How's a secret agent meant to catch a break? If it's not a demi-god going through puberty, it's a renegade Nazi clockwork army going senile. Or a death cult in Nepal. Or a battery-chewing wizard's relationship problems. Arthur Wallace, agent of MI37--Britain's agency for dealing with the supernatural, the extraterrestrial, and the generally odd--has to pull everything together, and he has to do it before a magical bomb tears reality apart... Views: 45
On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents -- she would never get married and she would never have children. But life, as Jane discovers, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then she falls pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise -- but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.Just when Jane has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision -- stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.Like Kennedy's previous highly acclaimed novels, Leaving the World, speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our... Views: 45
SUMMARY: Miriam Lapp, who left the Amish community in Pennsylvania three years ago, is heartbroken when her sister calls to reveal that her mother has died suddenly. Traveling home to Pennsylvania, she is forced to face the heartache from her past, including her rift from her family and the break up of her engagement with Timothy Kauffman.Her past emotional wounds are reopened when her family rejects her once again and she finds out that Timothy is in a relationship with someone else. Miriam discovers that the rumors that broke them up three years ago were all lies. However, when Timothy proposes to his girlfriend and Miriam's father disowns her, Miriam returns to Indiana with her heart in shambles.When Miriam's father has a stroke, Miriam returns to Pennsylvania, and her world begins to fall apart, leaving her to question her place in the Amish community and her faith in God. Views: 45
IT'LL TAKE MORE THAN ANGELS AND DEMONS TO STOP HIM.Reporter Spencer Finch is a journalist embroiled in the hunt for a missing book, encountering along the way cat burglars and mobsters, hackers and mysterious monks. At the same time, he's trying to make sense of the legacy left him by his late grandfather, a chest of what appear to be pulp magazines from the golden age of fantasy fiction. Following his nose, Finch gradually uncovers a mystery involving a lost Greek play, secret societies, generations of masked vigilantes - and an entire hidden history of mankind. It's like The Da Vinci Code retold by the Coen brothers in this blockbuster blur. Views: 45
This new volume by the much-loved poet Sonia Sanchez, her first in over a decade, is music to the ears: a collection of haiku that celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach “exploding in the universe,” the “blue hallelujahs” of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta “thundering out of the earth.” Sanchez sings the praises of contemporaries whose poetic alchemy turns “words into gems”: Maya Angelou, Richard Long, and Toni Morrison. And she pays homage to peace workers and civil rights activists from Rosa Parks and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to Brother Damu, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. Often arranged in strings of twelve or more, the haiku flow one into the other in a steady song of commemoration. Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning. Views: 45
From Publishers WeeklyIn this anemic medical thriller from bestseller Palmer (_The Second Opinion_), former trauma surgeon Dr. Nick Garrity, who suffers from PTSD as the result of a suicide attack on his field hospital in Afghanistan, is now in charge of the Helping Hands RV, a mobile clinic that plies the streets of Baltimore offering medical aid to the homeless. Meanwhile, a high-priced hit man starts to commit a series of murders, his first victim being Belle Coates, a nurse in Charlotte, N.C. When Belle's sister, Jillian, who lives in Virginia, searches for her sister's killer, she finds a connection to Nick. Several missing homeless men lead everyone to a massive plot involving high-level politicians and a secret CIA program. The action is all fairly predictable, the characters off-the-shelf, and the writing, if not exactly purple, at least mauve: A guttural, primal scream exploded from Nick's throat as he crouched by the body. 250,000 first printing. (Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. FromPalmer’s best novel in years is a highly suspenseful story that begins with a murder staged to look like a suicide and ends with the exposure of a far-reaching conspiracy. The three central players are Jillian Coates, a nurse who refuses to believe her sister would kill herself; Nick Garrity, a physician still haunted by the disappearance of his best friend three years ago; and Franz Koller, a ruthless hired killer who has several victims to dispatch, only none of them can look like murder. Palmer cleverly teams up Nick and Jillian, uniting them in a common purpose: to find out how Jillian’s dead sister and Nick’s missing friend seem to have come in contact with one another. Palmer keeps his two leads—and us, too—in the dark for a good portion of the book, dispensing the occasional tantalizing hint of some horrible secret lying just below the surface. When we discover the truth behind the mystery, we’re shocked and exhilarated and bewildered, all at the same time. Palmer has always spun a good yarn, but this one is more compelling and features more engaging characters than some of his recent efforts. --David Pitt Views: 45
