David Blake is no gangster, or so he likes to think. He's a white-collar criminal, working for gangster Bobby Mahoney, enjoying the good life while the money keeps on pouring in. Trouble is, a big chunk of that money has just gone missing along with Geordie Cartwright – and Blake is getting the blame. Has Geordie done a runner with the drop or has he been killed by a rival gang? In a desperate and bloody finale, Blake has to make an agonising choice and someone has to pay the ultimate price…

Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two.DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab's DNA cases currently in court.Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Councilman Irvin Irving's son jumped or was pushed from a window at the Chateau Marmont. Irving, Bosch's longtime nemesis, has demanded that Harry handle the investigation.Relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.

“He’d just learnt to walk,” she said. “He was sitting playing on his blanket, then all of a sudden he was gone.”A 16-month-old boy is found drowned in a pond right by his home. Chief Inspector Sejer is called to the scene as there is something troubling about the mother’s story. As even her own family turns against her, Sejer is determined to get to the truth.

When Special Agent Ren Bryce is called to Tate, Oregon to investigate the disappearance of twelve-year-old Caleb Veir, she finds a town already in mourning.Two other young boys have died recently, although in very different circumstances. As Ren digs deeper, she discovers that all is not as it seems in the Veir household and that Tate a small town with a big secret.Can Ren uncover the truth before more children are harmed?

Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage

The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement: “I shot him between the eyes.” As the tale—a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness, desperation, and bitterness—proceeds, the narrator’s murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

The stunning sequel to James Smythe’s critically acclaimed literary sci-fi novel The Explorer.TWENTY YEARS following the disappearance of the infamous Ishiguro – the first manned spacecraft to travel deeper into space than ever before – humanity are setting their sights on the heavens once more.Under the direction of two of the most brilliant minds science has ever seen – that of identical twin brothers Tomas and Mirakel Hyvönen – this space craft has a bold mission: to study what is being called ‘the anomaly’ – a vast blackness of space into which the Ishiguro disappeared. Between them Tomas (on the ground, guiding the mission from the command centre) and Mira (on the ship, with the rest of the hand-picked crew) are leaving nothing to chance.But soon these two scientists are to learn that there are some things in space beyond our understanding. As the anomaly begins to test the limits of Mira’s comprehension – and his sanity – will Tomas be able to save his brother from being lost in space too?

The 6:20 Man is back, dropped by his handlers into a small coastal town in Maine to solve the murder of a CIA agent who knew America’s dirtiest secrets. Can Travis Devine uncover the truth before his time runs out?When CIA operative Jenny Sikwell is murdered in rural Maine, government officials have immediate concerns over national security. Her laptop and phone were full of state secrets that, in the wrong hands, could endanger the lives of countless operatives. In need of someone who can solve the murder quickly and retrieve the missing information, the U.S. government knows just the chameleon on whom it can call.Ex-Army Ranger Travis Devine spent his time in the military preparing to take on any scenario, followed by his short-lived business career chasing shadows in the deepest halls of power, so his analytical mind makes him particularly well suited for complex, high-stakes tasks. Taking down the world’s largest financial conspiracy proved his value, and in comparison, this case looks straightforward. Except small towns hold secrets, and Devine finds himself an outsider again.Devine must ingratiate himself with locals who have trusted each other their whole lives, and who distrust outsiders just as much: Dak, Jenny’s brother, who’s working to revitalize the town; Earl, the retired lobsterman who found Jenny’s body; and Alex, Jenny’s sister, with a dark past of her own. As Devine gets to know the residents of Potter, Maine, answers seem to appear and then transform into more questions. There’s a long history of secrets, and people who will stop at nothing to keep them from being exposed — leaving Devine with no idea whom he can trust... and who wants him dead.

After his sister is in a horrible car accident and then vanishes from the hospital, FBI agent Ford MacDougal, along with agents Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich, learn that the murder of an elderly woman is linked mysteriously to his sister's disappearance and they are plunged into a world of evil.

The year is 1949.

In the bombed-out ruins of Cologne, Hanno Dasch is king.

Director of the most successful black market operation in post-war Germany, Dasch has kept his clients supplied with goods so extravagant and rare that they were almost impossible to find even at the height of Germany’s conquests.

Nobody but Dasch, his enigmatic daughter and the war criminal he keeps as his bodyguard know how he does it.

None of this has escaped the attention of Allied Intelligence, who face not only the systemic corruption of a country where everything is in short supply, but the growing threat of Stalin’s KGB.

Fearing that Dasch will soon expand his business to include dealings with Russia, and invite the further meddling of Russian agents in the west, the CIA sets in motion an undercover operation to infiltrate and, ultimately, destroy Dasch’s empire.

A disgraced American Army officer, Nathan Carter, is recruited to approach Dasch and to ingratiate himself with promises of stolen army supplies.

