Concealed in Death J.D. Robb

Concealed in Death J.D. Robb

Overview:

The incomparable J. D. Robb presents the latest moving and suspenseful novel in the #1 New York Times–bestselling Eve Dallas series.

In a decrepit and long-empty New York building, a man begins the demolition process by swinging a sledgehammer into a wall. When the dust clears, he finds two skeletons wrapped in plastic behind it.

The man is Lieutenant Eve Dallas’s billionaire husband, Roarke, and he summons her immediately. His latest real estate project is going to be on hold for a while, because by the time Eve and her crew are finished searching the premises, there are twelve murders to be solved….

After a little digging reveals that the place housed a makeshift shelter for troubled and homeless teenagers back in the mid-2040s, Eve tracks down the people who worked there. Between their recollections and the brilliant work of the force’s new forensic anthropologist, Eve begins to put names and faces to the skeletal remains. They are all girls. A tattooed tough teenager who dealt in illegal drugs. The runaway daughter of a pair of well-to-do doctors. They all had their stories. And they all lost their chance for a better life.

Everyone has something to hide. And when Eve discovers a stunning connection between the victims and someone she knows, she is even more driven to reveal the secrets of the place that was called The Sanctuary—and to find the evil concealed in one human heart.

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Vampire Most Wanted Lynsay Sands

Vampire Most Wanted Lynsay Sands

Overview:

Take a road trip with the undead . . . in this latest in the Argeneau series by New York Times bestselling author Lynsay Sands

For Basha Argeneau, anything is better than facing her estranged family. Even hiding out in sweltering southern California. But when a sexy immortal in black shows up determined to bring her back to the clan, she'll do anything to keep far, far away from the past she can't outrun.

Marcus Notte isn't here to play games—especially not with someone as crazy as the infamous blonde. Asked by Lucian Argeneau to bring her back for questioning, Marcus is determined to carry out Lucian's request—no matter how the seductive little mind-reading vamp feels about it.

Basha doesn't mind fighting fire with fire, especially with a hot immortal involved. But if he wants to take her away, he'll have to catch her first . . .

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Yours Until Death Gunnar Staalesen

Yours Until Death  Gunnar Staalesen

Overview:

Originally published in Norway in 1979 and first translated into (and published in) English in 1993, YOURS UNTIL DEATH is an early volume in a series featuring Varg Veum, a not very successful private eye. As the novel opens, Varg, whose name was sarcastically said by his father to mean "Outlaw", is missing his ex-wife and son and lamenting his impecunious state when an eight-year-old boy, Roar, comes bursting into his office. Roar has had his bicycle stolen by a local gang of teenage thugs and has looked in the phone book for a private detective. He lives alone with his mother, Wenche, and does not want her to try to recapture the bike because the thugs beat up and molested the mother of one of Roar's friends who tried to remonstrate with them for an earlier misdeed.

Perhaps because Roar reminds Varg of his own estranged son, he decides to take on the case, quickly tracking the gang to a hut in the woods and retrieving the boy's bike. Roar lives in a large tower block and invites Varg home after his rather bruising success. Hence, Varg meets the alluring Wenche, and learns her story, as well as discovering for himself what life is like in the grim flats, where most of the families have been abandoned by the fathers, and the teenage gang, headed up by the (allegedly) psychopathic Joker, rule.

Plagued by melancholy and a sense of sympathy for the underdog, Varg begins to dig into the circumstances of the tower-block dwellers, interviewing the truculent Gunnar, the leader of the local youth club and the only person who seems to have any influence over the boys, and Joker's mother Hildur, now an old drunk living on her memories.

Soon, the unstable situation blows up into a real crime, and the police become involved. Varg and Joker are both witnesses, and based on his previous experiences with the police, Varg manages to infiltrate himself into the investigation. In the best traditions of detective fiction, he meets all the people who know the victim and the accused, listens to their stories and broods about what it all means. By the end, ours and Varg's prejudices have been taken out, aired, turned around and, after Varg's dogged persistence at uncovering every aspect to the lives of the small cast of characters however inconsequential, the identity and motivation of the criminal are revealed- leaving a sense of sadness and missed opportunity, as well as sheer, unnecessary waste.

