Four girls at a southwestern boarding school discover they have amazing feline powers and must unite to stop an ancient evil in the second riveting adventure of the Hunters of Chaos series.Ana's life changed dramatically when she accepted a position at an exclusive boarding school in New Mexico. She found three great new friends—Shani, Doli, and Lin—and together, they discovered that they each had the power to turn into a wildcat. Their new friendship and powers were put to the test in a battle against the god Anubis and his newly resurrected Brotherhood of Chaos. After defeating the Brotherhood, Ana learns that her aunt and uncle have gone missing. Her friends are ready to help her find them, but then Shani is accused of vandalizing school property and expelled. While Ana and the others head to Mexico to search for her family, Shani travels to Mumbai to stay with her father. But strange things are happening in the Indian city. Has she stumbled upon another...

After a devastating tragedy sent her into a severe depression, Justine Montgomery gave up her newborn daughter for adoption. Realizing her mistake too late, she discovered her daughter had been adopted by divorced journalist Duncan Banks--and that he was looking for a nanny. Without revealing her identity, Justine took the job and was determined that securing her child's future would be the only passion in her life. But she never anticipated Duncan's growing suspicions about her--or the powerful attraction between them.A poverty-ridden childhood and a failed marriage left Duncan Banks unwilling to trust in anyone but himself. It didn't take him long to realize that there was something not quite right about his daughter's otherwise perfect nanny. But in trying to uncover Justine's secrets, Duncan soon found his own vulnerabilities were at stake. With divided loyalties and an unexpected passion threatening their fragile relationship, Justine and Duncan must risk...

Historian Wrenn Grayson arrives at the Rosemont mansion expecting to receive payment for her services from the mansion's new owner, Clay Addison. That expectation dies when she and Clay find Trey Rosemont murdered on the foyer floor. Across town, police officers race to Eastwood University. Priceless Egyptian artifacts were stolen from the history department safe. Wrenn's longtime love, Eastwood p

The kidnapping for ransom of a beautiful American-born contessa poses Marshal Guarnaccia's gravest challenge.From Publishers WeeklyElegant is the word for Nabb's (The Monster of Florence; The Marshal at the Villa Torrini; etc.) 11th Salvatore Guarnaccia psychological police procedural elegant in style and elegant of mind. Guarnaccia, marshal of the carabinieri, finds clues in the way people behave. His colleagues appreciate his talents, but tend to keep him on the sidelines of any investigation. For them, his greatest talent is in dealing with difficult people, questioning those reluctant to speak, calming those who refuse to be calmed. The unpretentious Sicilian sleuth, whose adopted city is Florence, has a gift for inspiring trust and encouraging others to confide in him. He also has a home life that includes a loving wife who nags him and two kids who give him problems. He is endearingly absent-minded. In the present tale, an American-born woman, Countess Olivia Brunamonti, has been kidnapped by a band of professional thugs. Italian law forbids the paying of ransom, and the family does not report the kidnapping for a week, deepening Olivia's danger. In addition, the gang has left a false trail to a rival clan. Time, as they say, is running out. Olivia is a wonderful character. Her graphic account of her ordeal, which runs intermittently throughout the book, gives the reader a perspective on the physical and psychological seriousness of her situation. Nabb, an Englishwoman who has lived in Florence since 1975, is a fine writer with a sharp intelligence and deep sensitivity to human pain and frailty. (Sept. 18)an Englishman (1982), will be reissued in paperback simultaneously.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalMarshal Guarnaccia, featured in some ten previous titles, investigates the kidnap-for-ransom of an American-born countess in Florence. With a low-key narrative and protagonist but effective nonetheless. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A chilling new novel about a girl who must delve into her past if she wants to live long enough to have a future when a series of murders that are eerily similar to the dark stories her brother used to tell start happening in her hometown.Lana used to know what was real. That was before, when her life was small and quiet. Her golden stepbrother, Ben was alive. She could only dream about bonfiring with the populars. Their wooded island home was idyllic, she could tell truth from lies, and Ben's childhood stories were firmly in her imagination. Then came after. After has Lana boldly kissing her crush, jumping into the water from too high up, living with nerve and mischief. But after also has horrors, deaths that only make sense in fairy tales, and terrors from a past Lana thought long forgotten. Love, blood, and murder.

