A matriarch of a dysfunctional family is pushed to her tipping point by the disappearance of her son.

When a crime-ridden city's mayor and his re-election opponent are both assassinated in quick succession...  »

Once the ruler of an entire universe, the Great Spirit Mata Nui finds himself cast out of his own body, his spirit trapped inside the fabled Mask of Life, hurtling through space. After landing on the far-away planet of Bara Magna, the mask creates a new body for Mata Nui, who unwillingly gets caught up in the furious battles of the nearly barren and dangerous planet. The locals, called Agori ask for his help against the unrelenting army of the Rock Tribe, called the Skrall and their leader, Tuma. The Glatorian warriors start to train him, teach him how to protect himself, while Mata Nui also adds some of his special powers to their fighting skill. The experienced veteran Ackar, the feisty female Kiina, the young Glatorian Gresh, and a friendly, special beetle named Click aid him on his way. But there is a traitor among the Agori, and bigger secrets lay hidden under the sands of the desert planet...

Barkley Michaelson is in a deep life rut. He's struggling to finish his PhD thesis when his father, the learned Eli Michaelson, wins the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Barkley and his mother, Sarah, a renowned forensic psychiatrist, now have the ill-fortune of living with a man-eating monster whose philandering ways have gotten less and less discrete. As if Barkley's world is not bad enough, on the eve of his father receiving the Nobel, Barkley is kidnapped and the requested ransom is the $2,000,000 in Nobel prize money. Needless to say, Eli refuses to pay it and so starts a venomous tale of familial dysfunction, lust, betrayal and ultimately revenge. In the words of Michel De Montaigne, the 16th century philosopher: "There is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead."