To American soldiers in Vietnam, "back in the world" meant America and safety. To Tobias Wolff's characters, Back in the World is where lives that have veered out of control just might become normal again. Unfortunately, the men and women in these gripping, pungent, and wonderfully skewed stories have only the vaguest notion of what normal is. A gentle priest finds himself in a Vegas hotel with a hysterical, sun-burned stranger. A...

Jack Morgan receives an offer he cannot refuse. When the head of the world's foremost investigation agency receives at invitation to meet Princess Caroline, third in line to the British throne, he boards his Gulfstream jet and flies straight to London. The Princess needs Morgan's skills, and his discretion. Sophie Edwards, a close friend of the Princess, has gone missing. She needs to be found before the media become aware of it. Morgan knows there...

The U.S. Secretary of State is going to a meeting in Libya when her plane crashes. The CIA hires Juan Cabrillo, a unidexter, to search for her. The crew locates the plane, but the Secretary of State has vanished. But what does it all have to do with a two-hundred-year-old naval battle? What are the ancient Islamic scrolls the Libyans seem so determined to find? The search for answers leads Cabrillo into another pitched battle at sea -- this time against...

To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry, Maine, was just their hometown: familiar, well-ordered, a good place to live. It was the children who saw--and felt--what made Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, It lurked, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each person's deepest dread. Sometimes It reached up, seizing, tearing, killing ... The adults, knowing better, knew nothing....

On his first night with Detroit PD, Officer Walter O'Brien is called to a murder scene. A terrified twenty-year-old has bludgeoned her kidnapper with skill that shocks even O'Brien's veteran partner. The young woman is also a brilliant escape artist. Her bold flight from police custody makes the case impossible to solve, and, for Walter, even more impossible to forget. By the time Walter's promoted to detective, his fascination with the missing, gray-eyed...

Meg Murry, her brother Charles Wallace, and their friend Calvin O'Keefe become involved with unearthly strangers and a search for Meg's father, who has disappeared while engaged in secret work for the government.

When her best friend Lydia disappears, Piper Sail goes searching for answers in the dark underbelly of 1924 Chicago, uncovering deep corruption that may lead back to her affluent neighborhood.

"Soviet Union in 1973, there is perhaps no greater honor for a young girl than to be chosen to be part of the famed USSR gymnastics program. So when eight-year-old Anya is tapped, her family is thrilled. What is left of her family, that is. Years ago her mother disappeared. Anya's only confidant is her neighbor, an older woman who survived unspeakable horrors during her ten years in a Gulag camp--and who, unbeknownst to Anya, was also her mother's...

Relates the exploits of the four Alden children as they locate a missing man. "Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny used to live alone in a boxcar. Now they have a home with their grandfather and are determined to solve the mystery that surrounds an old yellow house on his property. Strange things have happened in that house where long ago a man disappeared. When the Boxcar Children explore the house, they find an old letter written by the brother of...

"A bolt of lightning on my kicks ... The court is sizzling. My sweat is drizzling. Stop all that quivering. Cuz tonight I'm delivering," raps basketball phenom Josh Bell. Thanks to his dad, he and his twin brother, Jordan, are kings on the court, with crossovers that make even the toughest ballers cry. But Josh has more than hoops in his blood. He's got a river of rhymes flowing through him - a sick flow that helps him find his rhythm when everything's...