KIDS

Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay--until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Charlie Asher, it seems, has been recruited for a new position: as Death. It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.

Agreeing not to pursue a relationship after one date, unlikely lovers Min Dobbs and Cal Morrisey are thrown together again in the wake of such factors as a jealous ex-boyfriend, a determined psychologist, and a bizarrely intelligent cat.

Combining Southern warmth with unabashed emotion and side-splitting hilarity, Flagg takes readers back to Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where the most unlikely and surprising experiences of a high-spirited octogenarian inspire a town to ponder the age-old question: Why are we here?

New York City is miles from Salt Lick, Texas, in more ways than one, but Debbie Sue Overstreet and Edwina Perkins-Martin are rarin' to go. The best friends/beauty shop owners/private-eye partners have been offered an all-expense-paid trip to the National Association of Private Investigators convention in the Big Apple. Debbie Sue sees the invitation as validation, but Edwina has one goal: to get her feet into a pair of super-glam designer shoes, not easily had back home. When they arrive, they bumble their way into a murder investigation that could end up leaving Debbie Sue deceased and Edwina stone-cold in her new Jimmy Choos!

Set in the wonderfully crazed city of Ankh-Morpork, "Going Postal" hilariously reflects the plight of post offices the world over as they struggle to compete in an era when e-mail has stolen much of the glamour from the postal trade.

It begins with attractive heiress Joey Perrone being tossed overboard from a cruise ship by her larcenous husband, Chaz, not for her money, which she has had the good sense to keep well away from him, but because he fears she is onto his crooked dealings with a ruthless tycoon who is poisoning the Everglades. Joey stays afloat until she is rescued by moody ex-cop Mick Stranahan, a loner who has also struck out in the marriage department. Then the two together, with the unwitting aid of a suspicious cop who can't pin the attempted murder on Chaz, hatch a sadistic plot to scare that "maggot" out of what little wit he has.

In this collection of essays, McManus ponders the strange allure of the RV, a thirtieth-century hunting trip, the art of wrestling toads, the existential implications of being lost, the baffling tendency of animals to outsmart those who wish to hunt them, the singular pleasure of doubling the size of every fish one doesn't catch, and what happens when a bear named Pooky decides to hibernate in the attic.

The highly anticipated follow-up to the "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," reveals the roots of the Ya-Yas' friendship in the 1930s and roars with all the raw power of Vivi Abbott Walker's 1962 T-Bird through sixty years of marriage, child-raising, and hair-raising family secrets.