Ben and his ex-mercenary buddy Chon are not your average entrepreneurs. Operating out of Laguna Beach, they run a highly successful marijuana operation, reaping significant profits from their loyal clientele.

When their turf is challenged by the Mexican Baja Cartel, they face a threat like never before. The cartel sends a clear message: a "no" is unacceptable.

Refusing to back down, Ben and Chon find themselves in a precarious situation when the cartel escalates its threats by kidnapping Ophelia, their playmate and confidante. Her abduction sets off a dizzying array of ingenious negotiations and gripping plot twists.

This tale is a provocative, sexy, and darkly engrossing thrill ride that will leave you breathless as you explore the costs of freedom and the price of one amazing high.

Only a handful of fictional characters are recognized by first name alone. Dean Koontz's Odd Thomas is one such literary hero who has come alive in listeners' imaginations as he explores the greatest mysteries of this world and the next with his inimitable wit, heart, and quiet gallantry.

Now Koontz follows Odd as he is irresistibly drawn onward, to a destiny he cannot imagine. The legend began in the obscure little town of Pico Mundo. A fry cook named Odd was rumored to have the extraordinary ability to communicate with the dead. Through tragedy and triumph, exhilaration and heartbreak, word of Odd Thomas' gifts filtered far beyond Pico Mundo, attracting unforgettable new friends - and enemies of implacable evil.

With great gifts comes the responsibility to meet great challenges. But no mere human being was ever meant to face the darkness that now stalks the world - not even one as oddly special as Odd Thomas.

After grappling with the very essence of reality itself, after finding the veil separating him from his soul mate, Stormy Llewellyn, tantalizingly thin yet impenetrable, Odd longed only to return to a life of quiet anonymity with his two otherworldly sidekicks - his dog, Boo, and a new companion, one of the few who might rival his old pal Elvis. But a true hero, however humble, must persevere.

Haunted by dreams of an all-encompassing red tide, Odd is pulled inexorably to the sea, to a small California coastal town where nothing is as it seems. Now the forces arrayed against him have both official sanction and an infinitely more sinister authority...and in this dark night of the soul, dawn will come only after the most shattering revelations of all.

When A Single Man was originally published, it shocked many by its frank, sympathetic, and moving portrayal of a gay man in midlife. George, the protagonist, is adjusting to life on his own after the sudden death of his partner, determined to persist in the routines of his daily life.

An Englishman and a professor living in suburban Southern California, he is an outsider in every way. His internal reflections and interactions with others reveal a man who loves being alive despite everyday injustices and loneliness.

Wry, suddenly manic, constantly funny, surprisingly sad, this novel catches the true textures of life itself.

An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind. It tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.

First published in 1979, The White Album is a journalistic mosaic of American life in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. It includes, among other bizarre artifacts and personalities, reportage on the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson family, a visit to a Black Panther Party press conference, the story of John Paul Getty's museum, a meditation on the romance of water in an arid landscape, and reflections on the swirl and confusion that marked this era.

With commanding sureness of mood and language, Didion exposes the realities and dreams of an age of self-discovery whose spiritual center was California.

The book is organized into sections:

• I. THE WHITE ALBUM - "The White Album"
• II. CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC - "James Pike, American", "Holy Water", "Many Mansions", "The Getty", "Bureaucrats", "Good Citizens", "Notes Toward a Dreampolitik"
• III. WOMEN - "The Women's Movement", "Doris Lessing", "Georgia O'Keeffe"
• IV. SOJOURNS - "In the Islands", "In Hollywood", "In Bed", "On the Road", "On the Mall", "In Bogota", "At the Dam"
• V. ON THE MORNING AFTER THE SIXTIES - "On the Morning After the Sixties", "Quiet Days in Malibu"