A king and some unexpected companions embark on a voyage that will take them beyond all known lands. As they sail farther and farther from charted waters, they discover that their quest is more than they imagined and that the world's end is only the beginning.<

(Skulduggery Pleasant #2) SUMMARY: Skulduggery and Valkyrie are facing a new enemy: Baron Vengeous, who is determined to bring back the terrifying Faceless Ones and is crafting an army of evil to help him. Added to that, Vengeous is about to enlist a new ally (if he can raise it from the dead): the horrible Grotesquery, a very unlikable monster of legend. Once Vengeous is on the loose, dead bodies and vampires start showing up all over Ireland. Now pretty much everybody is out to kill Valkyrie, and the daring detective duo faces its biggest challenge yet. But what if the greatest threat to Valkyrie is just a little closer to home? Look for Scepter of the Ancients<

Imagina que tienes doce años y que cuando tu tío, un famoso escritor de novelas de misterio, muere en extrañas circunstancias te conviertes en la heredera de su casa, de su dinero y de todos los derechos de sus libros. Eso es lo que le ocurre a Stephanie, la protagonista, al inicio de esta novela. Desde ese momento, unos desconocidos la atacan con la intención de conseguir “la llave” que sospechan que ella ha heredado. Es en ese momento cuando aparece Skulduggery Pleasant, un curioso personaje, amigo íntimo de su tío. Es un detective privado y mago con una peculiaridad: está muerto, en concreto es un esqueleto revivido gracias a la magia. A partir de aquí, Stephanie se adentra en un mundo lleno de magia y criaturas sobrenaturales (trolls, vampiros, etc).<

SUMMARY: Commissario Brunetti finds himself adrift in his tenth investigation-available for the first time in the United States Dona Leon has amased devoted fans around the world for her atmospheric and intelligent Commissario Brunetti series. "A Sea of Troubles" offers a rare glimpse into the scrupulous Commissario's personal life. When Brunetti investigates the murder of two local fishermen on the island of Pellestrina, the small community closes ranks, forcing him to accept Signorina Elettra's offer to visit her relatives there to search for clues. Though loyal to his beloved wife, Paola, he must admit that less-than-platonic emotions underlie his concern for his boss's beautiful secretary. Suspenseful, provocative, and deeply unsettling, "A Sea of Troubles" is an explosive and irresistible addition to Leon's marvelous series.<

Donna Leon's eighteen novels have won her countless fans, heaps of critical acclaim, and a place among the top ranks of international crime writers. Through the warm-hearted, perceptive, and principled Commissario Guido Brunetti, Leon's best-selling books have explored Venice in all its aspects: history, tourism, high culture, food, family, but also violent crime and political corruption. In About Face, Leon returns to one of her signature subjects: the environment, which has reached a crisis in Italy. Incinerators across the south of Italy are at full capacity, burning who-knows-what and releasing unacceptable levels of dangerous air pollutants, while in Naples, enormous garbage piles grow in the streets. In Venice, with the polluted waters of the canals and a major chemical complex across the lagoon, the issue is never far from the fore. Environmental concerns become significant in Brunetti's work when an investigator from the Carabiniere, looking into the illegal hauling of garbage, asks for a favor. But the investigator is not the only one with a special request. His father-in-law needs help and a mysterious woman comes into the picture. Brunetti soon finds himself in the middle of an investigation into murder and corruption more dangerous than anything he's seen before.<

SUMMARY: Beautiful and serene Venice is a city almost devoid of crime. But that is little comfort to Maestro Helmut Wellauer, a world-renowned conductor whose intermission refreshment comes one night with a little something extra in it-cyanide. For Guido Brunetti, vice-commissario of police and detective genius, finding a suspect isn't a problem; narrowing the large and unconventional group of enemies down to one is. As the suave and pithy Brunetti pieces together clues, a shocking picture of depravity and revenge emerges, leaving him torn between what is and what should be right -- and questioning what the law can do, and what needs to be done.<

SUMMARY: 'The body floated face down in the murky water of the canal. Gently the ebbing tide tugged it along towards the open waters of the laguna that spread out beyond the end of the canal-'Early one morning Guido Brunetti, commissario of the Venice Police, confronts a grisly sight when the body of a young man is fished out of a fetid Venetian canal. All the clues point to a violent mugging, but for Brunetti robbery seems altogether too convenient a motive. Then something very incriminating is discovered in the dead man's flat, something which points to the existence of a high level cabal - and Brunetti becomes convinced that somebody, somewhere, is taking great pains to provide a ready-made solution to the crime.<

