Beautiful and Dangerous Damon Black isn’t what Ariel Montgomery expects, not at all. Living with the all-consuming darkness of her tragic past, she’s always kept everyone and everything at a distance. And love? Impossible! Not if she wanted her past to stay in the past or her dark secrets to remain se-crets. The future was never even a real possibility, but between Damon’s lyrical voice and devastating good looks, she’s finding it hard to stay away. Their white hot chemistry has her re-thinking everything. For the first time since she’s lost her family, Ariel dreams of a life she knows she’ll never deserve. He’s determined to win her heart, body, and soul. But can she trust him? Trust his promise to save her from herself? Or will his attention be the final catalyst that breaks her forever?

It is very difficult to classify THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY. It is possible to say that it is a gripping adventure story of murderous criminals and brilliant policemen; but it was to be expected that the author of the Father Brown stories should tell a detective story like no-one else. On this level, therefore, THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY succeeds superbly; if nothing else, it is a magnificent tour-de-force of suspense-writing. However, the reader will soon discover that it is much more than that. Carried along on the boisterous rush of the narrative by Chesterton’s wonderful high-spirited style, he will soon see that he is being carried into much deeper waters than he had planned on; and the totally unforeseeable denouement will prove for the modern reader, as it has for thousands of others since 1908 when the book was first published, an inevitable and moving experience, as the investigators finally discover who Sunday is.

The story alternates between [Wesley] Hardin in Santa Fe, Mexico, and New York — shooting a last-stand Western until the producer blows the whistle and shuts off the funds, generating a cinéma vérité chronicle of his own life — and A.D. and Walker writing their script on the road, so that each movement in the present is complemented by an additional piece of the past uncovered. This narrative counterpoint allows Wurlitzer to pursue a satirical bent as he charts both fantasy trips, which becomes a contrast between the spiritual excesses of two generations: Yosemite Sam and Mr. Natural, each on a suicide mission. — Jonathan RosenbaumIf you splice Rudy Wurlitzer’s Slow Fade to his other four novels, they become a beautiful absurd quintet, never losing their miraculous beat. — Robert DowneySlow Fade comes out of the space between real life and the movies and closes it up for good. A great book: beautiful, funny, and dangerous. — Michael HerrSlow Fade may be the most traditional of Wurlitzer’s novels, and the time-honored pleasures of the novel are here in abundance: a twisting and turning story about fathers and sons, power and poverty, violence and fate. Some may read it as a “roman à clef” about certain notorious Hollywood players, but that seems rather secondary to me. Wurlitzer has fashioned a rare and wonderful thing — a deeply spiritual novel, without one whiff of incense or candle wax. — Scott Spencer