Mystery & Thrillers
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Deader Homes and Gardens: A Claire Malloy Mystery (Claire Malloy Mysteries)
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Joan Hess
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Minotaur Books (2012, Feb 14th).
Pages: 320
Claire Malloy discovers that house-hunting can be murder—literally—in the latest entry in Joan Hess's "wildly entertaining series." (Mystery Scene) Back from her somewhat unusual honeymoon, Claire Malloy must face the harsh reality of life with her new husband, police chief Peter Rosen, and her teenage daughter Caron—three people simply can’t fit into her cosy two bedroom apartment. After a week of fruitless looking, she finally finds the perfectplace—a well preserved large house on a large plot of land in an area called Hollow Valley. There are only a few problems. Such as the real estate agent disappeared mid-showing and hasn’t been seen since. And the last owner died in circumstances labeled ’accidental’ but were actually both ’mysterious’ and ’dubious’. more
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Death of a Kingfisher (Hamish Macbeth)
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: M. C. Beaton
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (2012, Feb 22nd).
Pages: 256
When Scotland is hit by the recession, Police Constable Hamish Macbeth notices that the Highland people are forced to come up with inventive ways to lure tourists to their sleepy towns. The quaint village of Braikie doesn't have much to offer, other than a place of rare beauty called Buchan's Wood, which was bequeathed to the town. The savvy local tourist director renames the woods "The Fairy Glen," and has brochures printed with a beautiful photograph of a kingfisher rising from a pond on the cover. It isn't long before coach tours begin to arrive. But just as the town's luck starts to turn, a kingfisher is found hanging from a branch in the woods with a noose around its neck. As a wave of vandalism threatens to ruin Braikie forever, the town turns to Hamish Macbeth. more
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The Whisperer
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Donato Carrisi
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Mulholland Books (2012, Jan 5th).
Pages: 432
A gripping literary thriller and smash bestseller that has taken Italy, France, Germany and the UK by storm.Six severed arms are discovered, arranged in a mysterious circle and buried in a clearing in the woods. Five of them appear to belong to missing girls between the ages of eight and eighteen. The sixth is yet to be identified. Worse still, the girls' bodies, alive or dead, are nowhere to be found.Lead investigators Mila Vasquez, a celebrated profiler, and Goran Gavila, an eerily prescient criminologist, dive into the case. They're confident they've got the right suspect in their sights until they discover no link between him and any of the kidnappings except the first. The evidence in the case of the second missing child points in a vastly different direction, creating more questions than it answers. more
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Vulture Peak (Sonchai Jitpleecheep)
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: John Burdett
Format: Deckle Edge]
Publisher: Knopf (2011, Jul 5th).
Pages: 304
Nobody knows Bangkok like Royal Thai Police Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, and there is no one quite like Sonchai: a police officer who has kept his Buddhist soul intact—more or less—despite the fact that his job shoves him face-to-face with some of the most vile and outrageous crimes and criminals in Bangkok. But for his newest assignment, everything he knows about his city—and himself—will be a mere starting point. He’s put in charge of the highest-profile criminal case in Thailand—an attempt to bring an end to trafficking in human organs. He sets in motion a massive sting operation and stays at its center, traveling to Phuket, Hong Kong, Dubai, Shanghai, and Monte Carlo. He draws in a host of unwitting players that includes an aging rock star wearing out his second liver and the mysterious, diabolical, albeit gorgeous co-queenpins of the international body-parts trade: the Chinese twins known as the Vultures. more
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Kill Shot (Mitch Rapp)
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Vince Flynn
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Atria (2011, Oct 11th).
Pages: 448
#1 New York Times bestselling author Vince Flynn is back with another nail-biting political thriller that follows the young Mitch Rapp on a deadly mission to hunt down the men responsible for the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack. For months, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of men, bullet by bullet. With each kill, the tangled network of monsters responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians becomes increasingly clear. He is given his next target: a plump Libyan diplomat who is prone to drink and is currently in Paris without a single bodyguard. Rapp finds him completely unprotected and asleep in his bed. With confidence in his well-honed skills and conviction of the man’s guilt, he easily sends a bullet into the man’s skull. more
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Need You Now: A Novel
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: James Grippando
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Harper (2012, Jan 3rd).
Pages: 368
“A brilliant blend of financial chicanery and government conspiracy which yields a story that is all too believable.” (Iron Mountain News on Need You Now )“Winning....A steady supply of action...will leave readers wondering if the author has come up with a solution to the real-life Madoff mysteries that still remain.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Need You Now )“Rousing. . . . An exciting tale of revenge.” (Publishers Weekly )“Superb plotting, high suspense, compelling timely issues, and finely honed characters make this crime novel/international thriller a great read.” (Library Journal (starred review) )“Filled with twists and turns and edge-of-the-seat tension.” (Romantic Times )“A complex and dizzying shell game…entertaining. more
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Private Games
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: James Patterson
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (2012, Feb 13th).
Pages: 416
On your markPrivate, the world's most renowned investigation firm, has been commissioned to provide security for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Its agents are the smartest, fastest, and most technologically advanced in the world, and 400 of them have been transferred to London to protect more than 10,000 competitors who represent more than 200 countries.Get setThe opening ceremony is hours away when Private investigator and single father of twins, Peter Knight, is called to the scene of a ruthless murder. A high-ranking member of the games' organizing committee has been killed. It's clear to Peter that this wasn't a crime of passion, but one of precise calculation and execution.DieNewspaper reporter Karen Pope receives a letter from a person who calls himself Cronus claiming responsibility for the murders. more
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Stay Awake: Stories
Author/Actors/Director/etc.: Dan Chaon
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Ballantine Books (2012, Feb 7th).
Pages: 272
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle Before the critically acclaimed novels Await Your Reply and You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon made a name for himself as a renowned writer of dazzling short stories. Now, in Stay Awake, Chaon returns to that form for the first time since his masterly Among the Missing, a finalist for the National Book Award. In these haunting, suspenseful stories, lost, fragile, searching characters wander between ordinary life and a psychological shadowland. They have experienced intense love or loss, grief or loneliness, displacement or disconnection—and find themselves in unexpected, dire, and sometimes unfathomable situations. A father’s life is upended by his son’s night terrors—and disturbing memories of the first wife and child he abandoned; a foster child receives a call from the past and begins to remember his birth mother, whose actions were unthinkable; a divorced woman experiences her own dark version of “empty-nest syndrome”; a young widower is unnerved by the sudden, inexplicable appearances of messages and notes—on dollar bills, inside a magazine, stapled to the side of a tree; and a college dropout begins to suspect that there’s something off, something sinister, in his late parents’ house. more
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