Book picks similar to
Forest Of Fortune by Jim Ruland
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King Death
Toby Litt - 2010
A heart - a human heart - slithering down outside the window of a train travelling between London Bridge and Blackfriars. Someone must have thrown it out from a carriage in front. Kumiko is determined to find out who - and why. But Skelton was sitting next to Kumiko on the train and he saw it too, so he also wants to get to the bottom of the mystery. Or he says he does, but really he just wants Kumiko back, because she's walked out on him, just like that, and left him heartbroken. Each for their own reasons, Kumiko and Skelton set out - separately - on a bizarre trail of discovery. Darting between dingy student pubs, the roofs of Borough Market and the corridors and car-parks of Guy's Hospital, they become embroiled in the seedy world of young medical students, until eventually the gossip and the stories lead them both to the hospital's infamous dissection lecturer - known behind his back as 'King Death'...
The Woman Who Married a Bear
John Straley - 1992
In addition to honest work, there is a lot of alcohol consumed and other people's money appropriated. Bars are loud, fights are mean. Rowdy youths party in the ancient Russian cemeteries, sitting on overturned gravestones. Sitka is hardly straight-laced, but murder is uncommon enough to be widely noted—like the Indian big-game guide killed by an ex-miner obeying voices from the earth's center. The victim's mother, a Tlingit Indian, summons to her nursing home a local investigator named Cecil Younger. The case is old and ostensibly solved. She wants him to investigate anyway. What he unearths is a virtual fairytale contrived to hide a primal conspiracy.
The Trace
Forrest Gander - 2014
Driving through the Chihuahua Desert, they retrace the route of 19th century American writer Ambrose Bierce (who disappeared during the Mexican Revolution) and try to piece together their lives after a devastating incident involving their adolescent son. With tenderness and precision, Gander explores the intimacies of the couple's relationship as they travel through Mexican towns, through picturesque canyons, and desert capes, on a journey through the heart of the Mexican landscape. Taking a shortcut through the brutally hot desert home, their car overheats miles from nowhere, the story spinning out of control, with devastating consequences.
A Sound In The Dark
Kyle Alexander Romines - 2017
A weekend camping trip with a small group of friends seemed like the perfect distraction from a messy personal life, but as Zack and his friends made their way to the camping ground at Drifter’s Folly Memorial Park, he couldn’t shake the feeling something was terribly wrong. Zack should have listened to his gut, because he and his friends aren’t the only ones in the forest. Someone else is watching—someone with dark intentions. And he wants to play a game...
It Takes A Village To Kill Your Husband
Jethro Collins - 2012
Hollis Whitney is a successful and fabulous HGTV hostess on the brink of turning 40. She also happens to be madly in love with her carpenter even though she is married to sleazy movie director Frank Fielder. When Hollis discovers that Frank is diddling his latest (and much younger) leading lady, she sets out on a mission to kill him off. Her bitchy Beverly Hills friends catch wind of her plan and insist on helping her plot out the perfect murder. Together the women use their power and connections to help Hollis dig the hole that will bury Frank – figuratively and literally. What follows is a tale of the unique skills each woman brings to the plan and a moving story about long-lost love, finding yourself, onion rings and the importance of pink. Killing your husband could just be the secret to a happy ending.
Valley Girls
Sarah Nicole Lemon - 2018
But Rilla can’t help but be seduced by experiences she couldn’t have imagined back home. She sets her sights on climbing El Capitan, one of the most challenging routes in Yosemite, and her summer becomes one harrowing and ecstatic experience after another: first climb, first fall two thousand feet in the air, first love. But becoming the person Rilla feels she was meant to be jeopardizes the reasons why she came to Yosemite—a bright new future and a second chance at sisterhood. When her family and her future are at odds, what will Rilla choose?
The Marsh King's Daughter
Karen Dionne - 2017
But she also has a secret: she is the product of an abduction. Her mother was kidnapped as a teenager by her father and kept in a remote cabin in the marshlands of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Helena, born two years after the abduction, loved her home in nature, and despite her father’s sometimes brutal behavior, she loved him, too…until she learned precisely how savage he could be.More than twenty years later, she has buried her past so soundly that even her husband doesn’t know the truth. But now her father has killed two guards, escaped from prison, and disappeared into the marsh. The police begin a manhunt, but Helena knows they don’t stand a chance. Knows that only one person has the skills to find the survivalist the world calls the Marsh King–because only one person was ever trained by him: his daughter.
The Perfume Garden
Kate Lord Brown - 2012
Untouched since Franco's forces tore through Spain in 1936, the whitewashed walls have crumbled, the garden, laden with orange blossom, grown wild. Emma Temple is the first to unlock its doors in seventy years. Guided by a series of letters and a key bequeathed in her mother's will, she has left her job as London's leading perfumier to restore this dilapidated villa to its former glory. It is the perfect retreat: a wilderness redolent with strange and exotic scents, heavy with the colours and sounds of a foreign time. But for her grandmother, Freya, a British nurse who stayed here during Spain's devastating civil war, Emma's new home evokes terrible memories. As the house begins to give up its secrets, Emma is drawn deeper into Freya's story: one of crushed idealism, lost love, and families ripped apart by war. She soon realises it is one thing letting go of the past, but another when it won't let go of you.
