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Sandstorm
James Rollins - 2004
And now the search for answers is leading Lady Kara Kensington; her friend Safia al-Maaz, the gallery's brilliant and beautiful curator; and their guide, the international adventurer Omaha Dunn, into a world they never dreamed existed: a lost city buried beneath the Arabian desert. But others are being drawn there as well, some with dark and sinister purposes. And the many perils of a death-defying trek deep into the savage heart of the Arabian Peninsula pale before the nightmare waiting to be unearthed at journey's end: an ageless and awesome power that could create a utopia... or destroy everything humankind has built over countless millennia.
Narcopolis
Jeet Thayil - 2012
In Rashid's opium room the air is thick and potent. A beautiful young woman leans to hold a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her dark eyes. Around her, men sprawl and mutter in the gloom, each one drifting with his own tide. Here, people say that you introduce only your worst enemy to opium.Outside, stray dogs lope in packs. Street vendors hustle. Hookers call for custom through the bars of their cages as their pimps slouch in doorways in the half-light. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. There are too many of them to count in this broken city.Narcopolis is a rich, chaotic, hallucinatory dream of a novel that captures the Bombay of the 1970s in all its compelling squalor. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.
The Grave Tattoo
Val McDermid - 2006
What she never expected was to find herself at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives on the line. And with each new lead she pursues, death follows hard on her heels….
Calling Sehmat
Harinder Sikka - 2008
It is a story of a Kashmiri woman who married a Pakistani Army Officer so as to provide the Indian intelligence with invaluable information during the Indo-Pak War of 1971. Sehmat devised unique ways in her quest to get closer to the top brass in Pakistan. She almost single-handedly torpedoed Pakistans war plans through indefinable courage, wit and determination and was responsible for saving lives of scores of Indian soldiers. The story gives rare insight to the humble yet brave people of Kashmir who not only swear by India but also are willing to sacrifice their very being for the service of our nation.
White Crow
Marcus Sedgwick - 2010
Rebecca is an unwilling visitor to Winterfold - taken from the buzz of London and her friends and what she thinks is the start of a promising romance. Ferelith already lives in Winterfold - it's a place that doesn't like to let you go, and she knows it inside out.
The Tenth Unknown
Jvalant Nalin Sampat - 2011
The book starts during the reign of Emperor Ashoka and ends in 1947, when India gains independence.The core of The Tenth Unknown revolves around a race between different individuals to acquire a set of nine books. The books are some of the world’s best kept secrets, and it is believed that the person who gets the entire set will gain information that can lead to unlimited power and wealth.The books mentioned in this novel have been protected down the ages by a secret society of men appointed by Emperor Ashoka. They are scattered around the world and hidden, and the clues about their location are hidden in the ruins of the ancient Nalanda University.The attempts to trace the books take on a new pace when the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler manages to lay his hands on one of the books. This causes panic across the world. The British are worried at the prospect of empowering the dictator with unlimited wealth and power.The task of tracing the remaining books and ensuring their safety falls on Prithvi Rathore, who is more English than Indian. Prithvi is quite happy with his comfortable existence and his regular game of cricket. However, his grandfather, who was a member of the secret society formed to protect the books, insists that it is Prithvi’s duty to trace the remaining books and keep them safe. A reluctant Prithvi agrees to take up the task. His main opponent in this task is Joseph Heidler, a rather untypical Nazi officer who has been ordered by Adolf Hitler to get the remaining books.As the two men try to fulfill their assigned tasks, the race becomes intensely action packed. Will the good men win over the bad? Who will be able to decrypt the clues hidden amidst the broken ruins of Nalanda?
The Tournament
Matthew Reilly - 2013
Under its charismatic Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, it is an empire on the rise. It has defeated Christian fleets. It has conquered Christian cities.Then the Sultan sends out an invitation to every king in Europe: send forth your champion to compete in a tournament unlike any other.We follow the English delegation, selected by King Henry VIII himself, to the glittering city of Constantinople, where the most amazing tournament ever staged will take place.But when the stakes are this high, not everyone plays fair, and for our team of plucky English heroes, winning may not be the primary goal. As a series of barbaric murders take place, a more immediate goal might simply be staying alive…
Quest for Kriya
Rahul Deokar - 2014
But when Kriya vanishes without a trace, Shakti is unwittingly swept into a cataclysmic vortex of greed, lust and betrayal. Shakti meets Shiva, a struggling Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and discovers that love is an enigmatic cosmic force. Shakti and Shiva are thrust on a frantic race against time through the dark Mumbai underbelly, forbidden Thailand islands, and treacherous cliffs in the Andaman Sea, where danger lurks in every shadow. As they get closer to the truth, they realize that millions of innocent lives are at stake. Quest for Kriya is an epic saga of love, friendship and sacrifice. The journey is incredible. The emotions are real. The transformation is eternal.
