For every child who has ever looked up at the stars and asked, "What are they?" comes the story of a curious boy who never stopped wondering: Carl Sagan. When Carl Sagan was a young boy he went to the 1939 World's Fair and his life was changed forever. From that day on he never stopped marveling at the universe and seeking to understand it better.

For every child who has ever looked up at the stars and asked, "What are they?" comes the story of a curious boy who never stopped wondering: Carl Sagan. When Carl Sagan was a young boy he went to the 1939 World's Fair and his life was changed forever. From that day on he never stopped marveling at the universe and seeking to understand it better.

The year is 1976. Veteran New Haven homicide detective Frank Suchy has finally learned to cope with the demons in his life and the daily pressure of 'the job'-being exposed to every manner of death that could possibly befall someone-all the while celebrating his third year of sobriety. But when his best friend's child is brutally murdered in broad daylight outside a downtown shopping mall, his world begins to deteriorate, bringing back the nightmares...

Everyone knows that Salton's Sink is the driest patch of greasewood in the whole damned Colorado Desert. So when a slick land syndicate promises cheap water to a pack of greenhorn settlers, Stringer is more than a mite suspicious. One booze-thirsty engineer knows the truth about International Irrigation, but he's six feet under with a chest full of lead. Just a drunk's bad luck? Maybe, but Stringer's hanging on to his Winchester because in the Colorado...

Cheyenne, Wyoming, is a town that's leaping into the twentieth century spurs first. Pretty soon Cheyenne will be just as newfangled fancy as any Eastern city. But the folks there still know how to have fun. First the rodeo-and then the hanging. It's the rodeo that Stringer has been sent out to write about. However, before he knows it, he's up to his neck in the West's most notorious murder case. They're fixin' to hang Tom Horn, but something in town...

They say Judge Roy Bean has been up to some legal tomfoolery again. And it's MacKail's job to get the scoop on the infamous "hanging judge." But someone is out to stop Stringer-dead. Now it could be old Bean and some of his boys. Or maybe it's just another Lone Star gunslick with too much nerve and too little smarts. The only thing MacKail knows for sure is that newspaper men ain't welcome, especially not around Bean or his laughing pack of blood-simple...

What could cause Bob to give up his job at a pathology lab that demands so little of him, where he can play Tetris and surf the Web whenever he wants? What could lead him to walk out on a beautiful girlfriend who makes her living as a masturbation coach? What could make him risk everything to transform himself into Roberto, a kingpin in the Los Angeles Mexican mafia? An erotic tattoo-the Mona Lisa of erotic tattoos-painted on a severed arm, which...

Turk Henry is an overweight, beer-swilling rock star married to a supermodel and rich beyond his wildest dreams. Right now his pampered paunch is plopped on the beach in Phuket, the last place a recovering sex addict should go on vacation, surrounded by topless groupies and luscious bar girls. But Turk's struggles with monogamy pale beside a greater challenge when his wife is abducted by a group of renegade Thai pirates. The US government won't help,...

It was the 1950s, a time of calm, a time when all things were new and everything seemed possible. A few years before, a noble war had been won, and now life had returned to normal. For one little boy, however, life had become anything but "normal." To all appearances, he and his family lived an almost idyllic life. The father was a respected professor, the mother a witty and elegant lady, someone everyone loved. They were parents to three bright,...

On the open waters of the Pacific, a couple encounters a stranded madman. Rae and Ingram are nineteen days out of the Panama Canal, sailing slowly across the wide, flat Pacific on the Saracen, when they find Hughie Warriner in his dinghy. He was on a pleasure cruise in his yacht, the Orpheus, he says, when food poisoning killed his passengers and his ship began to sink. After an alleged ten days of desperately fighting to stay afloat he spied the...