The Crime of Julian Wells

The Crime of Julian Wells
Author: Thomas H. Cook
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2024-02-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1504091620

A renowned true-crime writer’s suicide opens up a continent-crossing mystery in this Edgar Award–winning author’s “spellbinding thriller” (Publishers Weekly). When the body of true-crime writer Julian Wells is found in a boat drifting on a Montauk pond, the question is not how he died, but why? Philip Anders, Wells’s best friend and literary executor, vows to find out what drove the enigmatic author to take his own life. The first clue is a map of Argentina that Wells had been examining on the day he died. Years ago, he and Anders made a fateful trip to Buenos Aires, where they met their tour guide, Marisol. Her subsequent disappearance during Argentina’s Dirty War haunted the author. Had he discovered some new clue to her tragic fate? Was he planning to return to South America? And what, if anything, does Marisol’s disappearance have to do with the curious dedication in Wells’s first book: For Philip, sole witness to my crime? Anders soon finds himself on a journey into his friend’s haunted, secret life. Spanning four decades and traversing three continents, The Crime of Julian Wells is a tour-de-force from one of America’s most acclaimed suspense novelists. “Intelligent and elegant.” —The Wall Street Journal “[A] striking example of a suspense writer working at the top of his form, and an agreeable diversion for those who enjoy a bit of style with their substance . . . Cook’s characterizations are richly balanced and finely nuanced.” —Los Angeles Times

The Children of Men

The Children of Men
Author: P. D. James
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012-01-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307367711

The year is 2021. No child has been born for twenty-five years. The human race faces extinction. Under the despotic rule of Xan Lyppiat, the Warden of England, the old are despairing and the young cruel. Theo Faren, a cousin of the Warden, lives a solitary life in this ominous atmosphere. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman leads him into contact with a group of dissenters. Suddenly his life is changed irrevocably as he faces agonising choices which could affect the future of mankind. NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

The Chatham School Affair

The Chatham School Affair
Author: Thomas H. Cook
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2024-02-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 150409168X

What drove a woman to murder in 1920s New England? “Few readers will be prepared for the surprise that awaits at novel’s end” in this Edgar Award–winning novel (Publishers Weekly, starred review). It was referred to as the Chatham School affair—a tragic event that destroyed five lives, shook a coastal Massachusetts community to its core, and traumatized a boy named Henry Griswald. Now Henry is an aged, unmarried lawyer, and as he writes his will, he recalls that long-ago day in 1926 when something drove his teacher to murder—and contemplates the role he played in it all . . . “Cook is a master, precise and merciless, at showing the slow-motion shattering of families and relationships . . . The Chatham School Affair ranks with his best.” —Chicago Tribune “Such a seductive book.” —The New York Times Book Review “Like the best of his crime-writing colleagues, Cook uses the genre to open a window onto the human condition . . . [a] literate, compelling novel.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Crime and the Silence

The Crime and the Silence
Author: Anna Bikont
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 557
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374710325

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category A monumental work of nonfiction on a wartime atrocity, its sixty-year denial, and the impact of its truth Jan Gross's hugely controversial Neighbors was a historian's disclosure of the events in the small Polish town of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, when the citizens rounded up the Jewish population and burned them alive in a barn. The massacre was a shocking secret that had been suppressed for more than sixty years, and it provoked the most important public debate in Poland since 1989. From the outset, Anna Bikont reported on the town, combing through archives and interviewing residents who survived the war period. Her writing became a crucial part of the debate and she herself an actor in a national drama. Part history, part memoir, The Crime and the Silence is the journalist's account of these events: both the story of the massacre told through oral histories of survivors and witnesses, and a portrait of a Polish town coming to terms with its dark past. Including the perspectives of both heroes and perpetrators, Bikont chronicles the sources of the hatred that exploded against Jews and asks what myths grow on hidden memories, what destruction they cause, and what happens to a society that refuses to accept a horrific truth. A profoundly moving exploration of being Jewish in modern Poland that Julian Barnes called "one of the most chilling books," The Crime and the Silence is a vital contribution to Holocaust history and a fascinating story of a town coming to terms with its dark past.

