Mailbox Monday time again! And February’s host is Audra at Unabridged Chick
Had another good mailbox this week … three books … two from Paperbackswap, one from the publisher via Shelf Awareness, and one from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer program.
From Paperbackswap:
From Publisher via Shelf Awareness
Snow White Must Die introduces the investigative police detective team of Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein, who, on a rainy November day, are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: a woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto a car driving underneath. According to a witness, the woman may have been pushed. The investigation leads Pia and Oliver to the little village of Altenhain, and the home of the victim, Rita Cramer. Eleven years earlier, two seventeen-year-old girls vanished from the village without a trace. Their bodies were never found. In a trial based solely on circumstantial evidence, the then-twenty-year-old Tobias Sartorius, Rita Cramer’s son, was sentenced to ten years in prison. Bodenstein and Kirchhoff discover that Tobias, after serving his sentence, has now returned to his hometown of Altenhain. Did the attack on his mother have something to do with his return? In the village, Pia and Oliver encounter a wall of silence. When another young girl disappears, the events of the past seem to be repeating themselves in a disastrous manner. The investigation turns into a race against time, because for the villagers it is soon clear who the perpetrator is – and this time they are determined to take matters into their own hands.
From LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program:
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel tells the gripping legal story of a man who has spent almost forty years in prison for murders he denies committing and follows as well the tenacious lawyers who are fighting for his freedom. In 1962 the mysterious killing of a young couple on an isolated desert lovers’ lane bewildered the sheriff’s department of Maricopa County, Arizona. Despite a few promising leads – including several chilling confessions from Ernesto Valenzuela, a violent repeat offender – the case went cold. More than a decade later, a clerk in the sheriff’s department, Carol Macumber, came forward to tell police that her estranged husband was responsible for the 1962 Scottsdale Road murders. Though the evidence linking Bill Macumber to the crime was questionable, authorities arrested and charged him with a double homicide. During the subsequent trial, the judge refused to allow the confession of the now-deceased Ernesto Valenzuela to be admitted as evidence because of the attorney-client privilege. Bill Macumber was found guilty and has been in prison ever since, but for a brief interlude out on bail.
The Macumber case, rife with extraordinary irregularities, has attracted the sustained involvement of the Arizona Justice Project, one of the first and most respected of the nonprofit groups that represent victims of manifest injustice. This story illuminates the troubling nature of our criminal justice system, which as kept a possibly innocent man locked up for almost forty years, and introduces readers to the dedicated lawyers who are working to fix that system. With precise journalistic detail and evocative storytelling, Barry Siegel will change your understanding of American jurisprudence, police procedure, and what constitutes justice in our country.
Tales of a Book Addict 