A young girl leaves her house and meets two strangers, who tell her about star-crossed lovers. At times, the book seems like it is going nowhere--but every book has that--but when the meaning of the title becomes clear, it makes it all the more worthwhile to read.

"Every other road leads to nowhere" Well, this book certainly does not lead to nowhere. It takes the reader on a captivating journey through the lives of it's three main characters. From the day I first read this book (I have re-read it a number of times) my personal observation has always remained that it would make a fantastic movie. It has the type of timeless,meaningful story that can't be forgoten no matter how hard you try.

This book was wounderful!!!.......I think that it was so wounderful because people can relate to the main character.....real people have been put in the same situation as she was....this book was so good that i couldent put it down....i took me about 2 hours to read and i read straight through it......i thought i was really sad at the end...i cried....i cry ove most of pikes books because they move me in a way.......i love them and i am hooked to his books...its all i can read!!!

This is a great book. There are several short stories so you won't get fed up with one story plot, and "The Fan from Hell" is amazing! It isn't terrifying, exactly, but it really made me think. This is C.Pike's best book!

I'm extremely familiar with the author's work and I think these short stories are some of his best, riveled only by those he composed for the "Midnight Club." The first story, about a boy who thinks he's dreaming when he's really not, is demented and fun. The second, a sequel to his book "Master of Murder," is a neat twist on the first book. The third, a compelling and thought provoking glimse of future life, left me in tears. The fourth is a wildly futuristic story that speaks about the implications of present actions and how they affect the future in the long run. The fifth is a wicked story of a boy who decides to murder his girl friend. Finally, the sixth is a parody on an experience the author actually had. Read the book! The stories are short, fun and easy to understand!!

Fan From Hell was an amazing short story that was a semi-sequel to Master of Murder. Marvin, a yung H/S student/writer is talked into terrible lies from a woman who claims to be his #1 fan. She soon seduces him. She later black mails him by saying he, Marvin raped her & beat her. Even though it was her who hit herself & she did allow Marvin to "make love" with her. She negousates by telling Marvin to basicially write a story for her that she'd started, but couldn't complete. She tries to trick Marvin with his on plots, but she makes a mistake, never interfer with a writer & his work.{hehehe} She'll try to get rid of Marvin, but who'll survive? Pike leads the reader in many twists & turns & even though Pike insists Marvin isn't suppose to be based on him, i still think a portion of Marvin has Pike's brilliance & personality. I hope he'll have another story involving Marvin & his writings. He's my favortie YA writer of all time!so far at least...?

This is the third book in the vampire series about Alisa. In this book, she attempts to keep her DNA from the hands of someone who would test it and use the results to gain immortality. In this, she runs into an old "friend" who makes the story more exciting. Another wonderful book to add to your collection. I highly suggest it.

I have recently read this book and I was amazed at how well written it was. It was exiting and I never wanted to put it down. The only thing I didn't like about it was the way Christopher Pike shows vampires. He really tears down the way most people think of them as. Other than that, this is an excellent book and I throughly reccomend it!!

The first forty pages of this book(the first chapter) was more action packed than any book I've read. Like in his other books Pike goes into great depth, throws in romance, lots of violence, and some blow-em-up scenes. If you don't like books like that, this may not be a book for you, but if you like action in movies and/or this would be a great book for you(read the first two before hand). Something that Pike does in all of his Last Vampire books is vagely describe what has happened in the previous books. I don't like that because you should read them and know what's going on. Over all it was a great book them and I would hope anyone else would give it five stars.

Thank you

Inside the Pike Place Market lives up to its title. It delivers a "day in the life" of the Market village, plus color pushed photos from angles never before seen. And, 20 recipes as a bonus. I collect Market books, photos, and printed ephemera but nothing since Victor Steinbruecks Market Sketch Book brings the reader so close to the people and activity of the Market as Rex-Johnson's Inside.....

Braiden Rex-Johnson has written a foodies delight. Sumptuously decorated with the photographs of Paul Soders, Rex-Johnson's exploration of Pike Place Market is candy for all the senses. This is NOT a cookbook. There are just 20 recipes (all very good). Rather, this is a delightful narrative of the history of the market, the people and products that inhabit it, and the terrific food that emerges from it. Braiden-Rex is deeply in love with her market, and it shows in her wonderful book. When you finish the book, you'll be hungry, but very, very satisfied.

For anyone who has ever visited Seattle's famous Pike Place Market, the book is a joy. It captures the hustle, bustle and charm of the market. Braiden Rex-Johnson has culled stories that make the market come alive in words as well as the wonderful pictures of Paul Souders. The 20 recipes spice up the text and serve to bring home the variety and texture of the market. Congratulations to both Braiden and Paul!