As Carter moves further and further into the labyrinth of Dasch’s world, it soon becomes clear that the black market ring has already been compromised, but by someone even more dangerous than the Russians.

Carter stumbles upon a counterfeiting ring, with whom Dasch has unwittingly gone into business, which seems to have been created with the sole purpose of destroying the Soviet economy, something it could easily do with the superlative quality of the forged bills it is producing. With Carter caught in the middle, and facing the danger that his cover might be blown at any moment, a race begins between the Russian and American spy agencies to uncover who is responsible, before the situation escalates to war.

After a century in dormant seclusion, the matching appendage to the infamous Monkey's Paw has resurfaced. And once again, something sinister is afoot.

When a ninety-year-old Concord, Massachusetts resident named, Riley Stephenson, receives the other Monkey’s Paw as a birthday gift from an old friend, along with a strong warning to use his three wishes wisely, he wastes little time putting his good fortune to use. But haste and apathetic disregard of his friend’s advice quickly leads to ill-fated decisions with dire consequences.

On the heels of Mr. Stephenson’s first wish and subsequent disappearance, Finnegan Winters and Andria Walker — a rookie team of clandestine artifact collectors — are called in to track down Stephenson and the troublesome paw.

As the strange case unfolds, Finn and Andria find themselves involved in a head-spinning journey of veiled secrets and bizarre customs pointing to a mysterious healing pool hidden deep inside the jungles of the Amazon.

With the odds stacked against them and paltry information to work from, Finn and Andria must lean heavily on their novice instincts, but can they recover the paw before Stephenson makes his final wish and unleashes havoc of irreversible proportions?

In the first two books of his critically acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, The Hot Country and The Star of Istanbul, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler won the hearts of historical crime fiction fans with the artfulness of his World War I settings, his swashbuckling action, and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago journalist recruited by American intelligence. In the third installment, The Empire of Night, “Kit” is now a full-blown spy, and he has to go deep undercover to unravel a secret German plot for turning zeppelins into dangerous killing machines.It is 1917, and the United States is still wavering on the brink of war. At an elite intelligence meeting at a Hyde Park mansion, Kit’s handlers pair him up with someone he would never have expected — his mother. There’s a German mole somewhere in the British government, and the most likely suspect happens to be a diehard fan of the famous American theater actress Isabel Cobb. Disguised as a German-American reporter named Joseph William Hunter, Kit follows his mother and her escort Sir Albert Stockman from the relative safety of London into the lion’s den of Berlin.

In the first two books of his critically acclaimed Christopher Marlowe Cobb series, The Hot Country and The Star of Istanbul, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler won the hearts of historical crime fiction fans with the artfulness of his World War I settings, his swashbuckling action, and his charismatic leading man, a Chicago journalist recruited by American intelligence. In the third installment, The Empire of Night, “Kit” is now a full-blown spy, and he has to go deep undercover to unravel a secret German plot for turning zeppelins into dangerous killing machines.It is 1917, and the United States is still wavering on the brink of war. At an elite intelligence meeting at a Hyde Park mansion, Kit’s handlers pair him up with someone he would never have expected — his mother. There’s a German mole somewhere in the British government, and the most likely suspect happens to be a diehard fan of the famous American theater actress Isabel Cobb. Disguised as a German-American reporter named Joseph William Hunter, Kit follows his mother and her escort Sir Albert Stockman from the relative safety of London into the lion’s den of Berlin.

The international sensation – a riveting and electrifying blend of mystery, terror, and tense, violent actionAnna Heymes fears she is losing her mind. The wife of a top-ranking Parisian official, she suffers from amnesia and terrifying hallucinations – a living nightmare made more horrifying when psychiatric testing reveals that Anna has undergone drastic cosmetic surgery… though she cannot recall when or why.In the tenth arrondissement of Paris, a rookie police inspector and a seasoned veteran called out of retirement investigate the horrific murders of three anonymous young women – illegal Turkish aliens who could not have deserved such a brutal, inhuman death.From the murky night streets of clandestine Paris to the teeming fleshpot of Istanbul, two bizarre and terrible stories will become one – as prey and predator, manipulated and manipulator come together in a storm of blood and fury… in the hideous shadow of the wolf.

One stifling summer night in Longstreet, Mississippi, talented fourteen-year-old Darrell Clark ran home and was shot by cops, who had mistaken him for a purse snatcher. When the predictable cover-up starts, a group of black activists decide that the time has come for action against a corrupt city government. Marvel Atkins, their leader, links up with Kidd, the man with the plan to bring the city tumbling like the pack of Tarot cards he likes to consult. All he has to do is watch out for the Empress. The Tarot has warned him she is dangerous, but first he must find out who she is.

