"Logan Tanner lives the exhilarating life of a professional gambler, taking risks with nerves of steel. From casinos in Macau to Monte Carlo to Milan, he's racked up a fortune and become a living legend. But all the glitz and glamour hide a dark and violent past as an extractor -- a world that comes rushing back to him when the beautiful and innocent Lara Balkon enters his life. Soon Logan is drawn into the conflict between two Russian mafia bosses...

Hopkins, the hydrophobic, noisy-kneed son of a preacher, renounces his father's stern religion in favour of the Anglican Church. Lucinda Leplastrier, a frizzy-haired heiress, impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. When the two finally meet, on board a ship to New South Wales, they are bound by their affinity for gambling and risk, their loneliness, and their awkwardly blossoming mutual affection....

Nobody Move, which first appeared in the pages of Playboy, is the story of an assortment of lowlifes in Bakersfield, California, and their cat-and-mouse game over $2.3 million. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres - the American crime novel- but with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson's...

Ray Parisi is in trouble. Fired from his anchor job at ESPN after one too many public humiliations, Ray is holed up in a motel and in dire need of a break. His ex is engaged and shacking up with another guy in his old house, a Cambodian bookie wants to kill him, and he's wanted by the New York State Police. A few days before the Fourth of July, he unexpectedly receives an inheritance from his long-lost father, and it seems like all of his problems...

Mojo Sheepshanks hasn't quite figured out who she is or how to get on with her life. She spends her days playing the slot machines at Bad-Ass Bert's Biker Saloon. However, she would like to get cozy with a hot cop, but he has his own baggage. Suddenly she's seeing ghosts and turning up clues to her real identity. A wealthy man is claiming to be her long-lost uncle and she's being followed by an ex-con brother, as Mojo races to uncover the facts.

When shy and secluded author Sara Fielding ventures from her country cottage to research a novel, she inadvertently witnesses a crime in progress-and manages to save the life of the most dangerous man in London. Derek Craven is a powerful and near-legendary gambling club owner who was born a bastard and raised in the streets. His reputation is unsavory, his scruples nonexistent. But Sara senses that beneath Derek's cynical exterior, he is capable...

"When the Jensen family sends a new generation out into the world, they always keep the homefires burning - and rifles loaded - just in case they bring trouble back with them. Smoke Jensen's daughter Denny can outride, outrope, and outshoot any man who gets in her way. But being a pretty woman, Denny sometimes attracts the attention of unsavory suitors. Like the lecherous Count Malatesta. Denny met the seductive Sicilian on her trip to Europe - and...

"So each night begins. One of us picks up the other and we drive into the Mississippi darkness, headed for a place where everything is different." This first nonfiction book by Frederick Barthelme, author of BOB THE GAMBLER, and his brother and colleague Steven is both a story of family feeling and a testimony to the risky allure of casinos. Within a year and a half, the authors had lost both of their parents, less than a decade after their brother...

Wayne Arthurson's debut, Fall from Grace, marks him as a promising new voice in Canadian fiction. When Edmonton newspaper reporter Leo Desroches is assigned to cover the murder of an Aboriginal woman, his half-Cree heritage immediately identifies with the victim. Before long Leo discovers a pattern of murdered natives that goes back 20 years, and a police force that could not care less. Still fighting his own demons, Leo vows to uncover a brutal serial...