Heartless

Long before she was the terror of Wonderland—the infamous Queen of Hearts—she was just a girl who wanted to fall in love. Long before she was the terror of Wonderland, she was just a girl who wanted to fall in love. Catherine may be one of the most desired girls in Wonderland, and a favorite of the unmarried King of Hearts, but her interests lie elsewhere. A talented baker, all she wants is to open a shop with her best friend. But according to her mother, such a goal is unthinkable for the young woman who could be the next queen. Then Cath meets Jest, the handsome and mysterious court joker. For the first time, she feels the pull of true attraction. At the risk of offending the king and infuriating her parents, she and Jest enter into an intense, secret courtship. Cath is determined to define her own destiny and fall in love on her terms. But in a land thriving with magic, madness, and monsters, fate has other plans. In her first stand-alone teen novel, the New York Times-bestselling author dazzles us with a prequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Former investigative journalist Zoe Greene was so traumatized by a serial killer she put behind bars, she vowed never to ask probing questions again. Now writing for a soap-opera digest, she has become obsessed with soap-star Warren Clark, and doesn’t hesitate to join him for several sexually-satisfying weeks at his home in San Esteban, Mexico. But her best friend Steve Sorenson knows something about the charming tourist town that Zoe doesn’t—the brutally mutilated body of a teenage boy was found there recently, his heart torn from his body. And Steve fears that Zoe is headed straight into danger. From the moment Zoe arrives in San Esteban, things go drastically wrong. Warren disappears for long stretches of time. Other Americans she meets are hiding strange black crosses and blood-tipped cactus plants in their homes. When more people end up dead, their hearts also torn out, Zoe’s investigative instincts kick in. But even as she follows an ominous trail of clues, Steve’s discoveries suggest that she’s next on the killer’s list, and it may already be too late to save her.

A romantic sci-fi thriller Captain Kiera Bo is a valiant resistance fighter, but years of interstellar war have hardened her heart. To win, she must be as inhuman as her enemy: the all-conquering cyborg Dominion. When she’s captured by a Dominion battleship, at the mercy of Thaarn, its ruthless half-metal warlord, she expects only torture and death. But Thaarn—destroyer of worlds, slayer of countless thousands—is no longer the mechanical Dominion killer he once was. With his cyberwire implants failing, he’s regaining his lost humanity—and he’s driven to atone for the slaughter he’s wrought. When Thaarn offers an unthinkable alliance, Kiera sneers at his ‘guilt’ for trickery. The Dominion feel no pain, no remorse, no emotion other than rage. But with mutiny brewing among Thaarn’s murderous crew—and the fate of an entire resistance colony in her hands—Kiera must face the truth about her own dark crimes, and choose: die with her humanity intact, or win as a monster… A 20,000 word space opera novella

Sally lives with her mysterious family in a cavernous home overlooking Los Angeles. When a visitor arrives, Sally’s dark secrets—and the secrets of those around her—threaten to come to light.

What happens when a serial killer has the mafia after him? When a serial killer murders the sister of a big mob guy, the chase is on to catch him before the police do. HEARTLESS takes you into the mind of a killer. It reveals his thoughts and feelings before, during and after the kill. It offers a brilliant perspective of the police detective's challenge, a chilling inside look at how the mafia operates, and the lengths they will go to catch the killer. Follow the fear and apprehension of the beautiful Melissa Burke as she becomes the center of the insanity. The mafia is after the killer. The detective is after the killer, and the killer is after Melissa. This cold-blooded pursuit peaks with a brutal ending when they all meet. Can the mafia outrun a street smart cop, especially when their mutual target is a cold-hearted serial killer in New York City who removes the hearts of his young beautiful victims like Melissa Burke? After she got a glimpse of him as he left a club with her best friend and then killed her, Melissa becomes the sole obsession of the killer's eye. His next victim is the sister of Rocky T a prominent mob captain. The race begins between whether the street smart tough cop or the mafia will catch the killer before the killer cuts apart his next victim. This cat and mouse, blood spattered adventure peaks as the killer sets his sights on Melissa Burke. The pursuit of the killer leaves a heartless trail of victims and a blood thirsty spree as they all meet in a riveting standoff that forces a Machiavellian ending. Heartless is Book Two in a series of four.