Double Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a haunting novel of corruption and regret that brings to life the complexity and turbulence of Kenyan society in the last five decades. Rich in sensuous detail and historical insight, this is a powerful story of passionate betrayals and political violence, racial tension and the strictures of tradition, told in elegant, assured prose.The novel begins in 1953, with eight-year-old Vikram Lall a witness to the celebrations around the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, just as the Mau Mau guerilla war for independence from Britain begins to gain strength. In a land torn apart by idealism, doubt, political upheaval and terrible acts of violence, Vic and his sister Deepa must find their place among a new generation. Neither colonists nor African, neither white nor black, the Indian brother and sister find themselves somewhere in between in their band of playmates: Bill and Annie, British children, and Njoroge, an African boy. These are the relationships that will shape the rest of their lives.We follow Vikram through the changes in East African society, the immense promise of the fifties and sixties. But when that hope is betrayed by the corruption and violence of the following decades, Vic is drawn into the Kenyatta government’s orbit of graft and power-broking. Njoroge, his childhood friend, can abandon neither the idealism of his youth nor his love for Vic’s sister Deepa. But neither the idealism of the one nor the passive cynicism of the other can avert the tragedies that await them.In interviews given when the novel was published, Vassanji commented that The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is the first of his books to deal with his memories of Kenya, where he spent the first 5 years of his life: “I remember these images of fear, of terror. And I thought I had to come back to that and see the whole Mau Mau episode from the Asian point of view. I had never written a book set in Kenya, where my father was from. And when I did, I just felt good about it, because I was going back to one part, one of many homes.”The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, a compelling record in the voice of a character described as “a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning,” took three years to write. After research in Kenya and Britain, M.G. Vassanji devoted himself to the novel in a dark office at the University of Toronto. It was a hard process of creation and discovery, especially as Vassanji is an assiduous editor of his own work: “I come back to it over and over. For me, it’s like working on a sculpture. You sort of chip away a bit at a time until you tell yourself it’s as perfect as you can make it.” Vassanji’s fifth novel met with immense Canadian and international success. As well as making him the first author to win the Giller Prize twice, the book was a #1 national bestseller. The In-Between World of Vikram Lall is a profound and careful examination of one man’s search for his place in the world; it also takes up themes that have run through Vassanji’s work, such as the nature of community in a volatile society, the relations between colony and colonizer, and the inescapable presence of the past. It is also, finally, a deeply personal book: “The major thing that stands out in the book is people who are in-between. The feeling of belonging and not belonging is very central to the book. And that also played out in my life. When we lived in Tanzania we belonged and did not belong because we had come from Kenya. That has been a major thread in my life.”From the Hardcover edition.From Publishers WeeklyAs an Indian child growing up in 1950s Kenya, Vikram Lall is at the center of two warring worlds—one of childhood innocence, the other "a colonial world of repressive, undignified subjecthood" in which the innocent often meet with the cruelest of fates. He passes his early days in Nakuru playing with his sister, Deepa, their neighborhood friend Njoroge, and English expatriates Annie and Bill Bruce. Though Vic is third-generation African, he understands that Njo is somehow more Kenyan than he or his family will ever be. Police regularly raid Nakuru looking for Mau Mau rebels, who are terrorists in the eyes of Europeans, but freedom fighters to native Kenyans; one day tragedy strikes the Lall family's English friends. Haunted by a grisly description of the crime scene, the Lalls eventually pick up and move to Nairobi. Fast-forward to 1965, when Kenya has achieved independence and Mau Mau sympathizer Jomo Kenyatta is now the president of the nation. Njo, who worshipped Jomo from an early age, is a rising star in the new government. He tracks down the Lalls in Nairobi and begins an innocent courtship of Deepa, much to her parents' chagrin. Meanwhile, Vic continues to allow his memory of young Annie to define his life and, as a result, makes some morally ambiguous judgments when he lands a position in the new government. Telling his story from Canada, where he fled after getting top billing on Kenya's "List of Shame" as one of the most financially corrupt men in his country, Vic is a voice for all those who wonder about the price of the struggle for freedom. Vassanji, who was the 2003 winner of Canada's Giller Prize, explores a conflict of epic proportions from the perspective of a man trapped in "the perilous in-between," writing with a deftness and evenhandedness that distinguish him as a diligent student of political and historical complexities and a riveting storyteller. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New YorkerIn this novel set among Kenya's Indian diaspora, two ill-fated loves—Vikram Lall's for a young English girl, his sister's for a young African man—symbolize their family's tenuous social position as neither privileged oppressor nor righteous oppressed. Vikram, now in exile in Canada, recounts Kenya's painful process of decolonization and his own role laundering money for government officials, an activity that he justifies as the survival tactic of one considered "inherently disloyal" because of his race. Vikram's chilly amorality pervades this tautly written novel somewhat to its detriment. Although the narrative builds to the thawing of Vikram's frozen conscience, his professions of remorse are pro forma, and his return to Kenya in search of redemption feels forced. Still, the book admirably captures the tenor of the postcolonial period: the predicament of the Asian minority, the corruption that marred Kenya's fledgling independence, and the individual tragedies that were the cost of revolution. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Poker Boy wants nothing more then to be left alone in a good game of poker. But a cherub circles overhead in the poker room wanting to talk. And Poker Boy knows this cherub and knows the little guy represents trouble. Even worse, the question the cherub asks Poker Boy could change a lot of futures. How really, really annoying.