The Dusty Bookshelf
Eddie Gonzalez, a young man who only recently bought life insurance, is killed in a hit-and-run accident. The insurance company hires Frank to look into Eddie’s life. Frank thinks the company is just trying to get out of paying the money and he sets out to prove the legitimacy of the claim. In doing so, he manages to ruffle the feathers of Dennis Dannon, the chief of police and a friend of the Gonzalez family, and to bring threats down upon his own head. As Frank looks further into the case, it becomes clear that Eddie’s death was not an accident, and that the killers actually had another target in mind.
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T. S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction. Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake, who introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.
One thing about Miranda Mancini that has never changed is the name everyone knows her by—Munch. But the child abused by her father and sent into prostitution, the young girl who stole money because she couldn’t do without her drugs, the woman who spent awful months in prison—that person no longer exists. Instead, Munch Mancini is the surrogate “mother” of a friend’s loving little girl, a woman who can top any male car mechanic’s talents with a tool, and the unbelievably happy fiancée of police detective Enrique “Rico” Chacón. It’s an ordinary life and it’s exactly what she wants.
The story of a rebellious and fiercely intelligent young slave and the escape attempt that cost him his life is told from the perspectives of his father, the master, the master’s daughter, and the overseer’s son.
A research scientist has gone missing. An ace newspaper reporter has disappeared and so has a minidisk, along with its incriminating evidence. And a teenage hustler is on the run. In his pursuer, the Hammer, a skin-headed professional killer, the principle of evil has indeed been made flesh. Unsettling and unpredictable, this compelling page-turner delivers point-blank its every unexpected narrative hit, twist, and turn as it leads protagonist Joe Donovan to the terror of the mercy seat.
Carolyn and Ben Reiser moved to Hyland, New Hampshire with their two children for the comforts of rural life. But when the local police chief comes looking for their seventeen-year-old son Jacob to question him about the brutal murder of his girlfriend, the Reisers’ lives begin to unravel. A compelling story that will capture you in the opening scene and hold you through its shocking conclusion, Before and After is a stunning novel that pits parent against parent, brother against sister, family against community, blood loyalty against law-as “deep questions of loyalty, honesty, and love are forced to the surface in this psychologically riveting tale.”
Michael Anstruther-Wetherby is a rising member of Parliament—a man destined for power. Aristocratic, elegant, and effortlessly charming, he is just arrogant enough to capture the interest of the ladies of the ton. And with his connections to the wealthy and influential Cynster family—his sister is married to Devil Cynster, the Duke of St. Ives—his future appears assured. Except that Michael lacks the single most important element of success: a wife.
When an Albanian husband and wife are found dead in their home, Inspector Costas Haritos, a veteran junta-trained homicide detective on the Athens police force, is called to what seems at first to be an open-and-shut case. For the Greek police, two dead Albanians are hardly a matter of concern. But when Albania’s celebrity television news reporter Janna Karayoryi insists that the case was closed too early, Haritos becomes unnerved. He doesn’t exactly like the ambitious young journalist, but could she be right in thinking the murder has something to do with babies?
January, 1951, while the country is in the grip of war in Korea, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and Senator Joe McCarthy, the residents of St. Adele, Michigan are more concerned with staying warm and shoveling snow, until a bizarre ice storm brings down a towering pine. Entangled in its roots is evidence that leads Constable John McIntire to the abandoned farmstead of a young couple who had supposedly left the community years before, part of an exodus of Finnish-Americans gone off to build a workers’ Utopia in the Soviet republic of Karelia. McIntire’s fears are realized when he discovers two bodies, buried sixteen years in an unused cistern.
In this unforgettable novel of Queen Victoria, Jean Plaidy re-creates a remarkable life filled with romance, triumph, and tragedy.