Central Kansas Library System

A collection of short stories by the "Queen of Suspense" features her first published short story, "Stowaway." In 1974, Clark began writing a novella inspired by the dark side of the New York City fashion world. Now that story, Death wears a beauty mask, is available for the first time, in this collection short stories full of chills and heart-pounding drama.

Four stories on Henry and Sandra Britland, husband-and-wife team of sleuths, he a former U.S. president, she a former congresswoman. In A Crime of Passion, they investigate a murder for which his former secretary of state is falsely accused, while in They All Ran After the President's Wife, she is kidnaped in exchange for a terrorist.

Stephen King introduces each of these short stories with a passage about its origins or his motivations for writing it. There are connections between stories -- themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. "Afterlife" is about a man who died of colon cancer and keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature...

""The Woman in the Window"...opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged...

The eleven beautifully crafted stories in Bad Kansas reveal the complicated underbelly of the country’s most flown-over state and the quirky characters that call it home. In this darkly humorous collection, Kansas becomes a state of mind as Mandelbaum’s characters struggle to define their relationship to home and what it means to stay or leave, to hold on or let go. When a desperate woman finds herself on a date with a rugged man she has nothing...

The basis for the 2006 TNT miniseres--now available on DVD--King's bestselling short-story collection also features Dolan's Cadillac, soon to be released as a major motion picture starring Christian Slater and Wes Bentley.

"The four never-before-published novellas in this collection represent horror master King at his finest, using the weird and uncanny to riff on mortality, the price of creativity, and the unpredictable consequences of material attachments. A teenager discovers that a dead friend's cell phone, which was buried with the body, still communicates from beyond the grave in 'Mr. Harrigan's Phone,' which reads like a Twilight Zone episode infused with an...

"Seven Western stories that showcase Bonham's diversity of themes, settings, and time frames amidst meticulously researched period detail, well-developed characters, and vividly described action sequences"--