Literary Thriller

Samuel Charles Aubrey St. Aldwyn, Duke of Gravenhurst, is a radical rogue and champion of unpopular causes. No one would dream that he is also the author of a bestselling series of dark historical novels, a writer accused of corrupting the morals of the public, and a master seducer who counts among his passionate fans wellborn Miss Lily Boscastle. But Lily is no stranger to disrepute....

Welcome to Lemon Bliss, Louisiana, where an abandoned lemon tea factory is the most happening place in town and witches secretly rule the roost. Violet Broussard gets called back to the hometown she left in the dust when a dead body is found in the abandoned factory bequeathed to her by her grandmother. Violet has plans, and they most definitely don't involve staying in Lemon Bliss any longer than necessary. The town is mostly famous for its lemon tea infused with enough alcohol to make one experience bliss, hence the town's name. Yet, once she's there, things get a tad wacky.

Nayir al-Sharqi, known by his friends for religious piety and his Bedouin-like knowledge of the desert, lends his assistance to a wealthy family when their soon to-be-married daughter Nouf goes missing. After a short search, the girl is found dead, apparently drowned in the desert during a freak deluge. Something about her death doesn't sit well with Nayir, however, and he makes an uncomfortable alliance with a female coroner's technician to determine what really happened.

The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing who is intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. As Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London--and, indeed, the whole world--seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.

The 1960s: news of riots, war, unheard-of behavior, and rampant crime crowds the papers and the airwaves. Spurned by his wife at home and by superiors at work, Earl Summerfield hunkers down in his cramped San Francisco apartment and keeps a diary that is a scratched record of a world going to pieces. The words he overhears, the words he wants to say, swim in his head, turning into fantasies of ambition, love, and retribution. He is sorry for himself. He is angry at everyone.

The loner, Erlendur, has recently joined the police force as a young officer. The beat on the streets in ReykjavIk is busy: traffic accidents, theft, domestic violence, contraband.... And an unexplained death. When a tramp he met regularly on the night shift is found drowned in a ditch, no one seems to care. But his fate haunts Erlendur and drags him inexorably into the strange and dark underworld of the city.

Dallas Phillips refuses to believe her father committed suicide, even though things were tough on his farm and he was deeply in debt. When she hears he'd told a neighbor about an upcoming windfall, she grows suspicious, and her suspicion only deepens when she realizes someone is lurking in the nearby mountains after dark. For help, she turns to Trey Jakes, local police chief - and her former lover. As they begin to investigate, another mystery comes to light.

It's 1727. Tom Hawkins is damned if he's going to follow in his father's footsteps and become a country parson. Not for him a quiet life of prayer and propriety. His preference is for wine, women, and cards. But there's a sense of honor there too, and Tom won't pull family strings to get himself out of debt - not even when faced with the appalling horrors of London's notorious debtors' prison: The Marshalsea Gaol.

Bruno, chief of police in the French town of St. Denis, is already busy with a case when the body of an undercover French Muslim cop is found in the woods, a man who had called Bruno for help only hours earlier. But Bruno's sometime boss and rival, the Brigadier, doesn't see this investigation as a priority - there are bigger issues at stake. Bruno has other ideas.

World War II is nearly over. For the Russians the enemy is no longer Nazi Germany but the American behemoth that threatens to topple the Communist revolution. Deep within the walls of the Kremlin, Stalin's top man hatches a brilliant plan that will alter the course of postwar history - and it's all based on a deception as simple as the shell game.

Deftly blending such genres as mystery, science fiction, and classic literature, Jasper Fforde’s gleefully irreverent New York Times best-selling Thursday Next novels defy categorization. In this sixth installment, the threat of all-out Genre war looms over BookWorld. But with the real Thursday Next retired in the real world, the Council of Genres has no other choice than to tap the fictional Thursday to save the day. Her mission as emissary is to prevent the brewing war—but her task is made more difficult by a hidden foe manipulating events.

There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?

Ex-Navy SEAL Rock Babineaux is as Cajun as they come - spicy, sexy, and more than a bit wicked. But would he actually betray his country? Even his best friends on the special-ops Black Knights team aren't sure they can trust him. Now the target of a massive manhunt, Rock knows the only way to protect the team - especially his partner, Vanessa - is to run. Rock might think he can outmaneuver them all, but he hasn't counted on how stubborn Vanessa Cordero can be. And she refuses to cut him loose.

At an auction house in Bath, England, a large slab of carved stone is up for sale. At the height of what turns into very competitive bidding, there is a holdup attempt by three masked raiders who are trying to steal the stone. They shoot and kill the highest bidder, a professor who has recognized the female figure carved in the stone as the Wife of Bath from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The masked would-be thieves flee, leaving the stone behind.

A riveting novel in which old friends must excavate the formative event of their childhood - a murder - and determine how to pit truth against justice. Hutch Van Buren is 15 years old, playing sports and searching for arrowheads in a small industrial town in Ohio with his three closest friends when an altercation between the comrades and Petey Sanchez, a troubled 17-year-old, leads to Petey’s accidental death. Together, Hutch and his friends become ensnared in a web of secrets and moral dilemmas.

The Enchanted Village is abuzz when the old Tavistock house finally goes up for sale. Darcy's friend, Curecrafter Cherise Goodwin, is hoping she will have the winning bid on the home, but Darcy can't shake the feeling that something bad is about to happen - and her magical instincts are usually right.

For 18 years Jack has been a “transplant tourism director,” sending wealthy Americans and Europeans in need of kidneys and other organs to third-world countries where they would buy them from transplant centers on the take. The death of a client and a newfound relationship lead to a crisis of conscience as he is forced to choose between a $2 million commission - and participating in a murder.

Bo Luxton has it all - a loving family, a beautiful home in the Lake District and a clutch of best-selling books to her name. Enter Alice Dark, an aspiring writer who is drifting through life, with a series of dead-end jobs and a freeloading boyfriend. When they meet at a writers' retreat, the chemistry is instant, and a sinister relationship develops.... Or does it?

In this masterful debut, Martin Clark proves to be the heir apparent of great Southern raconteurs and the envy of more seasoned novelists as he takes us on a frantic tour of the modern South. Hung over, beaten by the unforgiving sun, bitter at his estranged wife, and dreading the day's docket of petty criminal cases, Judge Evers Wheeling is in need of something on the morning he's accosted by Ruth Esther English.

In this quirky debut novel from author Matthew Dicks, career criminal Martin uses his OCD to pilfer items from his victims' houses without being discovered. It helps that he only takes things the homeowner would never notice are missing - like a roll of toilet paper or a bottle of maple syrup. Martin has spent so much time snooping through homes he feels like he knows the owners, but when he starts meddling in their personal lives, his precise world turns to haos.