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Reviews

Reviews

by Michael Bennett - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, Māori detective Hana Westerman discovers a man ritualistically hanging in a secret room and a puzzling inward-curving inscription. Delving into the investigation after a second, apparently unrelated death, she uncovers a chilling connection to a historic crime: 160 years before, during the brutal and bloody British colonization of New Zealand, a troop of colonial soldiers unjustly executed a Māori Chief. Hana realizes that the murders are utu --- the Māori tradition of rebalancing for the crime committed eight generations ago. There were six soldiers in the British troop, and since descendants of two of the soldiers have been killed, four more potential murders remain. Hana is thus hunting New Zealand’s first serial killer.

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

Astoundingly, Constance Greene has found a way back to the place of her origins, New York City in the late 1800s, leaping at the chance, although it means leaving the present forever. Constance sets off on a quest to prevent the events that lead to the deaths of her sister and brother. But along the road to redemption, Manhattan’s most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng, lies in wait, ready to strike at the slightest provocation. Meanwhile, in contemporary New York, FBI Special Agent Pendergast feverishly searches for a way to reunite with Constance. But will he discover a way back to her before it’s too late?

by Hannah Morrissey - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Ever since business mogul Clive Reynolds disappeared 20 years ago, the name "Reynolds" has become synonymous with "murder" and "mystery." And now, lured by a cryptic note, down-on-her-luck photographer Morgan Mori returns home to Black Harbor and into the web of their family secrets and double lives. The same night she photographs the Reynolds holiday get-together, Morgan becomes witness to a homicide of a cop that triggers the discovery of a long-buried clue. This finally could be the thing to crack open the chilling cold case, and Investigator Ryan Hudson has a chance to prove himself as lead detective. But as Morgan exposes her own dark demons, could her sordid history be the key to unlocking more than one mystery?

by Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch - History, Nonfiction

In 1943, as the war against Nazi Germany raged abroad, President Franklin Roosevelt had a critical goal: a face-to-face sit-down with his allies Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. This first-ever meeting of the Big Three in Tehran, Iran, would decide some of the most crucial strategic details of the war. Yet when the Nazis found out about the meeting, their own secret plan took shape --- an assassination plot that would’ve changed history. A true story filled with daring rescues, body doubles and political intrigue, THE NAZI CONSPIRACY details FDR’s pivotal meeting in Tehran and the deadly Nazi plot against the heads of state of the three major Allied powers who attended it.

by Stephen Markley - Dystopian, Fiction

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters --- a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

by Jeff Lindsay - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Super thief Riley Wolfe can do it all. He is a master of disguise, can scale a wall, and can vanish into thin air (thick air, too). He uses these unique talents to rob the richest. But this time, it’s the most powerful who have him in their grips. It’s not just that the high-up, rogue government agent has abducted the only two people Riley loves: it’s the fact that Riley has to do the man’s dirty work to set them free. It’s something Riley ordinarily would find a modest day’s work, infiltrating a madman’s Soviet missile silo in one of the world’s most remote places, all to find a secret on a tiny flash drive. But he’s never had to race the clock like this.

by Keigo Higashino - Fiction, Mystery

In the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo, an unusual statue of a Japanese mythic beast --- a kirin --- stands guard over the district from the classic Nihonbashi Bridge. In the evening, a man who appears to be very drunk staggers onto the bridge and collapses right under the statue of the winged beast. The patrolman who sees this scene unfold goes to rouse the man, only to discover that the man is dead and was stabbed in the chest. The key to solving the crime is to find out where he was attacked and why he made such a superhuman effort to carry himself to the Nihonbashi Bridge. That same night, a young man named Yashima is injured in a car accident while attempting to flee from the police. Found on him is the wallet of the murdered man.

by Charles Cumming - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia, a spy in the guise of a language teacher. Embedded in the town of Voronezh, Kite’s mission is to extract a chemical weapons scientist before the man’s groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands and shuttle him across the border to freedom in Ukraine. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong, and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. 2020: Thirty years after that dangerous mission, Kite discovers that its outcome put his name on the notorious “JUDAS” list --- a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination. Kite’s fight for survival takes him to Dubai, where he enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian secret state.

by James Grippando - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Aspiring playwright Kate Gamble is struggling to launch a script she’s been secretly researching her entire life. Her father is Christian Gamble, CEO of Buck Technologies, a private data integration company whose clients include the CIA and virtually every counter-terrorism organization in the Western World. Kate’s father adores her, and a play about the dark side of Big Data would be the ultimate betrayal in his eyes. But Kate is compelled to tell this story --- not only as an artist exploring the personal information catastrophe that affects us all, but as a daughter trying to understand her mother’s apparent loss of purpose. Then Patrick Battle comes back into her life, changing everything she has ever thought about her play, her father and her mother’s tragic death.

by Elly Griffiths - Fiction, Mystery

When Cassie Fitzgerald was at school in the late ’90s, she and her friends killed a fellow student. Almost 20 years later, Cassie is a happily married mother who loves her job --- as a police officer. She closely guards the secret she has all but erased from her memory. One day, her husband finally persuades her to go to a school reunion. But then, shockingly, one of her old friends, Garfield Rice, is found dead in the school bathroom, supposedly from a drug overdose. Garfield was an eminent --- and controversial --- MP, and the investigation is high profile. The trouble is, Cassie can’t shake the feeling that one of them has killed again. Is Cassie right, or was Garfield murdered by one of his political cronies?