Download or read book The Expendable Man written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.

Download or read book An Expendable Man written by Margaret Edds and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2006-10 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it possible for an innocent man to come within nine days of execution? An Expendable Man answers that question through detailed analysis of the case of Earl Washington Jr., a mentally retarded, black farm hand who was convicted of the 1983 rape and murder of a 19-year-old mother of three in Culpeper, Virginia. He spent almost 18 years in Virginia prisons--9 1/2 of them on death row--for a murder he did not commit. This book reveals the relative ease with which individuals who live at society's margins can be wrongfully convicted, and the extraordinary difficulty of correcting such a wrong once it occurs. Margaret Edds makes the chilling argument that some other "expendable men" almost certainly have been less fortunate than Washington. This, she writes, is "the secret, shameful underbelly" of America's retention of capital punishment. Such wrongful executions may not happen often, but anyone who doubts that innocent people have been executed in the United States should remember the remarkable series of events necessary to save Earl Washington Jr. from such a fate.

Download or read book The Blackbirder written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A suspenseful World War II–era novel from “the world’s finest female noir writer . . . [featuring] a resourceful spy heroine” (Sarah Weinman, Los Angeles Review of Books). Julie Guilles has escaped to New York from Nazi-occupied France. But that doesn’t mean she’s safe. The German invasion put an end to her glamorous, sheltered life in Paris three years ago, and because she entered America illegally, she has to live in the shadows, a refugee without papers, never quite sure whom she can trust. When an old acquaintance is gunned down in front of her apartment building, Julie worries she could be next. To evade the NYPD, FBI, and Gestapo—basically anyone who might want to arrest, deport, or kill her—she must make her way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in search of “the Blackbirder.” She’s heard whispers about the trafficker who supposedly carries people across the southern border—for a hefty price. Julie has nothing but a smuggled diamond necklace with which to pay, and before the danger’s over, she may once again have to take a perilous stand in the war that’s plunged the world into chaos . . . Palpably tense from the first page, The Blackbirder is a dark, riveting tale of intrigue and espionage from an “extraordinary” Mystery Writers of America Grand Master (The New Yorker). “Without question this is the best book that Dorothy Hughes has written.” —The New York Times “Sleek suspense . . . grand reading.” —Kirkus Reviews “The master.” —Sara Paretsky, author of the V. I. Warshawski Novels

Download or read book The So Blue Marble written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “delightful . . . nonstop action” thriller from the author of In a Lonely Place—“readers new to this forgotten classic are in for a treat” (Publishers Weekly). At the age of twenty-four, Griselda Satterlee has already lived two lifetimes. A star of the silver screen, she gives up Hollywood after a year, and moves to New York to become a designer. While her ex-husband, Con, is out of town, she is staying in his apartment. Walking back one night, she meets two cheerful young men who want to go home with her—and won’t take no for an answer. David and Danny are twins, and they are the most beautiful men Griselda has ever seen. They are also the most dangerous. They want something from her: a lustrous blue marble, which they insist is in Con’s apartment. Though they leave without hurting her, Griselda knows that next time, they won’t be so amiable. To save herself, she must discover the secret of the marble—a secret with death at its core.

Download or read book Expendable written by James Alan Gardner and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world where the marginalized of society are sent into space on suicide missions, one woman decides to fight back: “Riveting” (David Feintuch). In Expendable, the first volume of the League of Peoples, Festina Ramos is assigned to escort an unstable admiral to planet Melaquin. Little is known about Melaquin, for every explorer who’s landed there has disappeared. It’s come to be known as the “planet of no return,” and the High Council has made a habit of sending troublesome admirals there in an attempt to get rid of them. It’s clear that this is intended to be Ramos’s last mission, but she doesn’t plan on dying, no matter how expendable she may be.

Download or read book Dread Journey written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A starlet on a transcontinental train fears her director may be trying to kill her in this novel by Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Dorothy B. Hughes. Four years after she arrived in Los Angeles, Kitten Agnew has become a star. Though beautiful and talented, she’d be nowhere without Vivien Spender: Hollywood’s most acclaimed director—and its most dangerous. But Kitten knew what she was getting into when she got involved with him; she had heard the stories of Viv’s past discoveries: Once he discarded them, they ended up in a chorus line, a sanatorium, or worse. She knows enough of his secrets that he wouldn’t dare destroy her career. But he may be willing to kill her. On a train from Los Angeles to Chicago, Kitten learns that Viv is planning to offer her roommate a part that was meant for her. If she lets him betray her, her career will be over. But fight for the part, and she will be fighting for her life as well.

