New York City cab driver Yuri Davydov is a disgruntled Russian émigré poised to lash out at the adoptive nation he believes has denied him the American Dream. A former technician in the Soviet biological weapons program in Sverdlovsk, BIOPREPARAT, Yuri possesses the knowledge and expertise to wreak havoc in the Big Apple. But before he executes his planned pièce de résistance of retribution against the wealthy Jews of Manhattan he first tests the Anthrax''s efficacy on a dealer in exotic carpets as well as on his increasingly suspicious American-born wife. Dr. Jack Stapleton and Dr. Laurie Montgomery (both last seen in Chromosome 6) begin to witness some unusual cases in their capacity as forensic pathologists in the city''s medical examiner''s office: a young obese black woman dies of respiratory failure on the heels of a Greek immigrant''s succumbing to what initially appears to be a sudden, overwhelming attack of influenza. At the same time, the pair are pressured from above to investigate the death of a prisoner from the blatantly obvious use of excessive force by police. When an unexpected breakthrough persuades Jack that the first two seemingly unrelated deaths are connected, his colleagues and superiors are skeptical. Only Laurie is somewhat convinced. The tension builds as the reader''s complacent assumption of the usual happy ending is eroded away by a never-ending series of twists and turns in the action. For even if the pair of doctors succeeds in solving the puzzle, will they still be able to react in time to keep Yuri and his militant American cronies from snuffing out the lives of a million Manhattanites?

Vector

Set in 1990, Jenny Brix lives in Iowa City. She is a history buff. She even has a Ronald Reagan picture when he was in his 20''s as a lifeguard! When she goes to a meeting, a very old professor has a heart attack. Panicking, she uses CPR on him, thus saving his life. After a few stops to the hospital, he asks her which US president she likes best. She answers Ronald Reagan. So then the professor tells her that she can go back in time and meet him. She is shocked, but the professor keeps telling her it''s true. She finally believes him, sort of. The professor takes her to Dixon, Illinois, Reagan''s childhood home. There professor tells her she has 80 hours to stay out of the timezone, or her body will be used to the other timezones and can''t come back to present day (1990). When she goes into the time machine, it actually is set on 1832, instead of 1932 (where she was going). She then meets Abraham Lincoln (who develops a little crush on her), and Chief Black Hawk during the Black Hawk War. After all of that is straightened out, she goes to 1932 with less than half the time left she started with. Once she gets there she sees a young, handsome Ronald Reagan going past her to save a person from drowning. She then gets some friends, Scooter and Betsy. They say there is a dance at Dixon''s run down, old high school. There she dances with Ronald and his brother. While dancing with Ronald, she falls down the steps with him. They then get a crush on each other. Afer going on a few dates, she has to go to her original timezone. Her and Ronald have a sad exchange (Ronald doesn''t know about the time traveling) when she has to leave. Jenny then takes Scooter and Betsy to Lowell Park, where she shows them the time machine. She then leaves, leaving the others dumbfounded. Wen she comes back, professor says he is Scooter, and spent the rest of his life finding things about the time machine after she left until he finally made the time machine. In the epilogue, Reagan visits Dixon the final time. He goes back to Lowell Park, where he spent 6 years as a lifeguard at. He then sees a familiar face from the past (Jenny) near a tree. He shrugs it off and goes back visiting.