Welcome to the unsteady world of Dustin Conrad, a twenty-something psychotic depressive who, on the brink of suicide meets a god that offers to save his life and fix all of his problems ... for a price. Crashing through boundaries of traditional storytelling, HEARTLESS is a terrifying twist on the Romance novel. Ambitious in scope and design, Durchholz has crafted a novel that seamlessly blends real-world insanity and metaphyiscal conspiracy. Filled with rich characters and enough plot twists to choke on, this is a novel like no other. Featuring anthropomorphic mirages, talking dogs, vampire robots, crabs with human faces, upside-down pages, missing words, pages from another novel...if you start to question your sanity...that's the point. You'll be okay...promise.

When a beautiful young woman is brutally murdered, the police turn their attention to the victims of the online dating service scam she was running. Mia and Jack opt to go in a different direction to find the woman’s killer—and when they do, a dark and sinister path opens up that nobody could have seen coming.

Heartless is Book 1 in the Iron Reapers MC trilogy. Books 2 and 3, Merciless and Ruthless, are available everywhere now! She’s a good girl who’s too innocent and pure to know what it means to be around someone like me. But this isn’t about what she wants. It’s about what I want. And what I want is to wreck the good girl in every way I can. Claim her. Use her. Make her mine. New Orleans might be the Big Easy, but this girl is anything but. I was here on business for my club—the Iron Reapers MC—when Sasha came into my life. She’s a good girl surrounded by a city of sin and debauchery. She’s so innocent that from the first whiff of her, I couldn’t keep myself away. She’s too good of a girl to be wrecked by a monster like me. I want to see how far I can push her. How much she can take. I want to hear the soft moans from her lips when I pull her close. But I don’t just want to make her moan. I want to make her scream. Scream to be taken. Scream to be used Scream to be mine.

The tremendously relatable protagonist of Tasma Walton's debut novel has en ever-evolving understanding of love. At the age of seven, she discovers that love doesn't necessarily last forever. At 21, she finds love but it escapes her. When she is 35, she learns that love can be dangerous. By the age of 49, she realizes that the greatest love of all comes from the heart. Readers will recognize themselves in the main character's loves and mistakes in this moving and confronting tale about the power of the human heart, the worthiness of its desires, and the often dire consequences of ignoring them.

From New York Times bestselling legend Mary Balogh—and the beloved author of Longing, Silent Melody, and Beyond the Sunrise—comes a ravishing novel of passion and duty, love and menace.... Life has taught Lucas Kendrick, Duke of Harndon, that a heart is a decided liability. Betrayed by his elder brother, rejected by his fiancée, banished by his father, and shunned by his mother, Luke fled to Paris, where he became the most sought-after bachelor in fashionable society. Ten years later, fate has brought him back home to England as head of the family who rejected him. Unwilling as he is to be involved with them, he must assume responsibility for his younger siblings, the family estate he once loved—and the succession. He faces the prospect of marrying with the greatest reluctance—until he sees beguiling Lady Anna Marlowe across a ballroom one night. Anna, far from being the bright-eyed innocent Luke takes her for, is no more a stranger to the shadows of a painful past than he is. But for her, marriage cannot so easily solve what is wrong in her life—not when a tormentor stalks her to the very doors of Bowden Abbey, where Luke and Anna must learn to trust in each other or risk any chance they may have for a happy future.

