White Jazz

      James Ellroy
     White Jazz

Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns--it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer--a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire. Klein's been hung out as bait, "a bad cop to draw the heat," and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins--all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, "forty-two and going on dead," it's dues time. Klein tells his own story--his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing--taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.

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    Killing Mr. Griffin

      Lois Duncan
     Killing Mr. Griffin

They only meant to scare him. Mr. Griffin is the strictest teacher at Del Norte High, with a penchant for endless projects and humiliating his students. Even straight-A student Susan can't believe how mean he is to the charismatic Mark Kinney. So when her crush asks Susan to help a group of students teach a lesson of their own, she goes along. After all, it's a harmless prank, right? But things don't go according to plan. When one "accident" leads to another, people begin to die. Susan and her friends must face the awful truth: one of them is a killer. Leave the lights on when reading this classic thriller! This new edition features modernized text and a new introduction by Lois Duncan, the master of teen horror.

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    Break No Bones

      Kathy Reichs
     Break No Bones

Following the tremendous success of "Cross Bones, "Kathy Reichs explores another high-profile topic in Break No Bones -- a case that lands forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan in the middle of a gruesome international scheme. Summoned to South Carolina to fill in for a negligent colleague, Tempe is stuck teaching a lackluster archaeology field school in the ruins of a Native American burial ground on the Charleston shore. But when Tempe stumbles upon a fresh skeleton among the ancient bones, her old friend Emma Rousseau, the local coroner, persuades her to stay on and help with the investigation. When Emma reveals a disturbing secret, it becomes more important than ever for Tempe to help her friend close the case. The body count begins to climb. An unidentified man is found hanging from a tree deep in the woods. Another corpse shows up in a barrel. There are mysterious nicks on bones in several bodies, and signs of strangulation. Tempe follows the trail to a free street clinic with a belligerent staff, a suspicious doctor, and a donor who is a charismatic televangelist. Clues abound in the most unlikely places as Tempe uses her unique knowledge and skills to build her case, even as the local sheriff remains dubious and her own life is threatened. Tempe's love life is also complicated. Ryan, her current flame, has come down to visit her from Montreal, and Pete, her former husband, is investigating the disappearance of a local woman -- and he and Tempe are staying in the same borrowed beach house. Ryan and Pete compete for her attentions, and Tempe finds herself more distracted by her feelings for both men than she expected. "Break No Bones "is a smart, taut thriller featuring the kind of high-stakes crime that makes the headlines every week. Reichs, the inspiration for the hit FOX TV show Bones, is writing at the top of her form, and Tempe has never been more compelling.

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    The Ghost Orchid

      Carol Goodman
     The Ghost Orchid

In her enthralling novels of literary suspense, Carol Goodman writes stories that resonate with emotion set in lush landscapes that entice the senses. Now, with The Ghost Orchid, a narrative that seamlessly weaves together the past and the present, Goodman creates her most lyrical and haunting work to date. For more than one hundred years, creative souls have traveled to Upstate New York to work under the captivating spell of the Bosco estate. Cradled in silence, inspired by the rough beauty of overgrown gardens and crumbling statuary, these chosen few fashion masterworks–and have cemented Bosco’s reputation as a premier artists’ colony. This season, five talented artists-in-residence find themselves drawn to the history of Bosco, from the extensive network of fountains that were once its centerpiece but have long since run dry to the story of its enigmatic founder, Aurora Latham, and the series of tragic events that occurred more than a century ago. Ellis Brooks, a first-time novelist, has come to Bosco to write a book based on Aurora and the infamous summer of 1893, when wealthy, powerful Milo Latham brought the notorious medium Corinth Blackwell to the estate to help his wife contact three of the couple’s children, lost the winter before in a diphtheria epidemic. But when a séance turned deadly, Corinth and her alleged accomplice, Tom Quinn, disappeared, taking with them the Lathams’ only surviving child. The more time she spends at Bosco, the more Ellis becomes convinced that there is an even darker, more sinister end to the story. And she’s not alone: biographer Bethesda Graham uncovers stunning revelations about Milo and Corinth; landscape architect David Fox discovers a series of hidden tunnels underneath the gardens; poet Zalman Bronsky hears the long-dry fountain’s waters beckoning him; and novelist Nat Loomis feels something lingering just out of reach. After a bizarre series of accidents befalls them, the group cannot deny the connections between the long ago and now, the living and the dead . . . as Ellis realizes that the tangled truth may ensnare them all in its cool embrace. From the Hardcover edition.