Download or read book Ride the Pink Horse written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-06-18 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the annual Fiesta, three desperate men converge in a perilous New Mexico town in this “extraordinary” crime novel (The New Yorker). It takes four days for Sailor to travel to New Mexico by bus. He arrives broke, sweaty, and ready to get what’s his. It’s the annual Fiesta, and the locals burn an effigy of Zozobra so that their troubles follow the mythical character into the fire. But for former senator Willis Douglass, trouble is just beginning. Sailor was Willis’s personal secretary when his wife died in an apparent robbery-gone-wrong. Only Sailor knows it was Willis who ordered her murder, and he’s agreed to keep his mouth shut in exchange for a little bit of cash. On Sailor’s tail is a cop who wants the senator for more than a payoff. As Fiesta rages on, these three men will circle one another in a dance of death, as they chase truth, money, and revenge.

Download or read book In a Lonely Place written by Dorothy B. Hughes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-05-06 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dix Steele is back in town, and 'town' is post-war LA. His best friend Brub is on the force of the LAPD, and as the two meet in country clubs and beach bars, they discuss the latest case: a strangler is preying on young women in the dark. Dix listens with interest as Brub describes their top suspect, as yet unnamed. Dix loves the dark and women in equal measure, so he knows enough to watch his step, though when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray, something begins to crack. The American Dream is showing its seamy underside.

Download or read book Nightmare Alley written by William Lindsay Gresham and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-04-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon to be a major motion picture from Academy Award–winning director Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Toni Collette. Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him. And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

Download or read book Already Dead written by Charlie Huston and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Those stories you hear? The ones about things that only come out at night? Things that feed on blood, feed on us? Got news for you: they’re true. Only it’s not like the movies or old man Stoker’s storybook. It’s worse. Especially if you happen to be one of them. Just ask Joe Pitt. There’s a shambler on the loose. Some fool who got himself infected with a flesh-eating bacteria is lurching around, trying to munch on folks’ brains. Joe hates shamblers, but he’s still the one who has to deal with them. That’s just the kind of life he has. Except afterlife might be better word. From the Battery to the Bronx, and from river to river, Manhattan is crawling with Vampyres. Joe is one of them, and he’s not happy about it. Yeah, he gets to be stronger and faster than you, and he’s tough as nails and hard to kill. But spending his nights trying to score a pint of blood to feed the Vyrus that’s eating at him isn’t his idea of a good time. And Joe doesn’t make it any easier on himself. Going his own way, refusing to ally with the Clans that run the undead underside of Manhattan–it ain’t easy. It’s worse once he gets mixed up with the Coalition–the city’s most powerful Clan–and finds himself searching for a poor little rich girl who’s gone missing in Alphabet City. Now the Coalition and the girl’s high-society parents are breathing down his neck, anarchist Vampyres are pushing him around, and a crazy Vampyre cult is stalking him. No time to complain, though. Got to find that girl and kill that shambler before the whip comes down . . . and before the sun comes up.

Download or read book Erle Stanley Gardner written by Dorothy Belle Hughes and published by William Morrow. This book was released on 1978 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mating written by Norman Rush and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1992-09-01 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want. “Luminous…Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” —The New York Times Book Review “The best rendering of erotic politics…since D.H. Lawrence…The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.” —The New York Review of Books The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man. What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of manners: “A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously.” —Newsweek

Download or read book The Ask and the Answer written by Patrick Ness and published by Candlewick Press. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part two of the literary sci-fi thriller follows a boy and a girl who are caught in a warring town where thoughts can be heard – and secrets are never safe. Reaching the end of their flight in The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd and Viola did not find healing and hope in Haven. They found instead their worst enemy, Mayor Prentiss, waiting to welcome them to New Prentisstown. There they are forced into separate lives: Todd to prison, and Viola to a house of healing where her wounds are treated. Soon Viola is swept into the ruthless activities of the Answer, while Todd faces impossible choices when forced to join the mayor’s oppressive new regime. In alternating narratives the two struggle to reconcile their own dubious actions with their deepest beliefs. Torn by confusion and compromise, suspicion and betrayal, can their trust in each other possibly survive?

