Book of the dead
Part of a series featuring fiction's original pathologist, Dr Kay Scarpetta. The 'book of the dead' is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to have a new meaning. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace. Moving to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which she and her colleagues offer expert crime scene investigation and autopsies to communities lacking local access to competent death investigation and modern technology. It seems like an ideal situation, until the murders and other violent deaths begin. A woman is ritualistically murdered in her multi-million-dollar beach home. The body of an abused young boy is found dumped in a desolate marsh. A sixteen-year-old tennis star is found nude and mutilated near Piazza Navona in Rome. Scarpetta has dealt with many brutal and unusual crimes before, but never a string of them as baffling, or as terrifying, as the ones before her now. Before she is through, that book of the dead will contain many names - and the pen may be poised to write her own.
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Fire sale
A dangerous, depressed place reeking of bad memories, South Chicago is a neighbourhood private investigator V.I. Warshawski left a long time ago. But now she's back, drawn to the streets of her childhood once again to do a favour for a friend. Death, conspiracy and burning buildings - coming home wasn't meant to be like this. A dangerous, depressed place reeking of bad memories, South Chicago is a neighbourhood private investigator V.I. Warshawski left a long time ago. But now she's back, drawn to the streets of her childhood once again to do a favour for a friend. It was never going to be easy - and when the mother of a local girl asks her to look into claims of sabotage at the factory where she works, V.I. quickly finds herself caught up in something far more sinister. They say home is where the heart is, but now, as she lies by the roadside with a piece of hot, twisted metal embedded in her shoulder, looking up at the factory's smouldering remains, Warshawski is beginning to wonder whether a trip down memory lane was such a good idea after all. Fire Sale marks the glorious next step for V.I. Warshawski - one of the most complex, compelling characters in modern crime fiction - and confirms Sara Paretsky's position as one of the world's leading crime writers.
The American boy by Andrew Taylor
Edgar Allan Poe is the American boy, a child standing on the edge of mysteries. In 1819 two Americans arrive in London, and soon afterwards a bank collapses, a man is found dead and mutilated, a heiress flirts with her inferiors, and a schoolmaster struggles to understand what is happening. Interweaving real and fictional elements, The American Boy is a major new literary historical crime novel in the tradition of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Possession. England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy's sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues. Then a brutal crime is committed, with consequences that threaten to destroy Thomas and all that he has come to hold dear. Despite his efforts, Shield is caught up in a deadly tangle of sex, money, murder and lies - a tangle that grips him tighter even as he tries to escape from it. And what of the strange American child, at the heart of these macabre events, yet mysterious - what is the secret of the boy named Edgar Allen Poe?
Cinnamon kiss
It is the Summer of Love as CINNAMON KISS opens, and Easy Rawlins is contemplating robbing an armoured car. It's further outside the law than Easy has ever travelled, but his daughter Feather needs a medical treatment that costs far more than Easy can earn or borrow in time. And his friend Mouse tells him it's a cinch. Then another friend, Saul Lynx, offers a job that might solve Easy's problem without jail time. He has to track the disappearance of an eccentric, prominent attorney. His assistant of sort, the beautiful 'Cinnamon' Cargill, has gone as well. Easy can tell there is much more than he is being told - Robert Lee, his new employer, is as suspect as the man who disappeared. But his need overcomes all concerns, and he plunges into unfamiliar territory, from the newfound hippie enclaves to a vicious plot that stretches back to the battlefields of Europe. The New York Times said of Mosley's bestseller, Little Scarlet, 'Nobody, but nobody, writes this stuff like Mosley'. CINNAMON KISS is further proof that he is the absolute master of crime fiction. Usual condition commensurate with age.