Step into Elaine Levine's exciting new series of alpha warriors-products of the government's secret corps of assassins called the Red Team:

Haunted by memories he cannot reach, stalked by an enemy bent on revenge…

Rocco Silas has come home to Wyoming after long years as a Red Team operative in Afghanistan. It isn't easy returning to civilian life, especially burdened as he is with a staggering case of PTSD or hunted as he is by an enemy determined to seek an eye-for-eye-neither of which can he battle until he confronts the truth of what happened one fateful day in the high mountain ranges of the Hindu Kush.

… She alone holds the key to his sanity.

Mandy Fielding's dream of opening a therapeutic riding center on her family's ranch is almost within her grasp-until she hires Rocco Silas, a dangerous ex-Spec Ops friend of her brother's. His haunted eyes and passionate touch promise a love she never dared believe possible. Can they confront the truth of his past and build a future together or will the enemy stalking him destroy them both?

Qu’arrive-t-il donc aux femmes de Stepford ? Ont-elles toujours été, ainsi que Joanna les découvre en s’installant dans cette ville, de véri­tables poupées ménagères, unique­ment préoccupées de l’entretien de leur intérieur et du bien-être de leur famille ? Ou alors sont-elles victimes de leurs maris, tous adhé­rents du « Club des Hommes », qui se réunissent chaque soir dans une vieille bâtisse mystérieuse interdite aux femmes ?

Joanna, jeune femme libérée, tente de créer une association féminine avec l’aide de deux amies nouvel­lement arrivées. Quelle n’est pas sa stupeur de les voir, à leur tour, se transformer brusquement, à l’image des autres femmes de la ville. L’inquiétude devient rapidement de l’angoisse…

Joanna réussira-t-elle à échapper à ce cauchemar aseptisé, clima­tisé, lot quotidien des femmes de Stepford ?

The wives in Stepford are not exactly what you might call feisty, but they do keep nice homes. They wax and vacuum, and clean and dust all day long and late into the evenings, but they never complain. They are rather pleasing to look at too these Stepford ladies. They are round and shapely in all of the right places and in many ways they are model wives.

When the Eberharts move to Stepford Joanna finds it hard to settle in the town. She finds the town's women weird. Not one of them ever seems to have time to pop over for a cup of coffee. They are much too busy keeping house. They do find time to go out every once in a while though, to do the shopping, and even that is done neatly; every item is perfectly stacked in their trolleys.

Fortunately Joanna does manage to find a couple of friends who are normal. In fact one of them, Bobbie, is refreshingly slob-like. The other one, Charmaine, exudes elegance and is obsessed with tennis. She even has her own court in the garden, and so things are not, perhaps, so bad in Stepford after all. Or so it seems. But when Charmaine suddenly sacks her maid, and dons the pinny herself, Joanna is shocked. And when she discovers that her tennis buddy is ripping up her tennis court so that her husband can have his own putting green, Joanna realizes – for a fact – that something very strange indeed is going on in Stepford

The Stepford Wives is a much shorter read than I had anticipated. My copy is only 116 pages long, but it achieves a lot in those few pages and bulking out of the story would only have spoiled it. I would describe this as being a quietly scary story. The real nasty stuff always happens just out of sight, never right there in your face. If you have ever watched any really old films, you might remember how scenes sometimes ended with the loving couple closing the bedroom door. What happened next was left to the viewer's imagination. In a similar way the nasty stuff in The Stepford Wives is left to the reader's imagination. In the final pages, there is a scene where the Stepford men-folk usher Joanna into Bobbie's kitchen and Bobbie, who really doesn't seem like Bobbie anymore and is holding a knife, calls her over to the sink so that she can prove to her that she isn't a robot. What happens next in that kitchen is left to the reader's imagination. The horror is not depicted in glorious Technicolor and if the claret flows it flows unseen, but it is still a very scary scene indeed and possibly one of the best ones in the book.

Considered one of the great dystopian novels—alongside Anthony Burgess’s and Aldous Huxley’s —Ira Levin’s frightening glimpse into the future continues to fascinate readers even forty years after publication.

The story is set in a seemingly perfect global society. Uniformity is the defining feature; there is only one language and all ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into one race called “The Family.” The world is ruled by a central computer called UniComp that has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. People are continually drugged by means of regular injections so that they will remain satisfied and cooperative. They are told where to live, when to eat, whom to marry, when to reproduce. Even the basic facts of nature are subject to the UniComp’s will—men do not grow facial hair, women do not develop breasts, and it only rains at night.

With a vision as frightening as any in the history of the science fiction genre, is one of Ira Levin’s most haunting novels.

Idealne miasto Stepford: niski wskaźnik przestępczości, raj dla szczęśliwych rodzin, dobrze utrzymane trawniki, bogate i czyste domy.

Idealne żony ze Stepford: piękne, posłuszne, zadbane, niewymagające. Mężczyźni ze Stepford chcą mieć właśnie takie żony. Trudno sobie wyobrazić, jak daleko mogą się posunąć, aby dostosować rzeczywistość do swoich wymagań…