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Life has never been so insane for Private Investigator Nikki James: a teenager is missing; a madman is kidnapping the wealthy; she’s got a vampire to contend with; and her partner and best friend, Jake, is in the hospital dying. And just when it seems like nothing else could possibly go wrong for her, Michael Kelly returns. The last thing Michael needs is a confrontation with Nikki - especially when his control over his bloodlust is still so tenuous. But when a kidnapper steps up his agenda to murder, they are suddenly forced into a partnership. Soon Michael discovers the biggest danger may not be from his need to ‘taste’ Nikki, but from his desire to make her a permanent part of his life - a life that is sure to get her killed. Nikki is determined to make Michael see that life apart is worse than death. But before she can make him see the light, a spectre from Michael’s past rises that could destroy any hope she has of a future with him.<

Private Investigator Nikki James is in San Francisco at the request of her business partner and best friend, Jake. His friend’s wife is missing, and he is determined to find her. The authorities believe the kidnapping is the work of a sick mind - Nikki knows it is something much worse. Vampires. Michael Kelly has returned from a vampire hunting exhibition in his homeland and wants to relax. When he discovers Nikki’s gone to San Francisco he has no choice but to follow - not only to keep her safe from the vampire gang, but because he fears the psychic talents she’s beginning to develop. As the body count begins to rise, so too does the danger. Soon Nikki becomes a target but she has no intention of obeying Michael’s demands that she leave. She’s tired of playing it safe and wants him to realise it’s all or nothing...<

One hundred years ago, Michael Kelly killed the sorcerer responsible for murdering Michaelżs lover. Now the sorcererżs brother, Weylin Dunleavy, is out for revenge. Nikki James wants nothing more than to pass the Circleżs strict entry exams so she can plan her wedding to Michael. But then one of the testers tries to kill her and Michael is shot and kidnapped. Her search for Michael leads her to the ghost town where Weylin Dunleavy is mirroring the past in order to raise his brotherżs spirit from hell. Heżs set in place a barrier of magic that strips Nikki of all but one psychic talent that she canżt control. But Weylin has one surprise for her that she cannot accept . . . Michael no longer remembers who she is.<

Curiosity was discouraged in the Greene tribe. Its members lived out their lives in cramped Quarters, hacking away at the encroaching ponics. As to where they were - that was forgotten. Roy Complain decides to find out. With the renegade priest Marapper, he moves into unmapped territory, where they make a series of discoveries which turn their universe upside-down... Non-Stop is the classic SF novel of discovery and exploration; a brilliant evocation of a familiar setting seen through the eyes of a primitive.

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Amazon.com Review

Kate Atkinson began her career with a winner: Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which captured the Whitbread First Novel Award. She followed that success with four other books, the last of which was Case Histories, her first foray into the mystery-suspense-detective genre. In that book she introduced detective Jackson Brodie, who reopened three cold cases and ended up a millionaire. A great deal happened in-between.

In One Good Turn Jackson returns, following his girlfriend, Julia the actress, to the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh. He manages to fall into all kinds of trouble, starting with witnessing a brutal attack by "Honda Man" on another man stuck in a traffic jam. Is this road rage or something truly sinister? Another witness is Martin Canning, better known as Alex Blake, the writer. Martin is a shy, withdrawn, timid sort who, in a moment of unlikely action, flings a satchel at the attacker and spins him around, away from his victim. Gloria Hatter, wife of Graham, a millionaire property developer who is about to have all his secrets uncovered, is standing in a nearby queue with a friend when the attack takes place. There is nastiness afoot, and everyone is involved. Nothing is coincidental.

Through a labyrinthine plot which is hard to follow because the points of view are constantly changing, the real story is played out, complete with Russians, false and mistaken identities, dead bodies, betrayals, and all manner of violent encounters. Jackson gets pulled in to the investigation by Louise Monroe, a police detective and mother of an errant 14-year-old. There might be yet another novel to follow which will take up the connection those two forge in this book. Or, Jackson might just go back to France and feed apples to the local livestock.

Atkinson has written an enjoyable and lively story of no degrees of separation among the most unlikely cast of characters. Some plot lines have been left to drift, but it does hang together in a satisfying fashion. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly

Having won a wide following for her first crime novel (and fifth book), Case Histories (2004), Atkinson sends Det. Jackson Brodie to Edinburgh while girlfriend Julia performs in a Fringe Festival play. When incognito thug "Paul Bradley" is rear-ended by a Honda driver who gets out and bashes Bradley unconscious with a baseball bat, the now-retired Jackson is a reluctant witness. Other bystanders include crime novelist Martin Canning, a valiant milquetoast who saves Bradley's life, and tart-tongued Gloria Hatter, who's plotting to end her 39-year marriage to a shady real estate developer. Jackson walks away from the incident, but keeps running into trouble, including a corpse, the Honda man and sexy, tight-lipped inspector Louise Monroe. Everyone's burdened by a secret—infidelity, unprofessional behavior, murder—adding depth and many diversions. After Martin misses a visit from the Honda man (Martin's wonderfully annoying houseguest isn't so lucky), he enlists Jackson as a bodyguard, pulling the characters into closer orbit before they collide on Gloria Hatter's lawn. Along the way, pieces of plot fall through the cracks between repeatedly shifting points of view, and the final cataclysm feels forced. But crackling one-liners, spot-on set pieces and full-blooded cameos help make this another absorbing character study from the versatile, effervescent Atkinson. (Oct. 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

