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Big Jack Is Dead by Harvey Smith
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A Place of Strangers
Geoffrey Seed - 2009
Approaching death, they are reserved and enigmatic, as if they are determined to take one last secret with them to the grave. He suspects that they have lied to him about who his real parents were – and what happened to them. And so begins an investigation that will reveal his past – and determine his future. As he digs deeper, he starts to uncover a terrifying conspiracy – one of murder and revenge, with its roots in the greatest crime in history, the Holocaust.
The Outsider
Arlene Hunt - 2013
Shy and reclusive, her world revolved around animals, so much so that by the time she was 15, Emma was a much sought after horse trainer. So who would try to harm this gifted young woman? Who was shooting in Crilly Woods on that fateful August day?Emma’s twin brother, Anthony, is determined to get to the bottom of what happened to his sister, and in the course of his investigations makes a terrible mistake, one that will change all their lives forever.The Outsider: sometimes those who love us most hardly know us at all.
The Secrets of Lost Stones
Melissa Payne - 2019
Haunted by memories and grief, Jess packs what’s left and heads for the small mountain town of Pine Lake, where she takes a position as caregiver to an eccentric old woman.A rumored clairvoyant, Lucy is strange but welcoming and immediately intuits Jess as a “loose end” in need of closure. But Jess isn’t the only guest in Lucy’s large Victorian home. There’s also Star, a teenage runaway with a secret too painful to share. And the little boy with heart-shaped stones, who comes with a hope for reconciliation—and a warning.Soon Jess learns that she’s not the only lost soul running from the ghosts of the past. She and Star have been brought together for a reason: to be saved by the very thing that destroyed them.
The Song of the Mockingbird
Bill Cronin - 2013
Only one problem: Jack cannot write a single word. Devastatingly depressed and hopelessly blocked Jack embarks on a personal journey back to the summer of 1961 when three childhood events created a psychological time-bomb that, thirty-five years later, threatened to destroy his marriage and end his writing career. Vibrant characters, settings like Charleston, Savannah and Key West and a tightly wound plot make this novel a “must read.” The Song of the Mockingbird is Bill Cronin’s second novel following five-star reviews for his first novel “Dial Tone.”
Misty Hill Reckoning
R.B. Tetro - 2016
When that peace is threatened by a corrupt sheriff, and the ruthless drug dealers he’s protecting, they’ll have to stand together with their friends and some unlikely allies if they hope to survive. Jake Dillon has come to Misty Hill looking for answers about his missing brother; who’s been working undercover for the DEA. He finds the Sanders standing alone against the people connected to his brother’s disappearance. He also finds the family that he’s always wanted, and the love he’s never had. The odds are stacked against them surviving, but Laura and her family won’t back down, and Jake won’t back off, until he finds his brother and his new friends are safe. In the Great Smoky Mountains, people have their own brand of justice. It’s been passed down from generation to generation. It’s called a reckoning, and it’s coming to Misty Hill.
A Cape May Diamond
Larry Enright - 2012
I’ll never forget that day. The Vietnam War had ended with the fall of Saigon that April, and the world was mired in one of its worst recessions ever. Unemployment in the United States was nearly nine percent, inflation even higher, and leadership lacking. The Watergate scandal had cast a smear across American politics, resulting in Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 to avoid impeachment, and his successor’s immediately pardoning him to close the book on an unhappy chapter in U.S. history.It was not a good time for anyone and a particularly hard time for the old Victorian town of Cape May. The crown jewel of the New Jersey shore had fallen into neglect and disrepair and was dying a slow death. Once the elegant summer home to presidents and kings, it had become the last refuge of the deposed.That’s where I met Tom Ryan. Tom was a king, or so he would have you believe, but unlike Richard Nixon, when Tom was dethroned, he wasn’t sent home with a slap on the wrist. He was sent to prison. He was a convicted draft dodger, but one of the lucky ones released early by President Ford as part of his mass clemency after Nixon’s pardon. The problem was, Tom had nowhere to go when he got out, so he took the money his dad mailed to him and spent it on a bus ticket to get as far away as possible to a place where nobody cared who he was or what he had done, a place where nobody cared about anything. That place was Cape May.As hard a time as it was for everyone, it was harder for me because that was the day I met Tom Ryan. I should have turned and walked away. I knew it when he first looked at me, but I didn’t, not my first mistake, but one that would make Monday, May 19th, 1975 the hardest day of my life. This is the story of how Tom Ryan and I met and how things never quite work out the way you think. You might find a love story in here somewhere. You might not. You might find a message hidden in one of the nickel pop bottles collected by the beachcombers from some of the most beautiful white sand beaches in the world. You might even find a little mystery, but life is a mystery, isn’t it?
Innocent Strangers
Millys Altman - 2012
Just as they prepare to journey on, they are arrested for the murder of a beautiful heiress to a coal mining fortune. Suddenly, they must escape the noose that is waiting to hang them. How they do this in a parochial town that brands them as criminals and refuses to give up its dark secrets is a tale of dogged sleuthing. Probing uncovers shocking details of intrigue, double-dealing, blackmail, and adultery in the past life and loves of this charming passionate woman. The trail finally leads them close to exposing the identity of the real murderer, but time is running out.
