On a hot, humid July morning, sixteen-year-old Cissy Pickering calmly and deliberately shoots her father in the back. To their Mississippi community, the death of well-regarded attorney Richard Pickering is a fascinating scandal. To Cissy's distraught mother, Caroline, it's an unforgivable crime. But in Cissy's troubled mind, killing her father was the only way she knew to save the two people she loves most in the world. For years, Cissy has endured...

Taking a hard look at his life after a streak of bad luck, LAPD detective Harry Bosch decides to tackle the unsolved decades-old murder of his mother and uncovers a devastating truth.

"With fierce intelligence and emotional intensity, Alice Sebold brings us a searing portrait of a mother-daughter bond that descends into murder. Clair and Helen Knightly are a parent and child locked in a relationship so unrelenting that they have become the center of each other's worlds. But as this novel opens, Helen crosses a boundary she never thought she would approach. And while her act is almost unconscious, it somehow seems like the fulfillment...

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...

"At the heart of Dennis Cooper's novel lies Larry, a teenager wrestling not only with his sexuality and the implications of a physical relationship with his younger brother, but with the very point of his existence. He is numb to most of what surrounds him." "As the book opens, Larry has been paid $500 by an older student to kill a fellow pupil and retrieve the boy's notebook. It seems simple enough. However, once Larry ventures into the notebook,...

"Beneath the roiling waters of the Arkansas River lie dead men and buried secrets. When Jane Mooney’s violent stepfather, Warren, disappeared, most folks in Maud Bottoms, Arkansas, assumed he got drunk and drowned. After all, the river had claimed its share over the years. When Jane confessed to his murder, she should have gone to jail. That’s what she wanted. But without a body, the police didn’t charge her with the crime. So Jane left for...