Jason Steadman is a thirty-year-old sales executive living in Boston and working for an electronics giant, a competitor to Sony and Panasonic. He's a witty, charismatic guy who's well liked, but lacks the "killer instinct" necessary to move up the corporate ladder. To the chagrin of his ambitious wife, it looks as if his career has hit a ceiling. Jason's been sidelined.

All that will change one evening when Jason meets Kurt Semko, a former Special Forces officer just back from Iraq. Looking for a decent pitcher for the company softball team, Jason gets Kurt, who was once drafted by the majors, a job in Corporate Security. Soon, good things start to happen for Jason - and bad things start to happen to Jason's rivals. His career suddenly takes off. He's an overnight success.

Too late does Jason discover that his friend Kurt has been paving his path to the top by the most efficient means available. After all, Kurt says, "Business is war, right?"

When Jason tries to put a stop to it, he finds that his new best friend has become the most dangerous enemy imaginable - and far more than his career hangs in the balance.

A riveting tale of ambition, intrigue, and the price of success, KILLER INSTINCT is Joseph Finder at his best.

Joseph Finder was born in Chicago in 1958 and spent much of his early childhood in Afghanistan and the Philippines. He later moved with his family to Bellingham, Washington and then to Albany, New York where he attended high school.

2004 saw the publication of PARANOIA, a thriller set in the corporate world that made the New York Times bestseller list in both hardcover and paperback, and is currently in development at Paramount. Joe's most recent novel, Company Man (2005), was an immediate New York Times bestseller, and will be available in paperback in March 2006.

Joe continues to write extensively on espionage and international affairs for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

“So…why should I save you?”
 
That’s the question Elliott Goodman hears in the OR as he’s about to have emergency surgery following a heart attack. But it isn’t Elliott’s surgeon who’s asking. It’s God. As in The Almighty. And God has a wager for Elliott. He challenges him to an eighteen-hole golf match. If Elliott wins, he is saved; if he loses… So begins this witty, insightful, very funny, and wholly unique novel about golf and life and the lessons learned from both.
 
To be fair (isn’t He always?), God sends down eighteen legendary opponents to play against Elliott and hopefully teach him a few tricks along the way. From Leonardo da Vinci (nice clubs) to Marilyn Monroe (nice…everything), Babe Ruth (pass the hot dogs), Abraham Lincoln (cheater!), and fourteen other luminaries, including Moses, John Lennon, Joan of Arc, Picasso, W.C. Fields, Socrates, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Beethoven, Gandhi, and Shakespeare, Elliott squares off against some of the most extraordinary people who’ve ever lived. As shots are analyzed, balls enter bunkers, and Freud drives the cart (control freak), Elliott has a chance to examine his life and his form, to see what he can correct or improve before meeting his ultimate challenger.
 
Bighearted and delightfully original, Bob Mitchell’s Match Made in Heaven is a grand celebration of golf and a profound parable of traveling our own personal fairways in a game where no effort is wasted, and every failure is just another chance to try again.
 
“A golf game against God—with the stakes—life and death? What a great concept! But it gets even better as Elliott Goodman plays golf with Leonardo da Vinci, W.C. Fields, John Lennon, and others. This daring book is a miracle, and, I think, quite possibly a classic.”
—James Patterson

Bob Mitchell is a dedicated sports fanatic and the author of three nonfiction books. He studied at Williams, Columbia, and Harvard, where he received a Ph.D. in French and Comparative Literature.  He was a French professor for eleven years at Harvard, Purdue, and Ohio State; served as a creative director at a number of New York ad agencies; and spent a year in Tel Aviv as a special consultant on commercial film writing and production.  He lives in Santa Barbara, California, with his wife, Susan.  Please visit his website, www.bobmitchellbooks.com.

Tony Cohan’s ON MEXICAN TIME, his chronicle of discovering a new life in the small Mexican mountain town of San Miguel de Allende, has beguiled readers and become a travel classic. Now, in MEXICAN DAYS, point of arrival becomes point of departure as—faced with the invasion of the town by tourists and an entire Hollywood movie crew, a magazine editor’s irresistible invitation, and his own incurable wanderlust—Cohan undertakes a richer, wider exploration of the country he has settled in.
 
Told with the intimate, sensuous insight and broad sweep that captivated readers of ON MEXICAN TIME, MEXICAN DAYS is set against a changing world as Cohan encounters surprise and adventure in a Mexico both old and new: among the misty mountains and coastal Caribbean towns of Veracruz; the ruins and resorts of Yucatán; the stirring indigenous world of Chiapas; the markets and galleries of Oaxaca; the teeming labyrinth of Mexico City; the remote Sierra Gorda mountains; the haunted city of Guanajuato; and the evocative Mayan ruins of Palenque. Along the way he encounters expatriates and artists, shady operatives and surrealists, and figures from his past.
 