The Barnes Noble ReviewMay 2000The Empty Chair is the third – or, if you count a guest appearance in the millennial thriller The Devil's Teardrop, the fourth – novel to feature Lincoln Rhyme, the irascible forensic genius who became a quadriplegic when a cave-in at a crime scene damaged his spinal cord beyond repair. The series began in 1997 with The Bone Collector, which was recently made into a so-so film starring Denzel Washington. Every Rhyme novel to date has been characterized by authentic forensic detail and wild, even extravagant plotting, and the latest entry is no exception. The Empty Chair may, in fact, be the single trickiest suspense novel published so far this year.Unlike earlier volumes, The Empty Chair takes place outside of New York City in the bucolic but sinister environs of Paquenoke County, North Carolina. Rhyme – accompanied by his long-suffering physical therapist, Thom, and his beloved forensic assistant, Amelia Sachs – has just been accepted as a patient at the Medical Center of the University of North Carolina, where he is scheduled to undergo an experimental procedure that might increase the range of his mobility but might, on the other hand, result in his death. Shortly after his arrival, Lincoln 's plans are disrupted by an unforeseen emergency. Jim Bell, Paquenoke County sheriff, has trouble on his hands and needs Lincoln 's expertise.According to Bell, a disturbed teenager – known, for reasons that become graphically clear, as the Insect Boy – has murdered a local football hero and abductedtwoyoung women. Convinced that the women have only hours to live, Bell asks Lincoln to examine the trace evidence found at the abduction site in the faint hope of pinpointing the kidnapper's location. Though he knows nothing about the physical composition of the surrounding area – he and Sachs, as he repeatedly comments, are "fish out of water" in the American South – Rhyme agrees to help. Once again using Amelia Sachs as his eyes and legs, he sets up an ad hoc forensic lab in a borrowed corner of the local Sheriff's office and goes to work.This sort of scenario – a crazed killer, a race against time, a scattered handful of clues – offers more than enough drama to fuel any number of traditional suspense novels. In The Empty Chair, however, this same scenario is merely the first level of a complex, multitiered mystery that constantly confounds our most fundamental expectations. The first indication that The Empty Chair contains unexpected depths comes when Lincoln, flawlessly interpreting his disparate bits of evidence, locates both the Insect Boy (Garrett Hanlon) and his most recent victim (an oncology nurse named Lydia Johannsen) within the first 150 pages. At that point, Deaver throws away the rulebook.After talking with Garrett Hanlon in the Paquenoke County jail, Amelia develops the instinctive sense that Garrett might, as he continually claims, be a victim, and that another unidentified killer might still be at large. In a moment of intuitive – and reckless – empathy, Amelia abandons her professional principles and escapes with Garrett, determined both to prove the boy's innocence and rescue the remaining victim, a local history student named Mary Beth McConnell. From this point forward, almost nothing that happens in The Empty Chair is even remotely predictable.It would spoil too many of the carefully constructed surprises to reveal the plot in any more detail. Suffice it to say that the narrative – which seems, at first, a simple but effective chase story – broadens and deepens to become something stranger and infinitely more complex. Throwing a varied assortment of people and elements into the mix – a trio of Deliverance-style rednecks, an emotionally scarred cancer survivor, a revisionist account of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, an apparently deranged deputy sheriff, a pair of incipient rapists, the hidden motivations of a wealthy industrialist, and the tragic history of Tanner's Corner, a "town without children" – Deaver constructs an artful, entertaining melodrama that has much to say about the destructive consequences of uncontrolled greed.If The Empty Chair has a besetting weakness, it is Deaver's relentless determination to dazzle the reader with his narrative sleight of hand, piling on an endless, constantly escalating series of shocks, surprises, and unexpected twists that might, in a lesser writer's hands, have become just a bit too much. But Deaver, as usual, is a consummate professional, and he holds it all together with the ease and assurance of a natural storyteller. Readers familiar with the earlier adventures of Lincoln Rhyme will be lining up for this one, which seems likely to attract a substantial number of new readers, as well. The Empty Chair is Jeffery Deaver at his best and most devious and is recommended, without reservation, to anyone in search of intelligent, high-adrenaline entertainment.– Bill Sheehan

New Year’s Day, 1990. The Berlin Wall is coming down. Soon America won't have any enemies left to fight. The army is under pressure to downsize. Jack Reacher is the duty Military Police officer on a base in North Carolina when he takes a call reporting a dead soldier. The body was found in a sleazy motel used by local hookers. Reacher tells the local cop to handle it – it sounds like the guy just had a heart attack. But the dead man turns out to have been a two-star general on a secret mission. And then, many miles away, when Reacher goes to the general’s house to break the sad news, he finds a battered corpse: the general’s wife. Lee Child’s new stomach-churning, palm-sweating thriller turns back the clock to Jack Reacher’s army days. For the first time we meet a younger Reacher, a Reacher not yet disillusioned with military life. A Reacher with family. A Reacher in dogtags and starched uniform who imposes army discipline, if only in his own pragmatic way. A Reacher as far from the no-credit card, no-last-known-address drifter of the previous novels as is possible to imagine.