Stephen Thorne

Love and the erratic heart are at the center of Hardy's story. Set in the beautiful Blackmoor Vale, The Woodlanders concerns the fortunes of Giles Winterborne, whose love for the well-to-do Grace Melbury is challenged by the arrival of the dashing and dissolute doctor, Edred Fitzpiers. When the mysterious Felice Charmond further complicates the romantic entanglements, marital choice and class mobility become inextricably linked.

Lucas and Katya were boarding school seniors when they decided to have a baby. Seventeen years later, and after a decade of absence, Lucas is newly involved in his daughter Vera's life. But after Vera suffers a terrifying psychotic break at a high school party Lucas takes her to Vilnius, Lithuania, his grandmother's homeland, for the summer. As he uncovers a secret about his grandmother, a Home Army rebel who escaped Stutthof, Vera searches for answers...

"Cold Storage, Alaska, is a remote fishing outpost where salmonberries sparkle in the morning frost and where you just might catch a King Salmon if you're zen enough to wait for it. Settled in 1935 by Norse fishermen who liked to skinny dip in its natural hot springs, the town enjoyed prosperity in the mid-20th Century, at the height of the frozen fish boom. But now the cold storage plant is all but abandoned and the population is shrinking every...

Master criminal Parker and his cohorts return to an abandoned country church where they had been forced to abandon the spoils of a bank heist, an endeavor during which he drives an old choir van and works to outmaneuver foes on both sides of the law.

The heist was a piece of cake. It didn't bother Parker that the priceless statue was in a Russian diplomat's house … because he had no scruples about ripping off a Red. It didn't bother Parker that his ex-girlfriend had blackmailed him into pulling this job … because he figured out how to make an extra fifty grand on the deal. It did bother Parker that somebody else was trying to steal the statue first-because being second wasn't Parker's style....

"A Scandal in Bohemia" is the first short story, third overall work featuring Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Watson recounts that a masked visitor to Baker Street is quickly deduced to be the hereditary King of Bohemia. The King is to become engaged to a young Scandinavian princess. However, five years before, he had a liaison with American opera singer, Irene Adler. Fearful that the marriage would be called off, he had sought to...

"Joseph Barkeley gets more than he bargains for when he agrees to authenticate the original manuscript of Bram Stoker's DRACULA, and personally transport it to Romania"--

Jonathan Rothwell is the principal economist at Gallup, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a visiting scholar at George Washington University. He lives in Washington, DC. Twitter @jtrothwell Why political inequality is to blame for economic and social injustice Political equality is the most basic tenet of democracy. Yet in America and other democratic nations, those with political power have special access to markets...

Buddhism asserts that we each have the potential to free ourselves from the prison of our problems. As practiced for more than twenty-six hundred years, the process involves working with, rather than against, our depression, anxiety, and compulsions. We do this by recognizing the habitual ways our minds perceive and react - the way they mislead. The lively exercises and inspiring real-world examples Cayton provides can help you transform intractable...

The United States military now views cyberspace as the "fifth domain" of warfare, alongside land, air, sea, and space. The Pentagon, the National Security Agency, and the CIA field teams of hackers who launch cyber strikes against enemy targets--and amass staggering quantities of personal information on all of us. These same virtual warriors, along with a growing band of private-sector counterparts, are charged with defending us against the vast array...