World-famous “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes faces a terrible crisis: a ring of criminal masterminds has threatened to loose thousands of plague-infected rats into the streets of London. But the Black Death isn’t Holmes’ only problem. A lone killer haunts the city. His calling card is a trail of corpses, drained of blood to the last drop. The key to solving both crimes rests in the hands of a mysterious nobleman recently returned to London on a personal matter. His name is Dracula. The Count is quickly entangled in a web of evil that even his immortal powers may not be enough to breach. Holmes and Dracula soon come to the peculiar realization that they may be each other’s only hope. Views: 45
Marion Cheyne is young, poor and ambitious. Her humble village roots and poorly paid job offer few opportunities and Marion feels trapped in a dead-end existence. So when an unexpected chance to escape presents itself, Marion grabs it, ignoring the moral implications of her actions, and sets out on a new life far away in Aberdeen. Years later and the struggling servant girl Marion has been transformed into Marianne, wife of the heir to Castle Lyall, and every inch the lady of the glen. More a business arrangement than a love match, Marianne's commitment to her role and to the name of Lyall is total, and as family, friends and world wars come and go, she will stop at nothing to protect her hard-won position. But the many secrets of her past refuse to stay safely buried. Nothing in the small community of the glen can remain hidden forever... Views: 45
An eye-opening journey to the most overlooked parts of America.Everyone knows that America is 50 states and . . . some other stuff. Scattered shards in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the not-quite states—American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands—and their 4 million people are often forgotten, even by most Americans. But they're filled with American flags, U.S. post offices, Little League baseball games, and residents who serve in the U.S. military at high rates. So how did these territories come to be part of the United States? What are they like? And why aren't they states?When Doug Mack realized just how little he knew about the territories, he set off on a globe-hopping quest covering more than 30,000 miles to see them all. Starting in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Mack examines the Founding Fathers' arguments over expansion. In American Samoa, he explores Polynesia's outsize influence on American... Views: 45
Amazon.com ReviewOne of the most promising secondary figures in Steve Hamilton's series about reluctant northern Michigan PI Alex McKnight has always been his teetotaling Ojibwa Indian pal, Vinnie LeBlanc. But Vinnie remained mostly to himself through the first four McKnight adventures. Blood Is the Sky finally lets him loose, and it's both a pleasure and painful to see what results.Vinnie's younger, ex-con brother, Tom, has disappeared. In violation of his parole, Tom had guided a small contingent of moose hunters into the pacific forests of Ontario, but none of them had returned home on schedule. To assuage Vinnie's worries, McKnight agrees to drive with him into Canada and look for the men. No luck; the owners of a money-losing lakeside lodge where those sportsmen had stayed say they departed days ago. So where did they go? Who were the two other, unidentified guys who came looking for them in advance of McKnight and his friend? And why was the hunters' vehicle abandoned, with their wallets inside, near an Indian reservation? Looking for answers, the detective and Vinnie set off into the woods, where hungry bears are by no means the most dangerous creatures they'll have to face.Despite its Deliverance-like moments, and an explosively violent conclusion that's not sufficiently foreshadowed, Blood Is the Sky is really a gracefully composed study of character, as focused on Vinnie's strengths and failings as Hamilton's previous novel, North of Nowhere, was on the backstory of another series regular, bar owner Jackie Connery. Yet McKnight shines here, too, his self-effacing humor keeping readers amused, when they aren't amazed--again--by the lengths to which this supposedly lonerish sleuth will go to help a friend in trouble. --J. Kingston PierceFrom Publishers WeeklyEdgar winner Hamilton's engrossing novel of revenge, the fifth in his Alex McKnight series (after 2002's North of Nowhere), alternates between well-paced action fraught with danger and Alex's slow, meticulous inquiries. A former Detroit cop sidelined by a bullet, Alex is living quietly in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula when he agrees to help an Ojibway friend, Vinnie Red Sky LeBlanc. Vinnie's searching for his black sheep brother, Tom, who hasn't returned from a job guiding a hunting party of wealthy Detroit men in the Canadian wilderness. The staff of an isolated lodge on an island-dotted lake arouses Alex and Vinnie's suspicions with their unsatisfactory explanations about the hunting party's trip. Then the anxious wives report their husbands are missing to the Ontario Provincial Police, leading Alex and Vinnie deeper into an investigation that eventually points to a crime in Detroit in 1985. The fate of Tom's hunting party becomes apparent early on, as the reader gets drawn into a complex series of inexplicable, and highly improbable, coincidences. Nonetheless, Hamilton develops his plot carefully. A fine writer, he excels at describing the lonely locale as well as depicting such memorable characters as tough-minded cop Natalie Reynaud and Maskwa, a 70-year-old Cree still flying his clapped-out plane around the Canadian skies.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 45
Quick as a flash, both girls were off their bicycles.... They crouched low, sheltered from view by a stalwart pine. In another second, a fearsome rider loomed blackly against the darkening sky. The ground shook as noiseless hooves galloped silently by them. A rush of cold air brushed across their staring faces. And the headless horseman sped silently by.... ISBN 0-307-21597-0 Views: 45
