MANHATTAN IS MY BEAT

Five feet two inches of slick repartee, near-purple hair, and poetic imagination, twenty-year-old Rune hasn''t been in Manhattan for very long. But she''s crafty enough to have found a squatter''s paradise in an empty TriBeCa loft, and a video store job that feeds her passion for old movies. It''s a passion she shares with her favorite customer, Mr. Kelly, a lonely old man who rents the same video over and over. The flick is a noir classic based on a real-life unsolved bank heist and a million missing dollars. It''s called Manhattan Is My Beat. That's the tape Rune is picking up from Mr. Kelly''s shabby apartment when she finds him shot to death. The police suspect a robbery gone wrong, but Rune is certain the key to solving the murder is hidden somewhere in the hazy, black-and-white frames of Mr. Kelly's beloved movie. But as Rune hits the mean streets of New York to find answers, she gets caught up in a dangerous adventure more chilling than anything Hollywood could dream up. As her story draws to its terrifying conclusion, Rune''s final close-up may include the killer of a co-star.

DEATH OF A BLUE MOVIE STAR

Twenty-one-year-old Rune is an aspiring filmmaker, but so far her only break has been scoring a job as an underpaid production assistant in Manhattan. Still, she's always on the lookout for the perfect topic for her own film - and she thinks she's found it when she witnesses the bombing of a triple-X movie theater in Times Square. Rune's got a great hook for her documentary: She plans to film it through the eyes of Shelly Lowe, the porn star whose movie was playing at the theater when it exploded. But just hours after Rune films a poignant Shelly reflecting on her dreams of becoming a serious actress, a second bomb silences the beautiful film star forever. Was Shelly in the wrong place at the wrong time - or was she the bomber's target all along? Rune vows to find out the truth behind the death of this blue movie star. But as she struggles to finish shooting her film, Rune's labor of love may be her final masterpiece - as a shooting of a more lethal kind threatens to write an ending to this story that no one wants to see....

HARD NEWS

Assistant cameraperson for a local New York news program, Rune finds information in the studio archives that could exonerate Randy Boggs, now serving time in Attica for a murder he claims he did not commit.

SHALLOW GRAVES

A Hollywood film director looking to shoot his next film in Cleary, New York, gets a lukewarm reaction from the town's inhabitants. When a friend is murdered, he learns how far the town will go to keep its secrets hidden.

BLOODY RIVER BLUES

Hard luck, the bottle and a prison stretch ended John Pellam's promising directorial career--and now the ex-Hollywood insider has been reduced to location scout. But while scouting locations for a shoot-em-up in Maddox, Missouri, he gets perilously close to a real riverfront rub-out.

THE BONE COLLECTOR

Lincoln Rhyme, ex-head of NYPD forensics, was the nation's foremost criminalist, the man who could work a crime scene and come away with a perfect profile of the killer, frozen in time. Now, Lincoln is frozen in place - permanently. An accident on the job left him a quadriplegic who can move just one finger, a great mind strapped to his bed, mulish and sarcastic, hiding from a life he no longer wants to live. Until he sees the crime-scene report about a corpse found buried on a deserted West Side railroad track, its bloody hand rising from the dirt. It belonged to a man who got into a cab at the airport and never got out. Reluctantly, Lincoln Rhyme abandons retirement to track down a killer whose ingenious clues hold the secret to saving his victims - if Rhyme can decipher them in time. The search leads him to the Bone Collector, whose obsession with old New York colors every scrap of evidence he leaves for Rhyme and his new partner, Amelia Sachs, whom he drafts as his arms and legs. But she's never worked a crime scene in her life - and he can only whisper in her ear as she does the exacting work he loved more than anything else.

THE COFFIN DANCER

Detective Lincoln Rhyme, the foremost criminalist in the NYPD, is on the hunt for an elusive murderer, the Coffin Dancer. He's a brilliant hitman who changes his appearance even faster than he adds to his trail of victims, only one of whom has lived long enough to offer a clue: the assassin has an eerie tattoo on his arm of the Grim Reaper waltzing with a woman in front of a casket. Rhyme, tragically paralyzed from a line-of-duty accident, continues to tutor his beautiful protege, Detective Amelia Sachs, in the art of criminal hunting. Rhyme is certain he's seen this killer before, and his suspicion of an earlier encounter fuels a bitter taste for vengeance. Rhyme's brainpower and Sachs's legwork are the only tools they have to track the cunning murderer through the subways, parks, and airports of a darkly painted New York City. And they have only forty-eight hours before the Coffin Dancer strikes again.

THE EMPTY CHAIR

A quadriplegic since a beam crushed his spinal cord years ago, Rhyme is desperate to improve his condition and goes to the University of North Carolina Medical Center for high-risk experimental surgery. But he and Sachs have hardly settled in when the local authorities come calling. In a twenty-four-hour period, the sleepy Southern outpost of Tanner's Corner has seen a local teen murdered and two young women abducted. And Rhyme and Sachs are the best chance to find the girls alive. The prime suspect is a strange teenaged truant known as the Insect Boy, so nicknamed for his disturbing obsession with bugs. Rhyme agrees to find the boy while awaiting his operation. Rhyme's unsurpassed analytical skills and stellar forensic experience, combined with Sachs's exceptional detective legwork, soon snare the perp. But even Rhyme can't anticipate that Sachs will disagree with his crime analysis and that her vehemence will put her in the swampland, harboring the very suspect whom Rhyme considers a ruthless killer. So ensues Rhyme's greatest challenge - facing the criminalist whom he has taught everything he knows in a battle of wits, forensics, and intuition. And in this adversary, Rhyme also faces his best friend and soul mate.

