A Fistful Of Nothing

The Great Depression never ate the country alive. WWII refuses to put out its raging fires. Every major city across fifty states has been blown sky-high by blitzing.This is 1952, America. The only choice the denizens of a war-torn Los Angeles have left is to plunge into the deep dark of the metro tunnels and make a new life in the ruins of the subway rails below—with elbow grease, neon, and blood. In the crumbling catacombs beneath Hollywood, an ex-private eye named Jim “Jimbo” Maynard scours the dead, dark underworld for payoff on a gamble gone wrong, but stumbles instead on a subterranean metropolis divided by vice, vendettas, mysteries, and murder plots. In order to hunt down the butchers of two seemingly unrelated corpses, Jim will come up against warring mob bosses, backstabbing bookies, mad inventors, tin titans, bootleg rum-running, corrupted coppers, and electromagnetic revolvers. Welcome to The Hollywoodholes. Welcome to your chrome coffin.

A REFUGE FROM THE STREETS... In the abandoned factory known as the Crypt, society's castoffs have found a place to call home. Some of its denizens are hiding or on the run; some have nowhere left to go. But the Crypt protects its own, providing care for street kids as well as medical and magical healing for those in need. It also sports an illegal tap into the Matrix, and hosts a coven of some of the most successful shadowrunners around. COMES UNDER ASSAULT BY A MEGACORP... When a disgraced corporate mover takes an interest in the Crypt—and in a valuable secret long hidden in its foundations—he doesn't intend to let the dregs of Seattle keep him from making the score of a lifetime. But he's about to discover that the Crypt's inhabitants aren't going to be buried so easily...

Greg Rucka has earned the kind of reputation that all thriller writers envy: his crime fiction grabs readers by the throat and compels them to read as if their own lives were at stake. Now, in an electrifying departure, Rucka creates a new kind of hero: a damaged young woman in free fall who’s not only in danger--but dangerous. A Fistful of Rain Mim Bracca is riding the fast lane straight off the end of the world. Now she’s coming home without a job, without a future, and without a prayer--and only one last chance to get her feet under her, or go down forever. But home has its own terrors, including a past Mim has done everything possible to leave behind. Now that past is coming back with the shocking speed and deadly intent of a sniper’s bullet, aimed to destroy her once and for all. When Mim suffers her first blackout, waking up dazed and bloodied, she’s certain she’s hit rock bottom. She’s wrong. She’s only just begun to fall. The photos are invasive, obscene, and all over the Internet for anyone to see. How they got there, where and when they were shot, and by whom, Mim has no idea. And before the investigation into the matter even begins, a brutal murder makes it clear that whatever Mim thinks her life has been up to now, she’s about to learn it’s all a lie. The kind of lie that will kill. Written with stunning originality, A Fistful of Rain crosses the line separating the guilty from the innocent as it takes us on a breakneck ride of deceit and double cross and--quite possibly--the last twenty-four hours in Mim Bracca’s stormy life.

Winner of the Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2019 Shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize and the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award 'Astonishing, staggering' Ben Okri, Daily Telegraph A groundbreaking new history that will transform our view of West Africa By the time of the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for many centuries. Its gold had fuelled the economies of Europe and Islamic world since around 1000, and its sophisticated kingdoms had traded with Europeans along the coasts from Senegal down to Angola since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies - most importantly shells: the cowrie shells imported from the Maldives, and the nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. Toby Green's groundbreaking new book transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa. It reconstructs the world of kingdoms whose existence (like those of Europe) revolved around warfare, taxation, trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, royal display and extravagance, and the production of art. Over time, the relationship between Africa and Europe revolved ever more around the trade in slaves, damaging Africa's relative political and economic power as the terms of monetary exchange shifted drastically in Europe's favour. In spite of these growing capital imbalances, longstanding contacts ensured remarkable connections between the Age of Revolution in Europe and America and the birth of a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa. A Fistful of Shells draws not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, on art, praise-singers, oral history, archaeology, letters, and the author's personal experience to create a new perspective on the history of one of the world's most important regions.

Gypsum LaZelle had nearly given up. She’d already watched her two older siblings experience the transition—the sudden, debilitating process that turned them from ordinary children into mages, gifted spellcasters like their beautiful mother. Perhaps she was a late bloomer, she thought until her younger siblings came into their powers as well. Now, at twenty, Gypsum fears that she must accept her fate: a mundane life without magic. She can live with being ordinary, an outsider. After all, someone in the family had to take after her father…But one day, alone at home wither family away, Gypsum falls terribly ill. And when the symptoms pass, something has changed. Something she’s dreamed of for such a long time—and suddenly, isn’t ready for at all. “One of the most original and important writers of fantasy working in America today.”—The New York Review of Science Fiction

Hired to babysit a spoiled actor whose latest film is being shot in the Valley, Chet and Bernie uncover links between the actor and a long-ago local crime, a situation that is further complicated by the actor's troublemaking cat.

The author of the bestselling Dead Witch Walking makes her hardcover debut with this spellbinding new supernatural adventure featuring the highly original Rachel Morgan. Things are going well for Rachel Morgan, witch, independent runner, and one-third of the runner service Vampiric Charms. She’s got a business, friends, even a semi-regular—and always-sexy—boyfriend. So what if Kisten is a vampire? So’s her roommate Ivy.... But an unexpected call for help sends her out of Cincinnati on a desperate trip to rescue the son of her business partner Jenks. It’s fun at first, even with dealing with a human-sized Jenks (you cannot believe how much trouble a 6-foot pixy can cause, especially when he looks like a supermodel...), but the road trip quickly turns dangerous when confronting an old love becomes a fight for survival. For seeing Nick Sparagmos again is the least of Rachel’s problems--the ancient, mystical statue he has stolen holds the key to sinister, wild magic that can change humans into Weres. And for the first time in milennia, the Were packs are banding together to overthrow human and Inderlander alike. The fight that follows will shake Rachel’s very soul...and she will never be the same.

Money. Love. Family. When it all falls away and she's left with nothing, one unlikely woman must save herself so that she can save humanity. When Alena Ford is exiled from the whitewashed Upper East Side paradise she hid behind and forced to face both the racial injustice--and her painful past--that she pretended to forget, chaos ensues. A desperate move to a gritty section of Brooklyn sets off an adventure she never imagined.She befriends her eccentric new neighbor Gloria, and the woman's stunning amethyst necklace and Black Madonna painting draw her into a world of ancient secrets, dark forces, and powerful magic. Alena is descended from an ancient order called The Bridgers, chosen to save humanity from the origin of evil, the Shetani. To succeed, Alena must first battle the demons of her past; if she loses, the fate of the world is at stake. If Alena hopes to survive a final showdown between good and evil, she will need to awaken gifts bestowed to her lifetimes ago and heed the wisdom of the Beings of Light--but first she must make it through her initiation alive.