He Said/She Said
Erin Kelly - 2017
Kit is an eclipse chaser; Laura has never seen one before. Young and in love, they are certain this will be the first of many they’ll share. But in the hushed moments after the shadow passes, Laura interrupts a man and a woman. She knows that she saw something terrible. The man denies it. It is her word against his. The victim seems grateful. Months later, she turns up on their doorstep like a lonely stray. But as her gratitude takes a twisted turn, Laura begins to wonder—did she trust the wrong person? 15 years later, Kit and Laura are living under assumed names and completely off the digital grid: no Facebook, only rudimentary cell phones, not in any directories. But as the truth catches up to them, they realize they can no longer keep the past in the past.
White Lies
Jeremy Bates - 2012
Fearful for her safety, she lies about her destination in order to get him out of the car. But when she later discovers that he is a teacher at the same school, she finds herself feeding that initial lie with more lies.Then Katrina meets Jack Reeves. Handsome, charismatic and strong, he is exactly what she needs to extricate her from the expanding network of lies. She falls fast and hard for him. But when Jack lands himself in the middle of a grisly murder, she must decide whether to turn him in--or tell yet another lie.
Screaming To Be Solved
Lauren Hope - 2013
Without even a body to bury, Marxie is left to deal with the sorrow of his abrupt and brutal end. Seeking to start anew, she packs up and moves east to Savannah.But when Detective Grant Carter knocks on her door two years after the accident, Marxie’s carefully rebuilt world turns upside down once more. The grim detective gives Marxie unimaginable news: Evan’s body has been found in a nearby canal.Desperate for answers, Marxie embarks on a fascinating, complex and heart-wrenching journey to find out exactly what happened to the man she loved. And though the intriguing detective may be working under ulterior motives, he puts his whole being into helping the young widow bring closure to a mystery that haunts her every waking moment. Together, Grant and Marxie work to unearth a secret that runs as deep and murky as Savannah’s canals.
Sunset Beach
Mary Kay Andrews - 2019
Out of a job and down on her luck, life doesn’t seem to be getting any better when her estranged father, Brice Campbell, a flamboyant personal injury attorney, shows up at her mother’s funeral after a twenty-year absence. Worse, he’s remarried – to Drue’s eighth grade frenemy, Wendy, now his office manager. And they’re offering her a job.It seems like the job from hell, but the offer is sweetened by the news of her inheritance – her grandparents’ beach bungalow in the sleepy town of Sunset Beach, a charming but storm-damaged eyesore now surrounded by waterfront McMansions.With no other prospects, Drue begrudgingly joins the firm, spending her days screening out the grifters whose phone calls flood the law office. Working with Wendy is no picnic either. But when a suspicious death at an exclusive beach resort nearby exposes possible corruption at her father’s firm, she goes from unwilling cubicle rat to unwitting investigator, and is drawn into a case that may – or may not – involve her father. With an office romance building, a decades-old missing persons case re-opened, and a cottage in rehab, one thing is for sure at Sunset Beach: there’s a storm on the horizon.Sunset Beach is a compelling ride, full of Mary Kay Andrews' signature wit, heart, and charm.
Lacy Eye
Jessica Treadway - 2014
When Dawn brings her new boyfriend home from college for a visit, her parents and sister try to hide their doubts because they're glad that Dawn - always an awkward child - appears to have grown into a confident, mature young woman in her relationship with Rud. But when Hanna and her husband, Joe, are beaten savagely in their bed, Rud becomes the chief suspect and stands trial for Joe's murder. Claiming her boyfriend's innocence, Dawn estranges herself from her mother, who survived the attack with serious injuries and impaired memory. When Rud wins an appeal and Dawn returns to the family home saying she wants to support her mother, Hanna decides to try to remember details of that traumatic night so she can testify to keep her husband's murderer in jail, never guessing that the process might cause her to question everything she thought she knew about her daughter.
He Made Me (a Booker & Cash Story Book 2)
Oliver Tidy - 2017
Someone is demanding a lot of money from her husband and she wants to know why.What do the dying words of one man - he made me - actually mean?As the mystery unfolds people will come undone and reputations will be ruined before the answer becomes clear.At the end of the day Mrs Swaine might end up wishing she’d let sleeping dogs lie…
Also available in the Booker & Cash series:
Bad Sons
Rain Girl
Gabi Kreslehner - 2010
Summer is for growing, not for dying. So when the body of a beautiful young woman is found on the autobahn, dressed in a glittering party dress and bathed in June rain, Franza is determined to give her justice.Revealing victims’ hidden lives is part of the job, but as Franza and her partner, Felix, peel back the layers shrouding the girl’s disturbing past, darker mysteries emerge. Everyone has something to hide—even Franza, who must face her own secrets to reveal the truth.