"Romcom fans will fall in love with the cheeky charm and wry wit of . . . a delightfully bloke-centered counterpart to Bridget Jones and her diary." — BooklistTo coin a phrase, Josh is suffering a quarter-life crisis. He just broke up with his long-term girlfriend, lost his job, and moved back home with his parents (shudder). Welcome to rock bottom in Bristol. As Josh starts questioning all his life choices, he has a mad thought: Maybe he would just be bet...

On the brink of a milestone birthday he'd rather not celebrate, Henry Bradfield returns to his childhood home in Vermont to find his old belongings are the hottest items at his parents' garage sale. When Henry learns that his prized Spider-Man comics were sold to the son of his high school sweetheart, Erin Chadwick, suddenly vintage collectibles aren't the only things making him feel nostalgic.Tensions in the house rise as a long-simmering rivalry with his younger brother heats up,...

Three seasons into his minor league career, Del Tanner can no longer ignore the obvious: He lacks the power expected of a first baseman. Despite a smooth left-handed stroke and a slick glove, he’s regarded by the brass as nothing more than a warm body clogging a roster spot in A-ball. When his aspiring agent suggests he try steroids, Del makes a choice that will shadow him for the rest of his career.In his second novel, James Bailey (The Greatest Show on Dirt, 2012) humanizes the p...

C.J. Neubauer’s family was dysfunctional long before his mother walked out. At eight, he was just too young to realize it. Now 32, he has spent his entire adult life estranged from the people who should mean the most to him. But when his father kills himself, C.J. is thrust right back into the multi-fronted battle he escaped upon graduating college ten years ago.Almost immediately upon his return home, long-smoldering emotional brush fires flare up with his older brother, sister, a...

Minor league baseball is the land of dreamers, where young men endure months on the road, long bus rides, bad food, and constant pressure while they hone their craft and reach for the next rung up the ladder. Like the players on the field, the men and women who work for the teams put in long hours for low pay to be part of the game they love. It doesn’t take Lane Hamilton long to understand the appeal. When he’s fired for sleeping through an important meeting at the bank where he works, La...

In this gripping, fast-paced thriller, Dr. Robert "Doc" Lamb, trauma surgeon, former Army Special Forces Intelligence officer and CIA covert operative, swore he would never go back to his former life—not after his wife, Grace, was killed in a car bomb meant for him. But when Dr. Greg Johnson—the Broward County medical examiner, and an old friend—asks him to assist with the evaluation of a mysterious John Doe found floating in the Intracoastal Waterway, he begins to be pulled back into the ...

James Bailey's form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was as bizarre as it was unbearable. He was obsessed by a fear of drugs and their effects, believing himself to be in constant danger of becoming insanely high through people spiking his food, or even by just touching a photograph of a marijuana leaf.The treatment programme he went through at a specialist American clinic was challenging, to say the least. He was asked to shake hands and mingle with the local junkies, fighti...

With a loss of confidence at work and on the wrong end of a breakup, James Bailey ran away to Africa in what some might call a midlife crisis. He packed an oversized bag dubbed 'Baby Elephant' and pursued a dream he'd nurtured for years — becoming a safari guide.Through this diary-style narrative, readers experience the highs and lows of life on the African veld. James shares his home in an unfenced camp, the hard slog of guide training, heart-pounding moments with the Big Five, an...

The history of Chicago's street gangs, so I researched news articles, books, forum posts, interviewed old students and people from Chicago communities, and researched old social services records from the 1950s and 1960s. I translate poorly written pieces and stories in meaning. My work also included research into Puerto Rican, Mexican, white, and African American migration, as well as investigating the neighborhoods they lived or still live in, to establish the origins of these street gang...

This two-volume set, LNAI 9651 and 9652, constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 20th Pacific-Asia Conference on Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2016, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2016.The 91 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 307 submissions. They are organized in topical sections named: classification; machine learning; applications; novel methods and algorithms; opinion mining and sentiment analysis; clustering;...

Archodial Bragen is in trouble with the truth. A truth related to bones found in a cave on Apollis, a planet on the edge of the galaxy. This truth unravels everything Synthons know about the past, putting Bragen’s life in jeopardy. With the help of an old mentor, zie begins a journey through time that takes zam from zas own dystopian otherworld to a time when children were more than fables. Avoiding lidscans and thought watchers, Bragen races back and forth through time, in the process fin...