When people like Herbert Muskie take up residence in your mind, there's nothing you can do to get them out. Colin Potter is a skinny boy, hungry for chocolate. Herbert Muskie is enormously fat, hungry for revenge. A dramatic encounter down at the creek forges an unhappy alliance between the vindictive man and the fearful child. But who is the fat man and why does he hate the people of Loomis? What guilty secrets are hidden in the past and why are Colin's parents such special targets? A taut thriller from the award-winning author of The Fire-Raiser, Salt and Gool. Also available as an eBook

There was no sign of life. But not for a second did Pascoe admit the possibility of death. Dalziel was indestructible. Dalziel is, and was, and forever shall be, world without end, amen. Chief constables might come and chief constables might go, but Fat Andy went on forever. Caught in the full blast of a huge explosion, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel lies on a hospital bed, with only a life support system and his indomitable will between him and the Great Beyond. His colleague, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, is determined to bring those responsible to justice. Pascoe suspects a group called The Templars, and the deeper he digs, the more certain he is that The Templars are getting help from within the police force. The plot is complex, the pace fast, the jokes furious, and the climax astounding. And above it all, like a huge dirigible threatening to break from its moorings, hovers the disembodied spirit of Andy Dalziel.

A satire of traditional Christmas stories and noir. A hardboiled elf is framed for murder in a North Pole world that plays reindeer games for keeps, and where favorite holiday characters live complex lives beyond December. Fired from his longtime job as captain of the Coal Patrol, two-foot-three inch 1,300-year-old elf Gumdrop Coal is angry. He's one of Santa's original elves, inspired by the fat man's vision to bring joy to children on that one special day each year. But somewhere along the way things went sour for Gumdrop. Maybe it was delivering one too many lumps of coal for the Naughty List. Maybe it's the conspiracy against Christmas that he's starting to sense down every chimney. Either way, North Pole disillusionment is nothing new: Some elves brood with a bottle of nog, trying to forget their own wish list. Some get better. Some get bitter. Gumdrop Coal wants revenge. Justice is the only thing he knows, and so he decides to give a serious wakeup call to parents who can't keep their vile offspring from landing on the Naughty List. But when one parent winds up dead, his eye shot out with a Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model BB gun, Gumdrop Coal must learn who framed him and why. Along the way he'll escape the life-sucking plants of the Mistletoe Forrest, battle the infamous Tannenbomb Giant, and survive a close encounter with twelve very angry drummers and their violent friends. The horrible truth lurking behind the gingerbread doors of Kringle Town could spell the end of Christmas-and of the fat man himself. Holly Jolly!

Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man.

If, in some post-Marxist utopia, obesity were declared counterrevolutionary, how would a houseful of fat men strike back? If it were possible to win a new body by lottery, what kind of people would choose ugliness? If two gun-toting thugs decided to take over a business -- and run it through sheer terror -- how far would their methods take them? These are the questions that Peter Carey, author of The Tax Inspector and Oscar and Lucinda, brilliantly explores in this collection of stories. Exquisitely written and thoroughly envisioned, the tales in The Fat Man in History reach beyond their arresting premises to utter deep and often frightening truths about our brightest and darkest selves.

In 16 compelling essays about American culture & politics, this author, a scion of the world renowned musical Menuhin family, mixes it up with royalty, revolutionaries, murderers, celebrities & visionaries in a journey that juxtaposes his uncle - classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin - & Frank Zappa. For four decades the author has roamed the underground, writing extensively on his own unique & endearing vision. He has written for & worked at the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Daily News, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle & Psychology Today. His work is often nationally syndicated & anthologized in important books such as Unknown California: Classic & Contemporary Writing on California Culture, Society, History & Politics (Macmillan) & On Bohemia: The Code of the Self-Exiled (Transaction). The author's eclectic musical world includes giants like Woody Guthrie, Janis Joplin, Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Gregor Piatigorsky, Joseph Szigeti, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Arnold Schoenberg, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee & Hoyt Axton. But music isn't everything. As author of the classic Literary L. A. (Chronicle Books) & In Search of Literary L. A. (California Classics Books), he ranges among such nobles as Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Upton Sinclair, Thomas Mann, Howard Fast, Malcolm Lowry, Carl Sandburg & his own godmother, Willa Cather. As a journalist, he has written with intimate knowledge about Cleveland Amory, Herb Caen, Warren Hinckle & General Harrison Gray Otis, founder of the Los Angeles Times. His political coverage is massive, ranging from Abba Eban to Ronald Regan to Jim Garrison & the Kennedys. In the meanwhile, folks like Ed Asner, Ed Sullivan & Oliver Stone populate his Hollywood narrative. These tales collectively rip the masks off the politics, culture & society of the last four decades of the 20th century. Readers will meet some strange, shadowy figures, but also some beautiful visionaries.

For more than forty years, Jack Germond enjoyed an extraordinary career in political reporting. With his trademark no-nonsense style and tremendous wit in abundance, Fat Man in a Middle Seat remembers the personalities that dominated national politics during Germond’s career: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. Germond writes about the real stuff of politics and captures the details of the reporter’s life on the road—the off-the-record briefings and strategy sessions, countless late nights in bars, and overcrowded Friday-night standby flights. In the words of Tim Russert, this is “quintessential Germond—candid, insightful, and irreverent.”