Lowell Park

In his review of Strip Tease, Donald E. Westlake commented that, at the center of all the wackiness was an accessible, touching storyline: a single mother’s quest to rescue her young daughter from a reckless husband and an inadequate foster care system. Skinny Dip has at its center a wife who survives a murder attempt by her husband, and is driven not just by the need to get even, but to find out the reason he did it. This gives the novel more focus than some of Hiaasen’s other books, which often involve the characters running across each other in random ways, or going on unplanned wanderings across Florida. The other central plot is the fight to save the Everglades, and the role that the villains are playing in its destruction. Somewhere along the way, the two plot lines converge, and the quest to take revenge on Chaz becomes tied up with the aim of stopping Red’s pollution. In other words, the reader is offered a choice of which thing to root for: some readers may think that Chaz’s betrayal of the environment for money makes him detestable, but trying to murder his wife is what makes him a true monster; other readers may think the exact opposite. Skinny Dip is also enriched by a variety of subplots: Tool''s gradual moral awakening, as he grows closer to a dying old lady who is too proud to admit that she has been abandoned by her family; Karl Rolvaag''s longing for his native Minnesota, and his search for his escaped pet pythons; Chaz’s obsession with sex and his desperate attempts to reverse the erectile dysfunction which is his only sign of guilt over Joey’s murder, including experimenting with a black-market version of Viagra — "the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) definitely would not approve."; and finally, the suitcase full of money, which changes hands until it falls into the grip of the least likely person in the story. The novel contains many scenes reminiscent of classic farces. For instance, at one point there are five people in the Perrone house, three of whom are trying to hide their presence from the other: at the center is Chaz and his “back-up” girlfriend Medea, with whom he has just unsuccessfully attempted sexual relations; hiding under the bed is Joey, caught in the middle of another infiltration of the house; Tool is in another part of the house, ordered to protect Perrone but ordered by him to stay out of the way of his date; and finally Mick, who enters in search of Joey and, when he encounters Tool, politely asks him if he’s going to try to stop Mick. (“What a dumb-ass question. Of course I am.”) In a similar situation, Chaz, expecting sex with Rose, is drunk and drugged and lured into bed, not knowing that the woman he’s groping for is in fact his wife. Other funny situations arise out of Chaz’s paranoia and ineptness as a killer. He imagines he’s surrounded by enemies, but he always manages to look in the wrong direction. Even when the truth — for example, Joey — is right in front of him, he attributes it to hallucinations caused by the West Nile virus, rather than recognizing it for a sophisticated hoax.

Skinny Dip

In 1965, a mysterious beam of blue light came down from space and overlooked Northern California. This light had extraterrestrial powers that caused whomever the beam touched to die, go mad, or acquire a special unique power. This power is defined as full actualization of humankind, with strengths, understandings and communication abilities that exceed our normal capabilities. The people touched by the light in the novel were soon referred to as "Blues" and were segregated from society because of their new and improved super human powers. Soon after this discovery, they came together to try and find their purpose in the universe. As they look for their calling in life, an evil force emerges which sets the stage for a battle later on in the novel between good and evil. The evil represents the "Gray Man"l which is Horace LaFontaine, a character in the novel who is struck by the light at the moment of death and revived as a demon sent to kill all of the "blues". Once the "blues" discover this nemesis, they take refuge in the forest outside of Northern California. Soon the Gray Man finds out where they are hiding from inside sources and the "blues" come to a consensus in which they are going to confront their enemy and declare war with the Gray Man. This epic battle takes place at the ending of the novel and has an extraordinary finish. The "blues" all use their powers that they were given to destroy the Gray Man. They soon reside in the small cities of Northern California and live normal lives with the people of California.

