New York City children's author Erinn Winters is haunted by a past no one knows, and dark visions of death and danger that come to her without warning. But when a desperate search for her estranged sister leads her to Wolf River, Montana, Erinn suddenly finds her secrets, even her very life, at risk. And after meeting notoriously sexy Jase Fortune, Erinn finds herself in another kind of danger--she could lose her heart.
Jase Fortune is as committed to staying single as he is to running his booming family ranch--until mysterious, gorgeous Erinn shows up. But someone is out to destroy the Fortunes, and Jase finds himself willing to do anything to protect not only his family but Erinn too. As the peril mounts, so do Erinn's and Jase's feelings for each other, but the promise of love is threatened by deadly secrets and vicious enemies, and a killer who will stop at nothing....

Irish immigrant brothers Michael and Thomas O'Driscoll have returned from the brutal front lines of the Civil War. Unable to adapt to life as farm labourers, they re-enlist in the army and are thrown into ferocious combat with Red Cloud's coalition of Indian tribes in the heart of Montana's Powder River Valley. Thomas finds love amidst the daily carnage-which leads to a moment of violence that will change the brothers' lives forever. Meanwhile, following a double murder in a brothel, Lieutenant Martin Molloy sets off to track down the killers. As he journeys to a remote outpost, he meets Irish nationalist rebels and anti-immigrant nativists who prove to be opposed to his investigations. Wolves of Eden blends intimate historical detail and emotional acuity in a haunting narrative that explores themes of morality, the resilience of the human spirit and the injustice implicit in warfare.

The refereed proceedings of the International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing and Applications, ISPA 2003, held in Aizu, Japan in July 2003.

The 30 revised full papers and 9 revised short papers presented together with abstracts of 4 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications on Web-based and intranet systems, compiler and optimization techniques, network routing, performance evaluation of parallel systems, wireless communication and mobile computing, parallel topology, data mining and evolutionary computing, image processing and modeling, network security, and database and multimedia systems.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for.

With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters-losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

FEATURED ON BARACK OBAMA'S 2019 READING LIST SHORTLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 'SPECTACULAR' Guardian 'A WONDER' Daily Mail 'SPARKLING' The Times 'EXQUISITE' Observer 'MAGNIFICENT' TLS 'EPIC' Entertainment Weekly 'A TRIUMPH' LitHub 'INFECTIOUS' Financial Times 'A MASTERPIECE' Sunday Express Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life, biding her time with her youngest son - who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home - and her husband's seventeen-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits. Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts. He sees lost souls who want something from him, and he finds reprieve from their longing in an unexpected relationship that inspires a momentous expedition across the West. Mythical, lyrical, and sweeping in scope, Inland is grounded in true but little-known history. It showcases all of Tea Obreht's talents as a writer, as she subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West, making them entirely - and unforgettably - her own. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Guardian, Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The New York Public Library 'Should have been on the Booker longlist' Claire Lowdon, Sunday Times 'Magnificent... Brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Toni Morrison's Beloved' Times Literary Supplement 'Exquisite ... The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn; the prose is hard, muscular, more convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself' Alex Preston, Observer

Since Dracula's rise to power a shadow has swept across the nation, but nowhere is it darker than in the Deep South. Throughout the plantations, swamps, and cities, rumours abound of grotesque rituals, hooded figures, and bizarre creatures. Most terrifying of all, however, are the whispers of ancient magic - unspeakable arcane rituals and occult powers that can lead those who wield them towards mystical supremacy. or reduce them to gibbering wrecks.

This new supplement for Dracula's America: Shadows of the West introduces two new factions: the corrupt cultists of the Church of Dagon and the Salem Sisterhood, occult practitioners whose history dates back to the early Colonies. New stealth rules allow for all manner of sneaky and underhanded tactics, while expanded rules for arcane powers offer glory but could cost you your sanity. Alongside these are a host of new scenarios, Hired Guns, monsters, skills, and gear to challenge or assist those who dare venture into the Deep South of Dracula's America.

A nameless rider plods through the desert toward a dusty Western town shimmering on the horizon. In his latest novel, Robert Coover has taken the familiar form of the Western and turned it inside out. The lonesome stranger reaches the town -- or rather, it reaches him -- and he becomes part of its gunfights, saloon brawls, bawdy houses, train robberies, and, of course, the choice between the saloon chanteuse or the sweet-faced schoolmistress whom he loves. Throughout, Robert Coover reanimates the Western epics of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, infusing them with the Beckettian echoes, unique comic energy, and exuberant prose that have made him one of the most influential figures in contemporary American literature. It is, as The Washington Post Book World put it, "a fast-forward, ribald vision of the American West, a free-for-all that slides from surreal to ridiculous like a circus-goer's grin through a funhouse mirror ... a heady frisson, a salon entertainment, one helluva ride."

