When writer-for-hire Jaine Austen signs on to script vows for the ultimate Bridezilla, "I do's" soon become "I wish I hadn't's" - and curtains for the bride spell a veil of woes for Jaine... Jaine's accepted her share of lame gigs to pay the bills, but rewriting Shakespeare's got to be an all-time low. The fiasco begins with a call from Jaine's high-school nemesis, uber-rich uber-witch Patti Devane. It seems Patti will soon be sashaying down the...

Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender is summoned by a formidable nonagenarian mob boss to exact justice for a once-famous starlet whose career was derailed by an unknown adversary's compromising photos seventy years earlier.

When Jaine lands a job writing web copy and brochures for matchmaker Joy Amoroso, shes excited for a chance to help the lovelorn just in time for Valentines Day until she realizes what Dates of Joy is really all about. Joy is a ruthless taskmaster who screams at her employees for the smallest infractions, pads her website with pictures of professional models posing as clients, and offers up convincing but empty promises of love in exchange for inordinate...

At the height of the nine-day Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, sleuth Regan Reilly finds the festivities threatened by saboteurs and winds her way through a host of pilots, balloonists, tourists, and merchants.

Easy Rawlins, a tough World War II veteran and detective, is hired by a financier and gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant boardrooms to the raucous jazz joints of late 1940s Los Angeles.

"After being approached by a shell-shocked Vietnam War veteran who claims to have gotten into a fight protecting a white woman from a black man, Easy embarks on an investigation that takes him from mountaintops to the desert, through South Central and into sex clubs and the homes of the fabulously wealthy, facing hippies, the mob, and old friends perhaps more dangerous than anyone else."--Publisher description. 1969. Easy Rawlins, the Black private...

"In "The Kindness of Strangers," Amos Parisman, LA's oldest and most stubborn Jewish gumshoe, has never learned how to properly retire. One day, on his morning walk, he stumbles upon a grisly crime scene: someone has murdered a homeless woman and thrown her body into a dumpster. Lt. Mallory, who is in charge of the case, tells Parisman not to get involved. But when other homeless people start turning up dead, the police find themselves at a loss,...

"It's 1953 in Red-baiting, blacklisting Los Angeles, a moral tar pit ready to swallow Easy Rawlins. Easy is out of 'the hurting business' and into the housing (and favor) business when a racist IRS agent nails him for tax evasion. Special Agent Darryl T. Craxton, FBI, offers to bail him out if he agrees to infiltrate the First American Baptist Church and spy on alleged communist organizer Chaim Wenzler. That's when the murders begin."--Provided by...

"The seductive and relentless figure of Raymond Chandler's detective, Philip Marlowe, is vividly re-imagined in present-day Los Angeles. Here is a city of scheming Malibu actresses, ruthless gang members, virulent inequality, and washed-out police. Acclaimed and award-winning novelist Joe Ide imagines a Marlowe very much of our time: he's a quiet, lonely, and remarkably capable and confident private detective, though he lives beneath the shadow of...