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› Find signed collectible books: 'Absolute Trouble'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'American Tabloid'
We are behind, and below, the scenes of JFK's presidential election, the Bay of Pigs, the assassination--in the underworld that connects Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, D.C. . . .
Where the CIA, the Mob, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, Jimmy Hoffa, Cuban political exiles, and various loose cannons conspire in a covert anarchy . . .
Where the right drugs, the right amount of cash, the right murder, buys a moment of a man's loyalty . . .
Where three renegade law-enforcement officers--a former L.A. cop and two FBI agents--are shaping events with the virulence of their greed and hatred, riding full-blast shotgun into history. . . .
James Ellroy's trademark nothing-spared rendering of reality, blistering language, and relentless narrative pace are here in electrifying abundance, put to work in a novel as shocking and daring as anything he's written: a secret history that zeroes in on a time still shrouded in secrets and blows it wide open. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Angel Rock'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Away With Them to Prison'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Bill of Rights and the Police'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Billy Straight'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blindsighted'
In Blindsighted (book one of an anticipated three featuring Grant County, Georgia, pediatrician and coroner Dr. Sara Linton), first-time novelist Karin Slaughter comes out swinging in true medical examiner fashion. That is to say, covered with blood from the get-go.
Without warning, the body jerked violently, pitching forward and slamming Sara onto the floor. Blood spread out around both of them, and Sara instinctively clawed to get out from under the convulsing woman. With her feet and hands she groped for some kind of purchase on the slick bathroom floor. Finally, Sara managed to slide out from underneath her. She turned Sibyl over, cradling her head, trying to help her through the convulsions. Suddenly, the jerking stopped.
Sibyl is, or was, Sibyl Adams, a college professor who had the misfortune of being drugged, savagely raped, slashed, and left for dead in the toilet of the local diner, to be coincidentally discovered by Sara Linton. Coincidences don't stop there, and neither do the rapes and murders. The next is, unimaginably, still more gruesome than the first and it, too, is discovered by Dr. Linton. Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver is Sara's ex-husband, and mercurial detective Lena Adams, another major player in the ensuing drama, was Sibyl's twin sister.
And the monster behind these increasingly more depraved acts? Suspects abound, from the diner's jack-of-all-trades, Will Harris, to Victim No. 2's boyfriend, to Jack Allen Wright who, a dozen years prior, raped Dr. Linton (that rape had been a secret until now). There are other possibilities, naturally, and it soon becomes apparent that Sara's an intended target.
A graduate of the Patricia Cornwell school of mayhem and gore, Slaughter has faithfully stitched together a fast, engaging, and diverting read complete with a strong-yet-vulnerable heroine. Characters are nicely if somewhat obviously drawn, the plot is inventive, and the narrative's pacing quickens the pulse straight to the cliff-hanging denouement. And really, what more can you ask of an ME thriller? --Michael Hudson [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blood Money'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blood Money'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blood On The Moon'
Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can-t stand music, or any loud sounds. He-s got a beautiful wife, but he can-t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He-s a thinking man-s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there-s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blood Rain'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Body of Evidence'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brooklyn Bounce: The True-Life Adventures of a Good Cop in a Bad Precinct'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Brothers Karamazov'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Chiefs'
In the winter of I 1920, the first body is found in Delano, Georgia-the naked, brutalized corpse of a young boy. It Is a crime too horrific to be ignored; the first of many that will span four decades, embroiling three separate police chiefs in a remarkable manhunt that will expose the hatreds, fears, dark secrets and festering wounds beneath the surface of their sleepy God-fearing community.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Clockers/Movie Tie in'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Cold Case'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Cold Heart'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Cold Six Thousand'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Complete Steel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Convincing Alex'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cruel & Unusual'
A can't put down thiller! Classic! [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cutting Edge'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Da Vinci Code'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead Air'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Deadly Schedule'
When Inspector Douglas Roper first discovers the body of a well-to-do Englishwoman bludgeoned to death in his motel, he leaves the crime unsolved, but as he investigates a series of apparently unrelated crimes, he realizes they are the work of one diabolical killer. Reprint. AB. PW. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dear Irene, : An Irene Kelly Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Dedicated Man'
A dedicated man is dead in the Yorkshire dales -- a former university professor, wealthy historian and archaeologist who loved his adopted village. It is a particularly heinous slaying, considering the esteem in which the victim, Harry Steadman, was held by his neighbors and colleagues -- by everyone, it seems, except the one person who bludgeoned the life out of the respected scholar and left him half-buried in a farmer's field.
Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks left the violence of London behind for what he hoped would be the peaceful life of a country policeman. But the brutality of Steadman's murder only reinforces one ugly, indisputable truth: that evil can flourish in even the most bucolic of settings. There are dangerous secrets hidden in the history of this remote Yorkshire community that have already led to one death. And Banks will have to plumb a dark and shocking local past to find his way to a killer before yesterday's sins cause more blood to be shed. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Demon in My View'
She waits for him in the dark, her mind and body perfect, passive, until one day, when he goes to the cellar, and she is gone . . .
In A Demon in My View, Ruth Rendell creates a character as frightening as he is fascinating. Mild-mannered Arthur Johnson has never known how to talk to women. And his loneliness has perverted his desire for love and respect into a carefully controlled penchant for violence. One floor below him, a scholar finishing his thesis on psychopathic personalities is about to stumblequite literallyupon one of Arthur's many secrets. Haunting and intelligent, A Demon in My View shows the startling results of this chilling alchemy of two very disparate mindsone pathological and the other obsessed with pathology. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dust to Dust'
Minneapolis has more than its share of interesting cops (Lucas Davenport of the John Sandford thrillers, for one), and Tami Hoag's homicide dicks, Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska, join the club in this thoughtful and surprisingly moving novel of dirty cops and cover-ups. Internal Affairs investigator Andy Fallon is a suicide--or is he? The word around the department is that Andy, son of Iron Mike Fallon, an old hero of Sam's, killed himself because Mike turned his back on him when Andy told him he was gay. Or maybe it was because a lover dumped him, or even (snicker, snicker) a perverted sexual practice gone wrong. That's the gossip, but Sam feels he owes it to Mike to investigate.
Sam is a familiar type in this genre, and his self-awareness is almost painful at times. "You're a stereotype. The tragic hero," he's told by Amanda Savard, the strong-but-vulnerable Internal Affairs lieutenant whose determination to keep the Fallon case closed foreshadows her personal history. "The twice-divorced, smoking, drinking workaholic," Sam agrees. "I don't know what's heroic about that. It reeks of failure to me, but maybe I have unrealistic standards." But Sam's droll sense of humor is matched by his deeply ingrained crap detector. When Iron Mike apparently kills himself too, you can almost feel its needle vibrate. Then Sam and Nikki open another closed case, this one almost two decades old, and find the connections that threaten to unravel past crimes and future promises. Hoag is a writer very much in command of her craft: the pacing excels, the characters are complex and interesting, and the details well worked out. Readers will look forward to another Kovac and Liska adventure. --Jane Adams [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Eight Black Horses: An 87th Precinct Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Enemy : A Jack Reacher Novel'
Jack Reacher. Hero. Loner. Soldier. Soldiers son. An elite military cop, he was one of the armys brightest stars. But in every cops life there is a turning point. One case. One messy, tangled case that can shatter a career. Turn a lawman into a renegade. And make him question words like honor, valor, and duty. For Jack Reacher, this is that case.
New Years Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. The world is changing. And in a North Carolina hot-sheets motel, a two-star general is found dead. His briefcase is missing. Nobody knows what was in it. Within minutes Jack Reacher has his orders: Control the situation. But this situation cant be controlled. Within hours the generals wife is murdered hundreds of miles away. Then the dominoes really start to fall.
