakout by Megan McDonald (2013)

Stink has been in the Polliwog swim class for what seems like frog-ever, and still can't bear to put his face in the water. Then, one day, Stink has a close encounter with a freaky mutant frog. All of a sudden, his froggy senses are tingling! After a close encounter with a mutant amphibian makes him freaky for frogs, water-shy Stink becomes a swimming success. Book #8

El tango de la Guardia Vieja by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (2012)

En route from Lisbon to Buenos Aires in 1928, Max and Mecha meet aboard a luxurious transatlantic cruise ship. There Max teaches the stunning stranger and her erudite husband to dance the tango. A steamy affair ignites at sea and continues as the seedy decadence of Buenos Aires envelops the secret lovers. Nice, 1937. Still drawn to one another a decade later, Max and Mecha rekindle their dalliance. In the wake of a perilous mission gone awry, Mecha looks after her charming paramour until a deadly encounter with a Spanish spy forces him to flee. Sorento, 1966. Max once again runs into trouble--and Mecha. She offers him temporary shelter from the KGB agents on his trail, but their undeniable attraction offers only a small glimmer of hope that their paths will ever cross again. Arturo Pérez-Reverte is at his finest here, offering readers a bittersweet, richly rendered portrait of a powerful, forbidden love story that burns brightly over forty years, from the fervor of youth to the dawn of old age.

Ready to Die by Lisa Jackson (2013)

One by one, he'll stalk them, then he'll squeeze the trigger, savoring the way each lifeless body crumples to the reddening snow. One down already. And then there were five . . .

Per mille mammut, mi si gela la coda! by Elisabetta Dami (2010)

""A visiting rodent has arrived in Old Mouse City with astounding news. On his recent journey to a distant land, he spotted a mountain...moving! Holey cheese! Geronimo Stiltonoot sets off on a trip to the ice and snow to find out what lies behind this mystery. It's a fur-raising expedition!"--Back cover.

Guilty by Karen Robards (2008)

Kate White is a single mom and successful prosecutor in the Philadelphia DA’s office. She’s used to challenges, but none as terrifying as Mario Castellanos, the violent career criminal she's been hired to convict. But Kate and Mario have already met -- during one of the darkest periods of Kate's past. And Mario knows her secret. Now Kate has only one option: Play Mario's game. But when murder becomes part of it, homicide detective Tom Braga is called in to investigate. And as another threat, even more menacing, emerges from the shadows of Kate's past, she realizes the only person she can turn to for help is Tom--one man she can never trust with the truth.

All the flowers are dying by Lawrence Block (2005)

In his sixteenth Matthew Scudder novel, All the Flowers Are Dying, New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block takes the award-winning series to a new level of suspense and a new depth of characterization. Building on the critical and commercial success of Hope to Die, Block puts Scudder -- and the reader -- at the very edge of the abyss. Scudder, a complex character who has grown and aged in real time, confronts the implacable challenge of mortality. But he must also tackle a determined, relentless, and icily inhuman adversary, perhaps the most unforgettable villain Block has ever created. A man in a Virginia prison awaits execution for three hideous murders he swears, in the face of irrefutable evidence, he did not commit. A psychologist who claims to believe the convict spends hours with the man in his death row cell, and ultimately watches in the gallery as the lethal injection is administered. His work completed, the psychologist heads back to New York City to attend to unfinished business. Meanwhile, Scudder has just agreed to investigate the ostensibly suspicious online lover of an acquaintance. It seems simple enough. At first. But when people start dying and the victims are increasingly closer to home, it becomes clear that a vicious killer is at work. And the final targets may be Matt and Elaine Scudder. The suspense is breathtaking, the outcome never certain. A series that has garnered no end of awards -- the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe, the MalteseFalcon -- has ascended to a dizzying new height. With this novel, Lawrence Block, who recently received the Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom, is at the very top of his form.

Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson (2009)

The last great army of the Malazan Empire is resolved to make one final, defiant, heroic stand in the name of redemption. But can deeds be heroic when there is no one to witness them? The Deck of Dragons has been read, unleashing a dread power that none can comprehend...

