Category: Crime, Mystery, Thriller

Early eighteenth-century London, and two doctors are crisscrossing the boundaries of morality in the heady pursuit of scientific progress. This challenge leads Sir Edmund Calcraft, an eminent and notorious anatomist, and Joseph Bendix, his ambitious young student, into playing a dark game with the lawless side of English society. But Bendix’s growing passion for a woman he first glimpses in Calcraft’s house threatens to end their mutual quest.

From gallows to madhouses, from anatomical laboratories to a Frost Fair set on the frozen Thames, the two men compete in both head and heart. Mixing history, medical lore, and myth, The House of Sight and Shadow is a compelling tale about ambition, deception, and the fallibility of both love and reason.

( paraphrased from the sleeve by GoodReads,   290 pages )

When elderly Ailsa Lockyer-Fox is found dead in her garden, dressed only in night clothes and with blood stains on the ground near her body, the finger of suspicion points at her wealthy, landowning husband, Colonel James Lockyer-Fox. A coroner’s inquest gives a verdict of ‘natural causes’ but the gossip surrounding him refuses to go away.

Why? Because he’s guilty? Or because resentful women in the isolated Dorset village where he lives rule the roost? Shenstead is a place of too few people and too many secrets. Why have James and Ailsa cut their children out of their wills? What happened in the past to create such animosity within the family? And why is James so desperate to find his illegitimate grandchild?

Friendless and alone, his reclusive behaviour begins to alarm his London-based solicitor, Mark Ankerton, whose concern deepens when he discovers that James has become the victim of a relentless campaign which accuses him of far worse than the death of his wife. Allegations which he refuses to challenge . . . Why? Because they’re a motive for murder? . . .

( from the sleeve,   hardcover   415 pages )

On Midsummer’s Eve, 1974, Annie Raft arrives with her daughter Mia in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater to join her lover Dan on a nearby commune. On her journey through the deep forest, she sumbles upon the site of a grisly double murder–a crime that will remain unsolved for nearly twenty years, until the day Annie sees her grown daughter in the arms of one man she glimpsed in the forest that eerie midsummer night.

Like Gorky Park and Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Blackwater is a unique thriller in which the hearts and minds of the characters are as strikingly compelling as the exotic northern landscape that envelops them.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,  444 pages )

Edgar Award winner Jonathan Kellerman once more explores the corruption of California and produces a novel of complex characterizations and nonstop suspense. “Scythe-sharp…a great, good read.” � Daily News, New York.

By the time psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware reached the school the damage was done: A sniper had opened fire on a crowded playground, but was gunned down before any children were hurt.

“Though a time bomb is ticking away at the heart of this novel, readers will forget to watch the clock once they begin it.” �Chicago Sun Times.

While the TV news crews feasted on the scene an Alex began his therapy sessions with the traumatized children, he couldn’t escape the image of a slight teenager clutching an oversized rifle. What was the identity behind the name and face: a would-be assassin, or just another victim beneath an indifferent California sky?

“Virtually impossible to put aside until the final horrifying showdown.” � People.

Intrigued by a request from the sniper’s father to conduct a “psychological autopsy” of his child, Alex begins to uncover a strange pattern of innocence, neglect, and loss. Then suddenly it is more than a pattern �it is a trail of blood. In the dead sniper’s past was a dark and vicious plot. And in Alex Delaware’s future is the stuff of grown-up nightmares: the face of real human evil.

“A meticulously constructed thriller.” � Publishers Weekly.

( Courtesy of : Daily News, New York;  Chicago Sun Times; People; Publishers Weekly,   hardcover   468 pages )

***”My name is Lisa di Antonio Gherardini Giocondo, though to acquaintances, I am known simply as Madonna Lisa. My story begins not with my birth but a murder, committed the year before I was born…”***

**Florence****, April 1478:** The handsome Giuliano de’ Medici is brutally assassinated in Florence’s magnificent Duomo. The shock of the murder ripples throughout the great city, from the most renowned artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to a wealthy wool merchant and his extraordinarily beautiful daughter, Madonna Lisa.

More than a decade later, Florence falls under the dark spell of the preacher Savonarola, a fanatic who burns paintings and books as easily as he sends men to their deaths. Lisa, now grown into an alluring woman, captures the heart of Giuliano’s nephew and namesake. But when Guiliano, her love, meets a tragic end, Lisa must gather all her courage and cunning to untangle a sinister web of illicit love, treachery, and dangerous secrets that threatens her life.

Set against the drama of 15th Century Florence, *I, Mona Lisa* is painted in many layers of fact and fiction, with each intricately drawn twist told through the captivating voice of Mona Lisa herself.

( paraphrased from the sleeve by GoodReads,   509 pages )

It gets dark early in Algonquin Bay. Take a drive up Airport Hill at four o’ clock on a February afternoon, and when you come back half an hour later the streets of the city will glitter below you in the dark like so many runways. The forty-sixth parallel may not be all that far north; you can be much farther north and still be in the United States, and even London, England, is a few degrees closer to the North Pole. But this is Ontario, Canada, we’re talking about, and Algonquin Bay in February is the very definition of winter. Algonquin Bay is snowbound, Algonquin Bay is quiet, Algonquin Bay is very, very cold.

