Frank Carlson Library

An escaped convict encounters an enterprising prostitute at the start of this hard-boiled masterpiece. When Timothy Sunblade opens the door of his blue Packard to Virginia, their fates are forever intertwined. "Maybe if you saw her you'd understand," he reminisces. "Face by Michelangelo, clothes they drape on those models in Vogue, and a past out of a tabloid front page … Virginia, who came for one paid hour - and stayed for all eternity." After...

When Liana Dector, a woman who is possibly a cold-blooded killer wanted by the police, storms into his favorite Boston tavern demanding his help, George Foss, unable to say "no" to his first love, is drawn into a world of murder, betrayal, and secrets from which there is no escape.

Glen and Stan, the Odd Couple of scamdom, are back from their Big Get-Even adventure with another get-rich-quick-or-go-down-in-flames scheme. As part of their trafficking in counterfeit merch, they are looking to turn a few pallets of Grade Z computer chips into some military hardware sure to interest dictators and despots and drug lords around the globe. Bankrolled by a greedy local crime boss, they hope to promote a half-genius, half-addlepated...

Money talks. But who will pay the price? The sky is dark and heavy when Private Investigator Edgar "Doc" Holiday discovers the body of Hollywood's most famous animal trainer at a ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Titus, the canine star of a major motion picture is still missing, and his disappearance is costing the movie business more than just money. But as Doc continues his search for the invaluable dog, he soon unearths a deadly secret more complex...

From William Morris to Oscar Wilde to George Orwell, left-libertarian thought has long been an important but neglected part of British cultural and political history. In Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow, David Goodway seeks to recover and revitalize that indigenous anarchist tradition. This book succeeds as simultaneously a cultural history of left-libertarian thought in Britain and a demonstration of the applicability of that history to current politics....

A Moment of Doubt is at turns hilarious, thrilling, and obscene. Jim Nisbet's novella is ripped from the zeitgeist of the '80s, and set in a sex-drenched San Francisco, where the computer becomes the protagonist's co-conspirator and both writer and machine seem to threaten the written word itself. The City as whore provides a backdrop oozing with drugs, poets and danger. Nisbet has written a madcap meditation on the angst of a writer caught in a...

Fifteen years ago, Kate Ryan and her daughter Ruby moved to the secluded village of Zamora in northern New Mexico to find a quiet life off the grid. But when, Kate invites the wrong drifter home for the night, the delicate peace of their domain is shattered. Troy Mason manages to hang onto Kate for a few weeks, though his charm increasingly fails to offset his lies and delusions of grandeur. It is only a matter of time before the lies turn abusive,...

Lay preacher Obadiah Wheeler is responsible for conducting a group of missionaries into "unassigned territory," a stretch of Nevada wilderness open to evangelistic efforts. Obadiah's faith is shaky at best and no match for the tempting charms of the co-proprietor of a desert museum, raven-haired beauty Delandra Hummer. Together the two set off into the vast emptiness of the Mojave in search of a buyer for the museum's prize exhibit, an extraterrestrial...

Imaginative but socially inept Jerrie Howard has always perceived herself as a moth surrounded by people full of beauty, color and light. Undeterred by lingering childhood struggles, she managed to achieve high academic honors and graduates from a prominent college by the age of 20. Now 23, she is co-founder and editor in chief of Lion Publishing Group. With her promising career, bewitchingly gorgeous boyfriend, Leo, and an endless bank account,...

A crime writer uses the modest advance on his latest novel to rent a house on the Normandy coast. There should be little to distract him from his work besides walks on the windswept beach, but as he begins to tell the tale of forty-something Louis - who, after dispatching his own mother, goes on to relieve others of their burdensome elderly relations - events in his own life begin to overlap with the work of his imagination.