Life has imitated art in the terrifying release of dozens of lions, tigers and other wild animals into the Ohio countryside by the crazed owner of an exotic animal menagerie who then did away with himself, according to a story that broke this past week.

For a tense 24 hours several of the beasts including bengal tigers were on the loose, stalking the countryside. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s because you read the blurb for Jack Warner’s edge-of-your-chair thriller Maneater.  In Maneater a wild tiger has escaped its cargo truck and now roams the dense forests of the Appalachian Mountains. When deer and wild boar run out, the tiger turns its growing hunger towards man. Now it has a taste for easy prey. With a body-count on the rise and the media coming in, Sheriff Grady Brickhouse calls upon Jim Graham, a tiger hunter trained in India to end the man-eater’s killing spree.

However, Graham is retired, and at 73 his body isn’t as fast as it used to be. The only edge Graham holds now is a nine-year-old boy who has somehow bonded with the tiger. But, it’s a bond that makes him protective of the beast, even as it circles ever closer to hurting the ones he loves. This hunt will probably be Graham’s last. The question is, will it end with the tiger’s death or his own?

In Maneater, Jack Warner crafts a tightly suspenseful adventure novel, where death hides in the shadows of small town life. It will have you straining to hear the low growl of the wild before it’s too late…

Perhaps this book will have some resonance in view of the current world political climate…,

E-Reads has published very few original books, but we just couldn’t pass up Friend of My Enemy by Benjamin Eric Hill and we thought that the season of good will was the right time to feature a love story between a cold-blooded Israeli Mossad agent and a beautiful but proud Palestinian woman fighting to keep above pressure by terrorists. Though written a few years ago, nothing has really changed since then. Will love conquer the brutality of an age-old enmity? Read this white-knuckle thriller and find out.

- Richard Curtis

Originally published in 1980, Five Minutes to Midnight is a prophetic and terrifying vision of the threat of nuclear terrorism.

As Independence Day approaches, millions of Americans are planning a celebratory holiday while one radical, Carlos the Jackal, leader of the dreaded Terror International, planner of the Entebbe highjacking and the massacre at the Munich Olympics, has plans to raise the level of terror to new heights while bringing the threat home to the U.S. with a stolen nuclear weapon.

Standing in his way is Sam Sartain, a member of an elite counterintelligence team, who has long pursued Carlos and learned to analyze the twisted mind and plans of a mass killer. As he follows a series of deadly leads that range from the University campus in Berkeley, California to a prison in Berlin, races against time to prevent a colossal act of destruction in Washington, DC itself.

The author, Sabi Shabtai, an internationally recognized authority on terrorism, has served as consultant and lecturer to numerous corporations, airlines, police departments, SWAT teams, and the U.S. Army and Navy.  He served in the intelligence branch of the Israel Defense Forces and was a member of the Israeli Foreign Service. It will come as no surprise that he specializes in political violence and terrorism. In fact he has served as an undercover trouble-shooter on five continents.

Dr. Shabtai sold several scripts based on his personal exploits and expertise to the major studios. The hit movie Passenger 57 is loosely based on his own personal hijacking experience in the 1980′s, and The Assignment, starring Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland, and Ben Kingsley, is based on the author’s hunt for the master terrorist, Carlos The Jackal.

You say you’re a fan of detective novels but you haven’t discovered Richard Prather’s Shell Scott?  Hmmm, I don’t know about you…

But you can atone for your sin by picking up just about any of the nearly forty novels and story collections penned by the late great Prather and joining his humorous private eye on another whacked-out caper, inevitably populated by plug-ugly goons and scantily clad ladies in jeopardy. Shell is an endearing, self-satirizing hero who is as likely to nail the bad guys by bumbling as by brilliant detection and bravado.

I was one of millions who feasted on Shell Scotts like popcorn and now I’m happy to introduce them to you.  For light summer reading there just is nothing better.

