Within A Dream

Ever since his best friend, Andy, was in a car accident that left him in a coma, Charley Finch has been having nightmares in which he helps Andy escape the clutches of the demon, Zorl who is on a mission, it seems, to push Andy through the Door of Death. Within these dreams, Charley and Andy are sometimes cartoon characters in wild animations, or merely boys in hazardous escapades evading Zorl on steep mountains, dark forests or hiding in a shadowy ancient castle. After a month of these nightmares, Charley's family doctor refers him to a child psychiatrist, the towering dark, T. Arambaala. After several sessions, Dr. Arambaala sends Charley to a sleep lab of a local university where it is decided that lucid dreaming may be the only way for Charley to take control of his dreams and defeat Zorl. After Dr. Sybil Galt, the Dream Witch, teaches Charley how to become a lucid dreamer, or an oneironaut, a relentless battle ensues between Charley and Zorl until, after several...
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Layer Cake

Our narrator's too smart to tell you his name ("if I [did], you'd be as clever as me"), but he's not afraid to tell you everything else about the "layer cake"-London's intricately arranged constellation of underworld fiefdoms. He's a drug dealer who's planning to retire on his thirtieth birthday-after one last great score-to a life as "a gentleman of leisure." Only problem is his boss, the crime kingpin "don" Jimmy Price, has other plans. He can walk away from the life for good only if he can track down a runaway daughter for Jimmy's old friend.Complicating matters are two million top-grade Ecstasy tablets that were robbed from a factory in Amsterdam by a renegade outfit in Jimmy's employ who are now looking for someone to offload the ill-gotten loot. With an angry mob of German neo-Nazis in hot pursuit, and all crosses and double-crosses leading back to Jimmy, our narrator finds he may have to negotiate a new exit strategy.With a rich supporting cast of dozens of...
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Hostile Takeover

Professional assassin John Lago faces off against his deadliest adversary yet—his wife—in Hostile Takeover, the exciting sequel to Shane Kuhn’s bestselling debut The Intern’s Handbook, which the New York Post called “a sexy, darkly comic thriller.”At the end of The Intern’s Handbook, John tracks down his nemesis Alice but instead of putting a bullet in her head, he puts a ring on her finger and marries her. Together, they execute a hostile takeover of Human Resources, Inc., the “placement agency” that trains young assassins to infiltrate corporations disguised as interns and knock off high profile targets. As HR’s former top operatives, they are successful until conflicting management styles cause an ugly breakup that locks John out of the bedroom and the boardroom. But when Alice takes on a new HR target, John is forced to return to the office battlefield in a role he swore...
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I.O.U

The layered plot of the latest in the excellent Jenny Cain series (SAY NO TO MURDER) finds the Port Frederick, Mass., sleuth probing the cause of her recently deceased mother's insanity. Cain discovers that her mother's mental collapse many years before coincided with the bankruptcy of the family business. The closing of Cain Clams created considerable unemployment locally and countless enemies for the Cains--one such foe may now be trying to prevent the amateur detective from delving further into her family's past and the town's secrets. As she tracks down public mysteries, Cain unearths painful personal issues; an attempt on her life, construed as an effort at suicide, forces her to deal with the legacy of her mother's madness. Pickard masterfully resolves both plot lines in this affecting, provocative novel centering around the mystery at the heart of mother-daughter relationships.
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American Kingpin

From New York Times-bestselling author Nick Bilton comes a true-life thriller about the rise and fall of Ross Ulbricht, aka the Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder of the online black market Silk Road. In Hatching Twitter, Nick Bilton gave readers an astonishingly reported, riveting, and impeccably crafted story of the politics and power struggles behind the founding of Twitter. Now Bilton turns his investigative journalism to the story of Ross Ulbricht, the notorious and enigmatic founder of a drug empire called Silk Road. In 2011, Ulbricht, a 26-year-old libertarian idealist and former Boy Scout, launched "a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them." He called it Silk Road, opened for business on the Dark Web, and christened himself the Dread Pirate Roberts (after the Princess Bride character). The site grew at a tremendous pace, quickly becoming a $1.2 billion enterprise where...
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The Retribution

ReviewIt's perhaps fitting that for McDermid's 25th novel she's revisited her most thrillingly murderous creation, Jacko Vance (Daily Mirror )Val McDermid's 25th novel is stunningly good, but it comes with a health warning. It is truly disturbing (The Times )McDermid never pulls her punches in her graphic descriptions of the evils men (and women) inflict on each other...tension filled from start to finish (Irish Independent )Her writing is taut, her plotting pacy... McDermid is particularly good at analysing human damage and its effects (Scotsman )To write one brilliant book is hard. To write 25 is a miracle. That is what Val McDermid has achieved over the course of her career and it's why she is a much-loved legend in the literary world...the pace here is flawless and the various storylines are expertly interwoven...a superb crime novel (Sunday Express )Brilliant ... sensational ...unforgettable (Guardian )It's a tribute to McDermid's skill as a storyteller that she deliberately creates a trio of central characters who are essentially incapable of conventional empathy yet still manages to sustain reader sympathy right through to the coldly brutal finale (Irish Times ) Book DescriptionThe unforgettable, gripping new Tony Hill and Carol Jordan novel
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Agatha Christie - 1939 SSC - The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories

There's a body in a trunk; a dead girl's reflection is caught in a mirror; and one corpse is back from the grave, while another is envisioned in the recurring nightmare of a terrified eccentric. What's behind such ghastly misdeeds? Try money, revenge, passion, and pleasure. With multiple motives, multiple victims, and multiple suspects, it's going to take a multitude of talent to solve these clever crimes. In this inviting collection, Agatha Christie enlists the services of her finest—Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Parker Pyne—and puts them each to the test in the most challenging cases of their careers. Review“Agatha Christie’s indelibly etched characters have entertained millions across the years and a love of her work has brought together generations of readers—a singular achievement for any author and an inspiration to writers across the literary landscape.” (Jacqueline Winspear, New York Times bestselling author of the Maisie Dobbs novels )“Highly entertaining....Agatha Christie at her best.” (Springfield Republican ) About the AuthorAgatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in one hundred foreign countries. She is the author of eighty novels and short-story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels under the name Mary Westmacott. She died in 1976.
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04.The Torment of Others

Stunning psychological thriller featuring Tony Hill, hero of The Wire in the Blood, from one of Britain's bestselling novelistsFor some, there is nothing so sweet, so thrilling, as the torment of others ...A dead girl lies on a blood-soaked mattress, her limbs spread in a parody of ecstasy. The scene matches a series of murders which ended when irrefutable forensic evidence secured the conviction of one Derek Tyler. But Tyler's been locked up in a mental institution for two years, barely speaking a word – except to say that 'the Voice' told him to do it. Top criminal psychologist Dr Tony Hill is prepared to think the unthinkable – this is not a copycat murder but something much stranger. While DCI Carol Jordan and her team mount a desperate and dangerous undercover police operation to trap the murderer, Hill heads towards a terrifying face-off with one of the most perverse killers he has ever encountered...
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