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Twanged (Regan Reilly #4)
by Carol Higgins ClarkRegan Reilly plans to spend her Fourth of July week vacationing in the Hamptons at her parents' home and also with her best friend, Kit, who has a share in a group house. A last-minute phone call, however, casts Regan's trip in a new light. Brigid O'Neill, a rising country star, has been getting frightening "love notes" and she hires Regan as her bodyguard for a Fourth of July concert in Southampton. Brigid plans to play a fiddle given to her in Ireland and said to have magic powers. She later learns the rest of its legend - whoever takes it out of Ireland will have an accident or face death.<P> A guest found floating face-down in a pool at Chappy's welcoming party for Brigid is only the first in a series of ominous incidents. As Brigid's Fourth of July concert nears, it looks as if the cursed fiddle should be shipped back to Ireland - Express Mail! It's Regan's job to hold the curse at bay and fend off Brigid's pursuers.
Twenty Blue Devils (Gideon Oliver Mystery #9)
by Aaron ElkinsThe dead man is the manager of Tahiti's Paradise Coffee Plantation, producer of the most expensive coffee bean in the world, the winey, luscious Blue Devil. Nothing tangible points to foul play behind his fall from a cliff, but FBI agent John Lau, a relative of the coffee-growing family, has his suspicions. What he needs is evidence, and who better to provide it than his friend, anthropologist Gideon Oliver, the Skeleton Detective? Gideon is willing to help, but surprisingly—and suspiciously—both the police and the other family members refuse to okay an exhumation order. As a result, Gideon, to his surprise and against his better judgment, finds himself sneaking into a graveyard under cover of night with John, a flashlight, and a shovel—not exactly up to the professional standards of the world's most famous forensic anthropologist, but necessary under the circumstances. Gideon prefers his bones ancient, dry, and dusty, but the body he must examine had lain in the tropical sun for a week before it was found, and then buried native-style—shallowly, with no casket—so it is not exactly his…well, cup of tea. But it's not the state of the remains that bothers him the most, it's the deeper human ugliness that his examination uncovers: subtle clues that do indeed point to foul play, to mistaken identity, and to a murderous conspiracy that may have percolated through the family for decades—and brewed a taste for murder.
Where Serpents Lie
by T. Jefferson Parker<P> Terry Naughton is head of the Crimes Against Youth unit of the Orange County Sheriff's Department. He's seen plenty of heinous criminals in his years on the force, but nothing could have prepared him for the Horridus. <P> Abducting children from their beds, dressing them like little angels and releasing them the next day, the Horridus is a pedophile living an escalating fantasy, Naughton believes. A fantasy that will soon lead to sexual depravity and beyond. <P> When shocking and seemingly factual accusations put his career on the line, he must confront his dark past. Even if he can clear his name, can Naughton do the same for his conscience?
Fourth Horseman
by Margot DaltonShe's on maternity leave, unofficially, Detective Jackie Kaminsky can't ignore a thirty-year-old murder, Especially since the bodies are buried in her own back yard. Jackie Kaminsky finds her instincts put to the ultimate test when she unearths the bodies of a murdered woman and baby behind her new house. As a cop, she suspects this peaceful neighbourhood is hiding a sinister secret. As a mother, she fears for her own baby's safety.
Death Qualified: A Mystery of Chaos
by Kate WilhelmWhat's the link between a powerful mind-altering computer program and two murders in the Oregon woods? Seven years ago Lucas Kendricks deserted his young family and took off for mathematician Emil Frobisher's research project in Colorado. Now, after one day's warning--he ordered a monster computer to be sent to his old address--he's back, and then, moments later, he's dead, along with a young woman he gave a lift to only a few hours before. The police think Lucas raped and killed the hitchhiker and was shot down by his tiny, sharpshooting wife Nell; but defense attorney Barbara Holloway, needled by her estranged father into coming back to him and the law (she'd been on the run from both for five years after a dose of professional disillusionment) is convinced that Lucas's death had more to do with the mysterious men who followed him from Colorado. Taking on her share of cliches--alliance with her curmudgeonly, reluctantly supportive father; opposition from prosecutor/former lover Tony DeAngelo; romance with mathematician Mike Dinesen (whom she's called in to make sense of the connections Lucas had with Frobisher, psychiatrist Ruth Brandywine, and computer expert Walter Schumaker)--Barbara delves into those blank seven years, and comes up with answers that are even scarier than the questions: a set of the most user-unfriendly computer disks in literature.
