"The Furies" (Thomas Dunne Books), by Mark Alpert

Mark Alpert, known for his science-driven thrillers, takes readers on an unexpected journey into dark fantasy with "The Furies."

Imagine a world that co-exists with our own but remains hidden to outsiders. Those who inhabit this realm appear as Amish to people living nearby, but they are beings with a rare genetic disorder. Hundreds of years ago, their abilities terrified others and they were deemed witches. Rather than face persecution, they hid themselves away.

In present day, John Rogers is drowning his sorrows at a bar after an unsuccessful day at a job fair when a beautiful woman walks in with two men. He strikes up a conversation and after a period of time, watches her companions leave. Since it's late, he decides to make sure she gets home safely. They end up in a hotel room together. When they are about to become romantically involved, gunfire erupts in the hallway. The door to their room flies open and shots are fired. They flee to the roof where they meet more bullets. Ariel is hurt. When John offers to take her to a hospital, Ariel tells him about her hidden life.

Alpert has a knack for taking complex theories and making them relatable. This time, the science, while intriguing, takes a back seat to the story. John and Ariel are characters that readers will care about, and fans of Jim Butcher and other dark fantasy authors will enjoy "The Furies."

uez ?l ?? ?O? n soap opera and romance. Through a plot he defined as one of frustrated love, a man and woman too young to marry at 20 and too old to marry at 80, he wove in politics, history, economics and the mysterious rules of male desire.

"It was in those days that he devised his rather simplistic theories concerning the relationship between a woman's appearance and her aptitude for love," Garcia Marquez wrote. "He distrusted the sensual type, the ones who looked as if they could eat an alligator raw and tended to be the most passive in bed.

"The type he preferred was the opposite: those skinny little tadpoles that no one bothered to turn around and look at in the street, who seemed to disappear when they took off their clothes, who made you feel sorry for them when their bones cracked at the first impact, and yet who could leave the man who bragged the most about his virility ready for the trashcan."

Garcia Marquez reigned over both the external and the internal, public ceremony and private delusions and disappointments. "The Autumn of the Patriarch," a devastating and exhausting portrait of a Caribbean dictator published in the mid-1970s, was described by Garcia Marquez as a "poem on the solitude of power," complete with vultures barging into the presidential palace.

"No One Writes to the Colonel" was a sympathetic novella about a military man long overdue to receive his pension. The author's celebrated short story "Big Mama's Funeral" starts like a fairy tale ("This is, for all the world's unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama"), captures the ways of a small community with the intimacy of an ancient folktale and defines the workings of political power with a thoroughness you might find in a book by Robert Caro.

"No one knew the origin, or the limits or the real value of her estate, but everyone was used to believing that Big Mama was the owner of the waters, running and still, of rain and drought, and of the district's roads, telegraph poles, leap years, and heat waves, and that she had furthermore a hereditary right over life and property," he wrote.

"When she sat on her balcony in the cool afternoon air, with all the weight of her belly and authority squeezed into her old rattan rocker, she seemed, in truth, infinitely rich and powerful, the richest and most powerful matron in the world."