Latest Reviews
Mercy and Troy are looking forward to baby Felicity’s first holiday season. At Northshire’s annual Solstice Soirée, hosted by Northshire’s finest and funded by Mercy’s billionaire pal Feinberg, Amy’s little girl Helena is sitting on Santa Claus’ lap. She’s telling him she’d like a Bitty Baby doll just like little Felicity when the bearded man leaps up, thrusts the toddler at her mother Amy, and staggers away from the festivities. He disappears into the woods. By the time Elvis and Mercy find him, Santa Claus --- aka the town mayor --- is lying on his back, dead. This strange murder is the first of a series of similar Solstice-themed killings targeting the town’s most prominent citizens. Mercy and Troy and the dogs must team up with Thrasher and Harrington to capture The Yuletide Killer before he strikes again, this time far closer to home.
In DARK SISTERS, horror meets historical fiction when a curse bridges generations, binding the fates of three women. Anne Bolton, a healer facing persecution for witchcraft, bargains with a dark entity for protection --- but the fire she unleashes will reverberate for centuries. Mary Shephard, a picture-perfect wife in a suffocating community, falls for Sharon and begins a forbidden affair that could destroy them both. And Camilla Burson, the rebellious daughter of a preacher, defies conformist expectations to uncover an ancient power as her father’s flock spirals into crisis.
On a snowy winter night in 1999, Sander and Killian leave a house party together outside a small town in rural Sweden. The very best of friends, the two 17-year-olds imagine they will remain so forever. But by the next morning, a corpse is found in the trunk of a car, and each boy is a suspect in the murder. Each has something they want to conceal from the police. And from the other. The hunt for the killer will take more than 20 years. It will see the lead detective leave the force forever. And it won’t end until a second body turns up under similar circumstances, and the tight-knit community’s secrets are finally brought to light.
Failed lawyer Robert Green has such a good plan: Crack 300 safe-deposit boxes and sail off to South America with his brilliant, morally flexible sister, Penny. If it weren’t for the damned freezing rain. In the dying resort town of Granite Shores, cop Jack Biddle is self-appointed king --- mostly of bad decisions --- and he is looking for a way out. Then he spots a van spinning off a mountain road into the valley below. In the wreckage, Jack finds a very dead Robert, millions in heisted loot…and opportunity. All Jack has to do is clean up the mess, make Robert’s body disappear, make off with the fortune, and not get caught. One hitch is Penny. Another is Mitch Diamond, a wild card ex-con who knows more about the missing fortune than he lets on. Jack, Penny and Mitch each have an endgame. But there’s only one way out, and they’re crashing headlong toward it.
Birdie Keller wakes one freezing January morning to the news she’s been waiting 18 years to hear. Jimmy Maguire, the man who killed her sister, has been freed from jail. She leaves for London with a pistol and a plan: to find this man and make him pay. But every story has two sides. Jimmy can sense he’s being hunted. He knew Birdie a long time ago, in a life she’d sooner forget, and he isn’t the only one with something to hide. As the two circle each other in a heart-stopping game of cat and mouse, they plunge into a murky world of family secrets, betrayals and unsolved mysteries.
December 1921: Being single and a new Chief, Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard gets the short straw at Christmastime and is called upon by Chief Superintendent Markum to go to the Kentish home of a lord recovering from an attempt on his life. In bed with a concussion, the man is convinced someone is trying to kill him after he claims he was struck by the hoof of a running horse whose rider never stopped to check on him. Struggling with his own demons from the war and misgivings about helping a man who, as a colonel, oversaw the suffering of those on the frontlines from afar, Rutledge undertakes an uneasy investigation. And as the winter holiday approaches, he becomes increasingly convinced that nothing is as it seems.
Defense Attorney Karen Wyatt exposed corruption in the police force and the District Attorney's office while getting her client exonerated in court. But in doing so, she put a target on her back, and she was set up on a fake drug charge, imprisoned and disbarred until the conspiracy unraveled and her innocence was proven. Now reinstated to the bar, Wyatt is still interested in finding out who ordered her to be set up --- but the key figures were either killed or are in Witness Protection. In the meantime, Wyatt is a practicing defense attorney, whose current client is either guilty of a heinous murder, or is a too-trusting patsy for an acquaintance set up for a crime he didn't commit. It will take all of Wyatt's genius to defend her client successfully, but that's just one piece of an increasingly complex puzzle.
It's 11:59. And the city that never sleeps is afraid to get out of bed. A bomb explodes in a crowded New York subway station at exactly 11:59am. The next day, a second blast rips through a busy department store --- again at 11:59. As the bombs go off with clockwork precision, the death toll climbs and businesses shut their doors as the city hunkers down in fear. NYPD Red Detectives Kylie MacDonald and Zach Jordan face their most twisted case ever, as they race against the clock in search of one man who has vowed "to destroy New York City the way it destroyed my family."
In the long and dramatic annals of British history, no transition from one monarch to another has been as fraught and consequential as that which ended the Tudor dynasty and launched the Stuart in March 1603. At her death, Elizabeth I had reigned for 44 turbulent years, facing many threats. But no danger was greater than the uncertainty over who would succeed her. As Tracy Borman reveals in THE STOLEN CROWN, according to Elizabeth’s earliest biographer, William Camden, on her deathbed the queen indicated that James was her chosen heir, and indeed he did become king soon after she died. That endorsement has been accepted as fact for more than four centuries. However, recent analysis of Camden’s original manuscript shows that key passages were pasted over and rewritten to burnish James’ legacy.
Nils Vik wakes up on November the 18th and knows it will be the day he dies. He follows his morning routine as voices from his past echo in his mind, and looks around the empty house one last time, before stepping onto his beloved boat. His dog, dead these many years, leaps aboard with him, and then the other dead begin to emerge --- from the woods along the fjord, from each of the ferry stops along the route, from his logbook full of memories and quotations and jotted-down notes about the weather conditions. The people from the past accompany him now, prodding him, showing him what he might have missed before, as he waits for his Marta, his late, remarkable wife, to finally join him on the boat again.