Two Special Forces soldiersthe toughest of the toughare taken down, one at a time. Top military commanders are moved from place to place in a bizarre game of chess. And somewhere inside the vast worldwide fortress that is the U.S. Army, Jack Reacheran ordinarily untouchable investigator for the 110th Special Unitis being set up as a fall guy with the worst enemies a man can have.
But Reacher wont quit. Hes fighting a new kind of war. And hes taking a young female lieutenant with him on a deadly hunt that leads them from the ragged edges of a rural army post to the winding streets of Paris to a confrontation with an enemy he didnt know he had. With his French-born mother dyingand divulging to her son one last, stunning secretReacher is forced to question everything he once believed&about his family, his career, his loyaltiesand himself. Because this soldiers son is on his way into the darkness, where he finds a tangled drama of desperate desires and violent deathand a conspiracy more chilling, ingenious, and treacherous than anyone could have guessed. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fata Morgana'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gallows View'
Former London policeman Alan Banks relocated to Yorkshire seeking some small measure of peace. But depravity and violence are not unique to large cities. His new venue, the quaint little village of Eastvale, seems to have more than its fair share of malefactors, among them a brazen Peeping Tom who hides in night's shadows spying on attractive, unsuspecting ladies as they prepare for bed. And when an elderly woman is found brutally slain in her home, Chief Inspector Banks wonders if the voyeur has increased the intensity of his criminal activities. But whether related or not, perverse local acts and murderous ones are combining to profoundly touch Banks's suddenly vulnerable personal life, forcing a dedicated law officer to make hard choices he'd dearly hoped would never be necessary. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Get Blondie'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Good Life'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Goodnight, Irene'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'
Introduction by George Bernard Shaw Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not have much in the way of great expectations-until he is inexplicably elevated to wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettable characters-including a terrifying convict named Magwitch, the eccentric Miss Havisham, and her beautiful but manipulative niece, Estella, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainable love, and all of the happiness money can't buy. "Great Expectations has the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for a novel in the English language," according to John Irving, and J. Hillis Miller declares, "Great Expectations is the most unified and concentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world, and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero." INCLUDES A MODERN LIBRARY READING GROUP GUIDE [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Harm Done'
In Harm Done, Rendell has added a remarkable strand of acute social commentary to a book that still functions as an utterly compelling piece of detective fiction. In exploring the controversial subject of pedophilia, she takes the mainstay of her work--the problems of modern life--to a level of passion and commitment that gives the book a truly powerful underpinning.
Back in the familiar Sussex town of Kingsmarkham, Rendell's dogged sleuth Wexford is investigating the strange abductions of two young girls: Rachel, a bright middle-class student, and Lizzie, a mentally disabled 16-year-old living with her unsympathetic parents on a grim council estate. When both girls return home, apparently unharmed, Wexford is faced with a curious mystery: what really happened to them? As Wexford begins to uncover the disturbing truth, the dark psychological world that Rendell is so adroit at exploring suddenly comes into focus. And her gift for sharp but concise characterization remains untouchable, as in the case of a reluctant witness: '''We don't talk about that sort of thing.' She very nearly but not quite tossed her head." --Barry Forshaw, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Havana Bay'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Heart of Devin MacKade'
Devin MacKade knew it was his destiny to serve and protect the small town of Antietam, Maryland. And he always suspected his future should have little Cassie Connor in it. After Cassie married the wrong man, Devin tried to convince himself there would be other women, other loves. Now, after Cassies divorce, Devin can finally follow his heart. But can Cassie follow hers? [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hidden Obsession'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hoot: Library Edition'
Roy Eberhardt is the new kid--again. This time around it's Trace Middle School in humid Coconut Grove, Florida. But it's still the same old routine: table by himself at lunch, no real friends, and thick-headed bullies like Dana Matherson pushing him around. But if it wasn't for Dana Matherson mashing his face against the school bus window that one day, he might never have seen the tow-headed running boy. And if he had never seen the running boy, he might never have met tall, tough, bully-beating Beatrice. And if he had never met Beatrice, he might never have discovered the burrowing owls living in the lot on the corner of East Oriole Avenue. And if he had never discovered the owls, he probably would have missed out on the adventure of a lifetime. Apparently, bullies do serve a greater purpose in the scope of the universe. Because if it wasn't for Dana Matherson...
