Books in Playaway Adult Fiction series

Tess, an aspiring seamstress, thinks she's had an incredibly lucky break when she is hired by famous designer Lady Lucile Duff Gordon to be a personal maid on the Titanic's doomed voyage. Once on board, Tess catches the eye of two men, one a roughly hewnbut kind sailor and the other an enigmatic Chicago millionaire. But on the fourth night, disaster strikes.

Throw out everything you think you know about history. Close the approved textbooks, turn off the corporate mass media, and whatever you do, don't believe anything you hear from the government---The Rise of the Fourth Reich reveals the truth about American power. In this explosive new book, the legendary Jim Marrs, author of the underground bestseller Rule by Secrecy, reveals the frighteningly real possibility that today the United States is becoming the Fourth Reich, the continuation of an ideology thought to have been vanquished more than a half century ago. Although the United States helped defeat the Germans in World War II, we failed to defeat the Nazis. At the end of the war, ranking Nazis, along with their young and fanatical protégés, used the loot of Europe to create corporate front companies in many countries, including the United States of America. Utilizing their stolen wealth, men with Nazi backgrounds and mentalities wormed their way into corporate America, slowly buying up and consolidating companies into giant multinational conglomerates. Many thousands of other Nazis came to the United States under classified programs, such as Project Paperclip. They brought with them miraculous weapons technology that helped win the space race, but they also brought their insidious Nazi philosophy within our borders. This ideology, based on the authoritarian premise that the end justifies the means---including unprovoked wars of aggression and curtailment of individual liberties---has gained an iron hold in the “land of the free and the home of the brave.”

In the first novel of a spellbinding new trilogy, New York Times bestselling author Jeff Shaara returns to the Civil War terrain he knows best. A Blaze of Glory takes us to the action-packed Western Theater for a vivid re-creation of one of the war's bloodiest and most iconic engagements-the Battle of Shiloh. It's the spring of 1862. The Confederate Army in the West teeters on the brink of collapse following the catastrophic loss of Fort Donelson. Commanding general Albert Sidney Johnston is forced to pull up stakes, abandon the critical city of Nashville, and rally his troops in defense of the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Hot on Johnston's trail are two of the Union's best generals: the relentless Ulysses Grant, fresh off his career-making victory at Fort Donelson, and Don Carlos Buell. If their combined forces can crush Johnston's army and capture the railroad, the war in the West likely will be over. There's just one problem: Johnston knows of the Union plans, and is poised to launch an audacious surprise attack on Grant's encampment-a small settlement in southwestern Tennessee anchored by a humble church named Shiloh. With stunning you-are-there immediacy, Shaara takes us inside the maelstrom of Shiloh as no novelist has before. Drawing on meticulous research, he dramatizes the key actions and decisions of the commanders on both sides: Johnston, Grant, Sherman, Beauregard, and the illustrious Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest. Here too are the thoughts and voices of the junior officers, conscripts, and enlisted men who gave their all for the cause: Confederate cavalry lieutenant James Seeley, Private Fritz “Dutchie” Bauer of the 16th Wisconsin Regiment-brave participants in a pitched back-and-forth battle whose casualty count would far surpass anything the American public had yet seen in this war. By the end of the second day of fighting, as Grant's bedraggled forces regroup for what looks like a last stand, two major events-one of them totally unexpected-would turn the tide of the battle and perhaps the war itself. A Blaze of Glory brings the exhilaration of battle to life and illuminates a pivotal clash-at-arms that changed the course of American history.

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to “write a history of the world without leaving home.” The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has figured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture. Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposition imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.

In the summer of 1973 Joe Castle was the boy wonder of baseball, the greatest rookie anyone had ever seen. The kid from Calico Rock, Arkansas, dazzled Cubs fans as he hit home run after home run, politely tipping his hat to the crowd as he shattered all rookie records. Calico Joe quickly became the idol of every baseball fan in America, including Paul Tracey, the young son of a hard-partying and hard-throwing Mets pitcher. On the day that Warren Tracey finally faced Calico Joe, Paul was in the stands, rooting for his idol but also for his dad. Then Warren threw a fastball that would change their lives forever.

Morganville, Texas, is a small college town filled with quirky characters. But when the sun goes down, the bad come out. Because in Morganville, there is an evil that lurks in the darkest shadows---one that will spill out into the bright light of day. Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation. The popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks on the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero. And Claire really doesn't have the right connections---to the undead who run the town. When Claire heads off campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood.

By the end of 1943, all evidence of the abortive German attempt to assassinate Winston Churchill has been carefully buried in an unmarked grave in the Norfolk village of Studley Constable. But two of the most wanted ringleaders are still alive… In the fourth hard winter of war, British intelligence pick up disturbing reports from Heinrich Himmler's power base in Wewelsburg Castle. The mission is not yet accomplished. For the Fatherland, the Reichsfuhrer is demanding the Eagle's return…

A sensation across Europe?millions of copies soldA spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.It?s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.It?s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet?s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age?and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it?who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism?and an unexpected connection