Rhiannon, proud and spirited, is alone in the world after Bull Beynon, her one-time lover, marries someone else. She gains a respectable post as housekeeper to an elderly man, but when he dies his waspish sister throws her out onto the streets where she faces destitution. At the entrance to the notorious Paradise Park Hotel she encounters Sal, a young street girl whom she tries to rescue. Her attempt ends in failure and Sal returns to her old life on the streets, leaving Rhiannon is even more determined to become respectable. She obtains a job as maid to unhappy Janey Buchan, who takes a liking to Rhiannon and teaches her ladylike ways. Her rascally husband Dafydd, once the lover of Llinos Mainwaring, causes Janey great unhappiness, and eventually she runs away, leaving Rhiannon once more without a job or a home.In desperation, knowing that little stands between her and a return to her old life, she finds herself back at the Paradise Park Hotel. Once scarcely more than a... Views: 45
Frances Itani's lauded and award-winning American debut novel has been sold in sixteen countries, was a Canadian best seller for sixteen weeks, reaching #1, and has been awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best Book Award for the Caribbean and Canadian Region. Set on the eve of the Great War, Deafening is a tale of remarkable virtuosity and power. At the age of five, Grania emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf, and is suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. Sent to the Ontario School for the Deaf, Grania must learn to live away from her family. When Grania falls in love with Jim Lloyd, a young hearing man, her life seems complete, but WWI soon tears them apart when Jim is sent to the battlefields of Flanders. During this long and brutal war of attrition, Jim and Grania's letters back and forth-both real and imagined-attempt to sustain the intimacy they discovered in Canada. A magnificent tale of love and war, Deafening is also an ode to language-how it can console, imprison, and liberate, and how it alone can bridge vast chasms of geography and experience.Amazon.com ReviewIn Deafening, Canadian writer Frances Itani's American debut novel, she tells two parallel stories: a man's story of war and a woman's story of waiting for him and of what it is to be deaf. Grania O'Neill is left with no hearing after having scarlet fever when she is five. She is taught at home until she is nine and then sent to the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, where lifelong friendships are forged, her career as a nurse is chosen, and she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, with whom she falls in love.The novel is filled with sounds and their absence, with an understanding of and insistence on the power of language, and with the necessity of telling and re-telling our stories. When Grania is a little girl at home, she sits with her grandmother, who teaches her: "Grania is intimately aware of Mamo's lips--soft and careful but never slowed. She studies the word as it falls. She says 'C' and shore, over and over again… This is how it sounds." After she and Jim are married and he is sent to war, he writes: "At times the ground shudders beneath our boots. The air vibrates. Sometimes there is a whistling noise before an explosion. And then, all is silent." When Grania's brother-in-law, her childhood friend, Kenan, returns from war seriously injured, he will not utter a sound. Grania approaches him carefully, starting with a word from their childhood--"poom"--and moves through "the drills she thought she'd forgotten… Kenan made sounds. In three weeks he was rhyming nonsense syllables." A deaf woman teaching a hearing man to make sounds again is only one of the wonders in this book. Because Itani's command of her material is complete, the story is saved from being another classic wartime romance--a sad tale of lovers separated. It is a testament to the belief that language is stronger than separation, fear, illness, trauma and even death. Itani convinces us that it is what connects us, what makes us human. --Valerie RyanFrom Publishers WeeklyWar and deafness are the twin themes of this psychologically rich, impeccably crafted debut novel set during WWI. Born in the late 19th century, Grania O'Neill comes from solid middle-class stock, her father a hotel owner in Deseronto, Ontario, her mother a God-fearing daughter of an Irish immigrant. When Grania is five, she loses her hearing to scarlet fever. When she is nine, she is sent to the Ontario Institution for the Deaf and Dumb in Belleville and given an education not only in lipreading, signing and speaking but also in emotional self-sufficiency. After graduating, she works as a nurse in the Belleville hospital, where she meets and falls in love with Jim Lloyd. They marry, but Jim is bound for the war as a stretcher bearer. His war is hell on earth: lurid wounds; stinks; sudden, endless slaughter redeemed only by comradeship. Itani's remarkably vivid, unflinching descriptions of his ordeal tend to overshadow Grania's musings on the home front, but Grania's story comes to the fore again when her brother-in-law and childhood friend, Kenan, comes back to Deseronto from the trenches in Europe with a dead arm and a half-smashed face, refusing to speak. Grania, who was educated to configure sounds she couldn't hear into words that "the hearing" could understand, brings Kenan back to life by teaching him sounds again, and then by making portraits of the people in the town whom she, Kenan and her sister Tress know in common. As she talks to Kenan, she reinvigorates him with a sense that his life, having had such a rich past, must have a future, too. This subplot eloquently expresses Itani's evident, pervasive faith in the unexpected power of story to not only represent life but to enact itself within lives. Her wonderfully felt novel is a timely reminder of war's cost, told from an unexpected perspective.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. Views: 45
With charm and vivid detail, the acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Spencer acquaints readers with the places and people, the pleasures and heartaches, she has known in her life. From her idyllic childhood in small-town Mississippi onward, a questioning spirit and voracity for reading and writing shape Spencer's course: her formal and informal educations at Vanderbilt and in Rome, Florence, New York, and Montreal, and her break with the culturally rigid segregated society from which she sprang; her friendships with such great writers as Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, and Robert Penn Warren; and her own many remarkable literary successes. A deeply affecting memoir by an esteemed American author, Landscapes of the Heart reveals Spencer to be both a part of and forever apart from her beloved southern roots. Views: 45