In his first novel for a younger audience, Carl Hiaasen (Basket Case, etc.) plunges readers right into the middle of an ecological mystery, made up of endangered miniature owls, the Mother Paula's All-American Pancake House scheduled to be built over their burrows, and the owls' unlikely allies--three middle school kids determined to beat the screwed-up adult system. Hiaasen's tongue is firmly in cheek as he successfully cuts his slapstick sense of humor down to kid-size. Sure to be a hoot, er, hit with middle school mystery fans. (Ages 10 to 15) --Jennifer Hubert [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner'
The narrative talents of English stage actor Derek Jacobi are put to excellent use in this intriguing mystery of a double murder most foul. Author Elizabeth George presents her popular detectives Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers with one of their most grisly and difficult cases ever as they search for clues to a bloody crime while struggling to repair their own strained partnership. George's mystery bobs, weaves, twists, and turns from a packed West End theater through the sumptuous halls of a country manor and into the desolate reaches of the high country moors before revealing its delightfully wicked and suspenseful conclusion. Jacobi tackles the complex plot and diverse cast of characters with relish, working his theatrical skills into an outstanding performance. (Running time: 6 hours, 4 cassettes) --George Laney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Judgement in Stone'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Justice'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Justice'
The cruel and bizarre slaying of a beautiful teen leads Detective Decker into the dark heart of an exotic subculture: the seamy, sometimes violent world of Southern California's rootless, affluent youth. But even the confession of a disturbed kid with cold "killer eyes" cannot soothe Decker's inner torment. For he knows in his gut this crime goes much deeper and higher than anyone expects -- and that true justice, brutal and complete, has yet to be done.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Killing Breed'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kingdom of Shadows: A Novel'
Penzler Pick, January 2001: The thrillers of Alan Furst usually take place in the dark days preceding World War II, but while the main participants in that war are of course portrayed, Britain, France, Germany, and the United States do not usually star in Furst's novels. He prefers instead to focus his stories on the citizens of those countries whose allegiances and roles in that particular theater of operations are much more contradictory and conflicted.
Kingdom of Shadows is set in Paris during 1938 and 1939. It is unclear at that time what the fate of Hungary will be if Hitler has his way, but a small group of expatriates would like to insure that events turn out in their country's favor. Nicholas Morath is an Hungarian aristocrat who fought bravely in the Great War. He is now part owner of an advertising agency in Paris, while his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, is a minor diplomat stationed in Paris. Polanyi calls on Nicholas to take part in missions against the Hungarian Fascists: carrying letters or bringing individuals back across the border in the course of his business trips.
As Nicholas's dinner parties, business deals, and dalliances with his mistress start to take a back seat to the escalating crisis in Europe, his tasks become more complicated, dangerous, and bewildering to him. He knows far less than the reader, who understands that his actions will have far-reaching consequences even beyond the fate of Hungary. Nicholas just does what he can without the luxury of historic hindsight.
Furst has fashioned here an elegant gem that vividly portrays the city of Paris during the last peaceful days of 1938 and the menace of Hitler's ambitions in the Sudetenland and beyond. Nicholas Morath is a charismatic and sympathetic figure who will come to understand, as the war progresses, the consequences, both good and bad, of his smallest actions during that turbulent time. --Otto Penzler [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Les Miserables'
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjeana man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective JavertHugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.
Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital dramahighly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implicationsof the redemption of one human being. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lie in the Dark'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Maltese Falcon, the Thin Man, Red Harvest'
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
The three classic novels published here in one volume are rich with the crisp prose, subtle characters, and intricate plots that made Dashiell Hammett one of the most admired writers of the twentieth century.
