New York, NY: Penguin Putnam (1997)

Meet the unlikely traveling troupe of The Last Great Snake Show: snake handler Jubal Lee, a southern son of the swamplands; exotic dancer and sometime Aunt Bea impersonator Gloria Peacock; cranky old soldier Clinton Tucker, otherwise known as Cappy. These three have resolved to deliver the ailing Miss Darlene, their employer at The House of Joy - a popular nightspot on the North Carolina coast until a recent tornado wiped it out - to retire to the property on the Oregon coast she bought years ago sight unseen. With each step along their winding route, these innocents from a region of the country they have come to believe rife with intolerance face perversions and prejudices they never encountered at home. And with these confrontations, demons from the past come forward in a new light, and the need to escape heritage is balanced by the desire to defend it. The travelers are each called to give something of themselves and each must finally determine whether, and at what price, one sells one's soul.

New York, NY: Dutton (1997)

Near fine in dust jacket.

By day, Harper Cole works as a commodities trader and at night he leads quite a different life, serving as a systems operator for an exclusive erotic online service that caters to the rich and famous. But a stranger has now penetrated the network's state-of-the-art security, brutally murdering six celebrated female clients. Falsely accused of these horrible crimes, Harper realizes he must lure an elusive madman into the open--and place everything he holds dear directly in the killer's path!

New York, NY: Pantheon (1997)

Very good in dust jacket with some edge wear.

A haunting memoir about growing up dirt-poor in the pines of Alabama - and about moving on but never really being able to leave. It is the story of a war-haunted, hard-drinking father and a strong-willed, loving mother who struggled to protect her sons from the effects of poverty and ignorance that had constricted her own life. It is the story of the life Bragg was able to carve out for himself on the strength of his mother's encouragement and belief. And it is the story of his attempts to both atone for and avenge the mistakes and cruelties of his past. All Over but the Shoutin' is a gripping account of people struggling to make sense and solidity of life's capricious promises.

New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin (1997)

On this Sunday, after the NFL pre-season game, we were sitting on the porch quiet as mice when Jewel held up the newspaper and said, "Raymond. Let's go here and do this, " and "here" was the Paradise casino, a dozen blocks away on the beach in Biloxi, and "this" was gambling. So begins this story in which Ray and Jewel Kaiser try out the Paradise. What curious things happen to them, what tricks of chance involving, among others, Jewel's 14-year-old daughter RV, the casino and its personnel, Ray's dead father, and a mother convinced that a sitcom star is visiting across the street from her house, make up the fabric of this novel about wising up better late than never. Peopled with dazed casino denizens, a lusty grocery-store manager, body-pierced children, and hourly employees in full revolt, "Bob the Gambler" tells the refreshing story of a couple who, after tumbling headfirst out of their middle-class Garden of Eden, discover they've landed in an even more fertile garden outside its walls.

New York, NY: Harcourt (1997)

What is to become of a magician's assistant without her magician? This is the question Sabine asks herself after the death of Parsifal, the magician she worked with for more than twenty years and her husband for only a few months. Parsifal loved men, especially Phan, and though Sabine loved Parsifal, she contented herself with his friendship. Now Parsifal and Phan are both gone, and Sabine is left with full responsibility for their possessions and their histories. Always the assistant, her life is still defined by service to Parsifal. But in the world of illusion Sabine has occupied for her entire life, things are rarely what they seem. According to Parsifal, he had no living relatives. Now, with his death, comes the news that he has a mother and two sisters living in Alliance, Nebraska. Inevitably, the strangers will meet and Sabine will be carried away from her beloved Los Angeles to seek the truth of Parsifal's past in the bitterly windswept steppes of Nebraska in winter. It is here that Sabine will learn the truth about Parsifal's father, which lies at the heart of his son's abandonment of his family and of his identity. As the members of Parsifal's family turn to Sabine for help, she realizes that she is something of a magician herself. In this newfound strength Sabine may at last find the kind of love she had always been denied.

New York, NY: Hyperion (1997)

The acclaimed author of the Dave Robicheaux novels presents a new work that explodes with the violence, beauty, and history of the American West. To defend his illegitimate son, who has been wrongly accused of murder, Billy Bob Holland takes on the powerful class interests controlling the small town of Deaf Smith, Texas. As a result, he winds up facing the demons of his own past.

