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Editorial Content for Happy Birthday

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Amie Taylor

When Valerie Wyatt’s 60th birthday rolls around, there’s no reason to celebrate as far as she can see. In spite of the fact that she looks closer to 40 than 60, is the much-loved television queen of home entertaining, and has an empire that includes glossy books, furniture, fabrics and gourmet food, she finds it hard to enjoy her success on this dreadful day. Especially once an intrepid reporter unearths her true age and announces it on a particularly popular radio show for everyone to hear. Read More

Teaser

 

Danielle Steel follows a mother-daughter duo --- one a glamorous lifestyle arbiter, the other a shy, gifted chef --- both facing turning points in their dramatically different lives, each about to find love where she least expected it.

Promo

Danielle Steel follows a mother-daughter duo --- one a glamorous lifestyle arbiter, the other a shy, gifted chef --- both facing turning points in their dramatically different lives, each about to find love where she least expected it.

About the Book

Valerie Wyatt is the queen of gracious living and the arbiter of taste. Since her long-ago divorce, she’s worked hard to reach the pinnacle of her profession and to create a camera-ready life in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. So why is she so depressed? All the hours with her personal trainer, the careful work of New York’s best hairdressers, cosmetic surgeons, and her own God-given bone structure and great looks can’t fudge the truth or her lies about it: Valerie is turning sixty. 

Valerie’s daughter, April, has no love life, no rest, and no prospect of that changing in the foreseeable future. Her popular one-of-a-kind restaurant in downtown New York, where she is chef and owner, consumes every ounce of her attention and energy. Ready or not, though, April’s life is about to change, in a tumultuous transformation that begins the morning it hits her: She’s 30. And what does she have to show for it? A restaurant, no man, no kids.

Jack Adams once threw a football like a guided missile. Twelve years after retiring from the NFL, he is the most charismatic sports analyst on TV, a man who has his pick of the most desirable twentysomething women. But after a particularly memorable Halloween party, Jack wakes up on his 50th birthday, his back thrown out of whack, feeling every year his age. 

A terrifying act of violence, an out-of-the-blue blessing, and two extremely unlikely love affairs soon turn lives inside out and upside down. In a novel brimming with warmth and insight, beginning on one birthday and ending on another, Valerie, April and Jack discover that life itself can be a celebration --- and that its greatest gifts are always a surprise.

Editorial Content for Drop by Drop

Reviewer (text)

Joe Hartlaub

Keith Raffel, as he will tell you, has lived in two worlds (actually three, as we will get to in a moment). One was in Silicon Valley, where he worked for a high-tech firm and later was instrumental in setting up another company that was a pioneer in the field of “cloud” computing. His first two novels, DOT DEAD and SMASHER, were heavily informed by those experiences. Raffel’s second world is one in which he lived decades ago, a continent across and a world away from Northern California, when he worked in Washington, D.C. Read More

Promo

What Sam Rockman wants out of his stint working for the Senate Intelligence Committee is revenge for the death of his wife. What he gets is danger and betrayal.

About the Book

Stanford professor Sam Rockman suffers the crushing loss of his wife in a bombing at San Francisco Airport. Casting about to find meaning in the ruins of his life, he accepts an offer to come to Washington , D.C. to work for the Senate Intelligence Committee. What Sam wants out of his stint in D.C. is revenge for the death of his wife. What he gets is danger and betrayal. Secret documents are showing up on his doorstep. Russians are trying to poison him. A renegade CIA asset is strewing nuclear materials up and down Interstate 95. Sam finds allies among a savvy Kentucky senator, a billionaire investment banker, his wife's old rabbi, and the president's national security advisor. Too often, he finds himself thrown together with his counterpart on the other side of the aisle, the whip-smart, six-footer Cecilia Plant. Mourning still for his wife, Sam steels himself against Cecilia's appeal and remains suspicious of her motives.

