Category: Meme

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with June’s location being at Bluestocking’s Thoughts on Books.

It was a slim mailbox this week, with only one book coming in. However, this was a PBS wishlist book that I waited FOREVER for and that I’m going to be picking up as soon as I finish my current read because I’m super excited for it!!!

     Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker – his classmate and crush – who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah’s voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why. Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a first-hand witness to Hannah’s pain, and learns the truth about himself – a truth he never wanted to face.

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with June’s location being at Bluestocking’s Thoughts on Books.

Here’s what I got:

Both of these were PBS wishlist offers:

     An invalid for most her life, Alice James is quite used to people underestimating her. And she generally doesn’t mind. But this time she is not about to let things alone. Yes, her brother Henry may be a famous author, and her other brother William a rising star in the new field of psychology. But when they all find themselves quite unusually involved in the chase for a most vile new murderer – one who goes by the chilling name of Jack the Ripper – Alice is certain of two things: No one could be more suited to gather evidence about the nature of the killer than her brothers. But it anyone is going to correctly examine the evidence and solve the case it will have to be up to her.

    The Cosgrove Reportis both a gripping historical thriller and a new and entirely plausible solution to that still unanswered question: Why was Abraham Lincoln murdered? Republished to coincide with the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, this is a novel of immense power and imagination, based on meticulous research into the government’s official records of the assassination and the forgotten memoirs of many eyewitnesses. The novel opens when a recently discovered nineteenth-century manuscript falls into the hands of modern-day private investigator Michael Croft. His assignment is to verify the historical accuracy of the papers, which reveal the shocking cover-up of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the alleged capture and death of John Wilkes Booth. The manuscript itself, written by Pinkerton detective Nicholas Cosgrove, plunges both Croft and the reader back into post-Civil War Washington, where Cosgrove is hired by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to investigate rumors that Booth is still alive. His search brings him face-to-face with some of the most illustrious people of the period, and exposes a trail of lies and evasions equal to any modern day political scandal.

And the next three were a PBS Box-of-Books swap:

     Two men possess vital data on Russia’s Star Wars missile defense system. One of them is CARDINAL – America’s highest agent in the Kremlin – and he’s about to be terminated by the KGB. The other is the one American who can save CARDINAL and lead the world to the brink of peace … or war.

     Top military and intelligence personnel on both sides of the Iron Curtain are reading a remarkable work of fiction – a new thriller so gripping in its action and so convincing in its accuracy that the author is rumored to have been debriefed by the White House. Its theme: The greatest espionage coup in history. Its story: The chase for a top-secret Russian missile sub. Its title: The Hunt for the Red October.

     In the newly unified Germany, old horrors are reborn. It is the beginning of Chaos Days, a time when neo-Nazi groups gather to spread violence and resurrect dead dreams. But this year Germany isn’t the only target. Plans are afoot to destabilize Europe and cause turmoil throughout the United States. Paul Hood and his team, already in Germany to buy technology for the new Regional Op-Center, become entangled in the crisis. They uncover a shocking force behind the chaos – a group that uses cutting-edge technology to promote hate and to influence world events.

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.

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with April’s spot being at Passages to the Past.

Slim mailbox this week, but that’s definitely a good thing right now 🙂 I recently signed up for Bookmooch, this is the first book I’ve mooched:

  To pay for her last semester of school, college senior Lily Madison makes the difficult decision to donate her eggs to a fertility clinic. There she meets Peter Kelly, another penniless student who supplements his tuition money by visiting a sperm bank. Bound by their secret, and by a powerful attraction, they continue to think of each other even as life takes them in different directions. Nineteen years later, Pete – now a wealthy entrepreneur – sees Lily in an airport, and falls for her all over again. But while they enjoy their unlikely reunion, a news story about the fertility clinic they visited long ago will have shocking repercussions for both of them…

And this was a PBS Wish List book that I’ve waited a long time for:

    Although the private lives of political couples have in our era become front-page news, the true story of this extraordinary and tragic first family has never been fully told. The Lincolns eclipses earlier accounts with riveting new information that makes husband and wife, president and first lady, come alive in all their proud accomplishments and earthy humanity. Award-winning biographer and poet Daniel Mark Epstein gives a fresh close-up view of the couple’s life in Springfield, Illinois (of their twenty-two years of marriage, all but six were spent there), and dramatizes with stunning immediacy how the Lincolns’ ascent to the White House brought both dazzling power and the slow, secret unraveling of the couple’s unique bond. The first full-length portrait of the marriage of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln in more than fifty years, The Lincolns is written with enormous sweep and striking imagery. Daniel Mark Epstein makes two immortal American figures seem as real and human as the rest of us.

