GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO It's 1965 and the Beatles have turned pop music upside down. In the South, the Civil Rights movement is gathering momentum behind Martin Luther King. In Vietnam, the war is heating up. And in Ojibway, Michigan, cheerleader Susie Porter accuses her algebra teacher of rape. Attorney Joseph Daniels, unaware that his son Robbie has loved Susie since grade school, agrees to defend the teacher. His decision thrusts Robbie into a world he never dreamed existed. Part To Kill a Mockingbird, part American Graffiti, Postcards of the Hanging is the story of a young man discovering that life is never simple and that truth is often painful.

Diane Ramsey has a wealthy husband, a beautiful home, two lovely children - and a blackmailer. She turns to Hartford PI Zach Barnes for help, but the damning photographs keep showing up in her mail. All she can tell Barnes is, "That isn't me." Barnes follows a 25-year-old trail of abuse and deceit to the secrets Diane doesn't even know she keeps, and the monster who still pulls her strings...and will kill to keep it that way.

The Whammer Jammers: chicks on wheels, dirty deals, and everything you never dared ask about roller derby. Suspended after a "questionable" shooting, Hartford cop Tracy "Trash" Hendrix hires on to protect the local skaters from vandals while they prepare for a match to fund a women's shelter. He suspects a skater's ex-boyfriend, but the guy has an alibi when that shelter gets torched-and an even better one when he turns up dead. Then a skater is killed in a drive-by, and Hendrix knows someone plays rougher than the roller girls. Unless he can figure out who it is before the match begins, the wheels really will come off.

On Monday, Principal Peter Galvin welcomes the committee that will evaluate Ribicoff High School for accreditation-just as someone guns down a student outside the main entrance. On Tuesday, homicide cop Abigail Teague tells him she fears that the shooting will incite a gang war. On Wednesday, student teacher Kim Dombrowik finds drugs in a student's locker, and there's a riot in the school cafeteria. Thursday really sucks. And the evaluation committee won't leave until Friday... The novel follows a principal, a student teacher and a female homicide detective on their journeys through the minefields of poverty, racism, and local politics to find a killer and stave off a full-scale gang war. While Laura Lippman's To The Power of Three and Jody Picoult's Nineteen Minutes have also dealt with a school shooting, Liskow, a former teacher, is the first to look at how such tragic events impact the teachers and students who inhabit the building and how the tragedy will change everyone who is involved, sometimes for the better, but usually for the worse.

Anywhere else, fifteen will get you twenty. Along the turnpike, fifteen will get you dead. When beautiful fifteen-year-old Stacy Kendall disappears, her wealthy parents hire Hartford PI Zach Barnes to find her. Barnes fears that the girl is dead...until a brunette who looks like her shows up in a security video outside a sleazy motel room. Inside that room, a man lies dead. Overnight, Stacy turns from a kidnap victim to a murder suspect-and her parents' worst nightmare. To save the girl, Barnes invades a thriving trade in teen sex-trafficking, blackmail, and murder. Getting in is easy. Now he has to get back out.

In 1991, Jeremy Garth and Thunder Lizzard were poised to become Detroit's Next Big Thing. They went into the studio to cut the album that would make it all happen. Then Garth turned up dead in his car and took the unfinished album and the band with him. Now Re-Run Records hires Chris "Woody" Guthrie to find those lost session tapes for a memorial CD, and Guthrie finds that all is not peace and harmony in the Motor City. Three other people from that ill-fated session are also dead. Another is missing. All the cases are still open. Talk about Number One with a bullet...

For a romance writer, murder is the ultimate kiss-off... In Who Wrote The Book of Death? someone wants to finish off the writer instead of the book. When PI Zach Barnes agrees to protect a woman from death threats, he assumes that her name isn't really Taliesyn Holroyd. Unfortunately, he also assumes she really is writing a novel. She assumes that he's stopped drinking after his own wife's murder. What else they don't know could bury them both along with the book.