Between a reemerged ex-girlfriend, a mad bomber and a murderer loose on the streets of Mirabeau, Tex., sleuth/librarian Jordan Poteet has his hands full. The bomber is blowing up everything from mailboxes to the top floor of Mirabeau's B[HTML_REMOVED] Lorna, Poteet's ex, works for a land developer interested in turning the town's riverfront property into resort condos; and the murderer is a nasty soul who garrotes his victims with barbed wire. In this sequel to Do Unto Others, Abbott stirs up a homey brew of humor, sweet-and-sour Southern charm and, most of all, saucy, revealing characterizations: Jordan's current girlfriend, Candace, looks "like she'd tiptoed out of Laura Ashley University with a bachelor's in Prim," while Lorna is likened to a hurricane moving in from the coast?"The only difference was that hurricanes are indifferent to the destruction and chaos they cause." And then there's Billy Ray, the prosecutor, who's "the type of fellow that'd poke his finger between a cottonmouth's fangs to see if the mouth is really all soft inside." Add a mixture of slightly unbalanced townsfolk and a rigid environmentalist hell-bent on protecting Mirabeau from the developers, and you have escapist fare that's as good as it gets. Speaking in the first person as Jordan Poteet, Abbott brings an engaging new voice to Southern mystery fiction.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"A carefully considered plot, clearly drawn characters, and Abbott's irresistible Southern voice combine to create an exciting new entry in mystery fiction."-- Deborah Adams

"Abbott's debut has both light and dark tones, is thoroughly readable, and presents a well-drawn gallery of suspects."--Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

From the Paperback edition.

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality.  A novel that expands to fill volumes in the reader’s mind, Oracle Night is a beautifully constructed meditation on time, love, storytelling, and the imagination by "one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). Paul Auster's recent novels, The Book of Illusions and Timbuktu, were national bestsellers, as was I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationary shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of the blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationary shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book—only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today. "Compulsively readable yet wonderfully complex."—Eric Grunwald, The Boston Globe"Every bit as sad and spooky as [Auster's] New York Trilogy—and perhaps more intricate . . . [This book] plumbs persistent Austerian themes: identity, reinvention, betrayal, disappearance, chance, and the possibility that a supernatural heart quivers beneath the everyday surface of life . . . As in the New York Trilogy, he subverts our expectations of what a mystery story should be, and the reading experience is far richer for it."—Philip Connors, Newsday"Over the course of many books, Auster has burnished . . . ambivalence to a sheen by crossing metatextual strategies with the conventions of the noir thriller—Chandler meets Borges . . . Oracle Night is situated squarely on the Austerian matrix of narrative and reality—i.e., in a writer's notebook . . . [The novel] reads, indeed, like a dream or gloss on all the Auster novels that have come before, with its disorientation, its interlocking webs of seekers and sought, its blur of the invented and the artifact . . . Auster generously tips his hand here. He suggests that the terror of not being heard lies at the heart of writing, and that the artistic impulse generally might be summed up as: Somebody say something; 1 a.m., 2 a.m.—just keep talking. That a man who has produced more than 25 books is willing to convey the visceral ping of that terror is evidence not only of his talent but of his grace."—Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review"A writer recovering from a mysterious life-threatening illness begins to write in a notebook that has, it seems, the supernatural power to draw him into the very story he is writing. And the story, as it happens, is a reworking of Dashiell Hammett's idea about a man who, after nearly dying, flees a comfortable family life. That nothing is what it seems is standard-issue Auster metaphysics, and the narrator here seems familiar: too-literary, Brooklyn-based, decent, if a trifle self-serious. What saves Auster's story from ponderousness is the sheer verve with which he follows his narrator through the labyrinthine plot. He barely has characters, or none more substantial than you'd find in a 1930s murder mystery, but he shines as a fabulist and tale-teller, putting a high-modernist gloss on noir by leaving his tales within tales within tales unfinished."—The New Yorker "Paul Auster has taken the inherent self-consciousness of a novelist narrator to such painstakingly layered extremes that the strategy seems anything but lazy. In remarkably few pages, Mr. Auster builds up a marvellously thick ply of wallpapers, and it is delectable to peel away the little rose pattern to reveal the stripes underneath . . . The lucid Mr. Auster is a natural story-teller, with a seemingly inexhaustible trove of yarns at his disposal. All of the stories within stories are compelling in their own right . . . This neat, sweet volume is a joy to read. The prose is clean and translucent. Considering the number of spin-off plots that Mr. Auster manages to insert in asides or footnotes, readers get more than their money's worth in plain good story-telling."—The Economist"One morning in September 1982, a struggling novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness purchases, on impulse, a blue notebook from a new store in his Brooklyn neighborhood. So begins Auster's artful, ingenious 12th novel, which is both a darkly suspenseful domestic drama and a moving meditation on chance and loss . . . Bizarrely fascinating . . . His stories have a dreamlike, hallucinatory logic."—Publishers Weekly<