End Game
by Don PendletonAn ex-CIA agent has developed a large and efficient arms- trafficking organization based in the former Soviet Union. And, when it is learned that the organization has agreed to produce and sell the components necessary for assembling a nuclear bomb, Mack Bolan is sent in to stop the project as well as the illegal arms trafficking. But, despite his best efforts, the bomb components are secretly shipped and Bolan is forced to track down the nuclear device and attempt to capture or destroy it before it can be detonated. Violence. 218th novel in the "Executioner" series, 1997.
Gideon
by Russle Andrews"Gideon is fictional crime at its best-suspenseful and terrific" heroes, diabolical villains I'd love to prosecute, and rising err plot." That all adds up to a great thriller. "VINCENT BUGLIOSI "Gideon is" rich, original and fresh, filled with cover-tips, bodies and enough" intrigue to make John le Carr6 bleed red with envy. Russell Andrews" breaks all the tackles as he rampages his way into the front of the" thriller class, writing with clarity, wit and a chilling sense of" danger. Count on it-Gideon will be hotter than the sun this summer."" LORENZO CARCATERRA"
Into the Fire
by David WiltseFBI agent John Becker has the power to enter serial killers minds, he is able to guess their next action and when it will be so he is able to inform the Bureau. A cryptic note is located which is from a previous criminal - informing Becker that his cell mate who has just been released may be a serial killer. Swann - the informer wants the man caught due to him constantly raping him in prison. Becker is unsure and has right to be - Swann is released by order of Becker's superiors however it is him that is the serial killer. Swann having already determined his next target Aural McKesson. Swann takes him to an abandoned coal mine and tortures him but luckily Becker and others are present.
Wallflower
by William BayerFrank Janek, the unforgettable detective from the bestselling Switch, returns in a brilliant, shocking thriller. To capture a killer possessed by the most extreme sexual obsessions, Janek must try to think like a twisted murderer. And since the creep murdered Janek's beloved goddaughter, Janek's interest is entirely personal.
Zero At the Bone
by Mary Willis WalkerKatherine Driscoll is just three weeks away from disaster: foreclosure on her home and business, even the sale of her beloved dog. She has no hope of raising the $91,000.00 she so desperately needs -- until the father she hasn't seen for thirty years writes to her, offering her enough money to solve her problems... if she will do one thing in return. But Katherine may never learn what that is. When she arrives in Austin, she is hours too late: her father has died in a bizarre accident. As she sifts through the cryptic notes he left behind, she finds herself caught in terrible family secrets -- and a deadly illicit trade. The more she learns, the more determined she becomes to prove her father's death was no accident. In doing so, Katherine will make a bitter enemy -- desperate enough to kill... and perhaps, kill again.
Zero Tolerance
by Don PendletonThe Bayou Boys, lords of the New Orleans underworld, are facing serious and deadly competition. The Haitian posse is snatching a huge piece of the drug trade in the Big Easy, leaving a high body count in its wake. Mack Bolan's two-pronged attack begins in the swamps, first against the Bayou Boys, then on to the main event in Haiti, home of the voodoo posse. Stateside, the Executioner has witnessed the posse's trail of blood. But he has no idea what awaits him on the island. With criminal cults anything is possible. No matter. Time to rock. Violence. 229th novel in the "Executioner" series, 1998.
The Day I Went Missing: A True Story
by Jennifer MillerIt's happened to all of us at one time: falling victim to someone who says the words we want to hear. It usually ends with a wounded heart or lost love. But in one woman's case, it took a deadly turn. Jennifer Miller, an Emmy-nominated TV writer, was a highly functioning member of the Hollywood scene who had everything going for her: great contacts, great work, and the promise of an even greater future. But what Jennifer did not have was a happy life, or even the ability to understand what happy meant. A single woman who did not know what it was like to have a love relationship, she was haunted by a deepening despair. She toyed with therapy, but Jennifer, the daughter of a shrink, was convinced that she was beyond help. Then she met Dr. David Cohen, and discovered something worse than depression. Believing she had finally found someone to trust completely, Jennifer allowed herself to get sucked into Dr. Cohen's world. What followed is a chilling tale of fraudulent therapy that is enthralling and horrifying from its skillful beginning to its shocking conclusion.