New York, NY: Simon and Schuster (1997)

A haunting, powerful first novel of revenge and retribution--by one of the fastest rising talents of his generation. Virgil has always toed the line of the law, leaving the hell-raising to his brother, Boyd. Now Boyd is dead, and Virgil must avenge the death, fulfilling the old, unwritten code of the Kentucky hills.

New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press (1997)

A magnificent love story in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms". Based on true stories passed down from the author's great-great-grandfather, "Cold Mountain" is set at the end of the Civil War and tells the tale of a wounded soldier and his perilous journey home from the front.

New York, NY: Knopf (1997)

"This is Ford's voice at its best.... Nobody now writing looks more like an American classic". -- The New York Times Book Review In his first volume of short fiction since the acclaimed Rock Springs, Richard Ford creates a portrait gallery of male characters who are as wounded, as rueful, and as touchingly vulnerable as Frank Bascombe, the protagonist of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Independence Day. Here is the traveling salesman who congratulates himself on his happy marriage even as he probes the defenses of a vulnerable divorcee. Here is the stoic seventeen-year-old who is just beginning to apprehend the chaotic undercurrents of his parents' lives. Here is an aspiring novelist, stranded in a foreign country with a lover who may need him far more than she lets on. Passionate and ironic, written with an economy of words and vast reserves of feeling, Women with Men creates a poetry of American manhood in the traditions of Hemingway, O'Hara, and Sam Shepard. "Breathtaking.... Women with Men is sumptuous and quietly realized, and it's signature Ford". -- Boston Globe "One of America's most accomplished practitioners of the art of the story". -- Newsday

New York, NY: Penguin Putnam (1997)

In a dangerous dry season, park ranger Anna Pigeon is posted to Georgia's Cumberland Island on 21-day fire detail. When a plane crashes nearby, Anna and her crew arrive in time to put out the flames, but too late to save the pilot and his passenger, Cumberland's only full-time law enforcement ranger. And when the cause of the "accident" is proven to be sabotage, Anna embarks upon an investigation that threatens to expose dark, clandestine crimes both old and new, making Anna suddenly the most endangered creature on the island.

New York, NY: Doubleday (1997)

Once he was a well-liked, well-paid young partner in a thriving Mississippi law firm. Then Patrick Lanigan stole ninety million dollars from his own firm—and ran for his life. For four years, he evaded men who were rich and powerful, and who would stop at nothing to find him. Then, inevitably, on the edge of the Brazilian jungle, they finally tracked him down.

Now Patrick is coming home. And in the Mississippi city where it all began, an extraordinary trial is about to begin. As prosecutors circle like sharks, as Patrick’s lawyer prepares his defense, as Patrick’s lover prays for his deliverance and his former partners wait for their revenge, another story is about to emerge. Because Patrick Lanigan, the most reviled white-collar criminal of his time, knows something that no one else in the world knows. He knows the truth.

New York, NY: Hyperion (1997)

For ten years now, Angelina Amaro has kept a secret so deep, so personal, that she couldn't share it with anyone, not even her closest relative. She is in love. In love with the man who betrayed her father, Mafia capo Paul Amaro, and sent him away to prison. All these years she has pined for Sal Martucci, knowing that the intense - though chaste - love they shared would, someday, bring him back to her. But Sal is now Ziggy Maxx, living with a new name and a new face, dodging cameras and cops, tending bar and running scams in Key West. He hasn't thought about Angelina for years (she never even put out, after all), but he sure has thought about her father: a man who wants nothing more than to see Ziggy dead. And has the power to get it done. But fate always intervenes where true love is involved, and when Angelina sees a pair of hands mixing a drink in a relative's Florida vacation video, she recognizes something that only the obsessed and lovesick ever could. So she packs her bags and heads to Mile Marker One - knowing that somehow, she would find her Sal. While there, she pals up with a young gay man who has his own romantic dreams of what he might find in the sun. But what Angelina doesn't realize is that her father is on to her whereabouts; and Sal's sleazy cronies are on to the value having a capo's daughter in their midst.

New York, NY: Harper Collins (1997)

John Deal's old friend, bookstore owner Arch Dolan is assassinated one day after the announcement that a bookselling conglomerate is opening a superstore across from his shop. Seeing Arch's killer, Deal finds himself pitted against a murderous mob of right-wingers and a plot to take over the mass media.