Pardon the Ravens


Book Description

"As good as the best offerings of Turow, Grisham, and other legal-thriller hitmakers"—Booklist, on Wrong Man Running From the author of Wrong Man Running and the writer and director of the films Reunion and The Warrior Class, this fast-paced legal thriller set in the Mad Men era grabs you and doesn't let go. Gifted young New York lawyer Alec Brno gets the career boost of a lifetime: the opportunity to try a huge fraud case making international headlines. But he risks it all when he falls for an alluring young woman whose estranged husband is a sadistic Mafia don—and the criminal mastermind behind Alec's case. Alan Hruska is a native of New York and a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School. He is a former trial lawyer who has represented Henry Kissinger, William Paley, Sam Walton, Katherine Graham, and many others. As cofounder of Soho Press, he currently serves as chairman of the board. He has also written and directed a number of movies, including Nola, The Warrior Class, and Reunion, and several plays. Pardon the Ravens is his third novel.




Animal Encounters


Book Description

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal. The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.




The Inglorious Arts


Book Description

New York lawyer Alec Brno (Pardon the Ravens) is must rescue two of his firm’s largest clients to avoid professional and financial ruin. Meanwhile, his adopted sixteen-year-old daughter, the inheritor of a Mafia fortune, is targeted in a sex-slave scheme by her uncle, the capo famiglia, as is Alec’s beautiful sister-in-law. The Inglorious Arts deals with two high-stakes courtroom battles, Mob terror, and the frantic race to save both women.




Believe Me


Book Description

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Izzard is one of the funniest people alive, a talented actor, a sharp cross-dresser, an experienced marathon runner, and a great writer. You will have to read this if only to find out what a jazz chicken is.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer With his brand of keenly intelligent humor that ranges from world history to historical politics, sexual politics, mad ancient kings, and chickens with guns, Eddie Izzard has built an extraordinary fan base that transcends age, gender, and race. Writing with the same candor and insight evident in his comedy, he reflects on a childhood marked by the loss of his mother, boarding school, and alternative sexuality, as well as a life in comedy, film, politics, running and philanthropy. Honest and generous, Believe Me is an inspired account of a very singular life thus far.







It Happened at Two in the Morning


Book Description

In this fast-moving, fast-talking legal thriller, brash young New York lawyer Tom Weldon happens to witness the 2 a.m. murder of a business tycoon and finds himself held captive with the murdered man’s arrogant daughter. The two escape and go on the run, trying to stay one step ahead of a hitwoman while Tom unravels the mystery behind the violence. Alan Hruska is the author of the novels Pardon the Ravens and Wrong Man Running, the writer of several plays, and the writer and director of multiple films, most recently The Man on Her Mind. A former trial lawyer, he is a New York native and a graduate of Yale University and Yale Law School.







The Raven


Book Description

The author of the Gabriel's Inferno Trilogy reveals a beautiful yet deadly underworld where creatures of the night roam and Gabriel and Julianne become the target of a powerful but elusive enemy... Raven Wood spends her days at Florence’s Uffizi gallery restoring Renaissance art. But an innocent walk home after an evening with friends changes her life forever. When she intervenes in the senseless beating of a homeless man, his attackers turn on her, dragging her into an alley. Raven is only semiconscious when their assault is interrupted by a cacophony of growls followed by her attackers' screams. Mercifully, she blacks out, but not before catching a glimpse of a shadowy figure who whispers to her... Cassita vulneratus. When Raven awakes, she is inexplicably changed. Upon returning to the Uffizi, no one recognizes her. More disturbingly, she discovers that she’s been absent an entire week. With no recollection of her disappearance, Raven learns that her absence coincides with one of the largest robberies in Uffizi history - the theft of a set of priceless Botticelli illustrations. When the police identify her as their prime suspect, Raven is desperate to clear her name. She seeks out one of Florence's wealthiest and most elusive men in an attempt to uncover the truth. Their encounter leads Raven to a dark underworld whose inhabitants kill to keep their secrets... THIS EDITION ONLY: Includes Bonus Scenes







The Hill of the Ravens


Book Description

It is morning in America, many years in the future. As the 22nd century approaches, the United States and Canada have been shattered by war and upheaval and have broken up into separate ethnic, racial, and political enclaves. On the east coast a crumbling, bankrupt and tottering United States government still holds a weak and impotent sway over a ragged collection of tattered states and cities, but life is chaotic and plagued with poverty, violence, and desperation. The entire Southwest, beginning with Texas and extending westward to southern California and north as far as Utah, has become the Spanish-speaking Mexican state of Aztlan. And in the Pacific Northwest, from northern California on up to Alaska, a brutal fascist and white supremacist dictatorship rules the Northwest American Republic. Colonel Donald Redmond of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) is one of the Northwest Republic’s most ruthless and skillful political policemen. Then on a bright October morning he is called into the office of the State President, where he is given a top-secret assignment. A skeleton from the bloody and treacherous days of the revolution against America is about to emerge from the closet, and one of the most carefully guarded and suppressed mysteries of that revolution may become public knowledge. That long hidden truth may undermine the very moral and political foundations of the white supremacist state. A woman’s life hangs in the balance, but possibly even the fate a of a continent as well, as Donald Redmond and his partner Sergeant Nel plunge into the past and seek for the answer: who betrayed the Olympic Flying Column, and why? In The Hill of the Ravens, underground cult novelist H. A. Covington offers us a grim and chilling view of a future that may yet come to be.