Blue Light

The main storyline often branches out to flashbacks of significant events in John Wade''s past. John''s childhood is constantly referred to as the advent of his persona, Sorcerer. As a child John was frequently abused verbally and emotionally by his alcoholic father, whom to other children seemed the perfect father. John often visited Karra''s Studio of Magic, where he bought the Guillotine of Death, purchased by his father. John was devastated after his father''s death and channeled his grief into magic. Wade met his future wife Kathy during their college years, becoming intimate with her despite his secretive nature. John spied on Kathy, of which she was aware, just as he was aware of her affair with a dentist. When John was deployed to Vietnam, he and Kathy conversed through letters, some of which frightened Kathy. John became deeply absorbed in his identity as Sorcerer. Charlie Company was involved in a massacre of a village, reminiscent of the real-life My Lai massacre but later, while working a desk job in records, John erased his involvement with the Company. Afterwards, John became lieutenant governor of Minnesota and later ran for the US Senate, with his campaign managed by the business-oriented Tony Carbo. At one point, Kathy has an abortion, despite her great wish to have a baby, because having a child would be problematic for John''s career. After his landslide loss, John and Kathy took a vacation at a cabin in Lake of the Woods. They are continuously troubled by the revelation of John''s Vietnam secrets, but pretend to be happy nevertheless. One night, John wakes up to boil a kettle of water for tea. Instead of preparing a drink, he pours the boiling water over a few household plants, reciting "Kill Jesus", which seems to please him. He remembers climbing back into bed with Kathy, but the next morning she''s gone. After a day of walking around the area and discovering the boat''s absence, John talks to his closest neighbors, the Rasmussens. After some time they call the sheriff and organize a search party. The authorities are suspicious of John''s calm demeanor and noninvolvement in the search effort. Kathy''s sister joins the effort and John begins to search for Kathy as well. After eighteen days the search party is called off and the investigation into John heats up. With a boat from Claude and supplies from the Mini-Mart, John heads north on the lake. Claude is the last person to talk to the disoriented John, over the boat''s radio. O''Brien introduces a number of theories over the course of the story. Maybe Kathy had sped over the lake too quickly, hit a rough patch of water, and had been violently tossed into the lake, where she drowned. Perhaps she had misnavigated the boat and had become hopelessly lost in the wilderness, only to run out of supplies. Or possibly John had returned to the bedroom with the boiling water and had poured it over her face, scalding her. Afterwards he would have sunk the boat and body in the lake, weighed down by a number of rocks. Or the event might have been John''s last great magic trick, a disappearing act. John and Kathy would have planned her disappearance, and to have John join her later on, after the search efforts had been called off, leaving them to a new start at life. O''Brien introduces numerous pieces of evidence to support these theories, and leaves the decision up to the reader. Although the inconclusive ending irritates many readers, O''Brien tries to argue that this is the truest way to tell a story, which is reminiscent of his other book, The Things They Carried.

In the Lake of the Woods

In the late twenty-first century, far out in a nearby asteroid belt, a gigantic derelict castle-like alien spacecraft is discovered by the space exploration vehicle Hermes, commanded by Captain Olof Carlsen. Investigating the spacecraft''s interior, the astronauts first discover the desiccated corpses of giant bat-like creatures, then three glass coffins containing three immobilized humanoids - two male and one female - preserved in a state of suspended animation. Returning to Earth with the preserved humanoids, Carlsen discovers the true nature of the beings when one of them kills a young man, a reporter (and the son of a friend of Carlsen) whom Carlsen illicitly allowed to view the body. The woman kills her victim by completely draining his life-force (a quantifiable energy measured by a device called "lambda-field scanners"), then, when Carlsen attempts to intervene, partially draining him of energy as well. Carlsen is left still alive, but unable to prevent the woman from escaping from the hospital. Carlsen joins forces with Dr. Hans Fallada, a scientist researching energy vampirism and longevity, to find the escaped vampire and recapture her. In the course of their investigations they discover that the aliens can transfer from one body to another, and that the other two have also escaped; they also discover the potential for energy vampirism - and more generalized voluntary energy transfer - that exists in all humans, and the parallels between vampirism, criminality, and sexual fetishization. At last Carlsen tracks down the vampires in London, their leader having possessed the body of the Prime Minister; but their confrontation is averted when representatives from the Nioth-Korghai, the vampires'' original race, appear and offer the vampires (the Ubbo-Sathla, as they call themselves) the chance to regain their original nature as higher-dimension energy-beings. The vampires accept joyfully, but destroy themselves upon regaining the ability to see themselves for what they had become. An epilogue, set nearly a century later, reveals that Carlsen has used the techniques of benevolent energy transference he learned via his encounters with the vampires to live an extraordinarily long life, and possibly (it is implied) to have achieved a kind of transcendence upon his death.