Download or read book The Female Man written by Joanna Russ and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four alternate selves from radically different realities come together in this “dazzling” and “trailblazing work” (The Washington Post). Widely acknowledged as Joanna Russ’s masterpiece, The Female Man is the suspenseful, surprising, darkly witty, and boldly subversive chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael—all living in parallel worlds—meet. Librarian Jeannine is waiting for marriage in a past where the Depression never ended, Janet lives on a utopian Earth with an all-female population, Joanna is a feminist in the 1970s, and Jael is a warrior with claws and teeth on an Earth where male and female societies are at war with each other. When the four women begin traveling to one another’s worlds, their preconceptions on gender and identity are forever challenged. With “palpable anger . . . leavened by wit and humor” (The New York Times), Russ both employs and upends genre conventions to deliver a wickedly satiric and exhilarating version of when worlds collide and women get woke. This ebook includes the Nebula Award–winning bonus short story “When It Changed,” set in the world of The Female Man.

Download or read book The Winter Soldier written by Daniel Mason and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The epic story of war and medicine from the award-winning author of North Woods and The Piano Tuner is "a dream of a novel...part mystery, part war story, part romance" (Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See). Vienna, 1914. Lucius is a twenty-two-year-old medical student when World War I explodes across Europe. Enraptured by romantic tales of battlefield surgery, he enlists, expecting a position at a well-organized field hospital. But when he arrives, at a commandeered church tucked away high in a remote valley of the Carpathian Mountains, he finds a freezing outpost ravaged by typhus. The other doctors have fled, and only a single, mysterious nurse named Sister Margarete remains. But Lucius has never lifted a surgeon's scalpel. And as the war rages across the winter landscape, he finds himself falling in love with the woman from whom he must learn a brutal, makeshift medicine. Then one day, an unconscious soldier is brought in from the snow, his uniform stuffed with strange drawings. He seems beyond rescue, until Lucius makes a fateful decision that will change the lives of doctor, patient, and nurse forever. From the gilded ballrooms of Imperial Vienna to the frozen forests of the Eastern Front; from hardscrabble operating rooms to battlefields thundering with Cossack cavalry, The Winter Soldier is the story of war and medicine, of family, of finding love in the sweeping tides of history, and finally, of the mistakes we make, and the precious opportunities to atone. "The Winter Soldier brims with improbable narrative pleasures...These pages crackle with excitement... A spectacular success." —Anthony Marra, New York Times Book Review

Download or read book Earth and High Heaven written by Gwethalyn Graham and published by Cormorant Books. This book was released on 2003-08-02 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Erika Drake, of the Westmount Drakes, met and fell in love with Marc Reiser, a Jew from northern Ontario, their respective worlds were turned upside down. Set against the backdrop of the first three years of the Second World War, Earth and High Heaven captured the hearts and minds of its generation and helped to shape the more diverse and inclusive culture we have today. Published in 1944, this classic novel was very timely; it spoke of the prejudices of its time, when Gentiles and Jews did not mix in society. Earth and High Heaven was the most successful novel of its time, winning many awards and prizes, including the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 1945 (an award founded to reward books that exposed racism or explored the richness of human diversity). It was translated into eighteen languages and the film rights were purchased by Samuel Goldwyn for a remarkable $100,000. Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian novel to top the New York Times bestseller list for the better part of a year.

Download or read book Pick Up written by Charles Willeford and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2014-08-14 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'No one writes a better crime novel than Charles Willeford' Elmore Leonard In this riveting novel of psychological suspense, Charles Willeford charts a duel trajectory of alcoholic desire and destruction that is at once poignant, terrifying and utterly authentic. Prowling the grimy streets of San Francisco, Helen is a beautiful, sensuous drunk - and a pathetically easy pick-up. Harry just wants to help, but before long they are both adrift in a sea of alcohol - until Harry conceives the ultimate crime.