The two rough-looking men who abduct her and take her far from home and family make no response to her frantic questions "Why me? What are you going to do? Where are you taking me?" Held hostage in a camp of bandits, Ariana's emotions swing between terror and boredom as days stretch into weeks.

And then the boss's son appears in the doorway of her cabin. Does this mean she will never see her mother and father again, the two who had so lovingly adopted her as an infant and raised her as their own? Will she ever wear the wedding dress so carefully saved for her her one link with her birth parents, now long dead?

Torn from the headlines, here is the case that shocked a nation: the Seattle city bus ride that turned to mayhem and murder at the hands of a gunman. Ann Rule unmasks the forces that drove quiet, clean-cut Silas Cool to shoot the driver, causing the bus to plunge off the Aurora Bridge into an apartment building. The catastrophe left three dead -- including Cool -- and dozens injured. While the scene unfolds as in a terrifying movie, Rule finds very real answers to the haunting question "how could this happen?" -- and expertly constructs the unseen chain of events that resulted in an explosive and shattering tragedy.

Included here are nine other sensational cases that illuminate Rule's unique and authoritative view of the human psyche gone temporarily berserk. No one can match Rule's meticulous research, or reveal the motives to murder in such explicit and chilling detail. You may think you know who is safe and who is dangerous; in A Rage to Kill, Ann Rule frighteningly shows that none of us are truly protected from the flashes of irrational violence that can erupt from the killers among us.

It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,� including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book� her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.