The Space Vampires

People''s Republic begins with us being introduced to Ryan Sharma. Ryan has just completed some punishment laps and finds out that he is being wanted for a mission. Also, we learn about Fu Ning, a Chinese girl living in a Dandong boarding school and wanting to escape. The book then rotates between the two characters lives, eventually showing Ryan going to the USA to infiltrate the Aramov clan through Ethan Kitsell. Ning ends up escaping China and going on the run with her stepmum Ingrid as she is wanted for questioning over her husband Chaoxiang''s involvement in sending illegal immigrants across countries. Ingrid and Ning eventually try to flee China to Britain and end up in Kyrgyzstan. Unfortunately, Ingrid is tortured and is being tried to hand over bank account details so they can go to Britain. In the end, the deal doesn''t work, leaving Ning on her own and trying to get to Britain by herself. Meanwhile, Ryan becomes Ethan''s only friend after his mum and his best friend died, leaving him as his only support after saving his life again. Ryan also saved Ethan''s life when he was hit by a car this helped the part of the plot to bond with him. However, just as they were bonding, a bomb was placed at the bottom of Ethan''s house leaving him and everyone else at a motel. Ethan is then taken into care by a lawyer of his called Lombardi and is about to be taken back to Kyrgyzstan. This leaves Ryan to be sent back to CHERUB campus after hitting his mission controller''s head, Dr D. Ryan, after being taken back to CHERUB is punished with 400 hours of recycling duty but still has a friendship with Ethan. Ning,after being smuggled into Britain is forced to labour making sandwiches and having no way of getting out despite having no money owned to the gangsters there and not wanting to work there. The book concludes with her escaping the warehouse where she was labouring and almost being deported back to China. But, just before the plane leaves, Amy manages to meet up with her and gets her to join CHERUB as she has a boxing champion streak required for the phesique of cherub and she is also very smart required to the mental training as well as the point where she has no parents, afterall Ingrid has died being tortured and her dad is being questioned, so she is a perefect cherub candidate. As Ryan is involved with her story, he gives her a tour around campus and introduces her to everyone there. The book finishes off with Ryan being allowed to get back into touch with Ethan.

People''s Republic

Between World War I and II, a tremendously wealthy Englishman, Bartlebooth (whose name combines two literary characters, Herman Melville''s Bartleby and Valery Larbaud''s Barnabooth), devises a plan that will both occupy the remainder of his life and spend his entire fortune. First, he spends 10 years learning to paint watercolors under the tutelage of Valène, who also becomes a resident of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. Then, he embarks on a 20-year trip around the world with his loyal servant Smautf (also a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier), painting a watercolor of a different port roughly every two weeks for a total of 500 watercolors. Bartlebooth then sends each painting back to France, where the paper is glued to a support board, and a carefully selected craftsman named Gaspard Winckler (also a resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier) cuts it into a jigsaw puzzle. Upon his return, Bartlebooth spends his time solving each jigsaw, re-creating the scene. Each finished puzzle is treated to re-bind the paper with a special solution invented by Georges Morellet, another resident of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier. After the solution is applied, the wooden support is removed, and the painting is sent to the port where it was painted. Exactly 20 years to the day after it was painted, the painting is placed in a detergent solution until the colors dissolve, and the paper, blank except for the faint marks where it was cut and re-joined, is returned to Bartlebooth. Ultimately, there would be nothing to show for 50 years of work: the project would leave absolutely no mark on the world. Unfortunately for Bartlebooth, Winckler''s puzzles become increasingly difficult and Bartlebooth himself becomes blind. A crazed art fanatic also intervenes in an attempt to stop Bartlebooth from destroying his art. Bartlebooth is forced to change his plans and have the watercolors burned in a furnace locally instead of couriered back to the sea, for fear of those involved in the task betraying him. By 1975, Bartlebooth is 16 months behind in his plans, and he dies while he is about to finish his 439th puzzle. Ironically, the last hole in the puzzle is in the shape of the letter X while the piece that he is holding is in the shape of the letter W.

