August 2010 On Sale: August 17, 2010 Featuring: Adam Frawley; Doug MacRay; Claire Keesey 400 pages ISBN: 1439196508 EAN: 9781439196502 Paperback (reprint) $16.00 Add to Wish List Fiction Media Tie-In, Thriller Crime, Suspense Buy at Amazon.com What if you had to chose between family and freedom The Town by Chuck Hogan Previously published as PRINCE OF THIEVES The men wear masks. Their guns are drawn on the bank manager. She nervously recites the alarm code, and the tumblers within the huge vault fall. The timing and execution are brilliant. It could be the perfect heist. But as the huge sum of cash is stolen, so too is one man’s heart — and that man is the Prince of Thieves… Charlestown, a blue-collar Boston neighborhood, produces more bank robbers and armored car thieves than any square mile in the world. In this gripping, intricately plotted thriller, Claire Keesey, the branch manager for a Boston bank and one of an influx of young professionals chipping away at the neighborhood’s insularity, is taken hostage during a robbery. She is released, but Doug MacRay, the brains behind the tough, tight-knit crew of thieves, can’t get her out of his mind. Tracking her down without…

How To Train Your Dragon #1 February 2010 On Sale: February 1, 2010 Featuring: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III 240 pages ISBN: 0316085278 EAN: 9780316085274 Paperback (reprint) $5.99 Add to Wish List Childrens Buy at Amazon.com There are big expectations if you’re the son of the viking king How To Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell Now a major motion picture Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was an awesome sword-fighter, a dragon-whisperer and the greatest Viking Hero who ever lived. But it wasn’t always like that. In fact, in the beginning, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was the most put upon Viking you’d ever seen. Not loud enough to make himself heard at dinner with his father, Stoick the Vast; not hard enough to beat his chief rival, Snotlout, at Bashyball, the number one school sport and CERTAINLY not stupid enough to go into a cave full of dragons to find a pet… It’s time for Hiccup to learn how to be a Hero. Excerpt 1. FIRST CATCH YOUR DRAGON Long ago, on the wild and windy isle of Berk, a smallish Viking with a longish name stood up to his ankles in snow. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, the Hope and Heir…

Ask ten different scholars of rhetoric to define the word, and you’ll get ten different answers. Dictionary definitions usually say something along the lines of “the skill or study of using language as persuasion” (the one I give to my students gets even more specific: The art and skill of using language to communicate and/or persuade”). I suppose the key words in these definitions are “language” and “persuade”. Analyze any piece of writing—be it fiction or non-fiction, a bumper sticker or a political speech, a text message or a tweet, a lab report or a love letter—and you’ll find that each one is designed to move the reader in some way: to thought, to action, to response. The language may make an emotional appeal, a logical appeal, or an ethical appeal. What’s more, each one of these aforementioned texts tends to be in response to something else and is part of an ongoing conversation. Moreover, when we write, be it a novel or a blog post or a marketing analysis or a resume, we write with purpose and an audience in mind—even if we keep a private diary, we write “Dear Diary,” implying an intended reader, even if that reader…

November 2010 On Sale: October 26, 2010 Featuring: Aron Ralston 448 pages ISBN: 1451617704 EAN: 9781451617702 Paperback $7.99 Add to Wish List Non-Fiction Memoir Buy at Amazon.com Buy / Stream 127 Hours film What would you do? 127 Hours by Aron Ralston A major motion picture nominated for OSCAR The International Bestseller Between a Rock and a Hard Place–Now the Major Motion Picture 127 Hours Hiking into the remote Utah canyonlands, Aron Ralston felt perfectly at home in the beauty of the natural world. Then, at 2:41 P.M., eight miles from his truck, in a deep and narrow slot canyon, an eight-hundred-pound boulder tumbled loose, pinning Aron’s right hand and wrist against the canyon wall. Through six days of hell, with scant water, food, or warm clothing, and the terrible knowledge that no one knew where he was, Aron eliminated his escape option one by one. Then a moment of stark clarity helped him to solve the riddle of the boulder–and commit one of the most extreme and desperate acts imaginable. Honest, inspiring, and undeniably astonishing, 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place has taken its place in the annals of classic adventure stories. Excerpt Fraying contrails streak…

I’ve lost count of how many romantic comedies I’ve seen over the years. Dozens, at least. Most of the classics and pretty much every major motion romantic comedy since like 1985. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m still firmly camp Action Movie. But what is it about romantic comedies that just draws me to the screen? Dissecting this love affair has made me see a few similarities in what I like to read. And write. So let’s explore. First up, heroes. Have you ever noticed the heroes in romantic comedies? Of course you have! You’re supposed to. They’re these perfectly imperfect men. Good looking. Often funny, boy next door kinds of men. Even the wealthy ones are fairly approachable and yet, flawed.  I’m thinking of Hugh Grant’s character in Two Weeks Notice. Poor man. Handsome. Wealthy. And he didn’t know what he had until she was gone. The heroines. The gal we’d all like to be. Or be friends with. An underdog. Perhaps not the prettiest girl in the room (yet.) Just an all around likable person.  Kate Winslet in The Holiday, anyone? Of course, she is the prettiest girl in the room but she’s so conflicted all while being…