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with April’s spot being at Passages to the Past.

Another full mailbox with the final two PBS Box-of-Books packages I had come in. I’m very tempted to put my account on hold because there’s no way I can keep up anymore ….. but that wouldn’t be very much fun 🙂 Anyways, here’s what I got:

     The Cold War is over. And chaos is setting in. The new President of Russia is trying to create a new democratic regime. But there are strong elements within the country that are trying to stop him: the ruthless Russian mafia, the right wing nationalists, and those nefarious forces that will do whatever it takes to return Russia to the days of the Czar. Op-Center, the newly founded but highly successful crisis management team, begins a race against the clock and against the hardliners. Their task is made even more difficult by the discovery of a Russian counterpart … but this one’s controlled by those same repressive hardliners. Two rival Op-Centers, virtual mirror images of each other. But if this mirror cracks, it’ll be much more than seven years bad luck.

     Fighting for their lives aboard the hijacked submarine, ship superintendent Amy Russell and Commander Darius McCann have only one hope for survival. With the lives of millions at stake, they must play a dangerous game of cat and mouse, where capture would mean certain death. On land, Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Connelly and Commander Bruce Dunn are working to learn the details of the hijacking in time to stop the attack. As mass hysteria paralyzes New York City, the two investigators uncover a trail of secrets as dangerous as the silent weapon aimed at the heart of America.

     She lies in a pool of her own blood. More blood decorates one wall in macabre finger paintings. The victim is a fortune teller from the Little Saigon community of Westminster, California – a seemingly random murder. Detective Seven Bushard wonders cynically if she saw it coming. When local artist Gia Moon shows up at the precinct claiming to have had visions of another murder yet to happen, Seven doesn’t buy it. Some say Gia’s paintings give a glimpse into the next world, but all Seven knows is cold, hard evidence. But when per prediction comes true, his investigation becomes a hunt for a serial killer. But Gia is not all that she seems. A link to her past points to a lunatic whose desire to complete a bizarre collection has become an obsession. Now, Seven is locked in a game of greed and murder with a woman he can’t entirely trust, and a killer who will silence anyone who gets in the way.

     It is 1982. In the Vatican, priestly vultures gather around the dying Pope, whispering the names of possible successors. In a forgotten monastery on Ireland’s gale swept coast, a dangerous document is hidden, waiting to be claimed. And in a family chapel in Princeton, New Jersey, a nun is murdered at her prayers. Sister Valentine was an outspoken activist, a thorn in the Church’s side. When her brother, lawyer Ben Driskill, realizes the Church will never investigate her death, he sets out to find the murderer himself – and uncovers an explosive secret. The assassini. An age-old brotherhood of killers. Once they were hired by princes of the Church to protect it in dangerous times. But whose orders do they now obey?

     Shadow is the Secret Service code name for First Daughter Nora Hartson. And when White House lawyer Michael Garrick begins dating the irresistible Nora, he’s instantly spellbound, just like everyone else in her world. Then, late one night, the two witness something they were never meant to see. Now, in a world where everyone watches your ever move, Michael is suddenly ensnared in someone’s secret agenda. Trusting no one, not even Nora, he finds himself fighting for his innocence – and, ultimately, his life.

     Charlie and Oliver Caruso are brothers working at an ultra-exclusive private bank when they’re faced with an offer they can’t refuse – three million dollars in an abandoned account no one even knows exists. Almost as soon as they take the cash, a friend is killed and the bank, the Secret Service, and a female P.I. are closing in. Now the Caruso brothers are on the run and about to uncover an explosive secret that will test their trust and forever change their lives.