A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett virtually invented the hard-boiled crime novel. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, tangles with a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. The Thin Man introduces Hammett's wittiest creations, Nick and Nora Charles, who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. And in Red Harvest, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective, the Continental Op, takes on the entire town of Poisonville in a deadly war against corruption.
"Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer."Boston Globe
Hammett was spare, hard-boiled, but he did over and over what only the best writers can ever do. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.Raymond Chandler
Hammetts prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.The New York Times
As a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time.Ross Macdonald
Dashiell Hammetts dialogues can be compared only with the best in Hemingway.André Gide
Hammett is one of the best contemporary American writers.Gertrude Stein [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Medusa: An Aurilio Zen Mystery'
Michael Dibdins veteran Italian police officer is back. The newest addition to this remarkable series -- consistently galvanizing as much for its revelation of the subtle complexities of Italian life as for its page-turning suspense -- is a novel of long-held secrets set against a sweeping background of political and passionate intrigue.
When a group of Austrian cavers exploring a network of abandoned military tunnels in the Italian Alps comes across human remains at the bottom of a deep shaft, everyone assumes the death was accidental. Until, that is, the still-unidentified body is stolen from the morgue and the Defense Ministry puts a news blackout on the case. And is the recent car bombing in Campione DItalia, a tiny tax haven surrounded on all sides by Switzerland, somehow related? The whole affair has the whiff of political corruption. Thats enough to interest Aurelio Zens boss at the Interior Ministry, who wants to know who is hiding what from whom, and why.
The search for the truth leads Zen back into the murky history of postwar Italy and the obscure corners of modern-day society to uncover the truth about a crime that everyone thought was as dead and buried as its victim. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Monster'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moon Music'
In Moon Music Faye Kellerman turns her attention from the streets of Los Angeles, where her previous novels were set, to the casinos of Las Vegas. A mutilated body of a young woman is discovered in the desert and Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe sets out to determine who could have committed the murder and the brutal desecration that followed. His team of investigators include the tall and lusty Steve Jensen, novice Patricia Deluca, and medical examiner Rukmani Kalil. The relations between the four are complex and add depth to this tale of deadly dealings: Poe carries a torch for Jensen's mentally troubled wife and knows of his colleague's philandering; Kalil and Poe are engaged in an off-again, on-again affair. Although collectively they feel as though they are making progress in the case, another similarly mutilated corpse is found within a matter of weeks, turning the mystery from that of a peculiarly brutal murder in the singular to the search for a serial killer.
It's a tight, tense read. Kellerman engages the reader with her carefully wrought characters and with her sense of place. Las Vegas not only sets the stage for the story but is central to it. The seeds of the crime were planted in its small town past as a nuclear test sight and only reach their fruition in the gambling and selling of sex and drugs in the present. Kellerman ties it all together beautifully, with extraordinary hints of Native American mysticism and government conspiracies. In another's hands, such flights of fancy would verge on the ridiculous, but Kellerman manages to keep her fantastic plots well under control. For those with a strong stomach and an imaginative streak, Moon Music is a captivating thriller. --K.A. Crouch [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Motherless Brooklyn'
Pop quiz. Please complete the following sentence: "There are days when I get up in the morning and stagger into the bathroom and begin running water and then I look up and I don't even recognize my own _." If you answered face, then your name is obviously not Jonathan Lethem. Instead of taking the easy out, the genre-busting novelist concludes this by-the-numbers string of words with toothbrush in the mirror.
This brilliant sentence and a lot of other really excellent ones compose Lethem's engaging fifth novel, Motherless Brooklyn. Lionel Essrog, a detective suffering from Tourette's syndrome, spins the narrative as he tracks down the killer of his boss, Frank Minna. Minna enlisted Lionel and his friends when they were teenagers living at Saint Vincent's Home for Boys, ostensibly to perform odd jobs (we're talking very odd) and over the years trained them to become a team of investigators. The Minna men face their most daunting case when they find their mentor in a Dumpster bleeding from stab wounds delivered by an assailant whose identity he refuses to reveal--even while he's dying on the way to the hospital.