The books aren’t in any particular sequence, so you can start anywhere, but what the heck, start with A, Always Leave ‘Em Dying, and work your way down to W, Way of a Wanton.

Richard Curtis

Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana are a combustible mix – but if they combust they could ruin their professional careers. Passionately attracted to each other, they are equally passionate defenders of their clients even when their interests are completely adversarial.

Set all this tension against the sultry background of a Miami riddled with crime and corruption, drowning in drugs, illegal immigrants and shady deals, and simmering with a melting-pot clash of cultures and you have a recipe for a hotly explosive series of legal thrillers by Barbara Parker. You can find them on Barbara’s author page.

In the debut novel, Suspicion of Innocence, Gail Connor is a fast-rising attorney in a major law firm, about to make partner—until her life is derailed by the discovery of her sister’s murdered body and the possibility that Gail is the prime suspect. Gail must fight for her life as she gets a first-hand look at the dark underside of the legal system she is pledged to uphold.

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Barbara Parker was a dear friend, a dedicated professional writer and a beloved and esteemed client whose untimely passing was and remains a source of anguish to all who knew her. Trained as a lawyer, she worked as a prosecutor with the state attorney’s office in Dade County, Florida before moving into a private practice specializing in real estate and family law. Suspicion of Innocence, published in 1994, was her first legal thriller. It was followed by seven more titles featuring her two lawyer protagonists and sometime lovers, Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana. Suspicion of Innocence was a finalist for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and two other Gail and Anthony novels, Suspicion of Deceit and Suspicion of Betrayal, were New York Times bestsellers. She died in March 2009, at age 62. Too young. Far, far too young.

RC

For Americans and their lawmakers the looming financial and government crisis is terra incognita.  But not for Dan Simmons, whose just-published Flashback projects a dystopian future launched by a collapse identical to the one that is unfolding in our nation today.

In the author’s words, “Flashback posits the possibility that the United States of America, if it continues accruing debt without rethinking its spending and social welfare programs, could implode in sudden and total bankruptcy, losing not only its position in the world but its own sense of self for hundreds of millions of its citizens. In Flashback, this canary also imagines a cheap and available drug called flashback; a drug that allows hundreds of millions of Americans to find an escape hatch from life in such a damned and dismal future simply by reliving the good parts of their former lives. Over and over. And over.”

Simmons’s dark view of the world around the corner from today is controversial and has raised some hackles among fans and critics who like their futures to be politically correct. They obviously have confused dystopian and utopian. Simmons hasn’t.

But, taken for what it also is, a futuristic thriller packed with beautifully limned characters and a mystery that can only be solved by drug-induced time-travel, it is another triumph by the author of The Terror, Hyperion, Carrion Comfort and Summer of Night.

In a starred review Publishers Weekly says “Simmons makes some logical if depressing extrapolations from current political and economic developments in this outstanding mystery thriller set in a near-future dystopic United States.” Booklist calls it “Another winner from Simmons, whose imagination seems to know no bounds.”

Simmons has addressed a long letter to his fans detailing the thinking processes behind a book that will be debated for a long time to come. You can read his message here.

Ray Garton’s Ravenous does for werewolves what Live Girls did for vampires.

When Emily Crane’s car breaks down on a dark, lonely road at night, she is attacked and raped by a man she kills in self defense. That night, the dead rapist walks out of the morgue. Later, Emily begins to experience strange cravings and her body undergoes terrifying changes.

When brutal killings leave victims partially eaten in the northern California coastal town of Big Rock, Sheriff Arlin Hurley scoffs at the talk of werewolves…until a tuft of wolf’s fur is found on a victim. It soon becomes clear that whatever is responsible for the killings, it’s not alone. There are more than one. And they are doing something much worse than killing and eating people.

Nearly 25 years ago, Ray Garton reinvented the vampire mythos with his erotic novel Live Girls. Now he has updated the curse of the werewolf in Ravenous.

