dina washington

When a fire at Glastonbury Abbey reveals two skeletons, rumor has it they may belong to King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. King Henry II hopes so, for it would help him put down a rebellion in Wales, where the legend of Celtic savior Arthur is strong. To make certain, he sends Adelia Aguilar, his Mistress of the Art of Death, to Glastonbury to examine the skeletons.

Being an undercover poison taster for the rich and famous might sound glamorous, but for Isobel Avery it means stomaching bad clients and even worse coffee. The one side of the job that lives up to expectations is the money. Which is just as well for Izzy, since she needs an awful lot of it. Who knew when she made a lifelong commitment to a man that it would be one year living with him and the rest of her life paying for it?

Northamptonshire, 1810: As a new canal network snakes across the landscape, a vicious mob stakes its claim to the county. Every local constable is out on the hunt for the ruthless Panther Gang. When an elderly man is robbed and murdered in sleepy Middleton, the beleaguered magistrates send for help from London's Bow Street Police Office.

Detective Easy Rawlins returns in a mystery set in 1961 Los Angeles as Easy accepts a job searching for a beautiful woman nicknamed Black Betty who works as a housekeeper in Beverly Hills.

In the beginning, Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and Raymond "Mouse" Alexander were merely two young men hitting the road. In a "borrowed" 1936 Ford, they head for Pariah, Texas on a mission to retrieve money from Mouse's stepfather so he can marry his EttaMae. But on their steamy bayou excursion, Mouse chooses murder as a way out, while Easy's past liaison with EttaMae floats precariously in his memory. Easy and Mouse are coming of age - and everything they ever knew about friendship and about themselves is coming apart at the seams.

On the road in a “borrowed” '36 Ford, nineteen-year-old Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and his companion, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, are on a perilous odyssey that takes them from Houston to a mysterious bayou world of voodoo, sex, revenge, and death. Their destination is desolate Pariah, Texas—Mouse's home once, and still home to his hated stepfather.

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the now-classic novel of two women in the 1980s; of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women - of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Rut - -who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder.

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family's spoons, tried on their underpants, and tested their chamber pots. Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions.

One hundred and twenty years ago, Mark Twain left Huckleberry Finn’s father dead in a room crowded with oddities: a wooden leg, women’s underclothing, two black cloth masks, and more. Now, in a resonant and remarkable new novel, Jon Clinch tells the story of how the brutal and explosive Finn met his end in a room jammed with the telltale artifacts of his strange and mysterious life.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.