Detectives? Brooklyn? Is this the same Lethem who danced the postapocalypso in Amnesia Moon? Incredibly, yes, and rarely has such a departure been pulled off with this much aplomb. As in the "toothbrush" passage above, Lethem sets himself up with the imposing task of making tired conventions new. Brooklyn accents? Fuggetaboutit. Lethem's dialogue is as light on its feet as a prize fighter. Lionel's Tourette's could have been an easy joke, but Lethem probes so convincingly into the disorder that you feel simultaneously rattled, sympathetic, and irritated by the guy. Sure, the story is a mystery, but Motherless Brooklyn could be about flower arranging, for all we care. What counts is Lionel's tic-ridden take on a world full of surprises, propelling this fiction forward at edgy, breakneck speed. --Ryan Boudinot [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Murder Being Once Done'
A young girl is murdered in a cemetery. And Wexford's doctor has prescribed no alcohol, no rich food and, above all, no police work. When a young girl's body is found in a London cemetery and the local police, under the command of Wexford's nephew, are baffled, Wexford decides to brave his doctor's wrath and the condescension of the London police by doing a little investigating of his own. A compelling story of mysterious identity and untimely death, Murder Being Once Done is Rendell at her most sublime.
With her Inspector Wexford novels, Ruth Rendell, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, has added layers of depth, realism and unease to the classic English mystery. For the canny, tireless, and unflappable policeman is an unblinking observer of human nature, whose study has taught him that under certain circumstances the most unlikely people are capable of the most appalling crimes. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Murder Goes Mumming'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Murder Room'
Commander Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. Jamess formidable and fascinating detective, returns to find himself enmeshed in a terrifying story of passion and mystery -- and in love.
The Dupayne, a small private museum in London devoted to the interwar years 1919 -- 1939, is in turmoil. As its trustees argue over whether it should be closed, one of them is brutally and mysteriously murdered. Yet even as Commander Dalgliesh and his team proceed with their investigation, a second corpse is discovered. Someone in the Dupayne is prepared to kill and kill again. Still more sinister, the murders appear to echo the notorious crimes of the past featured in one of the museums galleries: the Murder Room.
The case is fraught with danger and complications from the outset, but for Dalgliesh the complications are unexpectedly profound. His new relationship with Emma Lavenham -- introduced in the last Dalgliesh novel, Death in Holy Orders -- is at a critical stage. Now, as he moves closer and closer to a solution to the puzzle, he finds himself driven further and further from commitment to the woman he loves.
The Murder Room is a powerful work of mystery and psychological intricacy from a master of the modern novel.
You cant possibly know him.
I can know enough, Emma said. I cant know everything, no one can. Loving him doesnt give me the right to walk in and out of his mind as if it were my room at college. Hes the most private person Ive ever met. But I know the things about him that matter.
But did she? Emma asked herself. Adam Dalgleish was intimate with those dark crevices of the human mind where horrors lurked which she couldnt begin to comprehend. Not even that appalling scene in the church at St. Anselms had shown her the worst that human beings could do to each other. She knew about those horrors from literature; he explored them daily in his work. Sometimes, waking from sleep in the early hours, the vision she had of him was of the dark face masked, the hands smooth and impersonal in the sleek latex gloves. What hadnt those hands touched? She rehearsed the questions she wondered if she would ever be able to ask. Why do you do it? Is it necessary to your poetry? Why did you choose this job? Or did it choose you?
