The Hunting Season

Based on his groundbreaking reporting for Vanity Fair, Hunting Season is award-winning journalist James Harkin's harrowing investigation into the abduction, captivity, and execution of James Foley, at the hands of the masked militant known as "Jihadi John" (Mohammed Emwazi), and the fate of more than two-dozen other ISIS hostages. On August 19, 2014, the jihadist rebel group known as ISIS uploaded a video to YouTube. Entitled "Message to America," the clip depicted the final moments of American journalist James Foley's life--and the gruesome aftermath of his beheading at the hands of a masked executioner. Foley's murder--and the choreographed killings that would follow--captured the world's attention, and the Islamic State's kidnapping campaign exploded into war. Hunting Season is a riveting account of how the world's newest and most powerful terror franchise came to target Western hostages, who was behind it, and why almost no one knew about it until it was too late.

YOU DON'T GO ALONE INTO MAD RIVER MOUNTAIN Everything would be okay in the country, thought April Benard, in her new summer home. Here her children would be happy and safe. Here she could spend precious time with the man who had saved her life and given his love. Here she could further her career by researching a clan of remote hill people, an inbred society locked inside their own special, isolated world. Truly, she had nothing to fear in Mad River Mountain. Nothing, that is, until the creatures she considered safe to study stray from the dark woods. Creatures with stunted bodies and pumpkin faces, deformed in flesh and in spirit. Creatures with a hunger for cold vengeance. And a thirst for hot blood. Tourist season is over. The hunting season has begun.

The tenth Anna Pigeon mystery When Anna answers a call to historic Mt. Locust, once a producing plantation and inn on Mississippi?s Natchez Trace Parkway and now a tourist spot, the last thing she expects to encounter is murder. But the man Anna finds in the stand?s old bedroom is no tourist in distress. He?s nearly naked, and very dead, his body bearing marks consistent with an S&M ritual gone awry. On a writing table nearby is an open Bible, ominous passages circled in red. It seems the deceased is the brother of Raymond Barnette, local undertaker and a candidate for sheriff, who wants to keep any hint of kinkiness out of the minds of the God-fearing populace. Ray may be hiding a house full of secrets in the old family homestead, but before Anna can start her investigation, she?s waylaid by malevolent poachers, peevish co-workers, and a suddenly turbulent romantic life. And when hidden agendas and old allegiances are revealed, it?s suddenly Anna?s life that's on the line.

Julia Brennan's debut novel, _Hunting Season_, is part auto-fiction, part lyric essay, part lament, part film journal, part performance, and part exorcism. Challenging traditional victim/perpetrator narratives, _Hunting Season_ is an intimate investigation into the ways we learn to love and wound. "A kind of fortress: elaborately constructed, designed to protect and to withstand the dangers that are everywhere around us. An imaginative, frightening and heartbreaking tour de force." (CAROLE MASO) "Brennan's cinematic fiction moves through the vignette-influenced narrative landscape with an expression of loneliness like a rifle flung over the hard shoulder of postmodern storytelling: you never know when her rifle will go off, leaving you bruised, cut in halves or quarters, or heartbroken. _Hunting Season_ is 'a slow amputation' of love, film, disaster, agony, tamed or nonchalant sadomasochism and sexual fantasies?. Come here and let her destroy you. Tenderly." (VI KHI NAO) "_Hunting Season_ frees the bildungsroman from its orthodox chronologies and wearisome protagonists. As in Ferrante, we see a woman artist come of age. She comes of age, ages, travels back, comes again. How best to repurpose an education in patriarchy? Like Ferrante, or Amina Cain, Eugene Lim, or Cristina Rivera Garza, Julia Brennan refuses to sacrifice to the gods of narrative arc. _Hunting Season_ plots in phenomenological ecotones, those sites produced in the connective tissue between mothers and children, hunters and prey, lovers and lover's ghosts, or the multiple paramours of a single artist." (DANIELLE PAFUNDA)

A teenage girl goes missing. When Hal, an intellectually disabled farmhand, returns from a hunting trip with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight, Alma Costagan and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of.

Eight years ago, the Austrian emergency services were called to the scene of a bizarre car accident. Eight years ago two mangled bodies were found in the snow not far from the vehicle, clawed and chewed, it seemed, by some ferocious animal. Eight years ago something unspeakable took Gerontius Moore's parents from him, leaving him orphaned and alone... And now, that something, is back. Caught up in a hunt he was never meant to be a part of, and finding help from a most unlikely source, Gerontius must once more flee the clutches of an appalling beast, before it learns its business is unfinished. Full moon or not, the hunt is on.

Stubborn, lethal, and from Jersey...what more could a Viking warrior want from his woman? Neecy Lawrence, winged warrior for a Viking Goddess, doesn't know what to do with a nice guy. Most days she's barely polite, much less nice. But Raven leader and loyal Odin warrior Will Yager isn't just nice. He's gorgeous, hot, and determined to have Neecy in his bed and his life until Ragnarok comes. It's just too bad Neecy is the most difficult woman Yager has ever known. Second in command to the Crows, a violent band of rowdy warrior women, Neecy's only concerns are keeping her "girls" safe and making up for a past she can't outrun. As far as she's concerned, Yager is nothing but a distraction she can't afford to deal with. But Yager wants Neecy. In fact, he's wanted her for a long time. Not just for a night, but forever. And like any self-respecting Viking, Yager will risk everything to get the one woman who makes his warrior life more than worth it.