Read the evocative opening of Giles Blunt’s novel and you may begin to understand why Tony Hillerman says this is the novel he wishes he’d written. Keep reading, and you may wonder why other authors haven’t joined the vicarious narrative line. With devastating precision, Blunt effortlessly weaves together strands of lives both led and taken in this tiny Canadian town, limning a hauntingly paradoxical picture of isolation and community, two sides of a fragile bulwark against violence.

John Cardinal was taken off homicide investigation after a fruitless and expensive quest for 13-year-old Katie Pine, a Chippewa girl who disappeared from the nearby reservation. After months of insisting that Katie was no runaway, Cardinal receives the cold comfort of vindication in the form of Katie’s corpse, discovered in an abandoned mine shaft. But the case, when reopened, becomes a Pandora’s box of horror. Katie’s body is only the first to be found, as Cardinal uncovers a pattern that links her death to those of two other children. When another boy is reported missing, Cardinal knows he is in a race against time to find the killer (so trite a phrase, while technically accurate, does radical injustice to Blunt’s razor-sharp plot and eerily pragmatic balance between the cop and his prey).

His new partner, Lise Delorme, is trying to uncover her own pattern. Drafted by the RCMP to find proof that Cardinal has been accepting money from drug runner Kyle Corbett to derail the Mounties’ investigations (three attempted busts good for absolutely nothing), she sifts through the minutiae of Cardinal’s life. Proud father, loving husband, dedicated officer–at what price has this edifice been constructed? Suffice it to say that Cardinal’s past and present link him in ironic counterpoint to those people for whom he is inevitably the bearer of bad tidings, leaving them “trying to recognize each other through the smoke and ashes” of grief.

Blunt has created a world in which every conversation can seem as ominous as the moan of the wind and the bullet-like report of shifting lake ice (“It was a new art form for Delorme, picking shards of fact from the exposed hearts of the bereaved. She looked at Cardinal for help, but he said nothing. He thought, “Get used to it.”). But it is also a world whose bleak landscape is touched with unexpected humor. Witness this description of one of the many minor, but always beautifully detailed, characters who populate the novel’s pages: “Arthur ‘Woody’ Wood was not in the burglary business to enhance his social life. Like all professional burglars, he went to great lengths to avoid meeting people on the job. At other times, well, Woody was as sociable as the next fellow.”

Part police procedural, part psychological thriller, part exploration of a region’s landscape and people, the novel is an astonishing, powerful hybrid– worthy of far more than a mere 40 words of praise.

( Courtesy of–Kelly Flynn, GoodReads,   388 pages )

In a suburb near Albany, New York, Ted and Ann Waring are waiting for divorce papers. Ted is hoping for reconciliation, but when he returns from a hunting trip with the couple’s two adolescent daughters, he loses his temper one last time, shooting and killing Ann in their living room. He claims it was an accident, but his thirteen-year-old daughter, Julia—the only witness—is sure it was murder. The younger girl, Ali, doesn’t know which way to turn. And when Julia testifies against her father, she sets into motion a struggle that pits family, friends, and townspeople against one another.

As the many layers of truth unfold in this “chilling meditation on the so-called acts of love” (The New York Times) Emily Listfield’s lean and subtle prose reveals the ways in which the emotions and evasions of the past reverberate uncontrollably into the present.

( from the sleeve,   374 pages )

Beautiful heiress Catherine Gowrie has spent her life protected by one of America’s wealthiest families and married to one of Britain’s most successful men. Now her all-powerful father is close to his greatest ambition – nomination as Presidential candidate. Nothing must be allowed to stand in his way.

But Sophie Narodni, a young journalist from Prague carries a secret that could destroy everything Don Gowrie has dreamed of – if he doesn’t silence her first.

( paraphrased from the sleeve by Google Books,   375 pages )

A rapist has committed a series of increasingly brutal assaults, and the investigation has landed in the capable hands of Santa Rita, California, Assistant D.A. Kathryn Mackay. But unraveling secrets only the dead can reveal moves Mackay into a bizarre netherworld where an encounter with a vicious rapist is just the beginning of her ordeal.

( Courtesy of GoodReads,   292 pages )

In a nondescript apartment block in Stockholm, most of the residents are elderly. Usually a death is a sad but straightforward event. But sometimes a resident will die and there are no friends or family to contact. This is when Marianne Folkesson arrives, employed by the state to close up a life with dignity and respect. Gerda Persson has lain dead in her apartment for three days before Marianne is called. When she arrives, she finds the apartment tidy and ordered. Gerda’s life seems to have been quite ordinary. Until Marianne opens the freezer and finds it full of books, neatly stacked and wrapped in clingfilm, a thick layer of ice covering them. They are all by Axel Ragnerfeldt, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, with handwritten dedications to Gerda from the author. What story do these books have to tell, about Gerda, and more importantly about Ragnerfeldt, a man whose fame is without precedent in the nation’s cultural life, but seldom gives interviews?

( Courtesy of GoodReads,  311 pages )