The Orange County, California, that the Becker brothers knew as boys is no more-unrecognizably altered since the afternoon in 1954 when Nick, Clay, David, and Andy rumbled with the lowlife Vonns, while five-year-old Janelle Vonn watched from the sidelines. The new decade has ushered in the era of Johnson, hippies, John Birchers, and LSD. Clay becomes a casualty of a far-off jungle war. Nick becomes a cop, Andy a reporter, David a minister. And a terrible...

Matt Stromsoe has come a long way since his wife and son were killed in an explosion meant for him. Wounded severely in both body and spirit, Stromsoe gave up the last thing that held any meaning for him-his job on the police force-and proceeded to hit rock bottom, hard. That was a lifetime ago, and finally the spiral of personal destruction and despair seems to have come to an end. The man responsible for the murders-Stromsoe's best friend from...

Annie Callaway discovers the Southern California bar run by Griffin Hale while looking for inspiration for her new commission--putting her graphic artist and animation talents to work creating the next superhero movie. A sudden threat to Annie's safety has Griffin stepping in to protect her, but neither is sure of what their future together may hold.

An ex-con with delusions of grandeur and his tagalong brother unwittingly team up with a psychopath one wrong word away from meltdown. When their late afternoon joyride turns into a random act of violence, they take a family hostage in the affluent bedroom community of Bristo Camino. Enter Chief of Police Jeff Talley, a stressed-out former LAPD SWAT negotiator who is hiding from his past. Plunged back into the high-pressure world that he desperately...

Kinsey Millhone never sees it coming. She is mired in the case of a doctor who disappeared, his angry ex-wife, and beautiful current one–a case that is full of unfinished business, unfinished homes, and people drifting in and out of their own lives. Then Kinsey gets a shock. A man she finds attractive is hiding a fatal secret–and now a whole lot of beauty, money, and lies are proving to be a fatal distraction from what Kinsey should have seen...

Eden Munro spends the summer with her father and his new family in Santa Monica and quickly finds herself thrust into a world full of new experiences and the more time she spends breaking the rules with them, the more she finds herself falling for the one person she should not--her stepbrother, Tyler.

S is for silence: the silence of the lost, the silence of the grave, the silence of oblivion. Thirty-four years ago, Violet Sullivan put on her party finery and left for the annual Fourth of July fireworks display. She was never seen again. In the small California town of Serena Station, tongues wagged. Some said she'd run off with a lover. Some said she was murdered by her husband. But for the not-quite-seven-year-old daughter Daisy that she left...

Reba Lafferty was a daughter of privilege, the only child of an adoring father. Nord Lafferty was already in his fifties when Reba was born, and he could deny her nothing. Over the years, he quietly settled her many scrapes with the law, but he wasn't there for her when she was convicted of embezzlement and sent to the California Institution for Women. Now, at thirty-two, she is about to be paroled, having served twenty-two months of a four-year sentence....

The classic novel that inspired the Acadamy award-winning film, There Will Be Blood. Penguin Books is proud to now be the sole publisher of Oil!, the classic 1927 novel by Upton Sinclair. After writing The Jungle, his scathing indictment of the meatpacking industry, Sinclair turned his sights on the early days of the California oil industry in a highly entertaining story featuring a cavalcade of characters including senators, oil magnets, Hollywood...

Being a twice-divorced, happily independent loner has worked like a charm for P.I. Kinsey Millhone―until holiday weekends like this one roll around. What she needs is a little diversion to ward off the blues. She gets her much-needed distraction with a case that places her career on the line. And if that isn't enough to keep her busy, her ex-husband, who walked out on her eight years ago, pops back on the radar... It all begins with a $5,000 deposit...