Editorial Content for A Small Hotel

Reviewer (text)

Joni Kretzmer

A SMALL HOTEL, Robert Olen Butler’s latest novel, is an engaging history of a married couple’s relationship with an unconventional format. Throughout the book, the reader is carried into different periods in Kelly and Michael’s life together, from their meeting at Mardi Gras to the beginning of divorce proceedings. The memories described are complemented with flashes of the present. Butler’s ability to engage the reader with his rich descriptions and smooth transitions is evident here. Read More

Teaser

 

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A SMALL HOTEL chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after 24 years of marriage. Rather than go to court on the day they are to finalize their divorce, Kelly drives to the hotel where they fell in love some 25 years earlier, and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her.

Promo

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time, A SMALL HOTEL chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after 24 years of marriage. Rather than go to court on the day they are to finalize their divorce, Kelly drives to the hotel where they fell in love some 25 years earlier, and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her.

About the Book

Set in contemporary New Orleans but working its way back in time,  SMALL HOTEL chronicles the relationship between Michael and Kelly Hays, who have decided to separate after 24 years of marriage.

The book begins on the day that the Hays are to finalize their divorce. Kelly is due to be in court, but instead she drives from her home in Pensacola, Florida, across the panhandle to New Orleans and checks into Room 303 at the Olivier House in the city’s French Quarter --- the hotel where she and Michael fell in love some 25 years earlier and where she now finds herself about to make a decision that will forever affect her, Michael, and their 19-year-old daughter, Samantha.

An intelligent, deeply moving, and remarkably written portrait of a relationship that reads as a cross between a romance novel and a literary page turner, A SMALL HOTEL is a masterful story that will remind readers once again why Robert Olen Butler has been called the “best living American writer” (Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram).

Editorial Content for A Death in Summer

Reviewer (text)

Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

No one heard the shot that hot summer afternoon. Not until the field manager went to the office of his boss, newspaper bigwig Richard Jewell, did anyone even know he was dead. He was across his desk "…with a bit of jawbone and a few teeth and a bloodied stump of spine, all that was left of what had been his head." In his hands he was holding onto one of his many shotguns. Would any of his enemies, who called him “Diamond Dick,” have the temerity to blow his head off? Or did he commit suicide? This is the conundrum facing Detective Inspector Hackett. Read More

Teaser

 

On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell --- known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick --- is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite.

Promo

On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell --- known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick --- is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite.

About the Book

One of Dublin's most powerful men meets a violent end --- and an acknowledged master of crime fiction delivers his most gripping novel yet

On a sweltering summer afternoon, newspaper tycoon Richard Jewell --- known to his many enemies as Diamond Dick --- is discovered with his head blown off by a shotgun blast. But is it suicide or murder? For help with the investigation, Detective Inspector Hackett calls in his old friend Quirke, who has unusual access to Dublin's elite.

Jewell's coolly elegant French wife, Françoise, seems less than shocked by her husband's death. But Dannie, Jewell's high-strung sister, is devastated, and Quirke is surprised to learn that in her grief she has turned to an unexpected friend: David Sinclair, Quirke's ambitious assistant in the pathology lab at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Further, Sinclair has been seeing Quirke's fractious daughter Phoebe, and an unlikely romance is blossoming between the two. As a record heat wave envelops the city and the secret deals underpinning Diamond Dick's empire begin to be revealed, Quirke and Hackett find themselves caught up in a dark web of intrigue and violence that threatens to end in disaster.

Tightly plotted and gorgeously written, A DEATH IN SUMMER proves to the brilliant but sometimes reckless Quirke that in a city where old money and the right bloodlines rule, he is by no means safe from mortal danger.

Editorial Content for My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Ron Kaplan

The dust jacket of this genial memoir depicts a high-stepping Dick Van Dyke in his heyday. But the funny thing about this funny man is that he wasn’t a high-stepper at all. He was a family man, a loyal friend, and a hard worker dedicated to his craft, all of which come across in MY LUCKY LIFE IN AND OUT OF SHOW BUSINESS.

"The book’s title refers to Van Dyke’s self-professed situations: good things seemed to just come his way, with no real planning involved." 

Teaser

 

This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a "simple song-and-dance man," but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.

Promo

This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a "simple song-and-dance man," but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.