This excellent book shows how one person's deceit can ruin many people's lives. Set in Erie Pennsylvania the mystery starts on the very first page. As the book progresses more pieces are added to the puzzle, to tempt the reader to seek out its ending.
Jack Craville is a guy happy with his lot in life. He is content to take clients out on his boat the Seadawg to catch fish. The messy job of scaling and cleaning the fish he leaves to his mate Mickey.
Getting involved in deep personal relationships has not been a part of Jack's life since his childhood sweetheart Gina broke up with him. The only woman that he had truly loved left him for another man. It was not just an ordinary man either, but rich Steve Sterling Rollins.
Jack thought that he would never see Gina again and that if he did that he would not care about her. He was wrong on both counts that fateful day, when Gina emerged from an Erie fog. It was the day that a fishing boat was towed in from the lake with all its crew missing.
That day Jack and all of those people at Pike's Marina he called his friends began a journey. It was a journey that became more perilous as it progressed. Leading to events that no one in their wildest dreams, could have predicted that they would happen in Erie.
Dave Bednar has written a tale that captures the reader's curiosity from the first page to the last. It flows smoothly as the plot gradually reveals that all is not as it seems. The ending is one that is compliments the novel with its delicate twist.
Those readers, who enjoy their mystery novels with a dash of humor and some hard-hitting action, will delight in Fish or Cut Bait. ...

In this first book of the Pike's Marina series, Dave Bednar establishes himself with a distinct voice as wordsmith and story teller. Landlocked Sailors not only has murder, action and suspense, but appealing prose describing the Erie PA locales. And it's all tied up into a neat package with quirky characters, realistic dialog, and humor.

Thomas Teague is one of the main characters, ex-special agent in the U.S. Naval Investigative Service looking for a quiet place to light. Teague is a wounded warrior, stoically bearing the aftermath of injuries that forced his retirement. All he wants is to charter out his boat to tourist types, admire Beth Osgood from a safe distance, and be left the hell alone. Teague enjoys quiet thoughts about his hero-father's days in WW II and listening to Glenn Miller music. He leads a purposely solitary life in hopes his past won't find him.

Jack Crevalle is the exact opposite of Teague. Crevalle has a heroic background of his own in the Coast Guard, but hides such courage well beneath a devil-may-care facade. Jack lives on his boat, playing loud music that grates on Teague's nerves, raucously enjoying one night stands that keep his boat rocking in its slip at Pike's Marina. Jack drinks too much, happily flaunts his appetite for females, and talks too loud. Still, there's something likable about the guy.

Beth Osgood's father owns Pike's Marina. Recently divorced, she's come back home to Erie to reclaim the safe and stable kind of life she's always known. Crevalle's crass ways turn her off completely, but she's more than just a bit intrigued by the quiet, world-worn Thomas Teague. Beth is a knockout - smart, feminine, athletic, self-assured - but fits into the odd group of folks at Pike's Marina like she's just one of the boys.

When the sweet natured, self-appointed security guard for Pike's Marina is bludgeoned to death for no apparent, this group and their friends set out to find answers. Everyone loved the murdered Liam, especially Beth and Teague. Who could possibly have reason to snuff out an innocent like Liam?

Finding the murderer won't be an easy task. The Great Lakes Sails Festival begins the same day as the murder and Erie is packed with tourists and sailors from around the world. Teague has a hunch that his past has returned to haunt him. He's soon proven right when an old nemesis shows himself. No one is safe from Russell Zurkis, whose history of insanity and murderous inclinations have joined forces to eliminate Thomas Teague and anyone he cares about. The gang will have to go some to escape the crazy Russell's wrath.

I give this book a hearty recommendation, for all the aforementioned reasons and more. Mr. Bednar has a fine beginning here, and I eagerly anticipate the second in his Pike's Marina Series. Look for a review of that second book to follow this one. Count your lucky stars, readers, because both Landlocked Sailors and Fish or Cut Bait have been released as of this writing.

This book is one of those you won't put down until you are done reading it. It is very well written(not long and wordy like many authors first trys)It's fun, enjoyable reading and has enough twists and turns to keep the reader at the edge of their seat.Anyone who likes any type of nautical theme will thoroughly enjoy this. The murder mystery has an exciting ending. I highly recommend this book.

No doubt the book is a little draggy and you can glean a lot of what Musil wants to say in his earlier more tightly written work. But, read this work (I've read this work twice) with the unpublished posthumous papers and you will get a feel of the vast scale of this masterpiece. If Musil had lived to complete this masterwork the way it would have inveitably turned out, it would have been the greatest novel of the century. It would have been the consummation of European thought of several centuries placed in context of both the first and second world wars...now that's something to think about.

