Kill the MessengerWith this new thriller, New York Times bestselling author Tami Hoag delivers her own message to suspense fans everywhere: Don't turn off the lights, and keep reading if you dare. From the gritty streets of Los Angeles to its most protected enclaves of prestige and power to the ruthless glamour of Hollywood, a killer stalks his prey. A killer so merciless no one in his way is safe--not even the innocent.At the end of a long day battling street traffic, bike messenger Jace Damon has one last drop to make. But en route to delivering a package for one of L.A.'s sleaziest defense attorneys, he's nearly run down by a car, chased through back alleys, and shot at. Only the instincts acquired while growing up on the streets of L.A. allow him to escape with his life--and with the package someone wants badly enough to kill for. Jace returns to Lenny Lowell's office only to find the cops there, the lawyer dead, and Jace himself considered the prime suspect in the savage murder. Suddenly he's on the run from both the cops and a killer, and the key to saving himself and his ten-year-old brother is the envelope he still has--which holds a message no one wants delivered: the truth.In a city fueled by money, celebrity, and sensationalism, the murder of a bottom-feeding mouthpiece like Lenny Lowell won't make the headlines. So when detectives from the LAPD's elite robbery/homicide division show up, homicide detective Kev Parker wants to know why. Parker is on the downhill slide of a once-promising career, and he doesn't want to be reminded that he used to be one of the hotshots, working cases that made instant celebrities of everyone involved. Like the case of fadingretty-boy actor Rob Cole, accused of the brutal murder of his wife, Tricia Crowne-Cole, daughter of one of the most powerful men in the city, L.A.'s latest "crime of the century."Robbery/Homicide has no reason to be looking at a dead small-time scumbag lawyer or chasing a bike messenger...unless there's something in it for them. Maybe Lenny Lowell had a connection to something big enough to be killed for. Parker begins a search for answers that will lead him to a killer--or the end of his career. Because if there's one lesson he's learned over the years, it's that in a town built on fantasy and fame, delivering the truth can be deadly. The Queen of the Big Time Known and loved around the world for her sweeping Big Stone Gap trilogy and the instant New York Times bestseller Lucia, Lucia, Adriana Trigiani returns to the charm and drama of small-town life with Queens of the Big Time. This heartfelt story of the limits and power of love chronicles the remarkable lives of the Castellucas, an Italian-American family, over the course of three generations.In the late 1800s, the residents of a small village in the Bari region of Italy, on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, made a mass migration to the promised land of America. They settled in Roseto, Pennsylvania, and re-created their former lives in their new home down to the very last detail of who lived next door to whom. The village s annual celebration of Our Lady of Mount Carmel or the Big Time, as the occasion is called by the young women who compete to be the pageant s Queen is the centerpiece of Roseto s colorful old-world tradition.The industrious Castellucas farm the land outside Roseto. Nella, the middle daughter of five, aspires to a genteel life in town, far from the rigors of farm life, which have taken a toll on her mother and forced her father to take extra work in the slate quarries to make ends meet. But Nella s dreams of making her own fortune shift when she meets Renato Lanzara, the son of a prominent Roseto family. Renato is a worldly, handsome, devil-may-care poet who has a way with words that makes him irresistible. Their friendship ignites into a fiery romance that Nella is certain will lead to marriage. But Nella is not alone in her pursuit: every girl in town seems towant Renato. When he disappears without explanation, Nella is left with a shattered heart. Four years later, Renato s sudden return to Roseto the night before Nella s wedding to the steadfast Franco Zollerano leaves her and the Castelluca family shaken. For although Renato has chosen a path very different from Nella s, they are fated to live and work in Roseto, where the past hangs over them like a brewing storm.An epic of small-town life, etched in glorious detail in the trademark Trigiani style, The Queen of the Big Time is the story of a determined, passionate woman who can never forget her first love. Murder at the B-School "Thanks to an assertive, go-getting administration, life at the Harvard Business School has never been better for the faculty members who teach there. Professors' salaries and the student quality are high. Creature comforts abound. Then tragedy strikes." "Eric MacInnes was the school's golden boy - until a misfortune in a campus hot tub leaves him a beautiful corpse. Dealing with this apparently freak accident, Harvard's administrators desperately need somebody to placate both the victim's parents and the Boston police. As Eric's former teacher, a struggling assistant professor at the bottom end of the exalted "B-School"'s tenure track, Wim Vermeer is the natural choice for the assignment." "But Wim is shocked when the drowning begins to look like an ingenious murder. For Eric floated through a rarefied world where everybody has money and power and absolutely nothing to kill for...or so it appears. Now determined to uncover the truth, Wim begins a quest that will take him from the swank hotels of old Boston to the mountain hamlets of upstate New York to the lush beaches of Puerto Rico. Applying his professorial research skills to the gritty real world of high chicanery and low crime, he unearths dark secrets that have been zealously hidden by forces unknown." When further bloodshed suddenly places Wim himself at the top of the suspect list, he seeks out a strategic ally and conceives a daring game plan. The ally is Boston Police Captain Barbara Brouillard, a cop's cop with tangled brown curls and a penchant for making up her own rules. The game plan is to wade straight into the camp of the people who most want him dead - and cut a deal that might just save his life. A Northern Light Sixteen-year-old Mattie Gokey has big dreams but little hope of seeing them come true. Desperate for money, she takes a job at the Glenmore, where hotel guest Grace Brown entrusts her with the task of burning a secret bundle of letters. But when Grace's drowned body is fished from the lake, Mattie discovers that the letters could reveal the grim truth behind a murder.Set in 1906 against the backdrop of the murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Jennifer Donnelly's astonishing debut novel effortlessly weaves romance, history, and a murder mystery into something moving, and real, and wholly original.