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    The 47th Samurai

      Stephen Hunter
     The 47th Samurai

In "The 47th Samurai," Bob Lee Swagger, the gritty hero of Stephen Hunter's bestselling novels "Point of Impact" and "Time to Hunt, " returns in Hunter's most intense and exotic thriller to date. Bob Lee Swagger and Philip Yano are bound together by a single moment at Iwo Jima, 1945, when their fathers, two brave fighters on opposite sides, met in the bloody and chaotic battle for the island. Only Earl Swagger survived. More than sixty years later, Yano comes to America to honor the legacy of his heroic father by recovering the sword he used in the battle. His search has led him to Crazy Horse, Idaho, where Bob Lee, ex-marine and Vietnam veteran, has settled into a restless retirement and immediately pledges himself to Yano's quest. Bob Lee finds the sword and delivers it to Yano in Tokyo. On inspection, they discover that it is not a standard WWII blade, but a legendary shin-shinto katana, an artifact of the nation. It is priceless but worth killing for. Suddenly Bob is at the center of a series of terrible crimes he barely understands but vows to avenge. And to do so, he throws himself into the world of the samurai, Tokyo's dark, criminal yakuza underworld, and the unwritten rules of Japanese culture. Swagger's allies, hard-as-nails, American-born Susan Okada and the brave, cocaine-dealing tabloid journalist Nick Yamamoto, help him move through this strange, glittering, and ominous world from the shady bosses of the seamy Kabukicho district to officials in the highest echelons of the Japanese government, but in the end, he is on his own and will succeed only if he can learn that to survive samurai, you must become samurai. As the plot races and the violence escalates, it becomes clear that a ruthless conspiracy is in place, and the only thing that can be taken for granted is that money, power, and sex can drive men of all nationalities to gruesome extremes. If Swagger hopes to stop them, he must be willing not only to die but also to kill.

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    You Can't Catch Me

      Joyce Carol Oates
     You Can't Catch Me

Tristram Heade is a reclusive, repressed Virginia bachelor and antiquarian book collector who has traveled to Philadelphia to keep an appointment with a fellow dealer. But when he arrives, his life takes an unexpected and dizzying turn. A train porter returns his lost wallet, but the identification inside belongs to a man named Angus Markham, a gambler and real estate prospector. When Tristram returns to his hotel, he’s greeted by staff as Markham, and in his room, he finds Markham’s suitcase and clothes—as well as Fleur Grunwald, a woman who certainly knows her lover, Markham, when she sees him. And she seems to desperately need his help. At first baffled, then intrigued, Tristram decides to play along—only to discover that he’s not in control of the game. Especially when he takes on Fleur and her sadistic husband and finds himself lost in a conspiracy of madness and murder. If only Tristram could be certain whether he’s to be the killer—or the victim.

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    The Salesman

      Joseph O'Connor
     The Salesman

It's Dublin, June 1995, the hottest summer since records began. But Billy Sweeney, a middle-aged salesman with a failed marriage, a faltering career and a tumbledown house, has more than weather on his mind. His youngest daughter lies in a coma in hospital following a mysterious attack on the petrol station where she worked. Devastated by the unfolding consequences of that hot, violent night, frustrated by officialdom and failed by the system, Billy finally tires of seeking legal justice. He decides to take the law into his own hands. . .

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    Hell Island

      Matthew Reilly
     Hell Island

A man-made secret location designed to host tests of classified experiments, Hell Island doesn't appear on any maps. But when all contact is lost with this mystery island, four crack special force units are brought in - can anything prepare them for the horror of what they will find there?