I've only gotten through volume l and part of volume ll (so far). I agree that I find it incredible that Musil is not as well known as Proust...he's his equal as a writer and in my opinion a much finer thinker. The brilliance of the book is in the extended introspections rather than the events...the multi-page musings on the human condition illustrate the timeless aspects of what we conceitedly think of as our "post-modern" psychic quandry. In common with Proust we are inside the protagonist's head, but in the third rather than first person, which gives the experience a different feel...we're a little outside at the same time. It's a ghostlier sort of connection, but I think equally as immediate. We walk the streets of Vienna as vividly as Chambray, but, perhaps Ullrich's less romantic nature, I find him a better correspondent. His perceptions are intellectual rather than the sensual, and yet, experiencing that intellect is a sensual experience for the reader (at least for this one!)

A note: I do not think the recent translation compares to the original English one...it may read more breezily, but my brief comparison suggests that it loses a LOT of subtlety in trying to achieve a more colloquial, effortless, less dated narrative voice. For instance, a passage in the original English translation reading "knowledge was beginning to become unfashionable" is translated in the new as "science became outdated". Two totally different meanings, and the first is clearly closer, given the context..(in which Musil is waxing sarcastic about a silly but dangerous bourgeois "believing" fad - spookily portentious of the Hitler era). An incredibly absorbing psychological novel...if your reading time is precious...nothing will reward more deeply or stay with you longer.

Of all the great European novelists of the first third of the century -- Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Knut Hamsun, Herman Hesse -- Robert Musil is far and away the least read; and yet he's as shapely as Gibbon, as mordant as Voltaire, as witty as Oscar Wilde and as indecent as Arthur Schnitzler, a fellow Viennese writer who gets more attention. "The Man Without Qualities" is an extraordinary amalgam of the formidable, the delicious and the unfinished; and no doubt each of these attributes is in some measure dissuasive.

If we take it that the characteristics of 20th-century life are fatuity, doubt and confusion; the "barbaric fragmentation" of the self, where "impersonal matters . . . go into the making of personal happenings in a way that for the present eludes description"; a crisis of individual identity and collective purpose -- then it is Musil's astonishing achievement to make a comedy of all this.

The book begins with a baroque meteorological description; its first action is a car accident; the hero is first seen looking out of a window, stopwatch in hand, conducting a statistical survey of passing traffic. Can there be any doubt that it is a prophetic book about our world? Musil is us. The world of "global Austria" in 1913 and "the Parallel Action" -- the plan, in the novel, to claim 1918 for the jubilee celebrating the 70th year of the reign of the Emperor Francis Joseph before the Germans get it for Kaiser Wilhelm's 30th, made nonsense of by the intervention of World War I -- is our world of the United Nations International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction and other fatuous schemes. While Musil's contemporaries Proust and Joyce chose interiority and the private world of memory, Musil is uncannily prescient about modern life, where sportsmen and criminals are indifferently idolized, where quantity sits in judgment on quality, so that an author, as Musil puts it, "must have an awful lot of like-minded readers before he can pass for an impressive thinker," where we sit and stew among "bobsled championships, tennis cups and luxury hotels along great highways, with golf course scenery and music on tap in every room." So "The Man Without Qualities" is satire; as one character says, "The man of genius is duty bound to attack." However, it is not harsh satire, nor is it sour. There is something loving about it. Musil's tone is unlike anyone else's. Partly it is the Austrian melancholy that underlies the book, the melancholy of a defunct empire, of a closed conditional: what was to happen did not. WHAT if, the novel implies, instead of expressing itself in the carnage of World War I, human folly had chosen another form? Partly it is the equable irony that plays over every character, institution and group in the book that makes reading Musil such an exquisitely flattering experience. No characters in the book escape mockery -- especially for taking themselves so seriously. All of them are skewed and partial, but none are caricatures; perhaps the book's almost complete lack of physical description plays a part here -- and yet, in spite of that, you feel you could pick them out in a lineup. They are Musil's puppets.

In his early career he wrote stories, plays and novels that had a certain popularity. But none of those prepare a reader for the expanse of "The Man Without Qualities". It took up the last two decades of his life, before he died in self-imposed exile in Switzerland in 1942, at the age of 61. It is a quite overwhelming novel, quite indeed...

So I picked up this book only because it was on my shelf, I had nothing better to do, and being the actress that I am, the title caught my eye. I'm so glad it did! This book was really great. I felt that all the charactors seemed real, like I almost new them. (Jeramie reminded me of about every boy that I know and love, and it didn't take me a long time to fall in love with him, but thats another story) I was impressed by Christopher Pike's ability to make the charactors so lifelike. Aside from that, it had great suspence, because at times, you think you know the solution, but Pike proves you wrong. This book has left me with the desire to read more books dealing with murder and mystery in the theater. A MUST READ FOR ALL HIGH SCHOOL DRAMA STUDENTS!