Women of Mystery

Women of Mystery
Author: Martha Hailey DuBose
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2000-12-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0312276559

In this remarkable book, Martha Hailey DuBose has given those multitudes of readers who love the mystery novel an indispensable addition to their libraries. Unlike other works on the subject, Women of Mystery is not merely a directory of the novelists and their publications with a few biographical details. DuBose combines extensive research into the lives of significant women mystery writers from Anna Katherine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart with critical essays on their work, anecdotes, contemporary reviews and opinions and some of the women's own comments. She takes us through the Golden Age of the British women mystery writers, Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham and Tey, to the leading crime novelists of today, focused on the women who have become legends of the genre. And though she laments, "so many mysteries, so little time," she makes a good effort a mentioning "some of the best of the rest." When DuBose writes of the lives of her principal players, she relates them to their times, their families, their personal situations and above all to their books. She subtly points out that Sayers, whose experience with the men in her life was inevitably disastrous, created in Lord Peter the ideal lover -- one who is all that a woman desires and needs. DuBose gives us the curriculum vitae that Dorothy Sayers created to help her bring Peter Wimsey to a virtual actuality. Ngaio Marsh would give up an active presence in the theatrical world she loved, but she recreated it for herself as well as her readers in many of her novels. The biographies of these woman are as engrossing as the stories they wrote, and Martha DuBose has shined a different, intimate and intriguing light on them, their works, and the lives that informed those works. This book is so full of treasure it's hard to see how any mystery enthusiast will be able to do without it. And what a gift it would make for anyone on your list who has been heard to announce "I love a mystery." Some of the treats inside: In the Beginning: The Mothers of Detection Anna Katherine Green Mary Roberts Rinehart A Golden Era: The Genteel Puzzlers Agatha Christie Dorothy L. Sayers Ngaio Marsh Margery Allingham Josephine Tey Modern Motives: Mysteries of the Murderous Mind Patricia Highsmith P.D. James Ruth Rendell Mary Higgins Clark Sue Grafton and more!!

The Forger's Daughter

The Forger's Daughter
Author: Bradford Morrow
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802149278

The author of the acclaimed suspense novel The Forger returns to the dangerously rarified world of literary forgery in this tense sequel. When a scream shatters the summer night outside their country house in the Hudson Valley, reformed literary forger Will and his wife Meghan find their daughter Maisie shaken and bloodied, holding a parcel her attacker demanded she present to her father. Inside is a literary rarity the likes of which few have ever handled, and a letter laying out impossible demands regarding its future. After twenty years on the straight and narrow, Will finds himself ensnared in a plot to counterfeit the rarest book in American literature: Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane, of which only a dozen copies are known to exist. Facing threats from his former nemesis Henry Slader, Will must rely on the artistic skills of his older daughter Nicole to help create a flawless forgery of this Holy Grail of American letters. Part mystery, part case study of the shadowy side of the book trade, and part homage to the writer who invented the detective tale, The Forger’s Daughter draws readers into the diabolically clever—and, for some, inescapable—world of literary forgery.

A Dancer in the Dust

A Dancer in the Dust
Author: Thomas H. Cook
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2014-09-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0802192688

This “beautifully written and elegantly plotted” thriller from the Edgar Award–winning author of The Chatham School Affair is “one of his best ever” (The Globe and Mail, Toronto). Twenty years ago, Ray Campbell was a well-intentioned aid worker dedicated to improving conditions in Lubanda, a newly independent African country. Now a cautious risk-management consultant, he is forced to reconsider that year of living dangerously when an old friend is found murdered in a New York alley. Signs suggest that this recent tragedy is rooted in a more distant one—that of Martine Aubert, the only woman Ray ever loved, whose fate he’d sealed with a grievous mistake: “In Rupala, twenty years before, I had rolled the dice for a woman who was not even present at the table, and how on the outcome of that toss, a braver and more knowing heart than mine had been forfeited.” Martine Aubert was a white, native Lubandan farmer whose dream for her homeland put her in conflict with fearsome men intent on its so-called development. As Ray returns to Lubanda to investigate the cause of his friend’s murder, he also revisits the passion he’d once felt for Martine and vows, in her memory, to rectify his wrongs. A Dancer in the Dust is a gripping story of ill-fated love: one man’s love for an extraordinary woman, and one woman’s love for her troubled country. “Not since John Le Carré’s The Mission Song have I seen such a loving and sorrowful portrait of modern Africa.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)

The Luminaries

The Luminaries
Author: Eleanor Catton
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 822
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316126950

The winner of the Man Booker Prize, this "expertly written, perfectly constructed" bestseller (The Guardian) is now a Starz miniseries. It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.

The Kitchen God's Wife

The Kitchen God's Wife
Author: Amy Tan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2006-09-21
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110100715X

"Remarkable...mesmerizing...compelling.... An entire world unfolds in Tolstoyan tide of event and detail....Give yourself over to the world Ms. Tan creates for you." —The New York Times Book Review Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past—including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, and other places in China during World War II, and traces the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949. The Kitchen God's Wife is "a beautiful book" (Los Angeles Times) from the bestselling author of novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Backyard Bird Chronicles, and the memoir, Where the Past Begins.