This installment in the famous Kinsey Millhone mystery series finds the no-nonsense private eye trudging through her well-guarded personal history to find her ex-husband's killer. A 1999 Publishers Weekly Best Book.

Willa Cather's O PIONEERS!, first published in 1913, tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, the daughter of a Swedish pioneering family, who successfully takes over the management of the family farm upon her father's death. The story encompasses Alexandra's difficult relationships with her brothers, Oscar and Lou, her love for a neighbor, Carl Lindstrom, and the tragic romance between her youngest brother, Emil, and a married woman. The setting is as important as the events of the story, however. Alexandra's near-obsessive love for the huge sky and vast plains of Nebraska is part of what fuels the plot, and Cather's chronicle of the prairie's evolution from a raw and wild landscape to thriving farmland reflects her own love of the land and her admiration for the immigrants who worked it. O PIONEERS! is an early novel, and in later books Cather would become more skilled at dialogue and plotting, but the passionate conviction she brought to this novel secures its position as one of her greatest works.

After publishing a full-length biography of Eugene O'Neill in 1962, the authors of this biography spent 38 years conducting intensive research into the life of the Nobel Prize-winning playwright. New interviews often led to new source material, including previously unseen letters and diaries, which allowed the authors to write an even more comprehensive account of their subject. This volume, the first in a projected series, follows O'Neill's life up to his first Broadway hit.

Lieutenant Abe Glitsky investigates the death of Tim Markam, CEO of a crooked San Francisco HMO.

Quindlen's first novel is a family chronicle set in the 1960s, focusing on adolescent Maggie and her discontented mother, whom she begins gradually to understand as she herself grows older and wiser.

Ingrid, a graduate student in anthropology, is obsessed with her professor, who disappears on a research project. She gets a grant that enables her to search for him at the bizarrely decadent semi-university he has founded on an island off the coast of Africa. She fails in her quest, spending her time in an affair with a local hunk, learning lessons about love and passion, not to mention anthropology.

The prolific and reliably knowledgeable John Updike's fourth collection of his wide-ranging critical pieces demonstrates once again the depth and range of his interests and the enduring grace of his prose style.

Thomas C. Cooper's personal view of the month-to-month art of gardening, from the new seed catalogs in January, to putting the garden to bed for the winter. The cultivator of a modest city garden in Boston, Cooper has useful advice for any garden, including how to neglect it when necessary.

This book features the stories of women who did not follow the Victorian norm of marriage and instead opted to pursue careers. They often had a hard time making ends meet, however, and their circumstances are contrasted with those of women caught in unhappy marriages. The conflicts between the men and the women in the book are not so different from the conflicts the sexes are still having.