     Grace Hart seemed to have it all: a bright, beautiful daughter, a successful career as a judge, and a lovely home in an Ohio suburb. But beneath the placid veneer, darker truths lie waiting. Her fifteen-year-old, Jessica, is teetering on the cusp of drugs and delinquency. And someone is stalking the troubled teenager. Someone who has already violated their home and stolen their peace of mind. Now the police are involved, Grace is relieved – and worried. Is Jessica in danger from a drug dealer who wants to silence her? Detective Tony Marino is on the case. He’s too close for comfort, asking disturbing questions, probing into her long-buried past, igniting feelings Grace has tried to suppress. In Tony’s strong arms, Grace finds comfort, protection – passion – as he tries to shield them from the evil lurking just beyond their door…

     When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court dies unexpectedly, the lame-duck president is only too happy to appoint his successor, a well-liked and respected decorated Vietnam veteran – who will be the first black chief justice in U.S. history. But one of the most conservative justices on the court feels that the position should have been his, and he is hell-bent on claiming it no matter who gets in the way … or how dishonorable and shameful his tactics. As nomination-ending scandals brew in Washington, former judge Tim Quinn races to uncover the real truth. He believes in the nominee’s innocence, but his report must prove it to the SEnate Judiciary Committee – before it is too late.

     As the city sizzles under the early summer sun, New York chief assistant D.A. Butch Karp and his family are happily vacationing on Long Island’s north shore. Their reverie changes to horror when they learn that their beachfront neighbors, Rose and Ralph “Red” Heeney – a coal miners’ union leader – have been brutally murdered back hom in tiny McCullensburg, West Virginia. Irresistable force meets immovable object when the governor appoints Karp special prosecutor to bring justice to the corrupt rural town, its ruthless union boss, and his band of violent henchmen. Now, Karp finds himself not only searching for the killers, but fighting to protect his own family from an evil that runs as deep as the mines that fuel it.

Mailbox Monday is still on tour, with March’s spot being at I’m Booking It.

Well, if you didn’t notice, I didn’t participate in last Monday’s edition of Mailbox Monday … why, you ask? Well, it’s because for the first time in AGES, I did not receive a single book. Not one book. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Zero. It was actually kind of sad, but definitely a good thing because I’ve got 4 different PBS Box-of-Books going right now. I discussed my insanity in a post you can view here. However, some of these books I’m already second-guessing. They will probably be re-listed and not read, but I’ll go ahead and mention them anyway.

I had three PBS wishlist books come in this week:

     At first, it sounds like the answer to a parent’s prayers: an elite boarding school in the Oregon mountains where wayward kids turn their lives around. But behind the idyllic veneer lie disturbing rumors of missing students and questionable treatments. Jules Farentino knows her half-sister, Shaylee, has been going off the rails lately. She’s just not sure Blue Rock Academy is the answer. Accepting a teaching position there lets Jules keep an eye on Shay, but also confirms her fears. One student is found hanged, another near death. Something sinister is at hand – and Jules may already be too late to stop it. As a brutal snowstorm sweeps in, cutting off the remote campus from the rest of the world, Jules will discover the Academy’s darkest secrets, and confront a murderous evil without limits, without remorse, without mercy …

     There have been countless attempts to solve the brutal murders committed by Jack the Ripper more than a hundred years ago. It seems that almost everyone has their own theory and their own suspect, ranging from the reasonably likely to the entirely preposterous. What this most famous of British criminal cases has always required is a professional eye to analyze the evidence with all the benefits of modern investigative techniques. Now that has been provided in the shape of the man most qualified to solve the case: former British murder squad detective Trevor Marriott. His long and arduous investigation dispels the rumors, fantasies and urban legends which have for so long stalked through the shadowy world of this vile killer. The results are startling: for many years it has been accepted that Jack the Ripper killed only five women, but now it can be revealed that up to nine were victims. And, most astonishingly of all, a new prime suspect never previously considered has emerged, with evidence linking him not only to the Whitechapel cases, but to murders all over the world.

     On a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse, an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. The only other clue the police have is one that they wish they didn’t: the dying woman’s last word is “foreign.” In the first riveting installment in the internationally bestselling Wallander series, police inspector Kurt Wallander doggedly investigates the horrible crime, as he contends with his own demons and tries to keep the public outcry for vengeance against an already reviled immigrant community at bay.

Remember those PBS Box-of-Books I mentioned? Two of them came in this week (13 books):

     When a NASA satellite discovers an astonishingly rare object buried deep in the Arctic ice, the floundering space agency proclaims a much-needed victory – a victory with profound implications for NASA policy and the impending presidential election. To verify the authenticity of the find, the White House calls upon the skills of intelligence analyst Rachel Sexton. Accompanied by a team of experts, including the charismatic scholar Michael Tolland, Rachel travels to the Arctic and uncovers the unthinkable: evidence of scientific trickery – a bold deception that threatens to plunge the world into controversy. But before she can warn the president, Rachel and Michael are ambushed by a team of assassins. Fleeing for their lives across a desolate and lethal landscape, their only hope for survival is to discover who is behind this masterful plot. The truth, they will learn, is the most shocking deception of all.