Yours Until Death is an unbearably tense novel of revenge and murder about marriage, childhood, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. First published in Norwegian in 1979, it was described by the critic Nils Nordberg as ""one of the finest, most serious, most ambitious books in post-war Norwegian crime writing."" ""Staalsen's mastery of pacing enables him to develop his characters in a leisurely way without sacrificing tension and suspense.

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Cold Hearts Gunnar Staalesen

Cold Hearts  Gunnar Staalesen

Overview:

On a frosty January day in Bergen, private detective Varg Veum is visited by a prostitute whose friend has disappeared. Before her disappearance, something had unsettled her: she'd turned away a customer and returned to the neighborhood in terror. Shortly after taking the case, Veum finds the first body - and it won't be the last either. His investigation leads him into a dark subculture where corrupted idealism has had deadly consequences. ""Veum can skillfully dole out violence, but the essentially humane detective prefers methods that involve dialogue and deduction, investigation and intellect- a welcome contrast to many in his line of work.""--Publishers Weekly Sept. 9, 2013 ""Cold Hearts is top-tier Scandinavian crime fiction; straightforward dialogue drives the plot, and tough but sympathetic Veum is equally comfortable in a fistfight, proving for secrets behind Bergen's closed doors, or examining crime's sociological roots.

Like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, this entry in Staalesen's long-running Norwegian crime series featuring Bergen detective Varg Veum (Consorts of Death, etc.) examines issues of class prejudice, misplaced trust, and self-righteous exploitation. Prostitute Hege Jensen, a former schoolmate of Veum's son, hires the aging PI to find her friend and fellow prostitute, Maggi Monsen, who disappeared one night after turning down a customer. Veum discovers that Maggie was plagued by predatory pimps and potentially murderous johns, but Maggie's sad tale proves as nothing compared to the harm done by well-intentioned busybodies whose interventions transform terrible situations into ones unimaginably worse. Under pressure, Veum can skillfully dole out violence, but the essentially humane detective prefers methods that involve dialogue and deduction, investigation and intellect—a welcome contrast to many in his line of work.

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COCKROACHES Jo Nesbo

COCKROACHES Jo Nesbo

Overview:

The thrilling sequel to Nesbo's debut novel The Bat, The Cockroaches sees Harry Hole sent to Bangkok to investigate the murder of the Norwegian ambassador

Harry is on a special mission

Detective Harry Hole arrives in a steaming hot Bangkok. The Norwegian ambassador has been found dead in a seedy motel room, and Harry has been sent to investigate. It's clear that the Ambassador's family are hiding some secrets of their own, but few people are willing to talk.

He needs to solve a crime and avoid a scandal

When Harry lays hands on some incriminating CCTV footage, things only get more complicated. The man who gave him the tape goes missing, and Harry realises that failing to solve a murder case is by no means the only danger that faces the unwary.

But in an unfamiliar city, who can you trust?

"Nesbø never lets a page go by without making characters and situations vivid."
    --Houston Chronicle

"The world is dark and frozen, according to Nordic noir, and so is the human heart.
But it's the magic Nesbø works with the genre's tropes that matters. . . . [He] might be my favorite of the lot."   
    --Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune

"Satisfyingly twisty. . . . A compelling, hard-edged thriller."
     --Booklist

“Excellent . . . the most popular among [Nesbø’s] earlier novels and one that casts a cold eye on the reality of expatriate life of some Europeans in Asia.”
     —The Irish Independent

“The complex narrative and large dramatis personae are handled with steely authority . . . The picturesque seediness of Bangkok and Thailand turns out to be Harry Hole's natural element, with Nesbo plumping his hero down in a very non-Norwegian setting.”
      —The Independent (UK)

Praise for Jo Nesbø

“Nesbø writes like an angel. As in Lucifer.”
    —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Harry Hole is fast becoming one of the planet’s favorite detectives. And his demons are almost as legendary as his observational and analytical skills.”
    —The Mirror (UK)

“Nesbø explores the darkest criminal minds with grim delight and puts his killer where you least expect to find them. . . . His novels are maddeningly addictive.”
    —Vanity Fair

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KILLER Jonathan Kellerman

KILLER Jonathan Kellerman

Overview:

After thirty-five riveting, internationally acclaimed novels of psychological suspense, #1 New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Kellerman returns with his most stunning thriller to date. Killer is a mesmerizing L.A. noir portrayal of the darkest impulses of human nature carried to shocking extremes.

