Elegant beauty or not, Iris Brodsky is a 76-year-old walking catastrophe. She can't even get her corpuscles to flow quietly. Everyone assumes she's crazy, but in her humble opinion, that doesn't give them the right to call her a murderer. She finally convinces Charlie Hamilton, that charming 45-year-old widower from the police department, that her late husband was the Homeric monster and Bulgarian spy she always claimed. Her own innocence, of course, is an altogether more complicated matter. Charlie has reasons of his own for believing in Iris and spirits her away just in time from the clutches of a publicity-hungry law enforcement establishment. But from the first inch of their transcontinental American odyssey onward, the colorful pair inadvertently breaks one law after another. Not the most constructive of strategies, but it still doesn't qualify either of them as homicidal. Or does it? From the Atlantic to the Pacific, with perilous collisions along the way, Until I Die describes a life that cannot be measured in years, where even the aged and dying start from scratch in the universal search for significance. There are no failures in this life, other than those unfortunate voyagers who give up before they learn to honor their own souls. For the rest, an instant of clarity is all it takes to validate a lifetime of confused wandering. Or so Iris and Charlie hope.

Our favorite erotica peddler, the nearly real Eddy Casanovitch, is forced to drastically pull in his horns when a young rocket scientist Mallory and the runaway Texan teenagers Sarah and Cozette fall on him from out of the beachy California sky. "You call that a plot?" Alex's New York publisher Grace bellows. Maybe not, but then the ancient love of Eddy's life, the gorgeous Keisha, shows up as a world-class madam with her own fascinating flock. And then the other love of his life, Sarah's Mom Roxie, roars in from Texas to collect her due. All this while Eddy's doing his best to talk Mallory's irritated CEO Daddy out of killing her. The fundamental problem: Eddy's just a regular guy with a vivid, if degenerate imagination. But the more he tries to explain it to neighbors, lovers, vengeful CEOs, and publishers, the less they understand. After all, he wrote all that trash, didn't he? But, as the exhausted man keeps repeating, there's a reason they call it fiction.

Three years later Mike and Tuesday are at it again--except as far as Tuesday's concerned, they're not at anything together. She's ditched her husband and moved on to national network TV. When her reporter nose gets her in trouble-again -Mike grumbles off to the rescue. And finds himself caught in a loony triangle between meddling saints, murderous mobsters, and his alleged ex-girlfriend Frankie, the kindest, sweetest killer-for-hire on the planet.

Sam Spaulding is a tough, violent former war photographer with a Pulitzer Prize and a dead brother Henry who at one time ran one of the ugliest gangs in Los Angeles. Sam finds out he has Stage III intestinal cancer and decides to go out spitting in the face of death. But he reckons without his wife Lydia, who takes on her husband's fatalism with every ruthless weapon at her disposal. The skeletons in Sam's closet hardly help, when they come back to haunt him in the foul-mouthed ex-junkie Rudy Spavik and his angry girlfriend Sheri Ballin. From Los Angeles to the Mexican Baja, this unlikely foursome careens between hell and redemption, never entirely sure which is which. Until a nasty spat with Abe Smullen, the most beautiful drug lord in history, welds them together into a reluctantly indestructible clan.

Mac Macleod always assumed that the grandiose dreams he fulfilled would define his life, that he would live on past his time. Not on a Napoleonic scale, but in terms of companies and factories built, workers employed, generations educated, all that wonderful-sounding stuff. But now he's not so sure. And all it takes to turn his world upside down is a kidnapped 15-year-old daughter and a ridiculous princessly ransom of $200.

Mama never did bake him cookies. But somewhere along the way the beautiful courier Mathilde Durand taught her son Alec to cover his tracks and flee from trouble. Handy skills for a Hollywood B-movie producer who responds to his partner's double-cross by stealing their $9,999,900 in seed money. Especially when the Bulgarian mobster who provided the funds comes looking for him. And when the Bulgarian's masters in the Consortium lose patience and start murdering everyone involved.

All George du Plessis wants to do is daydream about his late wife Izzie and not make a hash of raising their two beautiful daughters, Gisela and Adelaide. Yet for that plan to work, George would need a far less violent and convoluted family history. One thing George does know-he'll be damned if the sins of the European fathers and mothers will be visited upon these American children. And so he might...

What do Confucius, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Descartes, Siddhartha, Hobbes, and Judge Roy Bean have in common? Obviously not much. But meet Mike Miller, Messenger Extraordinaire, the man with the tightest lips in America. After dropping $40,000 on a philosophy degree and bagging three years worth of groceries, Mike finally found a use for all those seers. Twenty-eight years ago he let none other than John Gotti, the Teflon Don, set him up in the messenger business. Discretion required Mike to alias his clients after someone. While you're at it, say hello to Tuesday Miller, Texan beauty queen, TV journalist, and the love of Mike's tight-lipped life. Years ago Tuesday let a dying father talk her into marrying the messenger who refused to deliver Nietzsche's evil news. Everybody loves Tuesday, and yes, Mike means everybody. You couldn't fit two more disparate souls into a marriage. Tuesday's whole thing in life is talking, Mike's is shutting up. Tuesday longs for children, Mike runs in terror from them. Life's complications might befuddle Mike, but Tuesday lets a clear and clean conscience guide her. The only thing this couple agrees on? They are absolute nuts for each other. So why do they bicker so much? And why does Tuesday keep a divorce attorney on retainer? Mike has earned millions traveling the globe in his messenger disguise. Tuesday has earned some of the hottest TV ratings in Los Angeles. Life bumps and grinds along until Confucius pays Mike $15,000 to whisper sweet nothings in his dead wife's ear. After Mike delivers the message -- seriously -- Schopenhauer trashes the Millers' beachfront trailer. Confucius ups the ante by $100,000, but then Bean leaps in and tosses the rules of civilized society out the window. Mike and Tuesday hole up with Descartes after a mystery driver runs over Confucius, then Siddhartha weighs in with a ponderous terminal opinion. In the end the Judge is the villain, but still Mike prevaricates. Tuesday forces the issue and finds herself strapped across the railroad tracks. Just before Hobbes drops his bomb, Mike is finally forced to choose between neutrality and a healthy wife. Who says philosophy can't be fun? Actually, a lot of people, but then they haven't read this book.