The Errant Flock

      Jana Petken
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Valencia, Spain, 1491 The ambitions of four men merge and collide in a deadly game of intrigue. David Sanz, a young militiaman, is forced to carry out a heinous crime, and he becomes an unwitting pawn in a tense battle for power. Luis Peráto, the duke of Sagrat, sacrifices his own people to cover up dark secrets that could see him burnt at the stake for treason. Sergio Garcia, Sagrat’s lord treasurer, is a cruel and unscrupulous man, willing to eliminate anyone who opposes his rise to power. The inquisitor, Gaspar de Amo, zealously punishes heretics for their sins against Rome and her Holy Office. But bringing the Inquisition to the town of Sagrat proves more challenging than he or the church could ever have envisaged. In the midst of chaos, the people of Sagrat, terrorized by a series of murders, face an even greater danger with the arrival of the Inquisition and the unimaginable horrors it brings.

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    The Last Bookaneer

      Matthew Pearl
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book'a-neer' (bŏŏk'kå-nēr'), n. a literary pirate; an individual capable of doing all that must be done in the universe of books that publishers, authors, and readers must not have a part in London, 1890—Pen Davenport is the most infamous bookaneer in Europe. A master of disguise, he makes his living stalking harbors, coffeehouses, and print shops for the latest manuscript to steal. But this golden age of publishing is on the verge of collapse. For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public created a unique opportunity: books could easily be published without an author’s permission. Authors gained fame but suffered financially—Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few—but publishers reaped enormous profits while readers bought books inexpensively. Yet on the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to grind this literary underground to a sharp halt. The bookaneers are on the verge of extinction. From the author of The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl, The Last Bookaneer is the astonishing story of these literary thieves’ epic final heist. On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon Davenport sets out for the South Pacific island. As always, Davenport is reluctantly accompanied by his assistant Fergins, who is whisked across the world for one final caper. Fergins soon discovers the supreme thrill of aiding Davenport in his quest to steal Stevenson’s manuscript and make a fortune before the new treaty ends the bookaneers’ trade forever. But Davenport is hardly the only bookaneer with a mind to pirate Stevenson’s last novel. His longtime adversary, the monstrous Belial, appears on the island, and soon Davenport, Fergins, and Belial find themselves embroiled in a conflict larger, perhaps, than literature itself. In The Last Bookaneer, Pearl crafts a finely wrought tale about a showdown between brilliant men in the last great act of their professions. It is nothing short of a page-turning journey to the heart of a lost era.

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    Hold on Tight

      Deborah Smith
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Rucker McClure had drowned beer and chased women everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but he couldn't resist heading straight for Mount Pleasant, Alabama, when the town's mayor, ex-Miss Georgia Dinah Sheridan, sent him a baby possum in retaliation for a column that savaged their annual Possum Days celebration! Not a bit subtle where seduction was concerned, Rucker did his best to rough up Dinah's smooth edges, mesmerizing her with burning caresses and a voice that drawled steamy promises. "Keep your heart open and lips puckered," he warned her when he left town, but when he returned and began unraveling her mystery, Dinah knew her fate was sealed. If Rucker discovered the scandal that had once cost her everything, she'd lose him--and the life she loved. But if she wouldn't trust him with her secrets, how could he prove he cherished her?

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    Carnival of Shadows

      R.J. Ellory
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Kansas, 1959. A travelling carnival appears overnight in the small town of Seneca Falls, intriguing the townsfolk with acts of inexplicable magic and illusion. But when a man's body is discovered beneath the carousel, with no clue as to his identity, FBI Special Agent Michal Travis is sent to investigate. Led by the elusive Edgar Doyle, the carnival folk range from the enigmatic to the bizarre, but none of them will give Travis a straight answer to his questions. With each new turn of the investigation, Doyle and his companions challenge Travis's once unshakeable faith in solid facts and hard evidence. As the consequences of what has happened become ever more disturbing, Travis struggles to open his mind to a truth that defies comprehension. Will he be able to convince himself that things are not what they seem? Or will he finally reconcile himself to a new reality - one that threatens to undermine everything in which he has ever placed his trust? In his powerful, atmospheric new thriller, bestselling author R.J. Ellory introduces the weird and wonderful world of the Carnival Diablo and reveals the dark secrets that lurk at its heart.

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    Infected

      Scott Sigler
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SUMMARY: Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families. Working under the government's shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common they've been contaminated by a bioengineered parasite, shaped by a complexity far beyond the limits of known science. Meanwhile Perry Dawsey a hulking former football star now resigned to life as a cubicle-bound desk jockey awakens one morning to find several mysterious welts growing on his body. Soon Perry finds himself acting and thinking strangely, hearing voices . . . he is infected. The fate of the human race may well depend on the bloody war Perry must wage with his own body, because the parasites want something from him, something that goes beyond mere murder. Infectedis the first major print release from Internet phenom Scott Sigler, whose podcast-only audiobooks have drawn an immense cult following, with more than three million individual episodes downloaded. Now Sigler storms the bookstore shelves with this cinematic, relentlessly paced novel that mixes and matches genres, combining horror, technothriller, and suspense in a heady mix that is equal parts Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Crichton, and Stephen King. Infected will crawl beneath your skin and leave fresh blood on every page.

