Liam Mulligan, an old-school investigative reporter, finds himself drawn into Rhode Island's thriving sex business that involves legal prostitution and some very illegal pornography, pedophilia, and government corruption.

Five years ago, Don Snyder was teaching English at Colgate University. He was forty years old and had a wife, three children, a new baby on the way, and what seemed like a secure middle-class future. But then Snyder lost his chance at tenure -- and, all of a sudden, he was out of a job. The Cliff Walk is a moving, clear-eyed account of Snyder's agonizing loss and what it feels like to fall, rung by rung, down the socio-economic ladder. Snyder chronicles the denial and disbelief he went through as his hopes of finding another teaching job faded after being rejected for ninety positions. He explains how each painful change -- selling his house, buying groceries with food stamps -- reminded him how much he and his family had taken for granted in their previous life. And he describes how he finally found new hope in a job on a home construction crew in Maine. Working outside for ten hours a day through a vicious winter taught Snyder about his own cowardice and the lies he had come to believe about what a professional life of hard work entitled him to. Written with precision and elegance, The Cliff Walk captures the depth of one family's love and speaks to anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to be out of a job and out in the cold.

Set on the rocky and at times unforgiving coast of Maine, Stephen Russell Payne's emotionally powerful debut novel, Cliff Walking, shares a poignant tale of loss and love that weaves together the lives of three desperate people who struggle mightily to find a way to save each other. Kate Johnson is a recovering addict from California, married to a cunning, cruel man named Leland Johnson. When she gathers the strength to escape her hellish life, she leaves with her bright, artistic twelve-year-old son, Stringer, crossing Canada as stowaways on a freight train. They eventually find their way to Winter's Cove, a provincial town on the coast of Maine. Francis Monroe is a famous Maine seascape artist whose wife died windsurfing on the bay in front of their bungalow the year before, after losing her battle with breast cancer. Emotionally paralyzed since her death, Francis has been haunted both by her loss and his subsequent inability to paint. When Stringer appears at Francis's bungalow, the meeting triggers events that dramatically alter the course of their lives. Thrust into a life-threatening altercation, Stringer is forced to take action, and ends up facing felony charges. As Stringer and his loved ones do battle with the local sheriff and the politically aspiring state's attorney, the citizens of Winter's Cove have to navigate their own deep-seated prejudices, their beliefs about family and community, and the painful necessity to reexamine justice in their town. An intimate, probing novel that mines the healing power of hope that can grow out of shared desperation, Cliff Walking is a captivating love story that carries readers on an intense, thought-provoking journey. Both fast-paced and complex, this novel is nearly impossible to put down.

A revealing tour of the opulent Newport Mansions where the Astors, Vanderbilts, and other Gilded Age families spent their summers. At the turn of the twentieth century, the wealthy families of New York would vacation at their summer homes in Newport, Rhode Island. Where the salty air once mingled with the laughter of society women in ball gowns, the houses of the Newport Cliff Walk still preside in grandeur over the crashing waves below. From the grand majesty of the Breakers to the beautiful proportions of Rosecliff, these houses are enduring reminders of the architectural flowering of the Gilded Age. Walking along the paved trail, it's easy to imagine the faintest hint of a waltz coming from the windows of Beechwood, or to envision the Duchess of Windsor’s carriage arriving for a visit at Fairholme. Ed Morris takes you on a tour of twenty-four historic mansions and landmarks, entertaining along the way with tales of splendor and style, social maneuvering and matchmaking.

God only knows what possessed Bill Bryson, a reluctant adventurer if ever there was one, to undertake a gruelling hike along the world's longest continuous footpath—The Appalachian Trail. The 2,000-plus-mile trail winds through 14 states, stretching along the east coast of the United States, from Georgia to Maine. It snakes through some of the wildest and most spectacular landscapes in North America, as well as through some of its most poverty-stricken and primitive backwoods areas. With his offbeat sensibility, his eye for the absurd, and his laugh-out-loud sense of humour, Bryson recounts his confrontations with nature at its most uncompromising over his five-month journey. An instant classic, riotously funny, A Walk in the Woods will add a whole new audience to the legions of Bill Bryson fans.

Ten years in the works, a masterpiece of reportage, this is the definitive account of the Columbine massacre, its aftermath, and its significance, from the acclaimed journalist who followed the story from the outset. "The tragedies keep coming. As we reel from the latest horror . . ." So begins a new epilogue, illustrating how Columbine became the template for nearly two decades of "spectacle murders." It is a false script, seized upon by a generation of new killers. In the wake of Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech, the imperative to understand the crime that sparked this plague grows more urgent every year. What really happened April 20, 1999? The horror left an indelible stamp on the American psyche, but most of what we "know" is wrong. It wasn't about jocks, Goths, or the Trench Coat Mafia. Dave Cullen was one of the first reporters on scene, and spent ten years on this book-widely recognized as the definitive account. With a keen investigative eye and psychological acumen, he draws on mountains of evidence, insight from the world's leading forensic psychologists, and the killers' own words and drawings-several reproduced in a new appendix. Cullen paints raw portraits of two polar opposite killers. They contrast starkly with the flashes of resilience and redemption among the survivors. Expanded with a New Epilogue