Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with March’s spot being at I’m Booking It.
Had another good week … if only I could stay away from the Box-of-Books feature at PBS! Oh well. Here goes:
The Liar’s Diary by Patry Francis
Jeanne Cross’s contented suburban life gets a jolt of energy from the arrival of Ali Mather, the stunning new music teacher at the local high school. With a magnetic personality and looks to match, Ali draws attention from all quarters, including Jeanne’s husband and son. Nonetheless, Jeanne and Ali develop a deep friendship based on their mutual vulnerabilities and the long-held secrets that Ali has been recording in her diary. The diary also holds a key to something darker: Ali’s suspicion that someone has been entering her house when she is not at home. Soon their friendship will be shattered by violence – and Jeanne will find herself facing impossible choices in order to protect the people she loves.
Mercy by Julie Garwood
When esteemed Justice Department attorney Theo Buchanan is struck ill at a New Orleans gala, Dr. Michelle Renard works fast to save his life. Soon, Theo finds himself in a race to save her when Michelle is targeted by a deadly crime ring. They call themselves the Sowing Club, a devious foursome driven by greed to accumulate millions in a secret bank account. Now they’re dead set on silencing Michelle, who might know the secret behind the killing of one of their wives. Dodging a world-class hit man and a band of cunning criminals, Michelle and Theo walk a narrow path between passion and survival.
The Pelican Brief by John Grisham
In suburban Georgetown a killer’s Reeboks whisper on the floor of a posh home … In a seedy D.C. porno house a patron is swiftly garroted to death … The next day America learns that two of its Supreme Court justices have been assassinated. And in New Orleans, a young law student prepares a legal brief… To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it was political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder – a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds there is only one person she can trust – an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate – to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House’s inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For someone has read Darby’s brief. Someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the evidence of an unthinkable crime.
The Coroner by M.R. Hall
When lawyer Jenny Cooper is appointed Severn Vale District Coroner, she’s hoping for a quiet life and space to recover from a traumatic divorce, but the office she inherits from the recently deceased Harry Marshall contains neglected files hiding dark secrets and a trail of buried evidence. Could the tragic death in custody of a young boy be linked to the apparent suicide of a teenage prostitute and the fate of Marshall himself? Jenny’s curiosity is aroused. Why was Marshall behaving so strangely before he died? What injustice was he planning to uncover? And what caused his abrupt change of heart? In the face of powerful and sinister forces determined to keep both the truth hidden and the troublesome coroner in check, Jenny embarks on a lonely and dangerous one-woman crusader for justice which threatens not only her career but also her sanity.
Reap the Wind by Iris Johansen
Some would kill to know what Caitlin Vasaro knows. For the secrets she’s kept hidden all her life are the kind that the rich and the powerful will do anything to possess. Yet not even Caitlin knows how much danger she is in – or how far someone will go to hunt her down. But she is about to find out, when she enters a business deal with the mysterious and charismatic Alex Karazov and joins the hunt for one of the world’s most coveted treasures, the Wind Dancer, an ancient statue of legendary beauty and power. But Karazov is a dangerous man who has an even more dangerous enemy, and suddenly Caitlin is thrust into a shadow world of intrigue and deception, unable to trust anyone, not even the one man who can help. Now she must outsmart the cleverest of killers, a psychopath obsessed with the Wind Dancer whose ruthless plan spans continents and whose lethal rampage won’t stop at one death … or two … or even three – not until he finally gets what he wants: the secret Caitlin will die to keep.
The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum
Michael Havelock’s world died on a moonlit beach on the Costa Brava. He watched as his partner and lover, Jenna Karas, double agent, was efficiently gunned down by his own agency. There was nothing left for him but to quit the game, get out. Until, in one frantic moment on a crowded railroad platform in Rome, Havelock saw his Jenna – alive. From then on, he was marked for death by both U.S. and Russian assassins, racing around the globe after his beautiful betrayer, trapped in a massive mosaic of treachery created by a top-level mole with the world in his fist.
Top Ten by Ryne Douglas Pearson
He calls himself Michelangelo. Tortured by the horrific events of his childhood, he is mesmerized by a gruesome artistic vision that only he can create – and his victims can complete. But his victims are not chosen at random. When the FBI listed Michelangelo as number ten on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, he took it as an insult to his craft – an insult that had to be avenged. Now, he’s working his way up the list, wiping out the competition, and leading the FBI to find his gruesome works of art. And he won’t stop until he hits the top, and becomes … Number One.
The Whispering Room by Amanda Stevens
Work is a welcome refuge for New Orleans homicide detective Evangeline Theroux. Feeling suffocated by her new baby, in whose eyes she sees only her dead husband, she throws herself into a high-profile murder case. Reclusive writer Lena Saunders offers Evangeline a provocative theory about the crime: it is the work of a lunatic vigilante. Lena spins the sordid story of Ruth and Rebecca Lemay, whose mother brutally murdered her male children in an insane effort to root out an “evil” genre. The girls survived and grew to adulthood – but one is carrying on her mother’s grisly work. When the case takes a terrifyingly personal turn, Evangeline’s whole life will depend on a crucial, impossible choice: the lesser of two evils.
When a severed hand, clutching a gun, is found in a Chinatown alley in downtown Boston, detective Jane Rizzoli climbs to the adjacent roof-top and finds the hand’s owner: a red-haired woman whose throat has been slashed so deeply the head is nearly severed. She is dressed all in black, and the only clues to her identity are a throwaway cell phone and a scrawled address of a long-shuttered restaurant. With its wary immigrant population, Chinatown is a closed neighbourhood of long-held secrets – and nowhere is this more obvious than when Jane meets Iris Fang. Strikingly beautiful, her long black hair streaked with grey, she is a renowned martial arts master. Yet, despite being skilled in swordplay, neither she nor her strangely aloof daughter, Willow, will admit any knowledge of the rooftop murder. And pathologist Dr Maura Isles has determined that the murder weapon was a sword crafted of ancient metal from China. It soon becomes clear that an ancient evil is stirring in Chinatown – an evil that has killed before, and will kill again – unless Jane and Iris can join forces, and defeat it …
On a crisp fall evening in western Nebraska, what started as a group of kids filming their drug-fueled party ends in an explosive light show, leaving the victims apparently electrocuted, with odd scorch marks being the only evidence. While Maggie tries to make sense of the different stories, sifting through what is real and what is hallucination, she realizes that the surviving teens are being targeted and systematically eliminated. Meanwhile on the East Coast, Maggie’s FBI partner, R.J. Tully, and Army colonel Benjamin Platt are at the scene of a deadly outbreak, desperate to identify the pathogen that has infected children at a Virginia elementary school. Despite the miles that separate them, the two cases collide as Maggie, Tully, and Platt uncover secrets that were meant to stay hidden in the remote Midwest landscape.
Tales of a Book Addict 