Book SummaryWINNER TAKE ALLC.W. SchulerThe novel begins in Czechoslovakia on the day the shooting stopped in the European Theater of Operations, May 8, 1945, and ends on August 8, two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The narrative follows a U.S Army Infantry Battalion as it disengages from its combat mission and moves back across the border into Germany. Along the newly established Czech border the Battalion occupies an administrative district approximating the area of an American county where they are responsible for internal security within their zone of operation. In addition the Battalion is required to monitor the flood of refugees crossing the border as they attempt to escape the Czech police and the Soviet army advancing from the East. The former German forced labor camps in the area, whose occupants are now officially designated

Maximilian Fausto is on a mission. His dead mother set him the task of collecting her personal journals, but he quickly discovers that the elusive journals are not so easy to find. And he begins to suspect that his mother planned this journey for his personal growth. He's suspicious and depressed by nature, and he chafes against any attempt to right himself with the world.

Things get rough for Max. He's snared in a destructive love affair; he tangles with an Evangelical family; he narrowly escapes a drug lord's wrath. But working with his fractious family--a brother disabled in Vietnam, a well-meaning but alcoholic uncle, an angry father and a handful of dotty aunts--Max learns the evanescent quality of true love.

This odyssey is filled with heartache as well as joy, with the struggles and triumphs played out against a backdrop of profound longing and deep hope.

A political science major with three years of college under his belt, Charlie R. McNeil has planned his future, but serving in the military and fighting in a war is not part of the future he imagined. The American government thinks otherwise, however; he is drafted into the military, and sent to Korea-an assignment no one asks for. McNeil neither complains nor make waves; he goes where he's told to go and does what he's told to do. When the unexpected happens in Korea and the North Koreans cross the thirty-eighth parallel, Corporal McNeil finds himself immersed in war-a war that came so quickly after WWII that no one believed it possible and none of the military services were prepared. While McNeil moves up in military rank he never loses sight of his goal to earn a degree and work in Washington, DC. But first, he must survive Korea and return home to the United States. A military novel, "McNeil" captures the essence of war and the hardships of life on the battlefield from one young man who has other dreams.

Number one New York Times bestselling author Jocko Willink's fast-paced and exciting thriller Final Spin is a story of love, brotherhood, suffering, happiness and sacrifice - a story about life. Johnny . . . Shouldn't be in a dead-end job. Shouldn't be in a dead-end bar. Shouldn't be in a dead-end life. But he is. It's a hamster-wheel existence. Stocking warehouse store shelves by day, drinking too much whisky and beer by night. In between, Johnny lives in his childhood home, making sure his alcoholic mother hasn't drunk herself to death, and looking after his idiosyncratic older brother Arty, whose world revolves around his laundromat job. Rinse and repeat. Then Johnny's monotonous life takes a tumble. The laundromat where Arty works, and the one thing that gives him happiness, is about to be sold. Johnny doesn't want that to happen, so he takes measures into his own hands. Johnny, along with his friend Goat, come up with a plan to get the money to buy the laundromat. But things don't always go as planned . . .

Families are like snowflakes, in that no two are exactly alike. Each individual has a part to play on the stage of family drama, and those characters can be so different and yet so much alike as they share that clan identity. An individual can change the name or wear a mask, and move away to seek obscurity or fashion some other identity on near or distant frontiers or foreign shores, to dwell among strangers. Fame and fortune are calling, and for some a hermit's life is more attractive. The American traditions of love and romance, marriage and creation of another family institution have conventional conservative designs, but occasionally there is the unorthodox merger of opposites or the union of similar spirits in a compatible but unconventional connubial design. Children are born and grow up in these milieus to inaugurate their own family dramas, taking with them into those relationships all the features that genetics, nature and nurture have provided to equip them for assuming their place to play their part in the drama of human life in the American family tradition. This story is about one of those resulting families of unconventional design.

This is a story of Africa at its most cruel and tender moments. It is a story of violence set against the breathtaking beauty of Nyanga; that is not its real name, but those who were there will know the location. If I Should Die is not about black against white, but of resistance to change and the righting of past wrongs. It is about a war men know they cannot win, but fight anyway, because it's their job. The fight becomes personalized between two combatants who represent the best each side has to offer. Sergeant Wilson is severely wounded and taken away for interrogation. When the injured man's fiance tries to find him, she must make tough decisions in the name of love. Although this action-packed story set in Africa is fiction, most of it did happen. Author Tom Edwards was born in Hampshire, England. He served six years in the Fleet Air Arm branch of the Royal Navy. He then worked several years as an artist before moving to Southern Africa, where he was a freelance newspaper reporter and then a mining engineer in South Africa, Zambia and Namibia, finally settling in what was then Rhodesia. During the Rhodesian conflict, he joined the reserve branch of the security forces, serving on border patrol.

Andy Bishop's quest begins promisingly when he leaves Columbus, Ohio, in 1914 after graduating from the University of Notre Dame. In Austria, Hungary, his goals are threefold: make contact with distant Austrian relatives, practice his nascent journalistic skills, and discover why his aristocratic ancestor, Matthias zu Windischgratz, immigrated to America so long ago. The scenery changes drastically as Andy witnesses the last stand of imperial Austrian society. He arrives just three weeks before the assassination of the Kaiser's nephew, the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, Sophie. This event sparks the fateful slide toward world war and chaos for both family and friends. Andy's fateful decision to remain in the doomed Habsburg Empire after the war begins-and his irresistible attraction to a young Austrian countess-lead him to Budapest, Rome, and finally Paris, as Europe is convulsed by the greatest war since the defeat of Napoleon. Told from the perspective of Andy Bishop, "An American in Vienna" presents historical insight into the Austrian court, royal society, and the demise of a once-powerful empire as it becomes embroiled in the Great War.

"The Last Hookers" is intrigue, danger, action, and romance about aviators in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos Colonel Dunn who were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Their story shines light into dark corners of the NSA and CIA during covert operations in Southeast Asia.

Thessaly alienates her husband Karl, an American air force officer stationed in England, as she defends her mother, a bitter war-widow. Mum attempts to dominate Karl as she does Thessaly. The stress between the trio builds when Mum follows her daughter and Karl to the United States and Gloucester, Massachusetts.

As Karl and Thessaly's children grown up, Thessaly suffers seizures while being haunted by images of Shadowbrooks, the country house where she and her mother fled to during the stepped up bombing in World War II.

Plagued by sleepless nights, Thessaly wonders if the years she can't remember could be connected to this haunting Shadowbrooks house.

Mum comes to stay with them for a month each August which disrupts Thessaly, Karl and their children as Mum distorts and denies the life she and Thessaly had led at Shadowbrooks. Thessaly profoundly dreads her mother coming as she still attempts to dominate them. When Mum suddenly dies, Thessaly's seizures accelerate, but her medical tests are negative.

Convinced her illness is to do with Shadowbrooks. Thessaly sees a Boston psychiatrist who brilliantly unravels her Shadobrooks hauntings. After a trip back to Shadowbrooks, England, Thessaly not only discovers the disturbing story behind her mother and herself, but also the cover-up that had sent both into decades of denial