Eleven-year-old Warren is flip-flopping between trying to fit in at a new school and being the protective brother of Bennie, who has Down syndrome.

Here’s a memorable tale of two unlikely heroes: the lively, beautiful Flora and her husband, the brooding, studious Simon, two immigrants, both sent to America by their families to find a better life. An improbable match, they meet in New York City and fall in love. Simon—inventor of the jigsaw puzzle—eventually makes his fortune. Now wealthy, Flora and Simon become obsessed with rescuing those they left behind in Europe, loved ones whose fates will be determined by growing anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic. The Puzzle King explores a fascinating moment in history with a cast of characters who endure with dignity, grace, and hope for the future.

This book surveys the labyrinthine relationship between Stephen King and American History. By depicting American History as a doomed cycle of greed and violence, King poses a number of important questions: who gets to make history, what gets left out, how one understands one's role within it, and how one might avoid repeating mistakes of the past. This volume examines King's relationship to American History through the illumination of metanarratives, adaptations, "queer" and alternative historical lenses, which confront the destructive patterns of our past as well as our capacity to imagine a different future. Stephen King and American History will present readers with an opportunity to place popular culture in conversation with the pressing issues of our day. If we hope to imagine a different path forward, we will need to come to terms with this enclosure—a task for which King's corpus is uniquely well-suited.

The Mortal Jigsaw puzzle follows the struggles of a heroic urban vice principal, as he attempts to control a large high school teetering on the verge of chaos. During the course of an infamous day known as Fat Lip Friday, the ghetto principal tries valiantly to keep control of his school in the midst of a full blown gang war. Immersed in an environment replete with urban music, violence, verbiage, and dress, the reader is bombarded with shocking images of life in the modern hood. As the visceral educational conflagration unfolds, the protagonist, Jose Perez, unexpectedly catches glimpses of a diabolical conspiracy of which street gangs are just a small part. Thanks to his keen senses, Mr. Perez slowly collects the pieces to a profoundly disturbing global puzzle comprised of codes, lyrics, art, and symbols of Egyptian, Masonic, and satanic origin. While attempting to place the gratuitous carnage and depravity of the inner city into perspective, Mr. Perez accidentally stumbles upon an interdisciplinary mind control plan which draws upon religion, politics, economics, psychology, marketing, history, and the occult. Alarmed by his findings, Mr. Perez warns his community of their pending doom, only to be hunted down by the very debt cattle whom he tries to save from oblivion. In the end, both his community and his nation are condemned to fall under this nefarious plot, as this educators quixotic mission abruptly ends with an ominous knock on his front door.