-- from The Murder Room [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mystic River'
Dennis Lehane's Mystic River takes the material of the ordinary police procedural thriller and shapes it into heart-break. As boys, Jimmy, Dave and Sean were friends, until one day Dave was abducted by two men pretending to be cops, and was never quite the same again. As men, Dave is a damaged fantasist, safe in a quietly happy marriage; Jimmy a retired criminal making a good respectable living for the sake of his children; and Sean is the homicide cop who finds himself investigating the murder of Jimmy's eldest daughter Katie. This is not just a book about what becomes of the children who grow into adults; it is about what happens to a neighbourhood when the rules change, when an old established working-class district acquires gentrified espresso bars at one end and the beats of the city's most dangerous whores at the other. It is also a book about the tragedy of all sudden violent deaths; we never forget our sense of Katie as she was, dancing on the last night of her life--she is never just the corpse here, never just the object of mourning and investigation. --Roz Kaveney [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Night Shield'
Setting: Contemporary United States Sensuality: 7
Successful businessman Jonah Blackhawk owns a string of popular nightclubs. He knows that he wouldn't have survived his childhood spent on city streets without the intervention of Boyd Fletcher, the cop who refused to give up on him. When Boyd asks for Jonah's help in solving a series of high-ticket burglaries, Jonah can't refuse. What Jonah isn't prepared for is the detective assigned to the case. Strong-willed, blond, and beautiful, Detective Allison Fletcher is Boyd's daughter--she's also the woman who just might shatter Jonah's determination to remain heart-whole and single.
Undercover at the nightclub, Allison works closely with Jonah and it isn't long before the chemistry between them explodes. Given his past and the fact that she is Boyd's daughter, Jonah is convinced that he should leave her alone. But Allison has other plans--ones that propinquity and mutual passion are likely to bring to fruition if she and Jonah can only stay alive.
Nora Roberts skillfully blends hot romance with an intriguing and suspenseful plot, tosses in a group of interesting secondary characters for flavor, and delivers a novel that packs a lot of story into a small package. Her novels regularly hit the bestseller lists and Night Shield, the latest installment in the Night Tales series for Silhouette, is a sure bet for success on any list.--Lois Faye Dyer [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Night Shift'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nightshade'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Off Minor'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Omerta'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'One Across, Two Down'
Two things interest Stanley Manning: crossword puzzles, and the substantial sum his wife Vera stands to inherit when his mother-in-law dies. Otherwise, life at 61 Lanchester Road is a living hell. For Mrs. Kinaway lives with them nowand she will stop at nothing to tear their marriage apart. One afternoon, Stanley sets aside his crossword puzzles and changes all their lives forever...
In One Across, Two Down, master crime writer Ruth Rendell describes a man whose strained sanity and stained reputation transform him from a witless loser into a killer afraid of his own shadow. Mischievously plotted, smart, maddeningly entertaining, One Across, Two Down is a dark delightclassic Rendell.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Past Reason Hated'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Piranha to Scurfy'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Prior Bad Acts'
New York Times bestselling author Tami Hoag returns with a thriller that begins with a shocking crime scene youll never forget and follows two relentless detectives on a manhunt that ends in a chilling confrontation with the essence of human evil.
It was a crime so brutal, it changed the lives of even the most hardened homicide cops. The Haas family murders left a scar on the community nothing can erase, but everyone agrees that convicting the killer, Karl Dahl, is a start. Only Judge Carey Moore seems to be standing in the way. Her ruling that Dahls prior criminal record is inadmissible raises a public outcryand puts the judge in grave danger.
When an unknown assailant attacks Judge Moore in a parking garage, two of Minneapoliss top cops are called upon to solve the crime and keep the judge from further harm. Detective Sam Kovac is as hard-boiled as they come, and his wisecracking partner, Nikki Liska, isnt far behind. Neither one wants to be on this case, but when Karl Dahl escapes from custody, everything changes, and a seemingly straightforward case cartwheels out of control.
The stakes go even higher when the judge is kidnappedsnatched out of her own bed even as the police sit outside, watching her house. Now Kovac and Liska must navigate through a maze of suspects that includes the stepson of a murder victim, a husband with a secret life, and a rogue cop looking for revenge where the justice system failed.
