Bounty hunter Sexx Pistol never kept track of the body count, until it was one of her own lying dead on the ground. Struck with grief, she swore she would leave Kassius Del Mar, the man she held accountable for her partner's death, and her violent past behind. But it's hard to pass up easy cash for a quick hit job.

Two men, shaped by the demons of their past, find their lives inexplicably intertwined. Nicolas Michaud, the prodigy composer and pianist, grew up apart from the world. A mother who neglected him, and a father who never met him. But when he's suddenly orphaned, Nicolas is taken from his comfortable home and thrown into a life where no one understands him. Consumed by his desire to find the perfect musician for his Magnum Opus, he turns away from human relationships, and it turns him cold. Taking a job at the University in the United States, Nicolas is met with disappointment and regret. Until he meets Cedric Blum, a young chemical engineering student with a secret talent for music like Nicolas has never seen. But Cedric has his own past to overcome. With the help of an old friend, and new relationships, the pair begin their journey toward love, life, and the Magnum Opus. In the end, will Cedric's happy nature thaw Nicolas' icy exterior, or will Nicolas find himself consumed by his fear of love?

"The OSS is after Jimmy, and they're planning on using his daughter to catch him. But Jimmy will tear the world apart to keep his daughter safe. Literally. This morally bankrupt immortal freak of nature has absolutely no concern for the wellbeing of any human being besides himself and his Sweetpea. It'd be adorable if it weren't so scary"--Amazon.com.

“The best biography ever about Ed. Cahalan’s meticulous research and thoughtful interviews have made this book the authoritative source for Abbey scholars and fans alike.” —Doug Peacock, author, environmentalist activist and explorer, and the inspiration for Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang He was a hero to environmentalists and the patron saint of monkeywrenchers, a man in love with desert solitude. A supposed misogynist, ornery and contentious, he nevertheless counted women among his closest friends and admirers. He attracted a cult following, but he was often uncomfortable with it. He was a writer who wandered far from Home without really starting out there. James Cahalan has written a definitive biography of a contemporary literary icon whose life was a web of contradictions. Edward Abbey: A Life sets the record straight on "Cactus Ed," giving readers a fuller, more human Abbey than most have ever known. It separates fact from fiction, showing that much of the myth surrounding Abbey—such as his birth in Home, Pennsylvania, and later residence in Oracle, Arizona—was self-created and self-perpetuated. It also shows that Abbey cultivated a persona both in his books and as a public speaker that contradicted his true nature: publicly racy and sardonic, he was privately reserved and somber. Cahalan studied all of Abbey's works and private papers and interviewed many people who knew him—including the models for characters in The Brave Cowboy and The Monkey Wrench Gang—to create the most complete picture to date of the writer's life. He examines Abbey's childhood roots in the East and his love affair with the West, his personal relationships and tempestuous marriages, and his myriad jobs in continually shifting locations—including sixteen national parks and forests. He also explores Abbey's writing process, his broad intellectual interests, and the philosophical roots of his politics. For Abbey fans who assume that his "honest novel," The Fool's Progress, was factual or that his public statements were entirely off the cuff, Cahalan's evenhanded treatment will be an eye-opener. More than a biography, Edward Abbey: A Life is a corrective that shows that he was neither simply a countercultural cowboy hero nor an unprincipled troublemaker, but instead a complex and multifaceted person whose legacy has only begun to be appreciated. The book contains 30 photographs, capturing scenes ranging from Abbey's childhood to his burial site.

Two outlaws of love (and literature) at large in their own Wild West. Ralph Crawford may be a talented short-story writer -- one of the best in the Bay Area, in America, in the 1970s; hell, in the whole English-speaking, late-middle-twentieth century -- but off the page he's only human. In fact, as his wife, Alice Ann, can attest, he's a mess: a jealous but faithless husband, an inveterate bouncer of checks, a plunderer of private misadventures for the sake of his fiction, and an often hapless drunk. When his (similarly human) buddy, Jim Stark -- a novelist burning with ambition, promise, and humiliation over his own failed marriage -- promises to deliver a cargo of incriminating letters to Ralph's latest paramour, a dark lady in Missoula named Lindsay Wolfe, the lives of all four are changed in ways none of them could predict.Careening across the western states during the twilight of the San Francisco underground, Chuck Kinder's already semi-legary masterpiece, twenty-five years in the making, is a rueful, comi-tragic juggernaut of good and bad intentions gone awry, high seriousness and hard living, and the gradual, painful coming of age of two couples who have spent the best years of their lives raising bad judgment to an art. With affection and self-savaging wit, Kinder captures the siren song of the writerly vocation in all its squalor, destructiveness, and glory.