Life in the shadow of the King of Rock and Roll…

Orson is a young boy whose mother works at a U.S. Army base in Germany in the 1950s.

There, he becomes a fan of a G.I. stationed at the same base, one Elvis Presley, whose music is played over and over on the radio.

When Orson is caught stealing recordings of Elvis’s tunes from the PX, the publicity catches the star’s attention and thus begins a lifelong friendship.

As Elvis’s career rockets ever higher, Orson and Elvis share many adventures. Elvis becomes the idol of the nation, while Orson drifts away from mainstream life searching for something to believe in.

Each man is an emblem of his time, as social conventions crumble, barriers fall, and the cultural landscape of America changes forever.

A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster.

As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern.

China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan.

In a desperate attempt to cut costs, Meridian Airlines has given up on any pretense of customer service. The passengers on Meridian Flight Six from Boston to Cape Town are fed up with hours-long delays, uncomfortable cabin conditions, and rude airline personnel. But Brian Logan is more than a disgruntled passenger: He believes Meridian killed his wife and he’s about to take revenge by lighting the fuse of disaster.

When Capt. Phil Knight makes a forced landing in a hotbed of insurgents in Nigeria, he’s facing more than a rebel firefight. Violence erupts inside the cabin as Logan leads the passengers in a revolt. But with the loss of radio contact, the civilians don’t realize that NATO and the CIA believe their plane has been hijacked by terrorists and must be taken down.

Reginald Hill “raised the classical British mystery to new heights” when he introduced pugnacious Yorkshire Det. Inspector Andrew Dalziel and his partner, the callow Sgt. Peter Pascoe (The New York Times Book Review). Their chafing differences in education, manners, technique, and temperament made them “the most remarkable duo in the annals of crime fiction” (Toronto Star). Adapted into a long-running hit show for the BBC, the Gold Dagger Award–winning series is now available as ebooks.

Mary Connon froze out her husband, Sam, long ago. She likes the attention of other men—like the fellow members of Sam’s rugby club. Naturally, when she’s found dead in her sitting room with a hole in her head, Sam is a suspect. If only he hadn’t suffered a dizzying scrum injury that’s left everything a blur. He isn’t sure that he didn’t kill her. But Det. Inspector Andrew Dalziel and his partner, Peter Pascoe, are looking outside the unhappy home. Because it seems everyone within spitting distance of the suburban femme fatale—from prying neighbors to spurned lovers to jealous wives—wanted Mary dead. As the field of play expands, so do the motives . . .

With the redolent atmosphere of Ian Rankin and the spine-chilling characters of Thomas Harris, Mo Hayder’s The Devil of Nanking takes the reader on an electrifying literary ride from the palatial apartments of yakuza kingpins to deep inside the secret history of one of the twentieth century’s most brutal events: the Nanking Massacre.

A young Englishwoman obsessed with an indecipherable past, Grey comes to Tokyo seeking a lost piece of film footage of the notorious 1937 Nanking Massacre, footage some say never existed. Only one man can help Grey. A survivor of the massacre, he is now a visiting professor at a university in Tokyo. But he will have nothing to do with her.

So Grey accepts a job in an upmarket nightspot, where a certain gangster may be the key to gaining the professor’s trust. An old man in a wheelchair surrounded by a terrifying entourage, the gangster is rumored to rely on a mysterious elixir for his continued health.