When a knock on the door interrupts her nightly escape into the pages of a cheap romance, Midge, aka Beatrice Audra Smith, is understandably annoyed. Paperback romances may not be the world's best protection against the "lonelies," but what else is a 4'11," 87 pound, 30 1/4 year-old dreamer to do in the middle of the Enchantment Trailer Park in Santa Fe? Enter Horace Decker, out on parole and in every sense a getaway man. He explains his presence outside Midge's trailer as easily as he will capture her heart: "I got paroled two hours ago. Jake said he got this cute little sister. Said to look...

Author Robert Mayer has created a spellbinding tale of resounding readability which provides the most powerful, indictment capital punishment arid the "court system ever to appear in fictional form. The Execution explores the delicate, all too individualistic threads that weave the web. of American justice; with frightening precision, Mayer, traps the reader within that web, squarely upon Death Row.

To a growing boy, life without base-ball would be unimaginable, es-pecially in the spring of 1947. History is being made at Ebbets Field. Jackie Robinson is about to break the color line and Brooklyn has a shot at the pennant. In the Bronx, eight-year-old Ben-jamin "Peewee" Brunig dreams of making the major leagues as the next Dodger shortstop; the heir apparent to Pee Wee Reese. But even as he fan-tasizes about the future, the people around him-his mother, his rabbi father, his grandmother, even the neighborhood Rag Lady-are tor-mented by the present and the past. Only a family crisis could...

New Orleans, August 2005. The lives of a ballet dancer, a reporter, a psychiatrist, and a Voodoo queen intersect and overlap in the shadow of a stalker and a serial killer... and all the while, a bad wind named Katrina is headed their way.