Tea Cups & Tiger Claws
Timothy Patrick - 2013
The miracle is the birth of identical triplets, and the madness is all about money, of course. The year is 1916 and the newborn baby girls have become pint-size celebrities. Unfortunately, this small portion of fame soon leads to a much larger portion of greed, and the triplets are split up—parceled out to the highest bidders. Two of the girls go to live in a hilltop mansion. The third girl isn't so lucky. She ends up with a shady family that lives in an abandoned work camp. That’s how their lives begin: two on top, one on the bottom, and all three in the same small town. And when their worlds collide, as they must, the consequences are extreme."Tea Cups & Tiger Claws" spans fifty years and takes the reader from a shantytown to a gilded mansion, from dark desires to sacrificial love.
A Kind of Woman
Helen Burko - 2017
Barder does not return alone: with him is his new wife, Rachel, a beautiful blonde woman whom he met in Warsaw shortly after the war - a Jewish survivor who lost her entire family and remained alone in the world. Jacob fell in love with her and brought her to the states. Now he will defend her in the biggest battle of her life.
A Jewish lawyer’s wife is accused of committing Nazi war crimes
One evening, in a Broadway theater, Rachel is attacked by a woman who accuses her of being Matilda Krause - a German SS officer who served at the Nazi concentration camps. Rachel’s arrest and police investigation open the way to a sensational trial that will be written in the pages of history. With no one willing to protect a Nazi officer, Barder decides to defend his wife himself. Why would a Jewish survivor speak for a Nazi in the court of law? Barder is called to make an impossible case in the name of his beloved wife, and that of humanity altogether. The jury, the judge, and the readers will be astounded by what he has to say.
Girl Through Glass
Sari Wilson - 2016
Enduring the mess of her parent’s divorce, she finds escape in dance—the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism. Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory. It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her mentor.Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of “Mr. B’s girls”—a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness. As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a Midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsizes the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self. When she receives a letter from a man she’s long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.Told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us.
The Light of the Fireflies
Paul Pen - 2013
Before he was born, his family was disfigured by a fire. His sister wears a white mask to cover her burns.He spends his hours with his cactus, reading his book on insects, or touching the one ray of sunlight that filters in through a crack in the ceiling. Ever since his sister had a baby, everyone’s been acting very strangely. The boy begins to wonder why they never say who the father is, about what happened before his own birth, about why they’re shut away.A few days ago, some fireflies arrived in the basement. His grandma said, There’s no creature more amazing than one that can make its own light. That light makes the boy want to escape, to know the outside world. Problem is, all the doors are locked. And he doesn’t know how to get out.…
The Things We Wish Were True
Marybeth Mayhew Whalen - 2016
But behind the white picket fences lies a web of secrets that reach from house to house.Up and down the streets, neighbors quietly bear the weight of their own pasts—until an accident at the community pool upsets the delicate equilibrium. And when tragic circumstances compel a woman to return to Sycamore Glen after years of self-imposed banishment, the tangle of the neighbors’ intertwined lives begins to unravel.During the course of a sweltering summer, long-buried secrets are revealed, and the neighbors learn that it’s impossible to really know those closest to us. But is it impossible to love and forgive them?
Shall We Not Revenge
D.M. Pirrone - 2014
His investigation proves difficult when the neighborhood's Yiddish-speaking residents are reluctant to talk. But when the rabbi's headstrong daughter, Rivka, unexpectedly offers to help Hanley find her father's killer, the detective receives much more than the break he was looking for. Their pursuit of the truth draws Rivka and Hanley closer together and leads them to a relief organization run by the city's movers and shakers. Along the way, they uncover a web of political corruption, crooked cops, and well-buried ties to two notorious Irish thugs from Hanley's past. Even after he is kicked off the case, stripped of his badge, and thrown in jail, Hanley refuses to quit. With a personal vendetta to settle for an innocent life lost, he is determined to expose a complicated criminal scheme, not only for his own sake, but for Rivka's as wel
The Last of the Moon Girls
Barbara Davis - 2020
Eight years ago, she left the land that nine generations of gifted healers had tended, determined to distance herself from the whispers about her family’s strange legacy. But when her beloved grandmother Althea dies, Lizzy must return and face the tragedy still hanging over the farm’s withered lavender fields: the unsolved murders of two young girls, and the cruel accusations that followed Althea to her grave.Lizzy wants nothing more than to sell the farm and return to her life in New York, until she discovers a journal Althea left for her—a Book of Remembrances meant to help Lizzy embrace her own special gifts. When she reconnects with Andrew Greyson, one of the few in town who believed in Althea’s innocence, she resolves to clear her grandmother’s name.But to do so, she’ll have to decide if she can accept her legacy and whether to follow in the footsteps of all the Moon women who came before her.
The White League
Thomas Zigal - 2004
Blackmail, a secret organization hiding within the elite society of New Orleans, a white supremacist running for governor of Louisiana; these are the key ingredients in this fine Southern crawfish boil of a novel about guilt, privilege and racism in one of America's most exotic cities.