About the Book

Dick Van Dyke, indisputably one of the greats of the golden age of television, is admired and beloved by audiences the world over for his beaming smile, his physical dexterity, his impeccable comic timing, his ridiculous stunts, and his unforgettable screen roles. 
            
His trailblazing television program, "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (produced by Carl Reiner, who has written the foreword to this memoir), was one of the most popular sitcoms of the 1960s and introduced another major television star, Mary Tyler Moore. But Dick Van Dyke was also an enormously engaging movie star whose films, including Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, have been discovered by a new generation of fans and are as beloved today as they were when they first appeared. Who doesn’t know the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? 
            
A colorful, loving, richly detailed look at the decades of a multilayered life, MY LUCKY LIFE IN AND OUT OF SHOW BUSINESS, will enthrall every generation of reader, from baby-boomers who recall when Rob Petrie became a household name, to all those still enchanted by Bert’s “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a “simple song-and-dance man,” but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.

by Dick Van Dyke - Nonfiction

This is a lively, heartwarming memoir of a performer who still thinks of himself as a "simple song-and-dance man," but who is, in every sense of the word, a classic entertainer.

Editorial Content for The Three of Us: Growing Up with Tammy and George

Reviewer (text)

Barbara Bamberger Scott

It’s inevitable that when a celebrity’s kid writes a book, people will read it for the inside scoop on the parents. Georgette Jones tries to give us a realistic picture of what it was like to grow up as the only daughter of two of country music’s biggest stars. Her parents had lives bigger than life, and they gave her a giant shadow to get out from under. Her mother was Tammy Wynette, one of three women given the floating title of “queen of country music” in the ’60s and ’70s. The other two were Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. Read More

Promo

Georgette Jones --- the only child of country music’s “First Couple,” George Jones and Tammy Wynette --- pens a memoir about life with her troubled parents and the journey back to a relationship with her estranged father.

About the Book

The marriage of George Jones and Tammy Wynette was hailed as a union made in honky-tonk heaven. And when little Tamala Georgette Jones was born in 1970, she was considered country music’s heir apparent.

For the first four years of her life, Georgette had two adoring parents who showed her off at every opportunity, and between her parents, grandparents, older sisters, and cheering fans, Georgette’s feet seldom hit the ground.

But as in every fairy tale, dark forces were just around the corner. Her parents fought, and George drank. George and Tammy divorced when Georgette was four, and it would be years before she understood just what that meant.

The Three of Us is an honest and heartfelt look into the life of a broken family living in the glare of the public spotlight. Like so many of her generation, Georgette had to make sense of loving two parents who couldn’t love each other. With never-before-told stories about George and Tammy, it recounts Tammy’s descent into prescription pill addiction, her dependence on her fifth husband, George Richey, and her untimely death at the age of fifty-five. Georgette opens up about her broken relationship with her father and what it took for them to come back together. Lastly, Georgette discusses the ups and downs of her adult life: failed marriages, illness, an arrest, and now, an unexpected but thrilling career as a musician.

THE THREE OF US is a story of both extreme privilege and great trials, of larger-than-life people with larger-than-life problems. Rich in country music history, it contains twists and turns, highs and lows, but in the end, it stands as an intensely moving tale of love, loss, heartbreak, and what it means to be a family.

Editorial Content for Threat Warning

Reviewer (text)

Joe Hartlaub

If you are a fan of thriller novels, I hope you’ve been reading John Gilstrap’s Jonathan Grave series. The newly published THREAT WARNING is the third, latest and best in the series --- a character-driven work where the vehicle has four on the floor and horsepower to burn. Read More

Promo

Caught in the crossfire of a random attack, rescue specialist Jonathan Grave spies a gunman getting away --- with a mother and her young son as hostages. To free them, Grave and his team must enter the dark heart of a nationwide conspiracy.

About the Book

The first victims are random. Ordinary citizens, fired upon at rush hour by unseen assassins. Caught in the crossfire of one of the attacks, rescue specialist Jonathan Grave spies a gunman getting away --- with a mother and her young son as hostages. To free them, Grave and his team must enter the dark heart of a nationwide conspiracy. But their search goes beyond the frenzied schemes of a madman's deadly ambitions. This time, it reaches all the way to the highest levels of power...