As the size of the United States more than doubled during the first half of the nineteenth century, a powerful current of anxiety ran alongside the well-documented optimism about national expansion. Heartless Immensity tells the story of how Americans made sense of their country’s constantly fluctuating borders and its annexation of vast new territories. Anne Baker looks at a variety of sources, including letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, schoolbooks, as well as visual and literary works of art. These cultural artifacts suggest that the country’s anxiety was fueled primarily by two concerns: fears about the size of the nation as a threat to democracy, and about the incorporation of nonwhite, non-Protestant regions. These fears had a consistent and influential presence until after the Civil War, functioning as vital catalysts for the explosion of literary creativity known as the “American Renaissance,” including the work of Melville, Thoreau, and Fuller, among others. Building on extensive archival research as well as insights from cultural geographers and theorists of nationhood, Heartless Immensity demonstrates that national expansion had a far more complicated, multifaceted impact on antebellum American culture than has previously been recognized. Baker shows that Americans developed a variety of linguistic strategies for imagining the form of the United States and its position in relation to other geopolitical entities. Comparisons to European empires, biblical allusions, body politic metaphors, and metaphors derived from science all reflected—and often attempted to assuage—fears that the nation was becoming either monstrously large or else misshapen in ways that threatened cherished beliefs and national self-images. Heartless Immensity argues that, in order to understand the nation’s shift from republic to empire and to understand American culture in a global context, it is first necessary to pay close attention to the processes by which the physical entity known as the United States came into being. This impressively thorough study will make a valuable contribution to the fields of American studies and literary studies. Anne Baker is Assistant Professor of English at North Carolina State University.

The first female author in Dennis Cooper's groundbreaking "Little House on the Bowery" series.

What will the world look like in thirty years’ time? How will humanity survive the oncoming effects of climate change? Set in the near future and inspired by the world around us, Gravity Is Heartless is a romantic adventure that imagines a world on the cusp of climate catastrophe. The year is 2050: automated cities, vehicles, and homes are now standard, artificial Intelligence, CRISPR gene editing, and quantum computing have become a reality, and climate change is in full swing—sea levels are rising, clouds have disappeared, and the planet is heating up. Quinn Buyers is a climate scientist who'd rather be studying the clouds than getting ready for her wedding day. But when an unexpected tragedy causes her to lose everything, including her famous scientist mother, she embarks upon a quest for answers that takes her across the globe—and she uncovers friends, loss and love in the most unexpected of places along the way. Gravity Is Heartless is bold, speculative fiction that sheds a hard light on the treatment of our planet even as it offers a breathtaking sense of hope for the future.

Earth, 2050. Pregnant, unemployed, and living back home with her father, climate scientist Quinn Buyers wonders how she got to this point in her life. Her famous scientist mother is mysteriously missing, the planet is at risk from a massive solar storm, the Transhumans want to take a colony to Titan, and her assisted living companion, a robotic meerkat, is showing clear signs of anxiety and depression. But her biggest challenge is her partner. How can she reconcile her long-distance relationship with this reserved, enigmatic cyborg? The sequel to Sarah Lahey’s debut novel and the second book in the Heartless Series, Nostalgia is Heartless delves into the world of near future, exploring a society on the brink of climate catastrophe. This time, Quinn’s adventures take her across the globe to Antarctica . . . where it rains all day, every day. Readers will delight in following Quinn’s journey as she races to save her family, her planet, and—hopefully—her love life.

She was the one woman I couldn’t resist . . . Half past thirty and still single, my father rode my ass daily about getting married, starting a family, and looking the part. I needed to soften my enforcer image and have the outward appearance that I was on the straight and narrow. When I argued that I wasn't ready to settle down, he explained that no one ever was, and none of them ever did...with a wink. I laughed, until I thought about my mother. I might be a tough guy in a dangerous world, but I wanted a woman who could handle me at my worst and positively adore me at my best. Was that so much to ask of a wife? There'd only ever been one girl who came close to that: Marla. She was plenty tough herself. She had to be. She grew up in the world, as well. And when she came to me asking for help to avenge her brother’s death, I was more than happy to help . . . for a price. Marriage. To me. A mafia capo . . . the very thing she swore she’d never do. Heartless Sinner is the first book in the Made for the Mafia series. Each book in the series stands alone and ends in a guaranteed HEA.