The City of Angels has more than its share of psychopaths, and no one recognizes that more acutely than the brilliant psychologist and police consultant Dr. Alex Delaware. Despite that, Constance Sykes, a sophisticated, successful physician, hardly seems like someone Alex needs to fear. Then, at the behest of the court, he becomes embroiled in a bizarre child custody dispute initiated by Connie against her sister and begins to realize that there is much about the siblings he has failed to comprehend. And when the court battle between the Sykes sisters erupts into cold, calculating murder and a rapidly growing number of victims, Alex knows he’s been snared in a toxic web of pathology.

Nothing would please Alex more than to be free of the ugly spectacle known as Sykes v. Sykes. But then the little girl at the center of the vicious dispute disappears and Alex knows he must work with longtime friend Detective Milo Sturgis, braving an obstacle course of Hollywood washouts, gangbangers, and self-serving jurists in order to save an innocent life.

Killer is Kellerman—and Delaware—at their finest

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THE HOUSE GIRL Tara Conklin

THE HOUSE GIRL Tara Conklin

Overview:

Virginia, 1852. Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell. New York City, 2004. Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career: she must find the “perfect plaintiff” to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

It is through her father, the renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina discovers Josephine Bell and a controversy roiling the art world: are the iconic paintings long ascribed to Lu Anne Bell really the work of her house slave, Josephine? A descendant of Josephine’s would be the perfect face for the reparations lawsuit—if Lina can find one. While following the runaway girl’s faint trail through old letters and plantation records, Lina finds herself questioning her own family history and the secrets that her father has never revealed: How did Lina’s mother die? And why will he never speak about her?

Moving between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this searing, suspenseful and heartbreaking tale of art and history, love and secrets, explores what it means to repair a wrong and asks whether truth is sometimes more important than justice.

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After I'm Gone Laura Lippman

After I'm Gone  Laura Lippman

Overview:

The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Thing, I'd Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know returns with an addictive story that explores how one man's disappearance echoes through the lives of the five women he left behind—his wife, his daughters, and his mistressDead is dead. Missing is gone.When Felix Brewer meets nineteen-year-old Bernadette

In 1976, a bookie and gambler named Felix Brewer disappeared from the Baltimore area, leaving behind his wife, three daughters, and the imminent threat of jail time. Ten years later, his mistress, Julie, disappears as well. The assumption that Julie went to join Felix is disproved when, decades later, her body is discovered. Sandy Sanchez, a consultant for the police department, decides to take on this cold case, digging into Felix’s old business, his wife, Bambi, and their daughters in order to uncover what really happened to Julie.

After I’m Gone is a gorgeously written literary mystery, with five deep, thoughtful women at its core. Though it’s billed as a mystery novel, this is a character study more than anything else. It’s quiet, with small earthquakes rather than shattering ones; Bambi has the world at her fingertips in one moment, then loses everything in the next. It’s a close look at how circumstances can change people, and the difficult relationships between women. Lippman did an excellent job with her characters; each of these women gets a chance to narrate, and it’s fascinating to look into their heads and see how different, yet how much the same, they are.

Once again, Baltimore takes center stage in After I’m Gone, as it almost always does in Lippman’s novels. The city has a life of its own, reverberating underneath the surface of this book. It’s gritty, yet you can feel Lippman’s love for her city through her words and careful descriptions. Readers who enjoy novels with a sense of place will absolutely appreciate what Lippman has done with this novel, and her longtime fans will love the familiar character cameos that occur in the book.

The novel is told over a long period of time, jumping back and forth to fully flesh out each of the characters and their situations. It’s how we get to hear from Julie, though she’s dead when After I’m Gone begins. With the changes in narrators and time frames, this could be confusing, but it’s a testament to Lippman’s skill that these jumps only serve to enhance the story. She does a great job differentiating both her narrators and the time periods.

If you’re looking for a thoughtful, contemplative read that still manages to move at a quick pace and be suspenseful, you should absolutely pick up After I’m Gone. Lippman has incredible skill when it comes to literary mysteries; she does such a great job with her characters that they become the driving force of the story, rather than the plot.

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WAKE Anna Hope

WAKE Anna Hope 

Overview:

Anna Hope’s brilliant debut unfolds over the course of five days, as three women must deal with the aftershocks of World War I and its impact on the men in their lives.