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    The Library at Mount Char

      Scott Hawkins
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A missing God.A library with the secrets to the universe. A woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away. Carolyn's not so different from the other people around her. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. Clothes are a bit tricky, but everyone says nice things about her outfit with the Christmas sweater over the gold bicycle shorts. After all, she was a normal American herself once. That was a long time ago, of course. Before her parents died. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father. In the years since then, Carolyn hasn't had a chance to get out much. Instead, she and her adopted siblings have been raised according to Father's ancient customs. They've studied the books in his Library and learned some of the secrets of his power. And sometimes, they've wondered if their cruel tutor might secretly be God. Now, Father is...

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    Gerald's Party

      Robert Coover
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Ros is dead. A bad actress but a tremendous lover, when she was alive her thighs pillowed cast members, crew, friends and acquaintances. Now Gerald's party continues around her murdered corpse (it is, after all, just the first of the night), as the guests indulge in drinking, flirting and jealousies, and the police make their brutal investigations.An evening of cocktails, sex and violence, Robert Coover's novel is a murder mystery as rousing and disorienting as the best drunken party, a vaudevillian masterpiece.

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    The Guns of Navarone

      Alistair MacLean
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Twelve hundred British soldiers are isolated and waiting to die on the small island of Kheros, off the Turkish coast. Their lives can be saved if only the long-range, large-caliber, and catastrophically accurate guns of Navarone are silenced before the British Royal Navy arrives.Manned by a mixed garrison of Germans and Italians, Navarone is a grim iron fortress perched high atop an island ringed by cliffs. Captain Keith Mallory and his small, handpicked team of saboteurs must scale the sheer cliffs and infiltrate the German base to blow up the massive guns.“Action sustained at high pitch. From the outset, there is a feeling of suspense . . . an insistently gripping tale."—Scotsman“Its strength comes from the speed of its narrative, its vivid creation of tensions, and its power in handling descriptions of action."—Evening Standard

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    Geek Sublime

      Vikram Chandra
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The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer codingVikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?     Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an “Indian Mafia” in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer’s art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part...

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    The Edge of the Shadows

      Elizabeth George
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The first fire may have been an accident, but what about the second? And the third—the one that killed someone. Becca King and her friends wonder if one of the newcomers to the island is to blame. Perhaps it's Isis Martin's brother, Aidan, just home from a school for troubled teens. Or Parker Natalia, a talented musician fired by his bandmates for unknown reasons. Meanwhile, Becca's education in the paranormal continues, as fellow psychic Diana Kinsale encourages her to explore her growing extrasensory abilities. Beautiful Whidbey Island may seem like a tranquil haven, but all is not as it seems. The third book in the Whidbey Island saga confirms Elizabeth George's place as a top-notch writer of suspense novels.

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    First Light

      Charles Baxter
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Hugh Welch has cared for his little sister Dorsey ever since they were children, when Dorsey looked at him as though he were a god. But when Dorsey returns to their small Michigan hometown with a successful career as an astrophysicist and a happy family life, Hugh, who has a long habit of worrying about his sister, realizes that it's his own life he has to cure, not Dorsey's. As they explore their complicated history over one hot Fourth of July weekend, they'll come to terms with the experiences that put such distance between them and discover the imperfect love that ties them as siblings.

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    Disenchanted

      Susan Carroll
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An alluring love triangle and a daring caper unfold in this imaginative retelling of Cinderella, featuring an indomitable damsel who's not so easily swept off her glass slippers. At the tender age of seventeen, Ella Upton lost her innocence to a traveling minstrel, a youth with flaxen hair and a golden voice whose deep blue eyes concealed his true intentions—until it was too late. Seven years later, Ella's stepsisters chatter about winning the affections of the dreamy Prince Florian at the royal ball, but Ella has no such illusions. Instead, her dashing best friend, Malcolm Hawkridge, persuades her with his reckless charm and wicked smile to use the occasion to steal back a magic orb from the corrupt king. But before the clock strikes midnight, Ella finds herself pursued by more than one prince—not to mention Commander Horatio Crushington, who captures her with his piercing gaze from across the crowded ballroom. Dancing through the...

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    Salt is Leaving

      J. B. Priestley
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Dr Salt is leaving the dismal and depressing town of Birkden, and his departure can't come soon enough. Recently widowed and newly retired from the practice of medicine, Salt looks forward to starting a new life in a sunnier clime. But before he can go, he must solve the mystery of the disappearance of one of his patients, Noreen Wilks, a young woman in urgent need of a life-saving drug. Believing she's just a flighty girl who has run away, the police refuse to investigate, but Salt has reason to suspect foul play. Joining forces with Maggie Culworth, whose father has also inexplicably vanished, Salt must contend with powerful forces desperate to conceal the truth as he follows the clues towards a shocking and macabre conclusion. The only detective story by the prolific playwright and novelist J. B. Priestley (1894-1984), Salt is Leaving (1966) was originally written for the author's own amusement but has gone on to be recognized as a classic of the mystery genre....

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