This hefty novel returns to the universe of Vernor Vinge's 1993 Hugo winner A Fire Upon the Deep--but 30,000 years earlier. The story has the same sense of epic vastness despite happening mostly in one isolated solar system. Here there's a world of intelligent spider creatures who traditionally hibernate through the "Deepest Darkness" of their strange variable sun's long "off" periods, when even the atmosphere freezes. Now, science offers them an alternative...
A new Matt Scudder novel from the author of the Edgar Award-winning A Dance at the Slaughterhouse. Despite the payment of a hefty ransom, the kidnapped wife of a Brooklyn heroin wholesaler is viciously murdered. Scudder goes after the killers, because in his mind even drug dealers deserve justice.
Multilingual, anarchic spy Evan Tanner once again goes behind the Iron Curtain in this 1966 seriocomic tale. This time, he must break into a Prague prison to liberate a despicable Nazi who will lead Tanner to the documents exposing his network of hatred. As is typical in Block's Tanner yarns, the spy has unusual allies: a gang of Israeli terrorists and a beautiful Czech nymphomaniac. Then Tanner and his charge, Janos Kotacek, make a painstaking journey through Hungary and Yugoslavia and finally to Portugal. The means he devises to silence Kotacek's racist rants, sneak him into the West, and trick him into revealing his secrets are extremely clever.
Matthew Scudder is finally leading a comfortable life. He's sober, he's married, and the state just gave him a private investigator's license. He's growing older, and he's even getting respectable. Then Scudder signs on to help his closest and most unlikely friend, the larger-than-life Hell's Kitchen hoodlum Mick Ballou. And all hell breaks loose. Scudder finds out he's not so respectable after all. He learns the spruced-up sidewalks of New York are as mean as they ever were, dark and gritty and stained with blood. And he discovers he's living in a world where the past is a minefield, the present is a war zone, and the future's an open question.
The devilish Chip Harrison--young, broke, and girlless--stumbles on a discarded bus ticket and finds himself in South Carolina, where he becomes the local sheriff's protege and falls in love with a preacher's daughter.
