Showing results by author "Warren Adler"

ABC News anchor Dan Harris used to think that meditation was for people who collect crystals, play Ultimate Frisbee, and use the word namaste without irony. After he had a panic attack on live television, he went on a strange and circuitous journey that ultimately led him to embrace a practice he'd long considered ridiculous. Harris discovered that meditation made him more focused and less yanked around by his emotions. According to his wife, it also made him significantly less annoying.

When their 23-year-old daughter goes missing, divorcees Harry and Paulie are forced to leave behind their newly constructed lives to track Grace down. But Grace isn't lost, not physically at least. They find her seemingly unharmed in California on a sunny farm the other residents call 'Camp Star'. But nothing is as it seems.... Sinister motives lurk behind the smiles of those at the camp, and the two soon learn that Grace is in the clutches of a notorious cult. Under the spell of mind control, she denies Harry and Paulie as her family and shuns their love.

Eighty-three-year-old Harvey Franklin never thought he would find love again after losing his wife of more than 50 years. Spending his days walking his beloved poodle in Central Park, he has gotten used to the idea of being alone. Everything changes the morning he meets 80-year-old Sarah Silverman. Romance blooms between the two, and they quickly become entangled in a passionate love affair. When Sarah reveals her husband's battle with dementia, things become complicated....

The Roses met at an auction on Cape Cod. Oliver had just bought a Staffordshire figurine-one of a pair-but Barbara outbid him for its mate. The figurines belonged together, and so did the Roses. Now the two objets d'art sat together on a shelf in the Roses' home-symbols of the passion their owners shared. A passion that united them and now was about to tear them apart.

Warren Adler focuses his laser eye on New York City in these 15 vividly rendered short stories, where human relationships are at the center of them all. In a continuation of New York Echoes 2, Adler's themes in New York Echoes 3 deal primarily with intimate human relationships - the bittersweet pangs of first love, the stark reality of regret, revenge, and coming to terms with the past. 

Armed with the emotional mayhem inherited from their parents as well as compounded pressures involving a depraved headmaster, clandestine affairs, and Victoria's male-hating mother, The Children of the Roses presents a gripping story of the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children. Little more than a child herself, Josh's ever-sympathetic and overstuffed sister, Evie, lavishes her "food is love" obsession on her beloved niece and nephew, who are coping with their own sense of loss.

A womanizing married senator, enjoying a tryst in his Delaware beach home with a beautiful black woman, discovers that his paramour has accidentally drowned. Aware of the scandal that could ensue and destroy his political career, the senator mounts a campaign of cover-up and cynical lies designed to deflect the potential damage. This suspenseful tale of adultery, media manipulation, and political chicanery has familiar overtones and exposes the dilemma faced by any public figure who chooses the path of dissimulation and lying to protect his or her career.

A young New York couple, unable to have children and whose marriage seems to be sputtering, is advised to leave their tense urban lives and take a vacation in a more bucolic environment. Out west, they are suddenly confronted by violent rednecks and chased deep into the surrounding wilderness. Braving floods, avalanches, wild animals, and human predators, they come face-to-face with death.

During the bad old days of the Soviet Union, famous American cancer specialist Dr. Alex Cousins is sent by the president of the United States to Russia to prolong the life of the secretary general of the Politburo. While in Russia, Cousins learns that the Soviets plan to attack China. Suspecting that he knows their secret, the Soviets send him home via the Trans-Siberian Express, which, they hope, will keep him silent until it is too late to stop the attack.

As Great Britain and the United States celebrate a victorious end to WWII, Joseph Stalin's relentless Soviet Union is creeping across Eastern Europe, leaving a trail of devastation and murder in its wake. Winston Churchill, the cigar-puffing icon of the British fighting spirit, embarks on a crusade to lift the veil of secrecy that hangs over Stalin's mission. Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri sets the diplomatic stage upon which the world's political players grapple for supremacy as Churchill delivers his fated Iron Curtain speech on March 5, 1946.