Pilgrims by Garrison Keillor (2009)

Wobegon goes abroad in this rousing and moving story of a group trip to RomeMargie Krebsbach dreams up the idea of a trip to Rome, hoping to get her husband Carl to make love to her-he's been sleeping across the hall and she has no idea why. She finds a patriotic purpose for the journey. A Lake Wobegon boy, Gussy Norlander, died in the liberation of Rome, 1944, and his grave, according to his elderly brother, Norbert, is in a neglected weed patch near the Colosseum. So it's decided they will go to clean Gussy's final resting place. Margie is unprepared for the enthusiastic response- fifty people want to go with her, including her nemesis, the mayor of Lake Wobegon, Carl's bossy sister, Eloise, Mr. Berge the town drunk, and her treacherous mother-in-law. Margie fends off some of the would-be travelers with a graphic handout on the dangers of typhus and food poisoning and the seriousness of diarrhea, but ten applicants remain, though Carl is not sure he wants to go after all. At this, a heartbroken Margie gets the motley crew to the airport and aboard the plane, and then discovers one of the secret pleasures of travel-safely away from Lake Wobegon, the pilgrims' memories are quickened and they recall long-forgotten incidents. In the warm circle of kinship, as they enter alien territory, they tell stories of astonishing frankness and self-revelation all delivered with Keillor's trademark humor.

Russian winter by Daphne Kalotay (2010)

Former Bolshoi ballerina Nina Revskaya auctions off her jewelry collection and becomes overwhelmed by memories of her homeland, the friends she left behind amidst Stalinist aggression, and the dark secret that brought her to a new life in Boston.

Altar of Eden by James Rollins (2007)

Following the fall of Baghdad, two Iraqi boys stumble upon armed men looting the city zoo. The floodgates have been opened for the smuggling of hundreds of exotic birds, mammals, and reptiles to Western nations, but this crime hides a deeper secret. Amid a hail of bullets, a concealed underground weapons lab is ransacked—and something even more horrific is set free.Seven years later, Louisiana state veterinarian Lorna Polk stumbles upon a fishing trawler shipwrecked on a barrier island. The crew is missing or dead, but the boat holds a frightening cargo: a caged group of exotic animals, clearly part of a black market smuggling ring.Yet, something is wrong with these beasts, disturbing deformities that make no sense: a parrot with no feathers, a pair of Capuchin monkeys conjoined at the hip, a jaguar cub with the dentition of a saber-toothed tiger. They also all share one uncanny trait—a disturbingly heightened intelligence.To uncover the truth about the origin of this strange cargo and the terrorist threat it poses, Lorna must team up with a man who shares a dark and bloody past with her and is now an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, Jack Menard.Together, the two must hunt for a beast that escaped the shipwreck while uncovering a mystery tied to fractal science and genetic engineering, all to expose a horrifying secret that traces back to humankind's earliest roots.But can Lorna stop what is about to be born upon the altar of Eden before it threatens not only the world but also the very foundation of what it means to be human?

Generosity by Richard Powers (2009)

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. About halfway into Powers's follow-up to his National Book Award–winning The Echo Maker, a Nobel Prize-winning author, during a panel discussion, talks about how genetic enhancement represents the end of human nature.... A story with no end or impediment is no story at all. This then, is a story with both. Its hero, at least initially, is Russell Stone, a failed author of creative nonfiction turned reluctant writing instructor who cannot help transmitting to his students something of his flagging faith in writing. One of them, a Berber Algerian named Thassadit Amzwar, is so possessed by preternatural happiness that she's nicknamed Miss Generosity by her prematurely jaded classmates and has emerged from the Algerian civil war that claimed the lives of her parents glowing like a blissed out mystic. After Stone learns that Thassadit may possess a rare euphoric trait called hyperthymia, her condition is upgraded from behavioral to genetic, and Powers's novel makes a dramatic shift when Thassadit falls into the hands of Thomas Kurton, the charismatic entrepreneur behind genetics lab Truecyte, whose plan to develop a programmable genome to regulate the brain's set point for well-being may rest in Miss Generosity's perpetually upbeat alleles. Much of the tension behind Powers's idea-driven novels stems from the delicate balance between plot and concept, and he wisely adopts a voice that is—sometimes painfully—aware of the occasional strain (I'm caught... starving to death between allegory and realism, fact and fable, creative and nonfiction). Like Stone and Kurton, Powers strays from mere record to attempt an impossible task: to make the world right. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.