Here’s what Publishers Weekly said about Ravenous:

“For Garton, lycanthropy is a sexually transmitted diseas, spread mostly through rape, that runs rampant through a small town fraught with affairs and intrigues. His werewolf is a terrifying creature: not a remorseful, helpless cursed human but a homicidal beast driven by a dual urge to breed and feed. Hurley is a sheriff to root for, and Garton’s well-paced horror novel reworks the werewolf myth to great effect.”

To learn what was on Ray Garton’s mind when he wrote Ravenous, and for an expert comparison of vampires to werewolves Click here.

Night Life is the brilliant sequel to Ray Garton’s most famous novel, Live Girls.

Ray Garton’s Live Girls. published in 1987, changed the face of vampire fiction. The gritty, urban story of Davey Owen’s dark seduction and reluctant transformation into a creature of the undead has become a classic of the genre.

In Night Life, nearly two decades after battling the vampires of the Midnight Club in New York City, Davey is a marked man. He lives a quiet life in Los Angeles with the love of his life, Casey Thorne. The vampires he did not destroy back then have been hunting him ever since, eager to take their revenge–and now they have found him. For what he did to them, they are determined to make him pay with his last drop of blood. With the help of old friends and new allies, Davey and Casey must face the bloodthirsty nightmare of their past. This time, they may not have a future.

If you’re truly bloodthirsty,we urge you to read Live Girls and Night Life back to back. With the lights on.

Ray Garton’s Shackled has been traumatizing readers for 15 years. Here are what some of them have to say about it:

“I almost couldn’t bear to continue; but the story was so gripping I knew I would have to….It is so frightening that it doesn’t seem there is any further way for the story to intensify….The finale is virtuosic, and the plot twists up more and more, exponentially so, to a climax which is nothing short of vertiginous.”
– Michael Edwards

“Read it if you can. But I warn you, you might not be able to. And that is the highest recommendation it is possible to give horror fiction.”
– Richard Wright

“There were several occasions when I had to put to the book down, take a deep breath and say, ‘I can’t believe that happened to that character!’ If you want to be shocked, if you have a strong stomach or if you just want to find out how terrible the world can be–highly recommend Shackled. Just don’t expect it to be a pleasant ride.”
– Eoghain O’Keefe

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Children disappear all the time. It’s in the news every day. Where do they go? What happens to them? Who has taken them?

While covering a story for his tabloid newspaper, reporter Bentley Noble accidentally stumbles onto something else entirely…a story about something so unspeakable, he doesn’t know if anyone will believe it…a story that pulls him down into the depths of evil and depravity and threatens his very life.

With the help of a bestselling true-crime writer, Noble descends into the dark world of human trafficking, where fear and pain are tools of control and innocence is sold to the highest bidder. As a handful of good and decent people try to combat a monstrously powerful and all too real evil, some lives will be shattered, others will be ended…but none will be the same.

Want to know what was on Ray Garton’s mind when he wrote Shackled? Read his blog here.

E-Reads doesn’t publish a lot of original fiction, but when Ray Garton offered us the opportunity to be the first to release Meds, we didn’t have to think twice. It’s not only a gripping thriller, but a work of social significance, dramatizing what happens when people dependent on prescription drugs are suddenly deprived of their pills.

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Something is making people become violent and murderous…something they all have in common. When Eli Dunbar discovers what it is he becomes afraid, because it’s something he has in common with them–a drug prescribed to him by his psychiatrist. And now Eli is a ticking time bomb…

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Do you know all of the risks your prescription drugs might pose? Does your doctor? Or has the manufacturer hidden them from the public in the interest of profits? Those questions are answered with a vengeance in Ray Garton’s Meds, a thriller with lethal side effects.

And here’s another question: what do you think is worse? Chronic pain or addictive dependency on pain-killers?  Before you answer, read author Ray Garton’s gripping account of his personal struggle with both.