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Recent Reviews: |
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The Lovely Bones
On her way home from school on a snowy
December day in 1973, 14-year-old Susie Salmon ("like the fish") is lured
into a makeshift underground den in a cornfield and brutally raped and
murdered, the latest victim of a serial killer--the man she knew as her
neighbor, Mr. Harvey. Alice Sebold's haunting and heartbreaking debut
novel, The Lovely Bones, unfolds from heaven, where "life is a perpetual
yesterday" and where Susie narrates and keeps watch over her grieving
family and friends, as well as her brazen killer and the sad detective
working on her case. As Sebold fashions it, everyone has his or her own
version of heaven. Susie's resembles the athletic fields and landscape of
a suburban high school: a heaven of her "simplest dreams," where "there
were no teachers.... We never had to go inside except for art class....
The boys did not pinch our backsides or tell us we smelled; our textbooks
were Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue."
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The Conspiracy
Club
Over the course of twenty acclaimed novels of suspense, most recently The
Murder Book and A Cold Heart, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan
Kellerman has pitted psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware against adversaries as
disturbed and dangerous as Delaware is clever and compassionate. Now in
Kellerman’s gripping new novel, a different hero will hold the reader
spellbound: a dedicated young psychologist, unschooled in the ways of
violent crime and incalculable evil–until his life is irreversibly touched
by both . . . and he is thrust into a chilling hunt for a
twenty-first-century Jack the Ripper.
When his brief, passionate romance with nurse Jocelyn
Banks is cut short by her kidnapping and brutal murder, Dr. Jeremy Carrier
is left emotionally devastated, haunted by his lover’s grisly demise and
warily eyed by police still seeking a prime suspect in the unsolved
slaying. To escape the pain, he buries himself in his work as staff
psychologist at City Central Hospital–only to be drawn deeper into a
waking nightmare when more women turn up murdered in the same gruesome
fashion as Jocelyn Banks . . . and the suspicion surrounding Jeremy
intensifies. Now, the only way to prove his innocence and put his torment
to rest is to follow the trail of a cunning psychopath.
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Blow Fly
From Publishers Weekly... "Please don't go there. The past is the
past," sighs New York Assistant District Attorney Jaime Berger, who
herself was introduced in Cornwell's last Kay Scarpetta novel, The Last
Precinct (2000). Alas, many of Cornwell's fans are bound to agree. One
fascinating nonfiction bestseller (Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper,
Case Closed) later, Cornwell now returns to Scarpetta, formerly Virginia's
chief medical examiner. From the start, however, the formidable author is
up against the equally formidable task of getting her charismatic main
character off ice and back in action. We encounter Scarpetta languishing
in a crumbling little rental house in Florida. She has taken refuge there
and become a private forensic consultant after she was driven from her job
for her alleged involvement in the murder of a deputy police chief. The
violent death of her lover, Benton Wesley, the brilliant FBI psychological
profiler, has left her filled with an unappeasable grief. When the coroner
in Baton Rouge asks her advice on a cold case concerning an affluent woman
found dead of a drug overdose in a seedy hotel, it seems little more than
a diversion. Yet it becomes clear that the overdose may be related to a
fresh string of serial killings. Also disturbing Scarpetta's somber peace
is a troubling letter from someone out to kill her, the sick and obsessed
death-row inmate Jean-Baptiste. When Scarpetta is at last allowed to get
back to business, she is a feisty, independent powerhouse whose capacity
to concentrate and observe rivals Sherlock Holmes's. But too much of this
book is bound up in retrospective musings about events in previous books.
The great Scarpetta, her fiery crime-busting niece, Lucy, and a colorful
supporting cast deserve better. (Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information,
Inc.) |
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In Morality for Beautiful Girls,
Precious Ramotswe, founder and owner of the only detective agency for the
concerns of both ladies and others, investigates the alleged poisoning of
the brother of an important “Government Man,” and the moral character of
the four finalists of the Miss Beauty and Integrity Contest, the winner of
which will almost certainly be a contestant for the title of Miss
Botswana. Yet her business is having money problems, and when other
difficulties arise at her fiancé's Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, she
discovers the reliable Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is more complicated then he
seems |
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Lost Boy, Lost
Girl
A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her
son—beautiful, troubled fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill—vanishes from the
face of the earth. To his uncle, horror novelist Timothy Underhill, Mark’s
inexplicable absence feels like a second death. After his sister-in-law’s
funeral, Tim searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help
him unravel this mystery of death and disappearance. He soon learns that a
pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly
before his mother’s suicide Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned
house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty
building, the house on Michigan Street whispers from attic to basement
with the echoes of a long-hidden true-life horror story, and Tim Underhill
comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled
across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have
coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.
With lost boy lost girl, Peter Straub affirms once again that he is the
master of literary horror. |
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Girls in
America: Their Stories, Their Words
"Girls learn to keep quiet about pain, rage, intelligence,
desires, ideas and dreams." So writes Carol Cassidy, who
interviewed 28 girls ages 14 to 19 for
Girls
in America: Their Stories, Their Words, a book in which she
encouraged girls to break their silence.
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