Showing results by publisher "Dreamscape Media" in City Life

A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: It’s close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and, ideally, very little thinking. Her first gig - watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods - turns out to be inconvenient. Her next gives way to the supernatural: announcing advertisements for shops that mysteriously disappear. As she moves from job to job, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all but something altogether more meaningful.

A pitch-black, Dexter-like thriller with a razor-sharp skewering of our darkest fantasies, in which a Tokyo paparazzo commits murders to generate the photos his magazine’s readership ghoulishly demands. Ken Kato is a half-British, half-Japanese photojournalist working for a low-brow weekly...

My reputation with women stinks. I'll admit I haven't always treated them with the respect they deserve. That's not to say I'm a bad guy or anything. What my sisters and cousin would call toxic, I prefer to think of as selfish. But I'm ready to change everything if it means I'll have a chance with the lovely, sweet, wounded Sofia Diaz—and her adorable son Mateo. They've been through a lot with her ex—and she's still dealing with him far more often than I'd like—but I'm prepared to be there for both of them, to do whatever it takes to make them happy.

Distinguished for his talents as a rat killer, the nameless protagonist of Hye-young Pyun's City of Ash and Red is sent by the extermination company he works for on an extended assignment in C, a country descending into chaos and paranoia, swept by a contagious disease and flooded with trash. No sooner does he disembark than he is whisked away by quarantine officials and detained overnight. Still worse, when he finally manages to reach an old friend, he is told that his ex-wife's body was found in his apartment and that he’s the prime suspect.

When teenagers Jamal Deng and Aisha Saforo are shot dead on the edge of a notorious estate, DS Chris Ashcroft knows why he’s been assigned the case—and he doesn’t like it one bit. Refusing to write the murders off as gang violence, Ashcroft insists on digging deeper—something doesn’t add up.

Young, ambitious and single in New York City in the late ’80s, Faith Sibley is energized by the early success of her Have Faith catering enterprise. But she’s cast into an unexpected new role when she runs into old high school friend Emma Stanstead at a swanky uptown party: sleuth!

The vibrant stories in I’ll Give You a Reason explore race, identity, connection, and belonging in the Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. A young widow goes on her first date since her husband’s death and finds herself hunting a bear in the woods with a near stranger. An unhappy wife compares her mother’s love spells and rituals to her own efforts to repair her strained marriage. A self-conscious college student discovers a porn star who shares her name and becomes obsessed with her doppelgänger’s freedom and comfort with her own body.

Jo Waterstone knows what you should read next. She’s honed the skill of sizing up a person and recommending their next book in the decades she’s worked at Bruebaker’s Books. Her life has been shaped by the store, the bustle of customers exploring the stacks, and managing the eager staff. She can honestly say it’s the best job she’s ever had. Then the store’s elderly owner, Mr. Bruebaker, suffers a stroke, and just like that Jo’s perfect job is on the chopping block. Mr. B’s daughters and the bookstore’s icy CEO think the time is right to close for good, and they order Jo to lock up.

The Vanderhaven family of Manhattan has it all: wealth, prestige, good looks, and a thriving business empire. But their seemingly perfect world is ripped apart when their younger daughter, eight-year-old Brenna, runs off after overhearing her parents arguing. Out on the streets, she quickly realizes shes lost. Even more frightening, Brenna soon realizes that a man is following her. Meanwhile, in a townhouse in Brooklyn, Callie Griffin is throwing a birthday party for her one-year-old son, Oliver. The joy of the day is ruined by her sister Lauren's too-short, drive-by appearance.

Down on her luck, former Wall Street dynamo Gabrielle Clayton agreed to move into Paul Reed’s ramshackle but affordable apartment on the condition that they keep strict personal boundaries. Then Gabrielle discovered she and Paul shared a good deal more than the rent - like one outrageous claw-foot bathtub located smack in the middle of the kitchen - and things started heating up!

In this robust, elegantly plotted, and ultimately life-affirming novel, Zoe Whittall presents a dazzling portrait of the Millennial Generation - the 25-year-olds who grew up on anti-anxiety meds, text-messaging each other truncated emotional reactions, unsure of what's public and what's private. Holding Still explores an unusual love triangle involving Billy, a former teen idol, now an anxiety-ridden agoraphobic; Josh, a shy transgendered paramedic who travels the city patching up damaged bodies; and Amy, a fashionable filmmaker coping with her first broken heart.

Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of 40, they are both working jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful; Joe is floundering; both are in limbo, caught somewhere between mainstream and alternative culture, sincerity and irony, achievement and arrested development.

Copeland Cane V, the child who fell outta Colored People Time and into America, is a fugitive. He is also just a regular teenager coming up in a terrifying world. A slightly eccentric, flip-phone loving kid with analog tendencies and a sideline hustling sneakers, the boundaries of Copeland’s life are demarcated from the jump by urban toxicity, an educational apparatus with confounding intentions, and a police state that has merged with media conglomerates - the highly rated Insurgency Alert Desk that surveils and harasses his neighborhood in the name of anti-terrorism.

In a city teeming with stories, how do lost souls find one another? It’s a question Meg Rhys doesn’t think she’s asking. Meg is a self-identified spinster librarian, satisfied with living with her cat, stacks of books, and her dead sister’s ghost in her New York City apartment. Then she becomes obsessed with an intriguing library patron and the haunted house he’s trying to research. The house has its own story to tell too, of love and war, of racism’s fallout and the ghost story that is gentrification, and of Brooklyn before it was Brooklyn.

London is gripped by terror as a mastermind recreates history's most gruesome murders—without ever dirtying his hands. Paramedic Tom Freedman recruits his killers from the shadows of the internet, manipulating the broken and desperate to carry out his deadly vision. Emotionally damaged criminologist Ethan Marshall is dragged into the case, tasked with stopping a predator who thrives on control and chaos. When Tom's twisted game turns personal, Ethan receives chilling taunts and watches as the killer tightens his grip, pulling him further into the nightmare.

In part two of Homies, Lovers And Friends, Michelle is left with the fact that her life with Tasheem just might have caused her cousin to be murdered. When taking four steps forward, she feels as if she's pushed back fifteen. Just when she thought she had gotten rid of Tasheem and his evil ways, he came back and decided to cause harm to not just her, but Miracle.

With the secrets of Mello’s infidelity, Patsy is left with a baby, drinking problem and decision to make on her marriage. For years Patsy’s life has been about her husband. Will she be willing to work things out with the only man she has loved? Or will she allow her drinking problem get in the way and destroy more than just her life? Michelle and Thor are in a weird place where they love each other, but don’t feel entitled to speak on things in each other’s life.Secrets, love triangles, and tough decisions test relationships in the third of this urban romance series. C

When Louis’ old army buddy Owen shows up with a plan to drive a gang off a local estate, Louis reluctantly agrees to help. But the job turns deadly… After Owen kills the gang’s leader—the son of London’s most ruthless crime lord, Fritz, revenge is inevitable. As Fritz’s fury erupts, Louis and his comrades are dragged into a deadly game of survival. With hitmen closing in and secrets surfacing, Louis must protect his family while confronting Fritz’s crumbling empire. But Fritz, haunted by loss and his double life, is losing control of the world he has built.