Dublin, Ireland and Richmond, Virginia - separated by thousands of miles but linked by murder. Dr. Scarpetta, on a leisure stint in Ireland, has the perfect opportunity to find out if the murders on opposite sides of the Atlantic are linked. Five dismembered, beheaded bodies were found in Ireland years ago - now four have been discovered in the US. But the tenth corpse in Virginia is different. There are vital discrepancies and evidence that the elderly victim was already seriously ill. A copy-cat killing - ghoulish, but not unusual. But when the next body is found, Scarpetta discovers that the killer is armed with the most lethal weapon on earth - smallpox.
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Sunset: Celia Brayfield
$9.00Tropical sun, cheap booze and more natural beauty than you could shake David Attenborough at - Kim came to Los Alcazares for the same reason as all the other people there - to get away. It's a holiday paradise - and a place of fantastic dreams and incredible secrets. Kim trusts Matthew, her lover. She trusts her friend Stella. But she may have been wrong...A man has been killed on Los Alcazares and both of them were there when he died. That's what they're saying, anyway. So Kim waits for Matthew, at the beach bar where there is no beach, to find out what she can believe...
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Black Mountain is a sleepy little place where the local police deal with one homicide a year, if they're unlucky, and where people are still getting used to the idea of locking their doors at night. Hardly the place for a serial killer to be stalking, but that seems to be the case when 11 year-old Emily Steiner's corpse is found, with a bullet wound to the head and several small sections of skin removed from her frail, abused body. The crime bears disturbing similarities to the recent murder of young Eddie Heath in Virginia and Dr. Kay Scarpetta is called in to bring her forensic skills to the case. Fighting the natural assumption that Emiluy's murderer is also the man who killed Eddie, Scarpetta's instinct for the unusual is sharply awakened when another body is found...
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When five women are brutally raped and murdered in Sierra Leone, Reuters correspondent Connie Burns questions the arrest of three rebel soldiers for the crimes. No-one listens - in a vicious civil wear where hundreds of thousands are killed, the rape and murder of women is of no consequence. And who cares if child soldiers are beaten into confessing? With nothing to go one except her witnessing a savage attack on a prostitute, Connie believes a foreigner is responsible - a man who claims to have been in the SAS and who works as a bodyguard for a Lebanese diamond trader. She remembers him when he was a mercenary of Kabila's Kinshasa regime, and she suspects he uses the chaos of war to act out sadistic fantasies against women. Two years later in Iraq, the consequences of her second attempt to expose him are devastating. Terrified, degraded and destroyed, she goes into hiding in England where she strikes up a friendship with Jess, a reclusive loner. Borrowing Jess's strength. Connie makes the decision to attempt a third unmasking of a serial killer, knowing he will come after her...
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In 1970, Howard Stamp, a retarded 20 year old, was convicted on disputed evidence - and a retracted confession - of brutally murdering his grandmother in her Dorset home. Less than three years later he was dead, driven to suicide by self-hatred and relentless bullying by the other prisoners. A fate befitting - but what if he were innocent? Over a quarter of a century later, anthropologist and author Jonathan Hughes re-examines Stamp's case for a book on injustice. His research leads him to believe that Stamp was wrongly convicted. But is Stamp's story compelling enough to make Hughes leave his ivory tower in order to champion justice for someone her never knew? George Gardner, a local councillor has also been trying to bring the case to public attention and has unearthed new evidence which could exonerate him, but he needs Hughes on board if it is to be used to maximum effect. There seems to be no similarity between the illiterate Stamp and the academic Hughes, but their lives resonate through their damaged childhoods and sense of exclusion. If Jonathan is take up armas on Stamp's behalf, he must first face his own demons.
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The skeleton of a crucified man has been unearthed in Jerusalem. Eminent Israeli archeologist Michal Dugan urges his celebrated colleague John Lambert, a Simonite monk, to examine the find and verify what he so strongly suspects - that the body is that of Christ. Such a sensational revelation will rock the world but before the find can be made public, Father Lambert is found hanged, apparently a despairing suicide...
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A children's hurdy-gurdy tune, haunting a small boy's nightmare; the same tune, played by an old blind beggar outside a foggy graveyard; heard by an old old woman, bed-ridden in her Bavarian fastness; yet again, at the dead of night on a London street corner, a prelude to a brutal crime...This is the opening of the story which then turns to the fortunes of Mattie Falconer, cruelly widowed and now courted by a man some would say was her husband's killer. As the sympathetic police inspector pursues a series of inexplicable killings, Mattie seeks escape and happiness in the violin-making town of Mittenwald. But it is here, in the cliff top house in Bavaria, that the dark music becomes more insistent and infinitely more menacing...Cover art by Neville Dear.
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Brother Cadfael No. XVII. During the ploughing of the Potter's Field in October 1143 the grisly remains of a woman's body are unearthed. The tenant potter had only recently left there to become a monk at the Benedictine Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul and had abandoned his wife after fifteen years of marriage. Rumour had it that the beautiful, wild Welsh woman had returned to her homeland - perhaps with a lover. Who could tell? But the discovery of the corpse on Abbey land raises all sorts of questions, and ones that impel Brother Cadfael to leave the tranquility of the herbiary in order to piece together the clues that will solve a baffling crime. Cover art by Clifford Harper.
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Set in post-World War II America. The smell of warm gin hovers over a whole section of town. The threat of violence hangs in the air. And the neighborhood kids know all about drugs, knives and back-alley beatings long before they’re pushed into high school by weary truant officers. This is simply reality for the family that runs Varaki Quality Market. Its patriarch, Gus Varaki, is doing all he can to keep his business afloat after his beloved middle child, Henry, is killed in action in the Korean conflict. But his oldest son is at a crossroads, his teenage daughter has been seduced by a rough crowd and one of his employees is running a racket of his own. Only Henry’s despondent widow, Bonny, sees the awful truth - and the deadly plot hanging over all of their heads.