That’s me.  Evil Overlord of my characters. It’s kind of just like that. Evil Overlord: Plans to interfere with his targets’ lives. Me: Plan to interfere with my characters’ lives. Evil Overlord: Is constantly thinking, “What can I do to cause trouble for these people?” Me: “What can I do next to cause trouble for these characters? Evil Overlord: “In fact, what can I do to tear them to shreds?” Me: In fact, what can I do to make things as difficult as possible? Evil Overlord: “HOW SHALL I KILL THEM?” Me: HOW SHALL I– No, no no.  Wait a minute.  Here’s where we part ways. For me, it’s How will they get out of it? What new depths of themselves will they plumb to climb out of this personal disaster I’ve created, possibly while also saving the world? (Possibly.) Because the thing is, as the author, I don’t usually have any idea how they’re going to get out of what I put them into.  I’m so focused on getting them to the point of ultimate internal and external disaster (because, you know, that’s just the way I am) that when I reach it, I often go… Me: Uh, durrrr……

Deluxe Edition February 2011 On Sale: February 1, 2011 Featuring: Nicolas Sinclair; Laney Parks 292 pages ISBN: 0983034001 EAN: 9780983034001 Trade Size $15.00 Add to Wish List Romance Contemporary Buy at Amazon.com Love on a cruise Love Script by Tiffany Ashley A New Book with a Track Record Determined to land a huge advertising account for his company, Nicolas Sinclair get a LITTLE carried away and tells the potential client he’s married and about to celebrate his first anniversary. Now, Nick has a serious problem – he has agreed to a high-stakes cruise with this important client and must find a willing “wife” to join him. Laney Parks is either in the wrong place at the wrong time, or the right place at the right time – She isn’t sure which. She isn’t even entirely sure how she got roped into posing as her hunky boss’s wife. She find “sticking to the script” SERIOUSLY unnerving, especially when it involves cuddling up and kissing in public – and sharing the close confines of a cabin – and its single bed – with him. Witty and fun story with just the right amount of romance. Previous Picks

I have love on the brain. Not sure why… Maybe it’s because my kids are still ruining their teeth on leftover Valentine’s Day candy. Maybe it’s because I just wrote a short scene depicting my protagonist’s first crush. Maybe it’s because I’m going through an Ingrid Michaelson stage–and especially adoring “The Hat,” a sweet and soulful song about first love. Anyway, all this talk about first love has me thinking about my own. My first love was the first boy who I found attractive on a million different levels. Of course I had found boys “cute” before, but my first love was funny, charming, intelligent, talented in so very many ways, and attractive on top of it all. I got to know him as a friend over the course of two and a half years, all the while loving him in secret and mourning every time he fell for another girl–and tripped over himself to race to my side so he could tell me all about it. Sigh. Anyway, when he finally woke up and realized that he just might love me, too, I had already found the strength to let go of him. It was too little, too late….

January 2011 On Sale: December 21, 2010 Featuring: Roar 336 pages ISBN: 0061715808 EAN: 9780061715808 Hardcover $16.99 Add to Wish List Young Adult Contemporary Buy at Amazon.com Summer of love and chickens All You Get Is Me by Yvonne Prinz What happens when a city girl is transplanted onto a ramshackle organic farm in the middle of nowhere? Everything. Sixteen-year-old Roar has been yanked from her city life and suddenly she’s a farm girl, albeit a reluctant one, selling figs at the farmers’ market and developing her photographs in a rickety shed. And then she witnesses a crime that will throw the whole community into an uproar. Caught among the lure of a troublemaking friend, her love for a brooding boy, and her complicated feelings about her father’s human rights crusade, Roar is going to have to tackle it all. And with a camera around her neck, she’s capturing it all, too. Excerpt Thirteen black and white photos of the accident hang across the clothesline in my dark room like crime scene laundry. The last one is still in the developing solution. I push it around with the rubber tipped bamboo tongs as the image comes into focus. It’s the overturned SUV resting…

OUTCAST MINE is a departure for Jaime Craig in more ways than one. As you may or may not know, Jamie Craig is actually a pseudonym for the collaborative works between myself and Vivien Dean. Usually we write books a paragraph at a time. And by “usually” I mean “we always do that.” But when we started OUTCAST MINE, we wanted to try something new and challenge ourselves. We began by discussing the sort of book we wanted to write. I had just seen a movie Leonard Nimoy made in 1966 called “Deathwatch.” It’s based on a play and it’s very much an existentialistic nightmare. Nimoy’s character is a thief, and he’s in a cell with two other men. The other two men do have sex, and there’s a great deal of sexual tension between all three of them, as well as an impending sense of doom, and an ever-present claustrophobia. Leonard Nimoy is amazing and beautiful, and I was so inspired by this movie that I told Vivien we MUST write a prison story full of sexual tension, violence, and claustrophobia. Once that was decided, we gave each other a list of short prompts. Lines we liked from songs…