A World the Color of Salt: A Smokey Brandon Mystery
by Noreen AyresSounding like an uncensored outtake from vintage Hill Street Blues, this introduction to ex-stripper, ex-cop, Orange County forensic specialist
Unnatural Causes
by Janet BettleGeri Lander is a successful lawyer always ready to passionately defend the underdog. But when Joanna Pascoe comes to her for help in uncovering the truth behind her husband's mysterious death, even Geri believes she does not have much of a case. What has happened to Joanna's husband seems like a tragedy-a senseless, heart-wrenching tragedy. But, as Geri digs a little deeper, she comes up with frightening questions, and no answers: Why should a perfectly healthy man like Dr. Pascoe die after a simple case of food poisoning, and why such a gruesome death? The further Geri delves, the more suspicious the circumstances become, and before long she discovers that Thomas Pascoe has died from something far worse than food poisoning. Dr. Pascoe is the victim of a deadly super-bug-a bacterium resulting from over-use of antibiotics in farm animals. Geri begins to investigate, only to be thwarted at every attempt to discover the truth. The authorities are curiously unwilling to help, more people are dying, and suddenly Geri finds herself in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy. In this terrific first novel, Janet Bettle introduces a feisty heroine and brings a fresh and contemporary voice to the world of legal thrillers.
The End of Enemies
by Grant BlackwoodVeteran covert agent Briggs Tanner leaps into action when a man is brutally assassinated in front of him. His search will lead him from the depths of the Pacific Ocean, through the bullet-riddled back alleys of Beirut, to a deadly secret buried since World War II-and only Tanner can keep it from falling into the wrong hands...
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
by Sir Arthur Conan DoyleContains the following adventures: A Scandal in Bohemia The Red-headed League A Case of Identity The Boscombe Valley Mystery The Five Orange Pips The Man with the Twisted Lip The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle The Adventure of the Speckled Band The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Borrowed Hearts: New and Selected Stories
by Rick DemarinisTraveling salesmen, small-time hustlers, hitchhikers, harried fathers, and sex-obsessed sons: Rick DeMarinis's stories take men at the end of their rope, then give them just enough line for things to get interesting. Style rhetoric drives a burned-out high school teacher to violence in "Wilderness"; answering a Help Wanted ad leads to disastrous results in "Billy Ducks Among the Pharaohs." In charting the downward arc of their character's lives, DeMarinis's smart, self-conscious tales run the gamut from experimental fables to down-to-earth realism. In "Insulation," for example, his protagonist has a genetic predisposition for being struck by lightning; the gently naturalistic "Voice of America," on the other hand, follows a 17-year-old boy who both loves and resents his promiscuous mother and dreams "of waking up as someone else, in a different place, where things were decent." Even those stories that begin as mere narrative exercises soon turn into things greater than the sum of their parts. "Romance: A Prose Villanelle," for example, crosses the preposterous conventions of a romance novel with the strict patterning of the villanelle (the famously difficult poetic form in which two lines are repeated at intervals throughout; think "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). The results are odd, hilarious, and curiously apt: "Silence slips into the bloated prose," one repeated passage tells us. "It invades each trumped-up scene.... It is there, smirking, when you begin, there in the middle, showing a wider grin, and it waits for you at the dead end--a surprise ending of dead paper, rustling with the last word." It's difficult for fiction to interrogate itself and engage the reader's sympathies, but DeMarinis pulls it off. In Borrowed Hearts, he shows himself one of the funniest and deadliest American writers at work today: a Flannery O'Connor for the Prozac age.
The Golden
by Lucius ShepardThey are the Family. They are vampires. And they have gathered at Castle Banat to savor one they call the Golden, a mortal whose bloodlines reflect more than three centuries of careful, patient breeding. Now that the wait is over at last, they have come from all across Europe for the Decanting, eager to drink the exquisite, long anticipated elixir. But what should be one of the Family's finest moments is snatched from them. For someone ruth lessly murders the Golden, ravaging her body to drain every last drop of precious blood...and robbing her of the immortali ty-the change from life to life-that would have been hers. The task of hunting down the killer falls to Michel Beheim, former chief of detectives in the Paris police force. A mere child among the Family, only two years a Vampire compared to the cen turies many others claim, Beheim believes he will be able to solve this mur der as he solved those of his former life. But the motivations, the actions-the very concept of evil-are quite different for vampires than for ordinary mortals. It is the Lady Alexandra who first (continued on back flap) (continued from front flap) demonstrates just how dangerous Beheim's lack of experience may prove when she comes to his apartments to offer a clue, or rather, a hint of evidence. Both the murder and his investigation are part of a greater game, she says. Then--as cruel as she is seductive--she warns her new chosen lover that he should make no assumptions with regard to the players' ultimate goals...not even her own. So Beheim enters the game, following a twisting trail that leads from Alexandra's arms into the terrifying nightmare depths of Castle Banat.-.to a hidden chamber that holds secrets even the Family cannot fathom...to the lairs of centuries-old vampires possessed of knowledge and powers far beyond his own. And, in the midst of his fear and new hungers, Michel Beheim discovers that his professional skills alone cannot save him from those who would condemn him to an eternal hell, or from the unfathomable, growing darkness in his own immortal soul.