SUMMARY: A riveting new mystery from international bestseller Donna Leon Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti series has made Venice—a city that’s beautiful and sophisticated, but also secretive and corrupt—one of mystery fans’ most beloved locales. In this brilliant new book, Brunetti is summoned to the hospital bed of a respected pediatrician, where he is confronted with more questions than answers. Three men had burst into the doctor’s apartment, attacked him, and kidnapped his eighteen-month-old son. What could have motivated an assault so violent that it has left the doctor mute? And could this crime be related to the moneymaking scam run by pharmacists that Brunetti’s colleague has recently uncovered? As Brunetti delves deeper into the case, a story of infertility, desperation, and illegal dealings begins to unfold.<

SUMMARY: Donna Leons mastery of plot, her understanding of Venetian manners and mores, and above all her philosophical, unfailingly decent protagonist have made the Commissario Brunetti mysteries bestsellers around the world, including an ever-growing American audience. In "The Death of Faith," Brunetti comes to the aid of a young nursing sister who is leaving her convent following the unexpected death of five patients. At first Brunettis inquiries reveal nothing amiss, and he wonders whether the nun is simply creating a smoke screen to justify abandoning her vocation. But perhaps she has stumbled onto something very real and very sinistersomething that puts her life in imminent danger.<

SUMMARY: Donna Leon's "Commissario Guido Brunetti" mysteries have won legions of fans for their evocative portraits of Venetian life. In her novels, food, family, art, history, and local politics play as central a role as an unsolved crime. In "The Girl of His Dreams" when a friend of Brunetti's brother, a priest recently returned from years of missionary work, calls with a request, Brunetti suspects the man's motives. A new, American-style Protestant sect has begun to meet in the city, and it's possible the priest is merely apprehensive of the competition. But the preacher could also be fleecing his growing flock, so Brunetti and Paola, along with Inspector Vianello and his wife, go undercover. But the investigation has to be put aside when, one cold and rainy morning, a body is found floating in a canal. It is a child, a gypsy girl. Brunetti suspects she fell off a nearby roof while fleeing an apartment she had robbed. He has to inform the distrustful parents, encamped on the mainland, and soon finds himself haunted by the crime--and the girl. Thought-provoking, eye-opening, and profoundly moving, "The Girl of His Dreams" is classic Donna Leon, a spectacular, heart-wrenching addition to the series.<

SUMMARY: The latest case in Donna Leon’s bestselling Brunetti mystery series—“one of the most exquisite and subtle detective series ever” (The Washington Post) The Philadelphia Inquirer called Leon’s incomparable creation Commissario Guido Brunetti “the most humane sleuth since Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret.” It’s no wonder then that Leon’s legion of fans continues to grow with each new book that’s published. In Through a Glass, Darkly, Brunetti investigates the murder of a night watchman, whose body is found in front of a blazing furnace at Giovanni De Cal’s glass factory along with an annotated copy of Dante’s Inferno. Did the cantankerous De Cal kill him? Will Brunetti make the connection between the work of literature and the murderer in time?<

SUMMARY: For more than a decade Donna Leon has been a bestseller in Europe with a series of mysteries featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. Always ready to bend the rules to solve a crime, Brunetti manages to maintain his integrity while maneuvering through a city rife with politics, corruption, and intrigue.In Uniform Justice, a young cadet has been found hanged, a presumed suicide, in Venice’s elite military academy. Brunetti’s sorrow for the boy, so close in age to his own son, is rivaled only by his contempt for a community that is more concerned with protecting the reputation of the school, and its privileged students, than with finding the truth. The young man’s father is a doctor and former politician. He is a man of an impeccable integrity who inexplicably avoids talking to the police. As Brunetti pursues his inquiry, he is faced with a wall of silence. Is the military protecting its own? Or has Brunetti uncovered a conspiracy far more sinister than that of a single death?<

SUMMARY: When one of his wife's Paola's students comes to visit him, with a strange and vague interest in investigating the possibility of a pardon for a crime committed by her grandfather many years ago, Commissario Brunetti thinks little of it. But when the girl is found dead, clearly stabbed to death, Claudia Leonardo suddenly becomes Brunetti's case, no longer Paola's student. Claudia seems to have no discernible living family - her only familial relationship is with an elderly Austrian woman, who was the lover of her grandfather, but was not herself Claudia's grandmother. Brunetti is both intrigued and stunned by the extraordinary art collection the old woman keeps in her small, unprepossessing flat, and when she in turn is found dead, the case seems to have be about to open up long buried secrets of collaboration and the exploitation of Italian Jews during the war, secrets few in Italy are happy to explore.<

Amazon.com Review


Amazon Exclusive: Joe Hill Reviews Djibouti

The author of the critically acclaimed novels Djibouti:

In the spirit of Djibouti, his 48th novel.