     Despite a full schedule, frazzled suburban single mom Jan Jeffry has agreed to lend a hand during a two-day gathering of her friend Shelley’s former high school girls’ club. So while the reunited ladies are dishing dirt, Jane is sweeping it up – and she inadvertently becomes privy to all sorts of interesting postgraduate gossip and long-smoldering resentments. But then a corpse turns up among the one-time student body, the unfortunate victim of some rather nasty after-school activities. And unless Jan gets to the bottom of a sordid senior-year scandal, more alumnae are sure to die at the hands of a calculating classmate who’s majoring in murder.

     With the kids packed off on their summer road trips, suburban mom Jane Jeffry grabs the opportunity to enroll in a writing course at the community center. But when a classmate keels over dead after sampling a tasty treat from an impromptu student buffet, Jane realizes that the pen may be mightier than the sword … but poison beats them both. There’s a culinary killer among the local would-be literati. And before the demise of a disagreeable old biddy can be written off, Jane plans to cook the culprit’s goose in his or her own creative juices.

     Tom Clancy’s Op-Center is a beating heart of defense, intelligence, and crisis management technology. It is run by a crack team of operatives both within its own walls and out in the field. And when a job is too dirty, or too dangerous, it is the only place our government can turn. But nothing can prepare Director Paul Hood and his Op-Center crisis management team for what they are about to uncover – a very real, very frightening power play that could unleash new players in a new world order…

     Sleuth Regan Reilly is hired as a bodyguard for singer Brigid O’Neill, a rising country star who has been receiving threatening “love notes.” Brigid also possesses a “magical” Irish fiddle said to be cursed – whoever takes it out of Ireland will have an accident or face death. Still, Brigid brings it to the Hamptons, where her band will perform at a Fourth of July concert. Chappy Tinka, heir to a thumbtack fortune, and his ditzy wife, Bettina, are their hosts. Regan joins them at “Chappy’s Compound,” an oceanfront estate where they encounter Bettina’s guru Peace Man, Chappy’s bumbling sidekick Duke, a feng shui specialist obsessed with rearranging furniture – and a party guest found floating facedown in the pool. Is the curse of the fiddle real? Is there a murderer in the house? As the concert nears, the menace to Brigid grows, and Regan must discover the truth before it’s too late…

     When Alvirah and Willy become caught up in a Christmas mystery, all of Alvirah’s deductive powers and Willy’s world-class common sense are called upon. It begins when an unmarried woman leaves her newborn on the rectory doorstep of a Manhattan church. Meanwhile, a small-time thief and drug peddler is absconding from the church with a treasured artifact, a chalice adorned with a single star-shaped diamond. To elude the police, he grabs the stroller and disappears. Seven years later, the young mother returns to the church where her child was kidnapped while Alvirah and Willy are helping the neighborhood kids prepare for a Christmas pageant at an after-school shelter. But the future of the shelter is threatened when the city condemns the site and it is learned that the brownstone to which the shelter was moving has been willed to a smooth-talking couple, tenants in the building. Suspecting that the will is a fake and the tenants con artists, Alvirah sets out to discover the truth. Soon she finds herself in the middle of the puzzle of the missing child and chalice.

     Alvirah Meehan, the lottery winner turned amateur sleuth, teams up with private investigator Regan Reilly to solve another Christmas mystery. This time they get in the middle of a case involving a beautiful eighty-foot blue spruce that has been chosen to spend the holidays as Rockefeller Center’s famous Christmas tree. The folks who picked the tree don’t have a clue that attached to one of its branches is a flask chock-full of priceless diamonds that Packy Noonan, a scam artist just released from prison, had hidden there twelve years ago. An excited Packy breaks his parole and heads to Stowe, Vermont, to reclaim his loot. Once there, he is horrified to discover that his special tree will be heading to New York City the next morning. With a bumbling crew consisting of Jo-Jo, Benny, and an unsuccessful poet, Milo, he knows he has to act fast. What Packy does not know is that Alvirah and Regan are on a weekend trip to Stowe with Alvirah’s husband, Willy; Regan’s fiance Jack; Regan’s parents, Luke and Nora; and Alvirah’s friend Opal, a lottery winner who lost all her winnings in Packy’s scam. On Monday morning when they’re supposed to head home, they learn that the tree is missing, Packy Noonan may be in the vicinity, and Opal has disappeared.