THE STONE MONKEY

Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs, along with INS, are in hot pursuit of the criminal mastermind and international fugitive known only as "the Ghost"...with the trail leading off Orient Point, Long island, and a Chinese cargo ship carrying refugees and human slaves. But as the Coast Guard moves in to arrest, the ship is destroyed in a suspicious explosion—and the Ghost once again escapes the law and flees into New York's labyrinthine Chinatown....determined to silence forever any survivors who could reveal his identity. Now Lincoln and Amelia embark on a desperate search, uncovering clues along the way that will either lead to success or certain death.

THE VANISHED MAN

It begins at a prestigious music school in New York City. A killer flees the scene of a homicide and locks himself in a classroom. Within minutes, the police have him surrounded. When a scream rings out, followed by a gunshot, they break down the door. The room is empty. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to help with the high-profile investigation. For the ambitious Sachs, solving the case could earn her a promotion. For the quadriplegic Rhyme, it means relying on his protégée to ferret out a master illusionist they've dubbed "the conjurer" who baits them with gruesome murders that become more diabolical with each fresh crime. As the fatalities rise and the minutes tick down, Rhyme and Sachs must move beyond the smoke and mirrors to prevent a terrifying act of vengeance that could become the greatest vanishing act of all.

MISTRESS OF JUSTICE

Asked to help attorney Mitchell Reece locate a stolen document that could cost him a multimillion-dollar case, paralegal Taylor Lockwood finds out what goes on behind closed doors at Hubbard, White & Willis.

LESSON OF HER DEATH

Detective Bill Corde gazes down at the demure body in a bed of muddied hyacinths beside a gloomy lagoon, unaware that he is about to plunge into fears as dark and dense as the waters of Blackfoot Pond. As rumors of a crazed serial "moon killer" scorch the no longer serene Midwestern campus, Corde uncovers shocking secrets about the victim's sexual encounters with students and faculty. Exposing these lurid vignettes from the underside of college life could tear apart the seemingly placid surface of the academic community, revealing scenarios of sinister ambition, intrigue, and corruption. While he races to homevent another death before the full moon, Corde's public and private lives cruelly collide. The murderer has focused on the cop's family and leads them into an isolated world of terror from which there is no escape. Helplessly, Corde watches his guilt-haunted wife and troubled teenage son become entangled in a brilliant madman's malevolent trap. But it is Corde's learning-impaired daughter, Sarah, who is in the greatest danger - she alone may hold the key to the identity of the killer.

PRAYING FOR SLEEP

On a savage, storm-lashed night, Michael Hrubek - a dangerously paranoid schizophrenic - escapes from a mental hospital for the criminally insane by impersonating a dead man. He's on a mission - to find Lis Atcheson, the woman whose testimony identified him as the gruesome Indian Leap State Park murderer. He'll stalk her all the way home, where she waits in the cool autumn night...surrounded by her past. For Lis, the chief witness at Hrubek's trial, is a woman obsessed with the past. Living in the remote New England house that was her family's summer retreat, she is struggling to put her life back together after a period of terrible turmoil - just as Michael Hrubek sets out on his harrowing quest. Racing to intercept him are his psychiatrist, Richard Kohler, a brilliant doctor - but one with his own secrets to protect; Trenton Heck, a professional dog tracker, with an uncanny skill for picking up a trail and a desperate need for the reward money offered for Hrubek's return; and Lis's husband, Owen Atcheson, a man of uncommon intelligence and determination - who must hunt Hrubek down before he can destroy his wife. Yet Michael's madness is inextricably entwined with his genius - and he proves a far greater adversary than any of his pursuers anticipated. For though his mind is tormented by his eerie delusions of betrayal and revenge, he is crystal clear on one point: he knows Lis Atcheson better than she knows herself, and as he hunts her he is bringing a terrible secret into the light of day. As primal as the night itself, Praying for Sleep is an astonishing stay-up-all-night read, which delivers a climax you'll never forget. It is a brilliant work of terror, taut and intricate, subtle and original - the breakout book of a seasoned and skillful writer.

A MAIDEN'S GRAVE

A school bus carrying eight deaf school-girls and their teachers brakes suddenly on a flat Kansas highway. They should never have stopped. Waiting for them are three heartless men just escaped from prison - each with nothing to lose. And now, with the girls as their hostages, they have everything to gain. They make their stand in an abandoned slaughterhouse, and it is there that Lou Handy, a murderer and the convicts' ringleader, announces his terms: to kill one captive an hour unless his demands are met. What follows is a twelve-hour siege of noose-tight tension - and a war of nerves between Handy and the FBI's senior hostage negotiator, Arthur Potter.

DEVIL'S TEARDROP

THE BLUE NOWHERE

SPEAKING IN TONGUES

GARDEN OF BEASTS