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    Enigma

      Catherine Coulter
     Enigma

The highly anticipated twenty-first FBI thriller by New York Times #1 bestselling author Catherine Coulter presents Agents Savich and Sherlock with two baffling mysteries. Working with Agent Cam Wittier (Insidious) and New York-based former Special Forces agent Jack Cabot, they must race against the clock to catch an international criminal and solve the enigma of the man called John Doe. When Agent Dillon Savich saves Kara Moody from a seemingly crazy man, he doesn’t realize he will soon be facing a scientist who wants to live forever and is using “John Doe” to help him. But when the scientist, Lister Maddox, loses him, he ups the stakes and targets another to take his experiments to the next level. It’s a race against time literally as Savich and Sherlock rush to stop him and save both present and future victims of his experiments. In the meantime, Cam Wittier and Jack Cabot must track a violent criminal through the Daniel Boone National Forest. When he escapes through a daring rescue, the agents have to find out who set his escape in motion and how it all ties into the murder of Mia Prevost, the girlfriend of the president’s Chief of Staff’s only son, Saxton Hainny. It’s international intrigue at the highest levels and they know they have to succeed or national security is compromised. Featuring Coulter’s signature “breakneck plot and magnetic characters” (Huffington Post), Enigma is a shocking thrill ride that will keep the you turning pages as fast as you can.

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    Dark of the Moon

      John Sandford
     Dark of the Moon

Virgil Flowers — tall, lean, late thirties, three times divorced, hair way too long for a cop's — had kicked around a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport had brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He'd been doing the hard stuff for three years now — but never anything like this. In the small town of Bluestem, where everybody knows everybody, a house way up on a ridge explodes into flames, its owner, a man named Judd, trapped inside. There is a lot of reason to hate him, Flowers discovers. Years ago, Judd had perpetrated a scam that'd driven a lot of local farmers out of business, even to suicide. There are also rumors swirling around: of some very dicey activities with other men's wives; of involvement with some nutcase religious guy; of an out-of-wedlock daughter. In fact, Flowers concludes, you'd probably have to dig around to find a person who didn't despise him. And that wasn't even the reason Flowers had come to Bluestem. Three weeks before, there'd been another murder — two, in fact — a doctor and his wife, the doctor found propped up in his backyard, both eyes shot out. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years — and now, suddenly, three? Flowers knows two things: This wasn't a coincidence, and this had to be personal. But just how personal is something even he doesn't realize, and may not find out until too late. Because the next victim... may be himself.

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    Mercy Falls

      William Kent Krueger
     Mercy Falls

Back in the saddle as sheriff of Tamarack County, Cork O'Connor is lured to the nearby Ojibwe reservation on what appears to be a routine call -- only to become the target of sniper fire. Soon after, he's called to investigate a mutilated body found perched above the raging waters of Mercy Falls. The victim is Eddie Jacoby, a Chicago businessman negotiating an unpopular contract between his management firm and the local Indian casino. Sparks fly when the wealthy Jacoby family hires a beautiful private investigator to consult on the case. But once Cork discovers an old and passionate tie between one of the Jacoby sons and his own wife, Jo, he begins to suspect that dark, personal motives lurk behind recent events. Murder, greed, sex, and jealousy hide around every corner in this maze of danger. But somewhere beneath the turbulent Mercy Falls lies the truth -- and Cork is determined to find it....

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    Plan B

      Tuku Moni
     Plan B

It is a bizarre story of unholy union of two persons of uneven age, uneven economic background and uneven society. But is it the end the story? Or the old lady had a plan B?It is a bizarre story of unholy union of two persons of uneven age, uneven economic background and uneven society. But is it end the story? Or the old lady had a plan B?It is also a story far from reality.If, however, my story resembles with some reality, it is pure coincidence only, nothing to do with any reality or any real person.

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    The Sound of One Hand Clapping

      Richard Flanagan
     The Sound of One Hand Clapping

The Australian Booksellers' Association Book of the Year begins in 1954, in Tasmania where Bojan Buloh brings his family to start a new life away from Slovenia's privations of war and refugee settlements. Bojan's wife abandons him to care for their three-year-old daughter Sonja alone. Sonja returns to Tasmania 35 years later, and to a father haunted by memories of the war and other recent horrors.

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