The #1 international bestselling crime thriller that introduces Belgian detective Pieter Van In, "a brusque cop with every bad habit you can think of" ( The New York Times Book Review).The beautiful medieval architecture of Bruges belies the dark longings of her residents. When the wealthy and powerful Ludovic Degroof's jewelry store is robbed, nothing is stolen, but the jewels have been dissolved in jars of aqua regia, an acid so strong that it can melt ev...

Declan O Donnell has sailed out of Oregon and deep into the vast, wild ocean, having had just finally enough of other people and their problems. He will go it alone, he will be his own country, he will be beholden to and beloved of no one. No man is an island, my butt, he thinks. I am that very man. . . .But the galaxy soon presents him with a string of odd, entertaining, and dangerous passengers, who become companions of every sort and stripe. The Plo...

A must-read for anyone who grew up in America during the 50s and 60s.Revenge on a teacher. Saturday nights at the Drive-In. Fast cars, midnight shopping, and teenage sex. You’ll recognize the characters. They might have had different names in your town, but the escapades are universal. Relive your teen years with Brian, Marsha, Fusco, and the gang from Norwalk.

Brian Doyle was a one-of-a-kind author who wrote one-of-a-kind prayers about everyday subjects that help readers change the way they see the world.Prayers for cashiers and good shoes; for shorter sermons and better senators; prayers for the bruised, foolish, glorious, stumbling, brilliant Church; for chaplains and mathematicians; for idiot authors and muddy dogs: These are the most heartfelt and headlong prayers you will ever read and share—the grinning, snarling prayers we mouth q...

In the second novel by the international bestselling Pieter Aspe, Inspector Van In races against the clock to thwart a series of terrorist plotsOne quiet snow-covered Sunday morning in Bruges, a prominent business executive is found dead in the streets, apparently due to an alcoholic hemorrhage, but for Inspector Van In, there is something about the autopsy that does not add up. When he questions the businessman's friend, a Dutchman, he too is found dead the next m...

Brian Doyle might just be the most passionate storyteller in America. In this eclectic and compelling collection of stories Doyle writes about his discovery of the incarnated Spirit of God every time he turns around, often in the most unlikely of people, places, and things. In 37 short snapshots, he captures the spiritual essence of everyday life from the perspective of a committed Catholic who loves his faith, his family, his community, and his church, even with all their warts and failin...

"An affectionate homage," this novel of Stevenson's evolution into an adventure writer is "a loving reconstruction of an era of storytelling now lost" ( New York Times).The young Robert Louis Stevenson, living in a boarding house in San Francisco in the nineteenth century while waiting for his beloved's divorce from her feckless husband, dreamed of writing a soaring novel about his landlady's adventurous and globe-trotting husband, John Carson—but he never ...

Both intimate and irreverent, The Mighty Currawongs taps into the small truths of what makes a life worth living—from the oddly hilarious to the cherished and pure.A collection of headlong tales by Oregon author Brian Doyle—exploring such riveting and peculiar topics as chess in the Levant, tailors who specialize in holes, how to report stigmata to your attending physician, the intense hilarity of basketball, how to have a bitter verbal marital fight in yo...

If you love to read, or write, or both, you'll appreciate Brain Doyle—passionate observer of and commentator on all things written. In this ultimate collection of his thoughts on writers and writing and readers and reading, he covered everything from what the books people keep stashed in the cars or sitting on their bookshelves tell you about them, to the pleasures of reading box scores or what's hung on refrigerator doors, to the scent that books and newspapers give off as they age, to li...

Brian Doyle himself explains it best: “A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet and the great Bernard Darwin’s golf stori...

When Ryan's dad runs away from home because of the change of life, Ryan is sent to spend the summer with his aunt in Peggy's Cove.He goes fishing, almost gets into big trouble and learns a lot about tourist behavior, but most of all he misses his dad and hopes he'll come back soon.

What does it mean when people say You can’t compare apples and oranges”? Are comparisons across genres inherently invalid, or can they be insightful and illuminating? In this brilliant and provocative collection of essays, Dutch author Maarten Asscher maintains that comparisons can be the highest form of argument.Asscher makes his case with examples drawn from classical to contemporary history, art, and literature: Hamlet in Ithaca and Telemachus in Elsinore, the Mediterranean and...