Mother Nile is the story of Si, the American-born son of an Irish father and Egyptian mother, who goes on a journey through the winding streets of the City of the Dead to solve a half-century-old mystery. When his mother makes an urgent plea on her deathbed, Si knows that he must make the journey to Egypt to find out the truth about his long-lost half-sister, conceived during his mother's affair with King Farouk.

Detective Fiona Fitzgerald's privileged upbringing in the nation's capital and her intimate knowledge of its inner workings come in handy when Fran Miller, a top lobbyist and legal expert, turns up dead on Independence Day. It looks like suicide, but when the clues lead back to Mark Chancellor, the husband of Fiona's best friend, things get complicated. Chancellor is at the top of his game, well connected in Washington and known to believe that money is the planet's most powerful weapon.

Twenty-two short stories that will lift your spirits or break your heart from acclaimed author Warren Adler, well known for iconic novel turned international box-office hit The War of the Roses. Written to celebrate the author’s return to New York City after 40 years away from it, Adler focuses his laser eye on New York City in these 22 deftly crafted and compelling short stories. New York, the frenetic, tough-minded, generous-hearted city, magnet for people’s hopes and aspirations, is as vividly and lovingly portrayed here as any of the characters.

Aging mafia Don Salvatore Padronelli, a.k.a. the Padre, is furious when fanatical terrorists capture his beloved daughter and grandson on a trip to Egypt. Fed up with diplomatic caution that prolongs their captivity, the Padre and his loyal henchman cleverly insinuate themselves into the White House and hold the President and his wife hostage. Now the Padre calls the shots on getting the President to take steps to release his family.

A man seeking to purchase an antique doll for his ailing grandchild opens up a Pandora's Box of hidden family secrets and intrigue that results in bitter hostility and murder. Josh and Emily, through brilliant deduction and imaginative enterprise, discover the clues that lead to the solution that lies at the heart of this mystery. As characters they are similar in conception to the witty bantering loving couple, Nick and Nora Charles of the famed Thin Man series created by the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett.

Even when murderous gangsters are shoving his head into a toilet, Mickey Fine can’t stop making jokes. He wants a career in comedy so badly that he takes a job as a Tummler, a comedian and host for a hotel in the Catskills, a hotel where he knows the very gangsters who abused him are staying. An already dangerous situation escalates when Mickey falls for Mutzie, the “number one girl” of Pep who is arguably the most violent thug in the hotel. Betrayals and politics within the mob play out behind the scenes while Mutzie joins Mickey on stage.

In an attempt to reconnect with his two alienated adult children, George Temple replicates the memorable horse trek through the forbidding Yellowstone wilderness they had enjoyed 20 years earlier. But his callous children, Courtney and Scott, accompany him only to persuade him to restore the financial support he has withdrawn. As they are led by a drunken guide and a venal horse wrangler over potentially lethal terrain, their bonding experience quickly disintegrates. 

The caller made it clear - $10 million or her daughter's head. The power of unintended consequences sends the privileged life of prominent anti-war activist Sarah Raab crashing down around her. Fear and terror take hold, and Sarah turns to former CIA operative Carl Helman, a man she has only just met and who stands against everything she has been fighting for.

Jack Cooper is an unhappy man - mind, body, and spirit. In the blink of an eye, he has lost his longstanding job to the economy, his mother to illness, and his wife to her secret lover. Beaten, broken, and crippled by tragedy, he withdraws into total isolation, narrowing his life down to the simplest of routines in order to block out the pain. His day begins with a strenuous workout at the Bethesda Health Club, his personal oasis where his mind and body can be free, and ends in his tiny apartment, where he escapes from reality with his books until he can lose himself in sleep.

When a string of inexplicable murders rocks the hallowed streets of central D.C., Fiona finds herself charging through the shadows of a mysterious conspiracy. Faced with an investigation with no leads and a rising body count, Fiona's reputation as a top investigator is called into question. At the brink of professional ruin, an encounter with the eccentric yet charismatic Thaddeus Remington III at his museum-like mansion sends Fiona hurtling headlong through a whirlwind of clues.