Immortal Plague
Aiden James - 2011
A very dark secret.An archivist for the Smithsonian Institute and also a part-time operative for the CIA, no one would ever suspect the handsome ‘thirty-ish’ William is in fact the most reviled human being to ever walk the earth. His infectious warmth and sense of humor make such an assertion especially hard to believe.But long ago, William Barrow had another name…one that is synonymous with shame and betrayal: Judas Iscariot.Forced to walk the earth as a cursed immortal, William/Judas is on a quest to reclaim the thirty silver shekels paid to him in exchange for Jesus Christ. Twenty-one coins have now been recovered—thanks in large part to the help from his latest son, the esteemed Georgetown University history professor, Alistair Barrow.Ever hopeful the complete coin collection will buy him a full pardon from God and end his banishment from heaven, William plans a visit to a remote village deep within Iran’s Alborz Mountains to retrieve ‘silver coin number twenty-two’. But the CIA has a different objective for this trip, one that pits both father and son against an unscrupulous Russian billionaire searching for something else that’s just as precious within the ancient mountains of Iran… something that threatens peace in the modern world if William and Alistair fail to reach it first.
The Lives of Others
Neel Mukherjee - 2014
Each set of family members occupies a floor of the home, in accordance to their standing within the family. Poisonous rivalries between sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business threaten to unravel bonds of kinship as social unrest brews in greater Indian society. This is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider. The eldest grandchild, Supratik, compelled by his idealism, becomes dangerously involved in extremist political activism—an action that further catalyzes the decay of the Ghosh home.Ambitious, rich, and compassionate, The Lives of Others anatomizes the soul of a nation as it unfolds a family history, at the same time as it questions the nature of political action and the limits of empathy. It is a novel of unflinching power and emotional force.
Hey Dad! Meet My Mom...
Sandeep Sharma - 2015
What happens when a 10 year old child, who claims to be your future son, comes to you to help you find a perfect match for his mother? What happens when eventually you start to doubt on his intentions? What happens when a girl starts to turn your dreams into nightmares? What happens when your ‘Future son’ starts to haunt you? What happens when your FUTURE starts to bleed in your PRESENT through your PAST? ‘Hey Dad! Meet My Mom!!!’ is nothing less than a roller coaster ride of comedy, fear, love and don't forget to expect the unexpected!
The American Boy
Andrew Taylor - 2003
England 1819: Thomas Shield, a new master at a school just outside London, is tutor to a young American boy and the boy's sensitive best friend, Charles Frant. Drawn to Frant's beautiful, unhappy mother, Thomas becomes caught up in her family's twisted intrigues. Then a brutal crime is committed, with consequences that threaten to destroy Thomas and all that he has come to hold dear. Despite his efforts, Shield is caught up in a deadly tangle of sex, money, murder and lies -- a tangle that grips him tighter even as he tries to escape from it. And what of the strange American child, at the heart of these macabre events, yet mysterious -- what is the secret of the boy named Edgar Allen Poe?
December 6
Martin Cruz Smith - 2002
DECEMBER 6 Amid the imperialist fervor of late 1941 Tokyo, Harry Niles is a man with a mission -- self-preservation. But Niles was raised by missionary parents and educated in the shadows of Tokyo's underworld -- making his loyalties as dubious as his business dealings.Now, on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Niles must decide where his true allegiances lie, as he tries to juggle his Japanese mistress and an adulterous affair with the wife of a British diplomat; avoid a modern-day samurai who is honor-bound to kill him; and survive the machinations of the Japanese high command, whose plans for conquest may just dictate his survival.Set in a maelstrom of personal temptations and mortal enemies, with a remarkable anti-hero caught in a land he can never call his own, DECEMBER 6 is a triumph of imagination, history, and riveting storytelling.
The Last Mona Lisa
Jonathan Santlofer - 2021
Exactly what happens in the two years before its recovery is a mystery. Many replicas of the Mona Lisa exist, and more than one historian has wondered if the painting now in the Louvre is a fake, switched in 1911.Present day: art professor Luke Perrone digs for the truth behind his most famous ancestor: Peruggia. His search attracts an Interpol detective with something to prove and an unfamiliar but curiously helpful woman. Soon, Luke tumbles deep into the world of art and forgery, a land of obsession and danger.A gripping novel exploring the 1911 theft and the present underbelly of the art world, The Last Mona Lisa is a suspenseful tale, tapping into our universal fascination with da Vinci's enigma, why people are driven to possess certain works of art, and our fascination with the authentic and the fake.
The River Widow
Ann Howard Creel - 2018
Essentially trapped, Adah must plan an escape.But when she develops feelings for the one person essential to her plan’s success, she faces a painful choice: Will she choose to risk everything saving Daisy or take the new life offered by a loving man?