John Corey Whaley (born January 19, 1984) is an American young adult author of realistic literary fiction. His first novel, Where Things Come Back, was published by Simon & Schuster's Atheneum Books for Young Readers on May 3, 2011.

Whaley was born on January 19, 1984. He grew up in Springhill, LA and graduated from Springhill High School in 2002. He then moved to Ruston, Louisiana, to attend college. After college, he taught public middle and high school English for five years in Springhill, Cotton Valley, LA, and Shreveport, LA, before becoming a full-time author.

Whaley holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Secondary English Education from Louisiana Tech University in Ruston, Louisiana.

Just when seventeen-year-old Cullen Witter thinks he understands everything about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town, it all disappears. . .

In the summer before Cullen’s senior year, a nominally-depressed birdwatcher named John Barling thinks he spots a species of woodpecker thought to be extinct since the 1940s in Lily, Arkansas. His rediscovery of the so-called Lazarus Woodpecker sparks a flurry of press and woodpecker-mania. Soon all the kids are getting woodpecker haircuts and everyone’s eating “Lazarus burgers.” But as absurd as the town’s carnival atmosphere has become, nothing is more startling than the realization that Cullen’s sensitive, gifted fifteen-year-old brother Gabriel has suddenly and inexplicably disappeared.

Coordinates: 53°14′20″N 1°13′48″W / 53.239°N 1.230°W / 53.239; -1.230

Whaley is a small village in Derbyshire, England, located one mile from Whaley Thorns, 1½ miles from Elmton, 1½ miles from Langwith and 2½ miles from Bolsover.

The village has a pub, garage and a former watermill, now a home, of which the large mill pond still survives.

Set in arable farmland, the village was a farming settlement, and remains so to this day with several farming families living in the village. The Diocese of Derby archives record that there was an ancient chapel in the village, but no traces of that remain. A school, known as St Mary's Mission, and school house were built in the 1860s but both these are now residential.

There are three pre-historic rock shelters behind the former school, on Magg Lane and opposite the pub, the Black Horse. These are linked to the Creswell Crags.

Scarcliffe Park, an area of woodland to the south end of the village, has Bronze Age^{[citation needed]} and Roman remains. It is surrounded by a Pale ditch.

John Aloysius Corey (born 1955) is a fictitious recurring character in Nelson DeMille novels. He is quick-witted and cocky, but would be considered by most to be a brilliant detective.

Corey first appeared in DeMille's novel Plum Island. Since then, he's appeared in The Lion's Game, Night Fall, Wild Fire, and most recently, The Lion.

The character has a healthy disrespect for authority, a dry and engaging wit, and frequently crosses the powers that be. His outside persona is one of bemused detachment, however once he locks in on a problem, he's a merciless powerhouse who refuses to stop until he's solved his case.

In Plum Island, Corey is a New York homicide detective, on medical leave, and a lecturer at John Jay. In The Lion's Game, Corey has left the NYPD and become an agent for the fictional FBI Anti-Terrorist Task Force (ATTF) in New York. The ATTF is based on the real-life Joint Terrorist Task Force.

While the Plum Island case is a local matter, the three succeeding novels deal with international conspiracy and terrorism, as befits his change in occupation. Corey both meets and works with Kate Mayfield in the Anti-Terrorist Task Force, a fact which involves them both working on cases and getting into trouble together.

Oscar Jerome Hijuelos (born August 24, 1951) is an American novelist. He is the first Hispanic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Hijuelos was born in New York City, in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, to Cuban immigrant parents, Pascual and Magdalena (Torrens) Hijuelos, both from Holguín, Cuba. As a young child, he suffered from acute nephritis after a vacation trip to Cuba with his mother and brother, and was in St. Luke's Convalescent Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut for almost a year and eventually recovered.

He attended the Corpus Christi School in Morningside Heights, public schools, and later attended Bronx Community College, Lehman College, and Manhattan Community College before matriculating into and studying writing at the City College of New York (B.A., 1975; M.A. in Creative Writing, 1976) under Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag, William S. Burroughs, Frederic Tuten, and others. Barthelme became his mentor and friend.

He then practiced various professions, including working for an advertising agency, Transportation Displays Inc. (TDI), before taking up writing full time.