Showing results by publisher "Phoenix Books" in Literature & Fiction

Stephen Pearse and Peter Maryk are doctors who once worked together to research a horrifying virus outbreak in the Congo. Now Pearse heads the Bureau of Disease Control, and Maryk runs the clandestine special pathogens section of the disease detectives—making the two scientists bitter enemies. But when the disease from the Congo re-emerges in America, they must set aside their differences in order to stop a potential worldwide epidemic. Using the blood of one woman who is immune to the disease, they create a serum that might work—if the disturbingly cunning virus doesn't have plans of its own.

Although she is most famous for her bestselling fiction, Erica Jong started her publishing career as a poet and has an international reputation for her verse. Becoming Light includes early poems previously uncollected in book form, selections from her previous books and many new poems. Erica Jong's poetry exhibits her rare gifts for inventiveness, wit, vigor, honesty and accessibility.

This is the story of Bronx-born David Kokolovitz and his hilarious experiences with sex, Shakespeare, and the South Pacific. We follow David on his journey away from his Bronx home in search of an acting career. In a comedy of opposites, New Yorker David ends up living in the Deep South where he lands his first acting job at a southern Shakespeare repertory company. Just as the hazards of too-tight tights and too-long soliloquies become too much for him, World War II conveniently breaks out and he moves on to entertain the troops.

Combining short fiction with speculative history, this entertaining book invites listeners to look at what didn't happen to gain a richer understanding of what did. What if Napoleon had become emperor of the United States? Could one faulty screw have altered America's atomic-bomb policy? If Lincoln had been assassinated during the Gettysburg Address, would the Confederate States have remained a separate country?

Stories by Seven Renowned American mystery writers offer a delightful mix of mystery, suspense and murder in this new anthology.

Only 35, Jack Whitman is head of long-range planning at a major media-entertainment empire. It has been two years since the senseless murder of his pregnant wife in New York; the tragedy has left him emotionally numb, and blindly ambitious. With the corporation in verge of a merger with its German-Japanese counterpart, Jack becomes caught in a ruthless power play between the scheming CEO and the aging chairman and tastes the bitterness of corporate politics at its most ruthless level.

This collection of the finest short story mystery fiction by the most acclaimed writers, past and present features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Burke, Harry Kemelman, and everyone in between. Edited by multi-award-winning mystery connoisseur Otto Penzler, it offers a delightful mixture of mystery and suspense.

Learn the truth behind the mask of Hollywood in these 10 bizarre tales of dreams and dream weavers, movies and movie-makers, by some of the most respected fantasy writers of our time.

The hardworking single mother of young daughter, Joanna Brady still feels the acute pain of loneliness and loss, the hole that was left in her heart when her policeman husband was murdered. But Sheriff Brady is the law in Cochise County, and murder has shattered the small town's fragile peace. A local gun dealer has died violently, and his stock of high-powered weapons has been cleared out. When two more slayings follow soon after, suspicion falls upon rancher Alton Hosfield.

Lela lives in a fantasy world. It is the only place she can go to escape the horrendous legacy of her father's sexual abuse and his brutal murder of mother. When she joins a loving adoptive family, she buries all the memories of her former life - even her last memory of her sister, Jolene, pledging in a courtroom that she would come back for Lela some day. Then, one day , a strange man walks into Lela's life, bringing with him a neglected child who needs her love.

Tori Nunn went to Buenos Aires to forget. To forget her former life, to forget death of her astronaut brother Greg, who died in a tragic space accident? But when handsome Ariel Solares alerts her to Japanese cocaine dealers shipping nuclear material from Columbia, she won't let go. Soon she's back in her world of spies and counter-spies searching for the links between the Japanese killers, Russian dissidents with a new generation of nuclear weapons, and her own shadowy boss.

A sizzling novel set against the backdrop of the Detroit car world. Champion Motors, one of Detroit's biggest auto manufacturers, is shutting down plants and laying off its workers. Tensions are mounting and violence is erupting. The lack of overtime to go around and a fatal attraction between employees at the plant ends in murder. Rife with scandal, drama, and passion—between and beyond the sheets—Blue Collar Blues is an explosive novel with piercing insight and humor.

America's richest legends come from the frontier - from the land where the events of a single moment might erase the lines between law and lawlessness, between safety and mortal danger, between heroes and villains. The carefully selected stories in this collection are vibrant proof that the great American West is a fertile ground to storytellers. Here is the most varied collection of short stories by 17 highly acclaimed Western writers.

There's the Durango in Colorado, the one in Mexico, and the one in Spain; then there's the fourth one—the California town where god and the Franciscans forgot to found a mission. Now all it has going for it is climate—and splendid isolation. Kelly Vines, a disbarred attorney, and his father-in-law Jack Adair, a former judge just released from prison, are in the market for some isolation, since whoever put Adair in jail seems to have a continuing interest in putting him out of commission.

These 16 stories represent a unique perspective on Orson Scott Card's short fiction, from science fiction to social commentary to pure fairy tale. Included are three new stories not yet published in book form. None have ever been released in audio before.

More than any other writer, Alice McDermott exposes the vein of poetry, of profound joy and pain that transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal. At Weddings and Wakes tells the bittersweet, lovable, human story of an Irish-Catholic family on Long Island as seen through the eyes of two sisters and a brother.

True love comes when you least expect it. It was 1967 at Indiana University when Jana St. James, then 18 years old, met graduate student Robert Waller at a campus coffeehouse where he was playing his guitar. At first what they shared was an innocent friendship and simple love of guitar music. But then their love blossomed into something neither of them ever imagined possible.

Aboard the majestic ocean liner Queen Elizabeth II, the world's most powerful leaders meet to launch a new era of peace and global cooperation. For Chinese terrorists who believe that the summit will make their Asian homeland a pawn of Western imperialist power, this summit represents a betrayal. They infiltrate the ship— and in a terrifying instant, a small, deadly group of fanatics take control and hold the world and its leaders hostage. With the survival of the world's greatest leaders at stake, any misstep will mean the end of the delicate balance that passes for peace.

"I am born" famously begins David Copperfield. However, this is a birth which is blighted by its timing: 12 o'clock on a Friday night at precisely the time the clock began to strike. Such untimeliness means that David was destined to be unlucky in life and would be privileged to see ghosts and spirits, a dubious privilege. In David Copperfield, ghosts and other supernatural phenomena are invoked in relation to a range of male characters and situations.

Bad Dogs Have More Fun is an unforgettable collection of more that 75 newspaper columns by John Grogan, the number-one New York Times best-selling author of Marley & Me. Combining humor, wit, poignancy and affection, these columns provide insight into the intriguing and wonderful world we live in.