A young man who loves a free-spirited girl. A woman searching for her runaway daughter. A man trying to win back his ex-wife's love. A mysterious young woman yearning to be free. When the lives of these four intersect, passions erupt, devastating prices are paid, and the only hope is courage and a commitment that lasts always.

A woman whose past makes it impossible for her to get close to anyone. A middle-age man with a passion for young girls and the power to crush anyone who gets in his way. A teenage girl searching for the father she never had. A successful lawyer determined not to get burned again and to have a baby before she's forty. A man with an unquenchable grief for the daughter he lost eight years ago. A teenage girl who believes all her troubles would be over if she could only get her parents back together. When these six people meet, life for all becomes sometimes dangerous, sometimes hilarious, and...

Val believes his life is ending. Erin believes hers is not. Both may be wrong. Erin, while waiting to adopt an infant, takes her niece on a trip to the Greek Islands. Amy is a teenage girl eager for adventure of all kinds, and Erin tries to rein her in while at the same time fending off a local lothario eager to show young women the sights and a rich yachtsman offering a taste of luxury.

Ruth gets a lead on the daughter she gave up at birth. Her worst fears appear to be realized: her daughter is making the same mistakes she made. She has to find her before something terrible happens to her. And without her husband finding out that, because of this daughter, she deprived him of the son he always wanted. But if she does find her, will her daughter reject her? And how can she help Kim, the teenage assistant she has become so fond of, who is in the same trouble as she at nineteen?

Is there anything that can be said about the value of a novel, story or film other than that one likes it? If such factors were made known, writers could use them to write books that readers would not only like better but would feel are worth reading. Do the techniques in books on writing produce such novels? Are some books good even though we do not like them? Should we force ourselves to like a book because an English professor or a critic insinuates that only people with good taste like that particular book? Do the "arbiters of good taste" have grounds supporting their claims that the...

Reader and audience appeal, global constraints, large-scale desiderata, dynamics, consummation scenes, characters, relationships, structure, embodiment, voice, the line level. Developing and testing a theory of writing. Discusses such topics as originality, credibility, contrivance, crudeness, monotony, repetition. Story appeal, story impact. Threat, hope, need to know, tension and pace. Character realization, character identification, character appeal, repellant characters, character change, character and dynamics, a group as a character. The reality of relationships, the identity of...

After all else has failed, Linda joins an underground nationwide organization to find her kidnapped child.

A chance event makes her suspect that she and the other members of the local chapter are being used and that the people they are abducting and interrogating may not be kidnappers at all.

She begins trying to uncover what the organization is really about; but when one of the members does not come back from an assignment, she realizes that her suspicions may cost her life.

From college presidents to governors, to TV reporters, to faculty, to government agents, to drug dealers, to students of every political stripe, this novel follows a trail of circumstances, opportunities seized, weaknesses exploited, advantages enlarged, groups co-opted, expediencies implemented, to the ultimate unforeseen result where facts, rationality and evidence are sacrificed for a "greater good," where questioning is insensitive and disagreement is backlash, in a takeover that both liberals and conservatives see as ominous, a takeover that is reaching beyond the ivy walls into radio,...

Ruth tries to find her daughter before anything happens to her and at the same time help her young friend Kim through a heart-wrenching problem. She also wants to become reconciled with her own parents. But a long-buried secret may wreck her marriage. Only a miracle can bring Ruth's family together for Thanksgiving.