     In picturesque Branscombe, New Hampshire, on the night before the village’s first (any many hope annual) Festival of Joy, a group of employees at the local market learn they have won $180 million in the lottery. But the one worker, Duncan, who decided at the last moment not to play, is nowhere to be found. And while a second winning ticket was purchased in the next town, that winner hasn’t come forward. Could Duncan have secretly bought it? Alvirah Meehan, amateur sleuth, and private investigator Regan Reilly have arrived in town for the festival. And as they dig beneath the surface, they find that life in little Branscombe is not as tranquil as it appears. But while Alvirah and Regan have to put aside their visions of an old-fashioned weekend in the country, this fast-paced holiday keeper is sure to keep you dashing through the pages.

     Sterling Brooks has been cooling his heels in the Celestial Waiting Room for forty-six years, waiting for admission to heaven. Finally, just days before Christmas, he’s summoned before the HEavenly Council and found unworthy; throughout his life he had been hopelessly self-absorbed. To redeem himself, he is given the chance to go back to Earth and find someone to help. At New York’s Rockefeller Center skating rink, Sterling encounters Marissa, a heartbroken seven-year-old whose father and grandmother have been forced into the Witness Protection Program; they had overheard two gangsters hatch a sinister plot to collect money from a debtor. Able to travel through time and space, Sterling devises a master plan to reunite little Marissa with her family in time for Christmas. Along the way, he discovers within himself what it takes to earn his wings.

     Accidents happen, as the saying goes. But three fatal accidents don’t happen within days of each other – at least not in Blacklin County, Texas. The first was bad enough: John West, burned to a crisp when he was hit by a car while holding a can of gasoline. Then Pep Yeldell, best known for stealing cars and wives, drowned in an old swimming pool. Sheriff Dan Rhodes has an itch he can’t scratch, a hunch that these two deaths were murder. A third body makes three to many and puts Rhodes onto the cleverly concealed trail of a killer. But it leads him literally up a tree and on the receiving end of a rifle, and definitely unprepared to meet his own death by accident.

     For Colorado caterer Goldy Schulz, accepting a series of bookings at Hyde Castle is like a dream come true. It’s not every day that she gets to cook authentic Elizabethan fare – especially at a real castle that was brought over from England and reassembled stone by stone in Aspen Meadow. Goldy is determined that everything will go right – which is why, she figures later, everything went terribly wrong. It begins when a shotgun blast shatters her window. Then Goldy discovers a body lying in a nearby creek. And when shots ring out for the second time that day, someone Goldy loves is in the line of fire. Could one of her husband Tom’s police investigations have triggered a murder? Or was her violent, recently paroled ex responsible? With death peering around every corner, Goldy needs to cook up some crime-solving solutions – before the only dish that’s left on her menu is murder.

     It’s been a rough month for Kendra. Her boyfriend and sidekick, Jeff Hubbard, P.I., has gone missing – right after they decided to move in together. It sounds like a case of cold feet until the authorities find his car submerged in a canal. Kendra’s panicked inquiries lead her to Jeff’s Aunt Lois, an ex-pole dancer and full-time eccentric, who had taken her dog Flisa, a sweet-natured Akita mix, to a company that promised to clone the pup. But poor Flisa never made it out alive. And then, one of the cloners is murdered… As Kendra picks up the scent of Jeff’s investigation, she wonders: Was Jeff kidnapped? If not, why hasn’t he contacted her? Is he protecting his revenge-driven aunt? Or worse … could he be the killer? Kendra is hounded by questions, and for the first time, she’s not sure she wants the answers…

     Someone knocking on the door at 3 a.m. is never good news. For V.I. Warshawski, the bad news arrives in the form of her wacky, unwelcome aunt Elena. The fire that has just burned down a sleazy SRO hotel has brought Elena to V.I.’s doorstep. Uncovering an arsonist – and the secrets hidden behind Elena’s boozy smile – will send V.I. into the seedy world of Chicago’s homeless … into the Windy City’s backroom deals and bedroom politics, where new schemers and old cronies team up to get V.I. off the case – by hook, by crook, or by homicide.