See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. A deadly warning in a deadly game.In the bestselling tradition of The Silence of the Lambs comes The Tower, a novel of nail-biting suspense and heart-stopping terror played out in a psychological battle of wit, cunning, and pure evil between a diabolically clever killer and his determined hunter.The Tower, nicknamed Alcatraz II by law enforcement officials, is infamous as the world's foremost airtight extreme maximum security prison. A futuristic building, it is located offshore of San Francisco, and built to be 100 percent escape-proof. The men who are condemned to spend the rest of their lives there are the most dangerous, violent offenders in the prison system -- men whose crimes have made it imperative that they be separated from society, from one another, and from hope -- forever.Allander Atlasia, a psychopathic killer and himself the victim of a horrible sexual attack as a child, has been sentenced to the Tower for a series of gruesome crimes. But Atlasia manages to do the impossible -- he breaks out of the prison. He makes his way to the mainland and, armed with his own private agenda of hate and murder, begins his killing spree, intent on re-enacting and revenging the childhood tortures that turned him into a monster.Jade Marlow is an ex-FBI agent who has been assigned to hunt down and capture Atlasia. A self-described tracker, Marlow is relentless, fearless, and brilliant -- a loose cannon in a private struggle with his own demons. With a record of irrational behavior and violence, and a kind of genius for putting himself into the mind of a criminal predator that is itself a sort of madness, Marlow may just be the only man smart and diabolical enough to catch Atlasia.Atlasia's victims are the unfortunate bystanders in this complex story of emotional and psychological horror, as they fall prey to this madman's twisted re-enactment of his own depraved past, as he rights the wrongs he feels have been visited upon him. His message to his pursuers is delivered in a particularly chilling manner, a literal realization of the old adage See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.Two men -- one a sinister, inventive, pitiless serial killer, the other a brilliant sleuth and hunter who bears his own heavy burden of dark secrets and impulses -- play out a deadly game against a background of increasingly brutal murders, in which there are no rules but kill or be killed.Superbly written, ingeniously plotted, and enormously entertaining, The Tower marks the debut of a stunning new writer.

Shantyboat dwellers and steamboat roustabouts formed an organic part of the cultural landscape of the Mississippi River bottoms during the rise of industrial America and the twilight of steamboat packets from 1875 to 1930. Nevertheless, both groups remain understudied by scholars of the era. Most of what we know about these laborers on the river comes not from the work of historians but from travel accounts, novelists, songwriters, and early film producers. As a result, images of these men and women are laden with nostalgia and minstrelsy. Gregg Andrews's Shantyboats and Roustabouts uses the waterfront squatter settlements and Black entertainment district near the levee in St. Louis as a window into the world of the river poor in the Mississippi Valley, exploring their daily struggles and experiences and vividly describing people heretofore obscured by classist and racist caricatures.

Insane Sisters is the extraordinary tale of two sisters, Mary Alice Heinbach and Euphemia B. Koller, and their seventeen- year property dispute against the nation's leading cement corporation - the Atlas Portland Cement Company.In 1903, Atlas built a plant on the border of the small community of Ilasco, located just outside Hannibal - home of the infamous cave popularized in Mark Twain's most acclaimed novels. The rich and powerful Atlas quickly appointed itself as caretaker of Twain's heritage and sought to take control of Ilasco. However, its authority was challenged in 1910 when Heinbach inherited her husband's tract of land that formed much of the unincorporated town site. On grounds that Heinbach's husband had been in the advanced stages of alcoholism when she married him the year before, some of Ilasco's political leaders and others who had ties to Atlas challenged the will, charging Heinbach with undue influence. To help fight against the local lawyers and politicians who wanted Atlas to own the land, Heinbach enlisted the help of her shrewd and combative sister, Euphemia Koller, by making her co-owner of the tract. In a complex case that went to the Missouri Supreme Court four times, the sisters fiercely sought to hang on to the tract. However, in 1921 the county probate court imposed a guardianship over Heinbach and a circuit judge ordered a sheriff's sale of the property. After Atlas purchased the tract, Koller waged a lonely battle to overturn the sale and expose the political conspiracies that had led to Ilasco's conversion into a company town. Her efforts ultimately resulted in her court- ordered confinement in 1927 to Missouri's State Hospital Number One for the Insane, where she remained until her death at age sixty-eight. Insane Sisters traces the dire consequences the sisters suffered and provides a fascinating look at how the intersection of gender, class, and law shaped the history and politics of Ilasco. The book also sheds valuable new light on the wider consolidation of corporate capitalism and the use of guardianships and insanity to punish unconventional women in the early twentieth century.

Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, often brings to mind romanticized images of Twain's fictional characters Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer exploring caves and fishing from the banks of the Mississippi River. In "City of Dust, " Gregg Andrews tells another story of the Hannibal area, the very real story of the exploitation and eventual destruction of Ilasco, Missouri, an industrial town created to serve the purposes of the Atlas Portland Cement Company.

In this new edition, Andrews provides an introduction detailing the impact of this book since its initial publication in 1996. He writes of a new twist in the Ilasco saga, one that concerns the Continental Cement Company's attempt, not unlike Atlas's one hundred years earlier, to manipulate the sale of a piece of land near its plant in the town. He explores the uneasy relationship between preservationists and the plant's CEO and officials in St. Louis; the growing movement to preserve Ilasco's heritage, including the building of a monument to commemorate the early residents of the town; and the grassroots petition drive and letter-writing campaign that stopped the Continental Cement Company's machinations.