I read this book last year and i didn't think much of it. I am now reading it over, throughly, and found out it is one of the BEST books i've ever read! i'm not that much into horror books, but this is great! i can't wait to read another one of Pikes books!

Eighteen-year-old Melanie Martin is new to Careville, Iowa, and feels out of place at her new high school. All of that changes though when she is encouraged to tryout for a part in the school play (Final Chance) by the director, Susan Trels, and lands one of the leading roles. Part of her reason for joining though was because of Marc Hall, the brooding ex-football player she has a crush on and who seems to like her as well.

At first, everything seems to be working out for Melanie--that is, until opening night when one of the cast members is shot and killed on-stage, and Melanie becomes the prime suspect. For the remaining half of the book, Melanie tries to find out who the real killer is, as well as trying to find a link to an accident that happened almost one year ago involving several of the drama students. Because if she doesn't find out soon, she'll be tried--and more than likely convicted--as an adult for first-degree murder.

As with a lot of the Christopher Pike books I've read, I didn't want to set this book aside for anything, not even for sleep. "Last Act" was very engrossing and complex, and it was hard to guess the villain until close to the end because of the back story with Clyde. Another reason why I liked this book so much was because of Jeramie, the eccentric photographer/actor who mostly spoke in riddles. I absolutely fell in love with him from the beginning; he was just flat-out weird and had a wonderfully dry sense of humor that was rarely acknowledged.

In my opinion, "Last Act" is one Mr. Pike's best books and should definitely be read if you're a Pike fan or into teen mysteries.

hey... i'm 16 this year, and i still read spooksville... ;D
i love this series, and my favourite IS this book. i can read this over and over and over again and not getting tired of it. i love the way mr Pike twists the plot. And the description has always been great, from book 1 to 24...

to all who fancies a great story, for all ages, i would recommend this series. =)

I LUV this book! It's fabulous, fantastic, great, the best and ......(Opps! Ran Outta words!) All spooksville fans should read thiz book or else they would regret it forever!

This book cost me to shed a few tears over Watch's death, but I did a three cheer when I read that the other Watch had joined the gang again. (P.S: read #16) GGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTT book! I recommand it for Watch's fans...

This is without a doubt the best book of the LAST VAMPIRE series. It brought me to tears at the end (as most Pike books do). I never would have guessed the ending. It was soooo sad!N-E-ways just read it,its a great book! Okay, Buh Bye!!!

Pike has a great way with words in making everything seem real. Sita is such an amazing character and the plot for the book is great too. This series has me wanting to read more of his books, and I can't wait until I read the last installment!

This book was great I never knew what was to happen next and better yet who would win the battle. I think Christopher Pike did a great job with this and his series. He made a book just how I like one not always rushing to an ending, he made it into another book. I suggest anyone who likes horror mixed with action to read this book and don't rush! My opinion to this book is a great one and a thank-you to Christopher Pike. Any one else who has read this book would probably agree to just about all my words. Now I tell about the characters and the plot of the story. The to main characters are Alisa, a five thousand year old vampire who is going against her very own daughter to stop her from getting her best friend's baby Christ. Alisa can't believe it herself that the world has now a new Missiah. So now Alisa tries best with her power to try and stop her daughter from killing the new Missiah. However, to do this Alisa gets help from a group to help shoot down Kalika. The great thing about that is that it is a war against to equally as powered beings one with knowledge and one with strength.

I know that this book is the best chose for horror and fantasy because has some really gruesome stuff. This book is great for readers at an average reading level and you must read # 4 before #5. If you read this review please read the book, because it only gets better. I hope I gave enough information to be interested in this book

I read these books a while back. I loved them. This books literally grabs your attention and holds your attention untill you finish them and are crying for more. The set of Final Friends that I read were my library's, they don't have them anymore. When I found out they were lost I got so ticked off. I'm planning on buying them from a used books store near where I live. If you ever see all three of them, even if there is only one GET IT. It will be worth it believe me. They are the best set of Pike books I've ever read.
I loved every single character in this book. It's a great plot and soo funny too. I love every bit of these books soo much. You have to buy it you will not regret it.

Other great Pike books are Last Vampire 1-6, I'll see you later, Last Act and The two chain letter books

I have read the first book of the Final Friends trilogy (The Party) and it was brilliant. I can't wait until I read the other two in the series. It is awful not knowing who the killer is but I think Christopher Pike writes his books really well. I would recommend this book who likes mystery, horror and suspense. The charachters were very well portrayed, Micheal, Nick and Jessica were my favourite charachters. Polly was cool too and I liked Sara although she was cruel to Polly. Overall I really enjoyed it!

All I have to say is this is a brilliant book - great mystery.

I love Sara. I'm actually a lot like her - we have similiar personalities so I guess that's why I like her so much.