Wake: 1) Emerge or cause to emerge from sleep. 2) Ritual for the dead. 3) Consequence or aftermath.

London, 1920. The city prepares to observe the two-year anniversary of Armistice Day with the burial of the unknown soldier. Many are still haunted by the war: Hettie, a dance instructress, lives at home with her mother and her brother, who is mute after his return from combat. One night Hettie meets a wealthy, educated man and finds herself smitten with him. But there is something distracted about him, something she cannot reach. . . . Evelyn works at the Pensions Exchange, through which thousands of men have claimed benefits from wounds or debilitating distress. Embittered by her own loss, she looks for solace in her adored brother, who has not been the same since he returned from the front. . . . Ada is beset by visions of her son on every street, convinced he is still alive. Helpless, her loving husband has withdrawn from her. Then one day a young man appears at her door, seemingly with notions to peddle, like hundreds of out-of-work veterans. But when he utters the name of her son, Ada is jolted to the core.

The lives of these three women are braided together, their stories gathering tremendous power as the ties that bind them become clear, and the body of the unknown soldier moves closer and closer to its final resting place.

Advance praise for Wake

“Wake is a tender and timely novel, full of compassion and quiet insight. The author gives us a moving and original glimpse into the haunted peace after the Great War, her characters drawn by the gravity of the unmarked, the unknown, and perhaps, finally, the unhoped for.”—Chris Cleave, author of Little Bee

“Wake is a compelling and emotionally charged debut about the painful aftermath of war and the ways—small, brave, or commonplace—in which we keep ourselves going. It touches feelings we know, and settings—dance halls, war fronts, queues outside the grocer’s—that we don’t. I loved it.”—Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“Wake is powerful and humane, a novel that charms and beguiles. Anna Hope’s characters are so real, flawed, and searching, and her prose so natural, one almost forgets how very great a story she is telling.”—Sadie Jones, author of The Uninvited Guests

“Using telling detail, Hope creates a vibrant physical and emotional landscape in which her leading characters, and a sea of others, move irresistibly into the future, some having found resolution, others still in search. Fresh, confident, yet understated, Hope’s first work movingly revisits immense tragedy while also confirming her own highly promising ability.”—Kirkus

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Until the End of Time Danielle Steel

Until the End of Time Danielle Steel

Overview:

Two couples, four decades apart. One believes that if lovers die, they find each other again in another life. Or perhaps they wind up as stars side by side in the sky, together forever. Who knows how it really ends? Danielle Steel breaks new ground in her career as a perennial New York Times bestseller with the poignant story of two parallel destinies, and the kind of love we all hope will be everlasting.

UNTIL THE END OF TIME

Bill, a dedicated young lawyer working at his family’s prestigious New York firm, leaves everything he trained for to follow his dream and become a minister in rural Wyoming. Jenny, his wife, is a stylist whose heart and soul are invested in fashion. She leaves the milieu and life she loves to join him. The certainty they share is that their destinies are linked forever.

Fast forward thirty-eight years. Robert is a hardworking independent book publisher in Manhattan who has given up all personal life to build his struggling business. He is looking for one big hit novel to publish. Lillibet is a young Amish woman, living as though in the seventeenth century, caring for her widowed father and three young brothers on their family farm. In secret at night, by candlelight, she has written the novel that burns within her, and gets it into Robert’s hands, wrapped in her hand-stitched apron. He falls in love first with the book, and then with the woman he has never met, living in the sequestered world of the Amish—a world without telephones, computers, electricity, modern conveniences, or cars. Although Lillibet faces banishment from her family and community, she embraces the opportunity to publish her novel, and is irresistibly drawn to the man who has heard her voice. Destiny is at work here. Fate draws her from her horse-and-buggy life toward his, and the publication of her novel.

In the hands of master storyteller Danielle Steel, these two remarkable relationships come together in unexpected and surprising ways, as lovers are lost, and find each other again. If it is true that real love lasts forever and lovers cannot lose each other, then Until the End of Time will not only comfort and fascinate us, as destiny does her dance, but it will give us hope as well. Love and fate are powerful, irresistible forces, as Steel proves to us here, in a book about courage, change, risk, and hope . . . and love that never dies.

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