Tales of a Book Addict

One book this week, for review:

A mysterious hacker who identifies himself only as “Warlock” brings down the FBI’s website and posts a code in its place. The code hides the GPS coordinates of a Michigan cemetery, where a dead girl is discovered rising from the ground … as if she tried to crawl out of her own grave.

Born into a dynasty of illusionists, Jessica Blackwood is destined to become its next star – until she turns her back on her troubled family, and her legacy, to begin a new life in law enforcement. But FBI consultant Dr. Jeffrey Ailes’s discovery of an old copy of Magician magazine will turn Jessica’s carefully constructed world upside down. Faced with a crime that appears beyond explanation, Ailes has nothing to lose – and everything to gain – by taking a chance on an agent raised in a world devoted to achieving the seemingly impossible.

The body in the cemetery is only the first in the Warlock’s series of dark miracles. Jessica is thrust into the media spotlight, with time ticking away until the next crime – but can she confront her past to embrace her gifts and stop a depraved killer?

If she can’t, she may become his next victim.

Two review books this week.

On June 9, 2008, the butchered body of Travis Alexander was found in his Arizona home with twenty-nine knife wounds, his throat slit, and a gunshot to the head. The prime suspect was Alexander’s ex-girlfriend, Jodi Arias, who claimed she killed Travis in self-defense. Soon, graphic stories about the Mormon couple’s relationship and their lurid sexual encounters emerged, launching a trial filled with sex and deception and raising substantial questions about Arias’s deceit-filled world.

Award-winning broadcast journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell unearths Jodi’s history to illustrate the disturbing pattern of a murderer in the making. With insider accounts from those closest to Travis and Jodi, she separates fact from fiction, reporting on the bizarre and explicit stories that emerged during the riveting trial.

The Founders’ Plot takes you into the sordid and dangerous world of illegal immigration, the shady corridors and back rooms where devious politicians ply their trade, and sheds light on suspicious Supreme Court decisions. It turns hot-button contemporary issues into a compelling narrative that puts a human face on what are, for most, only distant abstractions.

The newly-elected California governor pushes through a stringent immigration law that’s declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. But the decorated Vietnam vet ignores the ruling and continues implementing the law, igniting a clash between federal, state, and judicial power that threatens to jar the country’s political and justice systems.