Month: April 2013

Mailbox Monday time again! And April’s host is Mari at MariReads

Wow, what a crazy week for my mailbox! I got lots of cool ARCs and I also made a trip to the used bookstore (bad, Tara, bad!)

ARCs:

In a world plagued by corrupt corporations and sinister forces that prowl the global landscape, Jack Madson needs to escape his own demons. Trapped in a hate-filled marriage, a job he despises, and a mountain of debt, he’s crafted a plan. He’ll fake his own death – simultaneously winning a large insurance payout for his family and paving the way for his getaway to Mexico. There, he’ll create a new life with the money he has been amassing from illegally selling intellectual property to criminal interests in China.

But Madson’s plan goes dangerously wrong in this new thriller. The $2.5 million that he socks away in a secret Mexican bank account becomes Madson’s escape route from all that has come to symbolize his miserable life. But when he finally arrives south-of-the-border, he learns that he’s been double-crossed by his partner in crime – and his bank account is empty. Madson has no choice but to return to the States and make a last ditch effort to double his ill-begotten payoff. The hitch? He must break into the computer system at NuGen to retrieve highly valuable bio-tech secrets. As bodies pile up, Madson struggles to stay one step ahead of the laser-focused insurance claims investigator who is determined to prove that his “accidental death” is anything but.

Psychiatrist Nadine Lavoie’s passion is to help people put their demons to rest, but she has demons of her own. Her mother was a wildly unpredictable manic depressive, her father an alcoholic, and there are whole chunks of her life that are black holes.

When Nadine is assigned a new patient who has recently attempted suicide, she quickly learns of some troubling parallels to her own life. Digging deeper, Nadine is forced to confront her own history and the damage that began when she and her brother were brought by their mother to a commune on Vancouver Island. What happened to Nadine? Why was their family destroyed? And why does the name Aaron Quinn bring feelings of terror to Nadine – even today?

Buried secrets, lost family memories, and murder collide in Chevy Stevens’s latest spellbinding novel of psychological suspense.

A young girl goes missing after getting into a car with a mysterious man. Soon after, a second girl disappears, and her devastated father, Witness, sets out to seek revenge.

As the trail grows cold, Samantha – a new detective (and the only woman) with the Botswana police force – is reminded of a childhood friend who had gone missing, and she devotes herself to keeping the first case open. She suspects that the girl was killed for muti, the traditional African medicine usually derived from plants and sometimes animals. But recent evidence shows that human parts are being incorporated into certain potions to conjure up a supposedly more potent formula. Detective Kubu joins forces with Samantha to take the investigation to the next level.

Meanwhile, Witness is convinced that his daughter, too, was murdered for muti – for a potion to ensure an election victory for opposition leader Marumo. On the night of Marumo’s win, Witness waits outside the politician’s home and murders him before fleeing town. Now Kubu and Samantha have yet another murder investigation on their hands, and the search of Marumo’s home yields a sample of muti that confirms their worst fears: the formula includes traces of human DNA and remains.

Kubu and Samantha are thrust into a harrowing race to stop a serial killer or killers – and those who would pay for their special, lethal muti.

When twenty-something political fund-raiser Olivia Greenley gets tapped to work on the presidential campaign of Georgia governor Landon Taylor, it’s her dream job. Her best friend in the world is the campaign manager, and Taylor is a decent, charismatic idealist, with a real chance to be a great leader. Sacrificing her sleep, comfort, friends, family, and income for a year to make the world a better place is the right call, but what happens when both Campaign Lesson #2, No Kissing the Boss, and Lesson #2, Loyalty Above All, go down in flames before the first primary?

Bridget Siegel, veteran of the John Edwards and Obama campaigns, vividly captures the idealism and chaos, as well as the emotional heat and corruption, of the candidate’s bubble. What becomes of Olivia’s best friends when she must keep from them the biggest secret of her life? Is the candidate a true romantic or a political hypocrite? How far can she go to justify her happiness? Told with savvy, humor, and delicious inside-the-Beltway detail, Domestic Affairs is a page-turning tale of love on the campaign trail – and it’s consequences – from a consummate Beltway insider.

From LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program:

A sought-after expert in criminal pathology, Dr. Charlotte Stone regularly sits face-to-face with madmen. At the age of sixteen, she herself survived a serial killer’s bloodbath. Because of the information she gave police, the Boardwalk Killer went underground, but Charlie kept her postmortem visions of the victims to herself. Years later, to protect her credibility as a psychological expert, she tells no one about these apparitions. Now a teenage girl is missing, her family slaughtered. The Boardwalk Killer – or a sick copycat with his M.O. – is back. This is the one case Charlie knows she shouldn’t go near. But she also knows that she may be the one person in the world who can stop this vicious killer, especially when she receives help from an unexpected source: the fiery spirit of a seductive bad boy who refuses to be ignored.

From the used book store:

Former Justice Department operative Cotton Malone has received an anonymous note carrying an unfamiliar Web address. Logging on, he’s shocked to see Cassiopeia Vitt, a woman who’s saved his life more than once, being tortured at the hands of a mysterious man who has a single demand: Bring me the artifact she’s asked you to keep safe. The only problem is, Malone doesn’t have a clue what the man is talking about, since Cassiopeia has left nothing with him. So begins Malone’s most harrowing adventure to date—one that offers up astounding historical revelations, pits him against a ruthless ancient brotherhood, and sends him from Denmark to Belgium to Vietnam then on to one of the greatest archaeological sites in the world: the tomb of China’s First Emperor, guarded by an underground army of terra-cotta warriors, which has inexplicably remained sealed for more than two thousand years—its mysteries about to be revealed.

Mailbox Monday time again! And April’s host is Mari at MariReads

Just one book this past week. Something a little out of my comfort zone, but it sounded intriguing when I spotted it on Shelf Awareness.

After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Storyby Michael Hainey

Michael Hainey had just turned six when his uncle knocked on his family’s back door early one morning with tragic news: Bob Hainey, Michael’s father, had been found dead in the night, alone on a dark Chicago street. The cause of death, a heart attack. Thirty-five years old, Bob was a bright and shining star in the hard-living brotherhood of the 1960s big-city newspapers, where booze-soaked nights bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family, and questions about the mysteries of his death that would obsess Michael long into adulthood.

Man years later, and now a seasoned reporter himself, Michael finally summons the courage to search out the truth of what happened that night – no matter the toll on his family. At the heart of his riveting quest is Michael’s mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity – and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding his relatives and tracking down a network of his father’s colleagues who abide by an honor code of silence, Michael sees  beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he had imagined with the man that he comes to discover. Perhaps most powerfully of all, his decade-long journey leads him to a moving rediscovery of his mother.

After Visiting Friends is a heartrending and beautifully written memoir of a family’s legacy of secrets, a universal story about how we find ourselves.