Life: A User''s Manual

A young man from Japan, during the Meiji era, crosses the Pacific Ocean and explores the United States. He finds that of all the places he has seen, he likes coastal California best because of the beautiful Sierra Mountains. Eventually, he returns home to Japan and marries his childhood sweetheart. The young man takes his new bride across the sea and they settle in California, where they have a daughter. As he watches his daughter grow up, the man is filled with nostalgia for his own childhood. He eventually decides to take his family back to Japan when his daughter is nearly grown up. The man is happy to see his old friends again, but moves from the village where he grew up to a city nearby in order to satisfy his daughter, who has spent her entire life living in a city. She eventually marries and has a son, who is the narrator of the story. The man, now the titular grandfather of the story, finds that once again he misses California. He plans a trip to see his adopted country again with his grandson, but never gets a chance to see California again as a result of World War II. His grandson eventually grows up and follows the same journey as his grandfather, understanding his grandfather''s feelings towards two places he called home.

Grandfather''s Journey

The Animorphs plan to have a lazy summer, with several Animorphs attending a pool party and Rachel going to a gymnastics camp. However, before she can leave for the camp, Rachel - in her eagle morph - takes a cruise through the air and, seeing Ax, attempts to say hello but is mobbed by smaller birds, who cause her to crash and lose consciousness. When she awakens, she has demorphed to human but has amnesia. Meanwhile, Jake and Cassie are attending the pool party. Because Marco was not invited, he decides to take Ax along. The two of them morph into mice and crash the party. After they are done terrorizing the guests, they run into the basement to demorph. However, when they demorph, they are attacked by a massive flying monster, known as a Veleek (yeerk word for "pet"). It destroys the house before abruptly dissolving into dust and leaving. The Animorphs regroup and discover that Rachel never made it to the gymnastics camp. Jake, Marco, and Tobias head into the forest to look for her. As Jake and Marco morph to wolves, the Veleek begins to chase after them, and they realize that the Veleek is drawn by the energy generated through morphing. Moments before they are about to collapse from exhaustion, the Veleek flies away. Rachel has been captured by a crazy ex-Controller, who locks her in a wooden shack and sets fire to it. Rachel inadvertently morphs into a grizzly bear to escape, and is then attacked by the Veleek. The two begin to fight, until Ax encounters them mid-combat. He begins to morph and the Veleek captures him and returns to the Blade ship, delivering Ax to Visser Three. Rachel demorphs and makes her way into town, where she hides out in an empty house. When police surround the house and tell her to come out, she morphs into an elephant and breaks through the side of the house. Meanwhile, Jake, Marco and Cassie notice the Veleek floating through the air as dust, and steal Cassie''s father''s truck in order to chase after it. They attempt to play a game of "keepaway", by continually morphing to distract the Veleek, but their plan does not succeed. The truck crashes into Rachel''s elephant form, restoring her memory but drawing the Veleek to all four Animorphs. The Veleek attempts to capture Rachel, but cannot lift her. Jake and Marco continue on in the truck, but crash it again, and Marco is captured by the Veleek. Marco and Ax, now prisoners of Visser Three, are on board the Blade Ship. Ax morphs into a flea and hides on the Visser''s body. He slightly demorphs and remorphs to attract the Veleek''s attention. The Veleek begins to attack Visser Three, causing Visser Three to order the water turned on. In the confusion, Ax and Marco escape from the Blade ship, morphing into birds moments before they hit the ground. From this event, the Animorphs realize that the Veleek does not like water. The next day, Cassie develops a plan: the Animorphs head out to sea, where Cassie finds and acquires a humpback whale. She morphs into a cockroach, and Tobias flies her as high up as he can. While the remaining Animorphs morph and demorph dolphins to keep the Veleek distracted, Cassie demorphs and then morphs into the whale, all the time falling back to the sea. The Veleek attempts to capture her but cannot carry the whale''s weight, and it is dragged into the sea and drowns.