10. The babes. The heroine of Djibouti would be one Dara Barr, who has touched down in Africa to make a documentary about the booming piracy business and maybe win herself another Oscar. Dara is as laconic and unflappable as any of Leonard’s finest heroes (see: waaaaaay overmatched.

9. The bad boys. Creative writing teachers who want to show their students how to draft an unforgettable antagonist ought to tear out chapter 18 and pass it around. That’s where Leonard tells us the story of James Russell, a clever Miami lowlife, who reinvents himself as Jamal Raisuli, al-Queda bomb-thrower… all in 7 pages of breezy, economical characterization.

8. The talk. Plenty has been written about Elmore Leonard’s mastery of dialogue, and I don’t need to rehash it. Why bother, when I could just quote some of it? An elderly terrorist, jailed in The States, gets talking with James Russell:
“What is it you hope to become in your life?”
“Famous,” James said. “I been looking at ways.”
“Become a prophet?
“I don’t tell what will happen. I do it.”

7. The walk. Everyone hustles in an Elmore Leonard novel; you can’t stand still and hope to score. From the slums, where life is the only thing cheaper than khat, to the clubs, where it’s easier to find a pirate than out on the open ocean, everyone is on their way up or on their way down… in a hurry.

6. The sound.
Leonard famously said that if his sentences sound like writing, he rewrites them, but don’t be fooled. These sentences jump to their own dirty, hothouse jazz rhythm. There isn’t a better stylist anywhere in American letters.

5. The seduction. Dara isn’t just curious about piracy; she spends thirty days on a boat with 73-year-old Xavier LeBo, long enough to fall a little in love with her best friend, and wonder if the old dude can still get it up. Xavier bets her ten-thousand dollars he can. It’s the book’s biggest gamble; trust me, it earns out big.

4. More boom for your buck. A lot of the suspense in Djibouti revolves around a tanker filled with enough liquefied natural gas “to set off an explosion a hundred times bigger than the Hindenburg disaster.” It’s an atom bomb with a rudder and all it needs is a target.

3. The place. Leonard doesn’t beat anyone over the head with his research, but from Djibouti to Eyl to New Orleans (the three backdrops for this story), the details are crisp, unforgettable, and right. You don’t read Djibouti. You live there.

2. The pay-off. Everyone in an Elmore Leonard story wants one, but only the reader is guaranteed to get one, and boy do they, in a final chapter that seems inevitable, yet comes as completely unexpected.

1. The know-how. Let’s get to it. In the fifty-plus years he’s been turning out lean, loose, laid-back thrillers, Elmore Leonard has cast his indelible stamp on American crime fiction, inspired his peers, and spawned a thousand imitators. He’s the kind of guy critics describe as old school, but that’s missing it. Elmore Leonard isn’t old school. He built the school.

(Photo of Joe Hill by Shane Leonard)



From

*Starred Review* Crime fiction grand master Leonard, who turns 85 in October, remains in top form. He has a new publisher and a new subject—Somalian pirates—but all the signature Leonard elements are shining as brightly as ever: the back-and-forth banter, always oozing wit but never too smart for the room; the cast of wonderfully idiosyncratic characters, each capable of a star turn; the always startling juxtaposition of the mundane against the violent. This time, mixed in with all of that, Leonard gives us one of his trickiest plots and cleverest turns of storytelling. Dara Barr is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, recently arrived in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa (the gateway to Islam . . . or the back door to the West) to film Somalian pirates in action. With her assistant, a 72-year-old sailor named Xavier, Dara, armed with a concealed spy camera, sets off onboard the Buster in search of pirates. She finds plenty, but she and Xavier also land in the middle of an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a tanker loaded with liquefied natural gas. Portions of the tale are related in real time, but much of the narration comes in the form of Dara and Xavier viewing film of what’s already happened and debating how to structure the documentary. This curious dramatic technique works magnificently, taking us inside the characters in a way that straight, action-oriented narration might not do. Leonard never tells a story in the expected way, but this time he outdoes himself. Marvelous entertainment. --Bill Ott
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