Compulsion

Milo and Alex search for a killer who is targeting women but using different MOs.

The basis of the award-winning film starring Orson Welles, Compulsion gives a shocking fictionalized account of the Leopold-Loeb murder case--in which two young graduates of the University of Chicago kidnapped and killed a child for the intellectual challenge. "A graphic and absorbing reconstruction of an infamous crime".--Saturday Review.

Beautiful Creatures meets The Body Finder in Compulsion, the first novel in a spellbinding new trilogy. All her life, Barrie Watson has been a virtual prisoner in the house where she lived with her shut-in mother. When her mother dies, Barrie promises to put some mileage on her stiletto heels. But she finds a new kind of prison at her aunt’s South Carolina plantation instead—a prison guarded by an ancient spirit who long ago cursed one of the three founding families of Watson Island and gave the others magical gifts that became compulsions. Stuck with the ghosts of a generations-old feud and hunted by forces she cannot see, Barrie must find a way to break free of the family legacy. With the help of sun-kissed Eight Beaufort, who knows what Barrie wants before she knows herself, the last Watson heir starts to unravel her family’s twisted secrets. What she finds is dangerous: a love she never expected, a river that turns to fire at midnight, a gorgeous cousin who isn’t what she seems, and very real enemies who want both Eight and Barrie dead.

From New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan comes a gripping new thriller. A lethal attack with no clear motive…and a killer dead-set on keeping the truth buried. A bomb explodes on a sunset charter cruise out of Friday Harbor at the height of tourist season and kills everyone on board. Now this fishing and boating community is in shock and asking who would commit such a heinous crime—the largest act of mass murder in the history of the San Juan Islands. Was the explosion an act of domestic terrorism, or was one of the dead the primary target? That is the first question Special Agent Matt Costa, Detective Kara Quinn and the rest of the FBI team need to answer, but they have few clues and no witnesses. Accused of putting profits before people after leaking fuel endangered an environmentally sensitive preserve, the West End Charter company may itself have been the target. As Matt and his team get closer to answers, they find one of their own caught in the crosshairs of a determined killer. Don’t miss THE MISSING WITNESS, the brand-new page-turning thriller from New York Times bestselling author Allison Brennan! A Quinn & Costa Thriller Book 1: The Third to Die Book 2: Tell No Lies Book 3: The Wrong Victim Book 4: Seven Girls Gone Book 5: The Missing Witness

Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.

A new Marxist theory of the abstract and impersonal forms of power in capitalism Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchment amidst crisis and unrest, Mute Compulsion offers a novel theory of the historically unique forms of abstract and impersonal power set in motion by the subjection of social life to the profit imperative. Building on a critical reconstruction of Karl Marx’s unfinished critique of political economy and a wide range of contemporary Marxist theory, philosopher Søren Mau sets out to explain how the logic of capital tightens its stranglehold on the life of society by constantly remoulding the material conditions of social reproduction. In the course of doing so, Mau intervenes in classical and contemporary debates about the value form, crisis theory, biopolitics, social reproduction, humanism, logistics, agriculture, metabolism, the body, competition, technology and relative surplus populations.

Dr. Frank Clevenger, a brilliant forensic psychiatrist, is eager to leave the world of the criminally insane behind-until he receives a chilling phone call. Close friend and former colleague North Anderson, now the Chief of Police on the exclusive island of Nantucket, is desperate for help in solving a shocking case: One of the infant twin daughters of billionaire Darwin Bishop has been murdered in her crib at the family's estate. The suspected killer is her adopted brother Billy, and investigators believe that the fugitive teenager has targeted the surviving twin. But as Clevenger maps the Bishop family's psychological layers he uncovers some disturbing revelations that lead him to believe Billy may be innocent. The Bishops are a deeply troubled family. As charming as he is ambitious and cruel, Darwin seems determined to protect his son-but is he actually trying to railroad him? Why does Garret, Bishop's other son, despise his father so intensely? Is beautiful Julia Bishop a mother grieving for her murdered child or a manipulative seductress with a dark secret to hide? As Clevenger fights to protect the innocent and hunt down the guilty, aspects of the case begin to collide with demons from his own past. After a life-threatening attack the forensic psychiatrist knows he must penetrate the killer's psychosis in order to identify him before the Bishop family-and Clevenger himself-become the next victims. Using his mastery of psychiatry, Clevenger lays a trap to reveal the murderer in an unforgettable finale.

Today has to be perfect. Magic. I look at the clock. 10:14 AM. Ten fourteen. One plus one is two plus four is six plus ten is sixteen minus one is fifteen minus two is thirteen. OK. I turn from the clock and walk into the hallway. "Ready." Saturday will be the third state soccer champion­ship in a row for Jake Martin. Three. A good number. Prime. With Jake on the field, Carson City High can't lose because Jake has the magic: a self-created protection generated by his obsession with prime numbers. It's the magic that has every top soccer university recruiting Jake, the magic that keeps his family safe, and the magic that suppresses his anxiety attacks. But the magic is Jake's prison, because sustaining it means his compulsions take over nearly every aspect of his life. Jake's convinced the magic will be permanent after Saturday, the perfect day, when every prime has converged. Once the game is over, he won't have to rely on his sister to concoct excuses for his odd rituals. His dad will stop treating him like he is some freak. Maybe he'll even make a friend other than Luc. But what if the magic doesn't stay? What if the numbers never leave? Acclaimed author Heidi Ayarbe has created an honest and riveting portrait of a teen struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder in this breathtaking and courageous novel.