With no time to spare, the detectives are pulled down a strange dark trail of smoke and mirrors, where no one is who they seem and everyone is guilty of Prior Bad Acts. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Rage'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rescue'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Reversible Errors'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Scanner Darkly'
Mind- and reality-bending drugs factor again and again in Philip K. Dick's hugely influential SF stories. A Scanner Darkly cuts closest to the bone, drawing on Dick's own experience with illicit chemicals and on his many friends who died from drug abuse. Nevertheless, it's blackly farcical, full of comic-surreal conversations between people whose synapses are partly fried, sudden flights of paranoid logic, and bad trips like the one whose victim spends a subjective eternity having all his sins read to him, in shifts, by compound-eyed aliens. (It takes 11,000 years of this to reach the time when as a boy he discovered masturbation.) The antihero Bob Arctor is forced by his double life into warring double personalities: as futuristic narcotics agent "Fred," face blurred by a high-tech scrambler, he must spy on and entrap suspected drug dealer Bob Arctor. His disintegration under the influence of the insidious Substance D is genuine tragicomedy. For Arctor there's no way off the addict's downward escalator, but what awaits at the bottom is a kind of redemption--there are more wheels within wheels than we suspected, and his life is not entirely wasted. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seventh-Inning Stretch'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shaman Sings'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Silent Weapon'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Slow Burn'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Some Lie and Some Die'
A mutilated body found at a rock festival.
In spite of dire predictions, the rock festival in Kingsmarkham seemed to be going off without a hitch, until the hideously disfigured body is discovered in a nearby quarry. And soon Wexford is investigating the links between a local girl gone bad and a charismatic singer who inspires an unwholesome devotion in his followers. Some Lie and Some Die is a devilishly absorbing novel, in which Wexford's deductive powers come up against the aloof arrogance of pop stardom.
With her Inspector Wexford novels, Ruth Rendell, winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, has added layers of depth, realism and unease to the classic English mystery. For the canny, tireless, and unflappable policeman is an unblinking observer of human nature, whose study has taught him that under certain circumstances the most unlikely people are capable of the most appalling crimes. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Speak No Evil'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Speeder's Guide to Avoiding Tickets'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Stanislaski Brothers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sweet Dreams, Irene'
At his son's request, Irene Kelly tries to prevent a smear campaign against a candidate for District Attorney and uncovers more than dirty politics when a satanic cult and a ritually butchered corpse come into the picture. Reprint. LJ. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Therapy : An Alex Delaware Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Trouble in the Brasses'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Twenty-Seventh City: A Novel'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'United States Essays 1952-1992'
Gore Vidal's reputation as America's finest essayist is an enduring one. This collection, chosen by the author from 40 years of work, contains about two-thirds of what he published in various magazines and journals. He has divided the essays into three categories, or states. State of the art covers literature, including novelists and critics, bestsellers, pieces on Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Suetonius, Nabakov and Montaigne (a previosly uncollected essay from 1992). State of the union deals with politics and public life: sex, drugs, money, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, The Holy Family (his essay on the Kennedys), Nixon, and finally Monotheism and its Discontents , a scathing critique of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In state of being, we are given personal responses to people and events: recollections of his childhood, E. Nesbit, Tarzan, Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Until Proven Guilty'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Urban Shaman'
Joanne Walker has three days to learn to use her shamanic powers and save the world from the unleashed Wild Hunt.
No worries. No pressure. Nevermind the lack of sleep, the perplexing new talent for healing from fatal wounds, or the cryptic, talking coyote who appears in her dreams.
And if all that's not bad enough, in the three years Joanne's been a cop, she's never seen a dead body -- but she's just come across her second in three days.
It's been a bitch of a week. And it isn't over yet. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Violet Fire'
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› Find signed collectible books: '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. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'You Have the Right to Remain Silent'
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