More than an immensely pleasurable and entertaining travel narrative by one of the most vivid, compelling travel voices to emerge in recent years, MEXICAN DAYS is both a celebration of the joys and revelations to be found in this inexhaustibly interesting country and a searching investigation of the Mexican landscape and the grip it is coming to have in the North American imagination.

TONY COHAN is the author of ON MEXICAN TIME, the memoir NATIVE STATE (a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year), and the novels OPIUM and CANARY  (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year). His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Condé Nast Traveler. He divides his time between Mexico and California.

THE MILLIONAIRES’ UNIT is the story of a gilded generation of young men from the zenith of privilege: a Rockerfeller, the son of the head of the Union Pacific Railroad, several who counted friends and relatives among presidents and statesmen of the day. They had it all and, remarkably by modern standards, they were prepared to risk it all to fight a distant war in France. Driven by the belief that their membership in the American elite required certain sacrifice, schooled in heroism and the nature of leadership, they determined to be first into the conflict, leading the way ahead of America's declaration that it would join the war. At the heart of the group was the Yale flying club, six of whom are the heroes of this book. They would share rivalries over girlfriends, jealousies over membership in Skull and Bones, and fierce ambition to be the most daring young man over the battlefields of France, where the casualties among flyers were chillingly high.

One of the six would go on to become the principal architect of the American Air Force's first strategic bomber force. Others would bring home decorations and tales of high life experiences in Paris. Some would not return, having made the greatest sacrifice of all in perhaps the last noble war. For readers of FLYBOYS, THE GREATEST GENERATION, or FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, this patriotic, romantic, absorbing book is narrative military history of the best kind.

Marc Wortman is an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous national magazines. He was a senior editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine, where the story of the Yale unit was originally published in the September/October 2003 issue. He also taught literature and writing at Princeton University and in a college program for inmates at Rahway State Prison in New Jersey. He lives in New Haven with his wife and daughter.

A smart, hip, and exhilaratingly funny primer for today's father
Once upon a time being a good dad meant doling out bowls of Frankenberry to the kids on weekends while your wife slept until eight. Today it means juggling bilingual board books, Baby Bjorn's, and chilled bottles of pre-pumped breast milk. Fortunately, new and prospective fathers have the equivalent of a Sherpa dad in Christopher Healy, who brings his experience-and that of more than 100 other dads-to this clearheaded and hilarious guide. Healy goes beyond the basics and tackles the questions that really matter:

• Is it appropriate to play a couple games of Grand Theft Auto in front of an infant?
• Who decided that people under five will only listen to trilly folk music?
• Is it okay to watch Blue's Clues when your child is not around?

Genuinely useful and truly entertaining, POP CULTURE is indispensable.

Christopher Healy, is a prolific freelance jopurnalist who has contributed to such publications as Salon.com, Cookie, The Washington Post, Child, Cargo, Glamour, and Real Simple. He lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn.

Welcome to Lamaar Studios. Once a small Southern California animation house, it has grown into an entertainment conglomerate encompassing movies, television, music, video games, and a sprawling theme park called Familyland.

When an actor portraying Familyland's beloved mascot, Rambunctious Rabbit, is brutally murdered on park grounds, Lamaar executives fear that their idyllic image of '50s America will be shattered. Feeling pressure from the studio, LAPD Detectives Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs must conduct their investigation while avoiding the public eye.

But as more murders are committed, Lomax and Biggs uncover a sinister plot. Someone has a vendetta against Lamaar, a vendetta worth killing for. With the media closing in and political pressure mounting, the partners must race to discover the Lamaar-hating madman before he brings the family entertainment giant to its knees.

Bringing a fresh duo of cops to the thriller set, The Rabbit Factory is both suspenseful and satiric, a taut mystery wrapped in sharp, comedic prose.

A copywriter by trade, Marshall Karp has also written for stage, screen and television.  His play, “Squabbles,” published by Samuel French, has been performed in over 600 theaters around the world.  He has been a writer, producer and executive producer on network TV shows for all the major networks.  His first feature film, “Just Looking,” directed by Jason Alexander, was released in 2000.  
 
Having spent time on both East and West coasts, he now lives in upstate New York.
 

THE RABBIT FACTORY is his first novel, and the first in a series of Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs thrillers to be published by MacAdam/Cage. The next title in his series will be published in 2007.

For more information on the author or the series, please visit www.LomaxAndBiggs.com.