The Andalite''s Gift

The story starts with Chamberlain’s 1938 triumphant return to 10 Downing Street, a public hero after the signing of the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler, declaring "peace in our time." The story ends with the fall of the Chamberlain Government, and the appointment of Churchill as Prime Minister. Churchill, relegated to the periphery of British politics by the late Thirties, lashes out against appeasement despite having almost no support from fellow parliamentarians or the British press. The novel includes many of the momentous historical personages of the day: Chamberlain, the ailing and pacifist Prime Minister; Churchill, the political outcast, whose pugnacity created opprobrium in the public eye; Joseph Kennedy, the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James''s; Guy Burgess, an alcoholic BBC journalist of later Cold War infamy; the machiavellian newspaper mogul, Max Aitken, (Lord Beaverbrook), and the stuttering and insecure King George VI, who personally detests Churchill and tries to persuade his good friend, Lord Halifax, to take the reins of leadership. Winston''s War is the first in a series of novels by Dobbs about Churchill''s wartime leadership. The sequel Never Surrender continues the storyline over the first few weeks of Churchill''s premiership.

Winston''s War

Nearly all the principals in the book have something to hide, and therefore something for Archie and Wolfe to inquire about, but not every secret is criminal, and the balance between private lives (including a passionate but commercially meaningless liaison between two hostile principals) and responsible disclosure is handled adroitly, and far better than in most Rex Stout novels. Just as in Before Midnight the agency partners have strong personality clashes, but this is seen in this book as a price that is paid for complementary talents in a boutique firm. Wolfe''s right-hand man and amanuensis Archie Goodwin is attending a Super Bowl party thrown by his "good friend" Lily Rowan at her East Side penthouse in Manhattan. During the game, there is a spectacular commercial involving parachutists, acrobats, and more promoting a cherry-flavored soft drink call Cherr-o-kee. One of the partners of the ad agency that put on that stunt, Rod Mills, is also at the party, and takes Goodwin aside to say that he''d like help with a problem. Later, all three partners of Mills/Lake/Ryman meet at Wolfe''s office discuss an acute problem of industrial espionage they''ve been having lately: their best ideas being discovered and used by a larger agency representing another cherry-flavored soft drink. The problem as presented by M/L/R is simple: to find the spy within the agency: the source of the industrial esponiage. Therefore, Goodwin has to look into possible links between members of the firm and its rival. While this remains elusive, it becomes clear that the executive of the rival drink''s campaign is the recipient of the information, but it isn''t long before he is found dead in his apartment (by Archie, who else?). This prompts the owner of Cherr-o-kee, a reclusive part-Cherokee billionaire named Acker Foreman to pay Wolfe a visit, along with his two adult sons, Arnold and Stephen. Despite the tense situation, Wolfe gains Acker Foreman''s respect with his knowledge of his career and of Cherokee history, especially the Trail of Tears (documented poignantly by de Tocqueville in Democracy in America). Arnold, however, displays the same hostility as he has to M/L/R personnel. After further investigation, Wolfe gathers the interested parties at his brownstone to lay out his proposed solution, this time without enough evidence to please law enforcement. However, since his mandate is simply to stop industrial espionage, he can (arguably) collect his fee. The rest is left for the reader to discover.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Vector

By Rob Swigart

Lowell Park

No Author Listed

Skinny Dip

By Carl Hiaasen

Blue Light

By Walter Mosley

In the Lake of the Woods

By Tim O''Brien

The Space Vampires

By Colin Wilson

People's Republic

By Robert Muchamore

Life: A User's Manual

By Georges Perec

Grandfather's Journey

By Allen Say

The Andalite's Gift

By K. A. Applegate

Winston's War

By Michael Dobbs

Fade to Black

By Robert Goldsborough