Skip to main content

Reviews

Reviews

by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Gideon Crew --- brilliant scientist, master thief, intrepid adventurer --- is shocked when his former employer, Eli Glinn, vanishes without a trace, and Glinn's high-tech lab Effective Engineering Solutions shuts down seemingly overnight. Fresh off a diagnosis that gives him only months to live, Crew is contacted by one of his former coworkers at EES, Manuel Garza, who has a bead on one final treasure hinted at in EES's final case, the long-awaited translation of a centuries-old stone tablet of a previously undiscovered civilization: The Phaistos Disc. What lies at the end of the trail will either save Gideon's life or bring it to a sudden, shocking close.

by Anthony Horowitz - Fiction, Mystery

Diana Cowper, the wealthy mother of a famous actor, enters a funeral parlor to plan her own service. Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home. Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life and chooses Anthony Horowitz. Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself at the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying, but his latest case --- with its many twists and turns --- proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own.

by Matthew Pearl - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

Five years after a series of Dante-inspired killings stunned Boston, a politician is found in a London park with his neck crushed by an enormous stone device etched with a verse from the "Divine Comedy." When other shocking deaths erupt across the city, all in the style of the penances Dante memorialized in "Purgatory," poet Christina Rossetti fears that her missing brother, the artist and writer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, will be the next victim. The unwavering Christina enlists poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes to decipher the literary clues, and together these unlikely investigators unravel the secrets of Dante’s verses to find Gabriel and stop the killings.

by Joanne Harris - Fantasy, Fiction

The end of the world has occurred, and Loki has been trapped in a seemingly endless purgatory until he finds a way to escape. Back in the ninth world (Earth), Loki finds himself sharing the mind of a teenage girl named Jumps, who is a bit of a mess. She’s also not happy about Loki sneaking his way into her mind, since she was originally calling on Thor. Worse, her friends have also been co-opted by the gods: Odin, Jump’s one-eyed best friend in a wheelchair, and Freya, the pretty one. Thor escapes the netherworld as well and shares the mind of a dog, and he finds that it suits him. Odin has a plan to bring back the Norse gods' ascendancy, but Loki has his own ideas on how things can go --- and nothing goes according to plan.

by Owen Laukkanen - Adventure, Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

McKenna Rhodes has never been able to get the sight of her father's death out of her mind. A freak maritime accident has made her the captain of the salvage boat Gale Force, but it's also made her cautious, sticking closer to the Alaska coastline. She and her crew are just scraping by, when the freighter Pacific Lion founders 200 miles out in a storm. This job is their last chance --- but there is even more at stake than they know. Unlisted on any manifest, the Lion's crew includes a man on the run carrying 50 million dollars in stolen Yakuza bearer bonds. The Japanese gangsters and the thief's associates want the money. Another salvage ship, far bigger and more powerful than Gale Force, is racing to the rendezvous as well.

by Dean Koontz - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Battling the strange epidemic of murder-suicides that claimed Jane Hawk’s husband, and is escalating across the country, has made the rogue FBI agent a wanted fugitive. Jane’s ruthless pursuers can’t stop her from drawing a bead on her prey: a cunning man with connections in high places, a twisted soul of unspeakable depths with an army of professional killers on call. Propelled by her righteous fury and implacable insistence on justice, Jane will confront head-on the lethal forces arrayed against her. But nothing can prepare her for the chilling truth that awaits when she descends the crooked staircase to the dark and dreadful place where her long nightmare was born.

by Michael Palmer and D.J. Palmer - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Growing up in the White House was never supposed to be easy. So when 16-year-old Cam, also a champion chess player, experiences extreme moodiness and an uncharacteristic violent outburst, doctors are quick to dismiss his troubles as adolescent angst. Still, Secret Service agent Karen Ray is convinced that Cam’s condition is serious --- enough so that she summons her physician ex-husband for a second opinion. At first, the president’s team doesn’t want to listen to Dr. Lee Blackwood. But when Cam gets sicker, Lee must make a diagnosis from a puzzling array of symptoms. As Lee and Karen race for a cure to help Cam, they begin to uncover betrayals that breach the highest levels of national security. And until they can find the truth, no one is safe.

by Jessica Fletcher, Donald Bain, and Jon Land - Fiction, Mystery

Jessica Fletcher takes up the case of her good friend, Barbara "Babs" Wirth, after Babs' husband, Hal, suffers a fatal heart attack that Jessica has reason to believe was actually murder. At the heart of her suspicions lies a sinister dating site Hal had used while he and Babs were having marital issues, a site that may be complicit in somehow swindling him out of millions. Jessica's investigation reveals that Hal was far from the only victim, and when his former business partner is also killed, a deadly pattern emerges. Jessica teams up with a brilliant young computer hacker to follow the trail, but as she gets closer to the truth, two near misses force her to realize that she may very well be the next victim.

by Brian Freeman - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

When a freak auto accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a "ghost," with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. Alarmingly, a gun is found in the car --- and the gun has recently been fired. The next day, Stride learns that a Duluth college student has also vanished, and he worries that the two incidents are related. His investigation of the girl's disappearance leads him into the midst of a film crew in Duluth, where a movie is being made based on a case in his own past. The actor playing Stride is Hollywood royalty, but Stride soon hears whispers that his cinematic alter ego has a dark side.

by Anne Perry - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

1910: Twenty-five-year-old Daniel Pitt is a junior barrister in London and eager to prove himself, independent of his renowned parents’ influence. And the new case before him will be the test. When his client, arrogant biographer Russell Graves, is found guilty of murdering his wife, Daniel is dispatched to find the real killer before Graves faces the hangman’s noose --- in only 21 days. Could Mrs. Graves’ violent death have anything to do with her husband’s profession? Someone in power may be framing the biographer to keep damaging secrets from coming to light. It is a theory that leads Daniel’s investigation unexpectedly to London’s Special Branch --- and, disturbingly, to one of his father’s closest colleagues.