For most of the last hundred years, Biloxi was known for its beaches, resorts, and seafood industry. But it had a darker side. It was also notorious for corruption and vice, everything from gambling, prostitution, bootleg liquor, and drugs to contract killings. The vice was controlled by small cabal of mobsters, many of them rumored to be members of the Dixie Mafia. Keith Rudy and Hugh Malco grew up in Biloxi in the sixties and were childhood friends,...

The struggle of three brothers to stay together after their parent's death and their quest for identity among the conflicting values of their adolescent society. Two rival gangs -- the "haves" & "have-nots" -- fight it out on the streets of an Oklahoma city. When it was first published in 1967, The Outsiders defied convention with its immediate, deeply sympathetic portrayal of Ponyboy and his struggle to find a place for himself in a difficult world....

"When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition ... Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is [their center of gravity] Jude, ... by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body...

Fifteen-year-old Ari Mendoza is an angry loner with a brother in prison, but when he meets Dante and they become friends, Ari starts to ask questions about himself, his parents, and his family that he has never asked before.

Lawyer Penn Cage returns to defend his best friend since childhood for the murder of a young female student, with whom his friend was intimate, at their old alma mater, St. Stephen's Prep.

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms...

"In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is...

Inspired by personal experiences, an original story about friendship, love, survival, and finding humor in unlikely places. Two best friends' lives change when one of them is diagnosed with spinal cancer.

Two convicts, one white and one black, never give up the dream of freedom, and together they turn hope and friendship into an uplifting bond no prison can ever take away.

"Loyalty is a way of life for the Sisterhood and their significant others. When lawyer Lizzie Fox's husband, Cosmo Cricket, is left critically injured after being shot by an unknown assailant, the men of BOLO Consultants head straight for Las Vegas to comfort Lizzie--and to uncover a dangerous enemy in the City of Sin. As head of Nevada's Gaming Commission, Cosmo has powerful enemies. Yet the shooting seems to be related to one of his private projects....