'If you read only one western in your life, this is the one' Roland Smith, author of Peak He rode into our valley in the summer of 1889, a slim man, dressed in black. 'Call me Shane,' he said. He never told us more. There was a deadly calm in the valley that summer, a slow, climbing tension that seemed to focus on Shane. Seen through the eyes of a young boy, Bob Starrett, SHANE is the classic story of a lone stranger. At first sight, the boy realises there is something unusual about the approaching man, but as Bob gets to know Shane, he realises that there is an inner sadness in him. SHANE is the story of a gunfighter who tries to hang up his gun but is drawn to the side of the boy's family and other homesteaders in their struggle to keep from being forced off their land.

An old elk hunter has set up an isolated camp in the Big Horn Mountains of northeastern Wyoming a week ahead of the opening of rifle season for a little "quiet time" before the rest of his "family" shows up. Alois, Ace, Gronsky and his dog Dozer are sucked into events that swirl around their idyllic setting, as teams of suspicious strangers set up three camps in separate locations in the vicinity. Not only are the strangers unfriendly, they are downright hostile to anyone snooping around. Little wonder; they plan to shoot down Air Force One on its way back from Jackson Wyoming. Five Jihadists are broken out of the new prison in nearby Wesley Montana and given the equipment they believe will shoot down the president's plane. The jihadists are purposely set up for failure. Air Force One goes down. The "home grown" Wyoming Militia, with collusion from corrupt law enforcement, wipe out the Jihadists, and the government manipulated media tells the world that the POTUS (the President of the United States) and his family are dead while those responsible have been destroyed. Ace has rescued his kidnapped Indian friend from the Jihadists and they witness the shoot-down of Air Force One and two escort fighter jets. They also witness the deployment of the president's escape pod and the pilot ejected from one of the fighters. If things were not bad enough already, Ace, his friend, Billy Black Stone, and fighter pilot Melanie, Yaz, Yasulevicz, must protect the first family from the teams bent on finishing the job, and battle winter conditions in the mountains of northern Wyoming. Despite the snow, things really heat up during the climax of this tale.

The Western, though a singularly American art form, is one of the great genres of world literature with a truly global readership. It is also durable despite being often unfairly maligned. Ever since James Fenimore Cooper transformed frontier yarns into a distinct literary form, the Western has followed two paths: one populist - what Time magazine famously billed 'the American Morality Play' - capable of taking many points of view, from red to redneck, but always populist, with a sentimental attachment to the misfit; the other literary - eschewing heroism, debunking with unsettling candour many of the myths of the West. It can sometimes be difficult to draw a sure line between the two forms, but both are represented in this outstanding collection which includes stories by Rick Bass, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Larry McMurtry, Mari Sandoz, Christopher Tilghman, and Mark Twain, among many others.

She sat down on the porch. "Did you get amnesia in Iraq?" He was busy putting Lizzy in the passenger's seat and shutting the door. When she said Iraq, he jerked his head and frowned. "I never went to Iraq." "Then the uniform was a hoax to pick up women?" Griffin stopped. "Six years ago my identical twin brother went to Iraq. He was killed two days after he got there. Are you mistaking me for Graham?" "Holy shit. Two of you?" Julie whispered. Julie Donavan is looking for a place to start over with her young daughter, but the very thing she's running from shows up in the form of her new next-door neighbor Griffin Luckadeau, hunky rancher and single dad who's absolutely infuriating... Griffin owns the ranch next door and is the twin brother of Graham, the soldier she'd had a one night stand with six years before and who was the biological father of her daughter. She never saw Graham again, and he was killed in Iraq shortly after he arrived. Ever since Graham passed, Griffin has stayed focused on running the ranch. The last thing he needs is a distraction from the woman who moved into the feuding ranch next door. But when his daughter insists she wants to be friends-or better yet, sisters-with the girl who looks like her twin, the sparks begin to fly. The Lucky Cowboys: Lucky in Love (Book 1) One Lucky Cowboy (Book 2) Getting Lucky (Book 3) Talk Cowboy to Me (Book 4)

The first in a new series featuring an avenging agent appointed by President Grant to settle scores and see that all is right in the West. Zak Cody, son of a wily prospector and an Apache maiden, is thought to have retired as a colonel serving under General Grant, but in his transition to Presidency Grant has appointed this war hero to the role of enforcer and avenging angel of America's untamed regions. Now "the Shadow Rider" and his ebony steed Nox patrol the west assuring that wrongs are righted and those of ill will meet their maker. Heading for a rendezvous at an Army outpost in Arizona he comes across wagon train savaged by Indians and a young woman in need of saving, but not all is as it seems. Dark forces on all sides work to insight genocide and claim the land, and all its riches, as there own.

