Month: May 2011

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with April’s spot being at MariReads.

Another slim mailbox, but that’s okay 🙂 This was a PBS wishlist book:

      London in 1856 is gripped by a frightening obsession. The specimen-collecting craze is growing, and discoveries in far-off jungles are reshaping the known world in terrible and unimaginable ways. The new theories of evolution threaten to disrupt the fragile balance of power that keeps the chaotic city in order – a disruption that many would do just about anything to prevent. When the glamorous Lady Bessingham is found murdered in her bedroom, surrounded by her vast collection of fossils and tribal masks, Adolphus Hatton and his morgue assistant Albert Roumande are called in to examine the crime scene – and the body. In the new and suspicious world of forensics and autopsy examinations, Hatton and Roumande are the best. But the crime scene is not confined to one room. In their efforts to help Scotland Yard’s infamous Inspector Adams track down the lady’s killer, Hatton and Roumande uncover a trail of murders all connected to a packet of seditious letters that, if published, would change the face of society and religion irrevocably.

And these two came from a trade with a fellow reader on the MysteryBookSwap Yahoo group:

     In the remote wastes of Greenland, a young scientist has unearthed an artifact hidden in a cave for a millennium – a 50,000-year-old meteorite known as the Sacred Stone, which possesses potentially catastrophic radioactive power. But the astounding find places him in the crosshairs of two opposing terrorist groups who seek the stone for themselves. One is a group of Muslim extremists who have stolen a nuclear device. With the power of the meteorite, they could vaporize any city in the West. The other group is led by a megalomaniacal industrialist who seeks to carry out the utter annihilation of Islam itself. Caught between two militant forces bent on wholesale slaughter, Juan Cabrillo and his ship of high-tech mercenaries known as the Corporation must fight to protect the Sacred Stone – and prevent the outbreak of World War III…

     Kansas City trial attorney Lou Mason is back … and this time, it’s personal. Hired to defend the accused murderer of local lawyer and political fixer Jack Cullan, he finds himself putting everything on the line to exonerate none other than his friend and mentor, ex-cop Wilson “Blues” Bluestone, Jr. With private files that rivaled those of J. Edgar Hoover, Cullan had the goods on any number of Kansas City high-rollers, from Mayor Billy Sunshine on down. But the homicide detective on the case has it in for Blues, who faces the death penalty if he’s convicted. Digging deeper, Mason unearths the kind of secrets someone will do anything to keep. And as he closes in on a desperate killer who’s leaving a bloody trail through very high places, Mason may be setting himself up as the next target…

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with April’s spot being at MariReads.

WELL! After two weeks of NO BOOKS in my mailbox, I had a 3 book mailbox this week. Very happy that the books arrived as quickly as they did! So here’s what I got:

     As a child, former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone was told that his father died in a submarine disaster in the North Atlantic. But what he now learns stuns him: His father’s sub was a secret nuclear vessel lost on a highly classified mission beneath the ice shelves of Antarctica. Twin sisters Dorothea Lindauer and Christl Falk are also determined to find out what became of their father, who died on the same submarine – and they know something Malone doesn’t: Inspired by strange clues discovered in Charlemagne’s tomb, the Nazis explored Antarctica before the Americans. Now Malone discovers that cryptic journals penned in “the language of heaven,” conundrums posed by an ancient historian, and his father’s ill-fated voyage are all tied to a revelation of immense consequence for human-kind. As Malone embarks on a dangerous quest with the sisters, he will finally confront the shocking truth of his father’s death and the distinct possibility of his own.

     Burr is a portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1933, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr’s past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States.

     In this profoundly moving work of epic proportion and intense human sympathy, Abraham Lincoln is observed by his loved ones, his rivals, and his future assassins. Seen by his wife, Mary, who adores him even as she is going made … by the Machiavellian Secretary of State Seward, who begins by scorning LIncoln and ends by worshipping him … by Lincoln’s rival, Salmon P. Chase, and his beautiful daughter, Kate … by David Herold, the druggist’s clerk at the center of the plot that will eventually take Lincoln’s life … and by the twenty-three-year-old presidential secretary, John Hay, who comes to know Lincoln intimately during his four years in the White House, Lincoln emerges as a complex and towering figure who presided over some of the most divisive and dangerous years in American history. In a brilliantly realized, vividly imagined work of fiction, Gore Vidal gives us a portrait of America’s great president that is at once intimate and public, stark and complex, and that will become for future generations the living Lincoln, the definitive Lincoln.