Capturing the essence of the Southwest in 1915, Oliver La Farge's Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel is an enduring American classic. At a ceremonial dance, the young, earnest silversmith Laughing Boy falls in love with Slim Girl, a beautiful but elusive "American"-educated Navajo. As they experience all of the joys and uncertainties of first love, the couple must face a changing way of life and its tragic consequences.

As a winter storm looms over Ambrose County in January of 1992, a local woman's body is discovered and believed to be the latest victim of a horrifying West Texas serial murderer known as The Red Queen Killer. Christopher Cantwell (Halt and Catch Fire, The Blue Flame, Iron Man) calls the series: "...the perfect kind of Texas noir-timeless, sinister, funny, kind, and poignant." Collects THAT TEXAS BLOOD #14-19

Larry McMurtry returns to the Old West in a fast-moving, comic tale about a woman determined to conquer anything that stands in the way of an ultimate confrontation with her wayward husband.

In his first historical novel in ten years, Larry McMurtry introduces Mary Margaret, a nineteenth-century version of the formidable, unforgettable Aurora Greenway of Terms of Endearment. Mary Margaret is married to Dickie, who hauls supplies to the forts along the Oregon Trail and, as Mary Margaret rightly suspects, enjoys the pleasures of other women across most of the frontier. Fed up and harboring a secret love of her own, she collects the kids; her brother-in-law, Seth; her sister, Rosie; and her cranky father and makes her way westward to settle things once and for all.

The story of their trek across the country is packed with the elements McMurtry fans love: encounters with historical figures such as Wild Bill Hickock and U.S. Army colonel Fetterman (whose incompetence resulted in one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of the American West), larger-than-life fictional characters who join the family on their journey, and confrontations with nature at its wildest. With characters based on actual traders of the Old Santa Fe Trail, Boone's Lick is vintage McMurtry.

Sundance, Butch & Me tells the story of Etta Place-an outlaw woman whose original identity may never be known. She accompanied the leaders of the Wild Bunch as they ran rampant over the American West, traveled to New York City, and finally fled to South America. Judy Alter's storytelling and impeccable historical research bring the era of the old west to life while highlighting the life of Etta Place.

Cherokee Rose tells the story of Rodeo cowgirl Tommy Joe Burns, an Oklahoma girl who earned the praise of Theodore Roosevelt for her daring and bravery as a rough-stock rider in the early years of the 20th century. Judy Alter's storytelling and impeccable historical research bring the era of the old west to life while highlighting the life of Tommy Joe Burns.

Arizona Territory, 1871. Valeria Obregon and her ambitious husband, Raul, arrive in the raw frontier town of Tucson hoping to find prosperity. Changing Woman, an Apache spirit who represents the natural order of the world and its cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, welcomes Nest Feather, a twelve-year-old Apache girl, into womanhood in Aravaipa Canyon. Mexican and Anglo settlers have pushed the Apaches from their lands, and the Apaches carry out raids against them. In turn, the settlers, angered by the failure of the U.S. government and the military to protect them, respond with a murderous raid on an Apache encampment under the protection of the U.S. military at Camp Grant, kidnapping Nest Feather and other Apache children. In Tucson, while Valeria finds fulfillment in her work as a seamstress, Raul struggles to hide from her his role in the bloody attack, and Nest Feather, adopted by a Mexican couple there, tries to hold on to her Apache heritage in a culture that rejects her very being. Against the backdrop of the massacre trial, Valeria and Nest Feather's lives intersect in the church, as Valeria seeks spiritual guidance for the decision she must make and Nest Feather prepares for a Christian baptism.

Hailed as one of "the best novels ever set in America's fourth largest city" (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry's "comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension" (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the "mundane happiness" of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, "El Chevy," bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable characters joins the naive troubadour's pilgrimage to California and back to Texas, including a cruel, long-legged beauty; an appealing screenwriter; a randy college professor; and a genuine if painfully "normal" friend. Since the novel's publication in 1972, Danny Deck has "been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life" (McMurtry), a testament to the author's incomparable talent for capturing the essential tragicomedy of the human experience.

The year is 1864. Sister Thomas Josephine, an innocent Visitantine nun from St Louis, Missouri, is making her way west to the promise of a new life in Sacramento, California. When an attack on her wagon train leaves her stranded in Wyoming, Thomas Josephine finds her faith tested and her heart torn between Lt. Theodore F. Carthy, a man too beautiful to be true, and the mysterious grifter Abraham C. Muir. Falsely accused of murder she goes on the run, all the while being hunted by a man who has become dangerously obsessed with her. Her journey will take her from the most forbidding mountain peaks to the hottest, most hostile desert on earth, from Nevada to Mexico to Texas, and her faith will be tested in ways she could never imagine. Nunslinger is the true tale of Sister Thomas Josephine, a woman whose desire to do good in the world leads her on an incredible adventure that pits her faith, her feelings and her very life against inhospitable elements, the armies of the North and South, and the most dangerous creature of all: man.