The Black Minutes


Martín Solares - 2006
    As police officer Ramón “el Macetón” Cabrera discovers, Blanco had been writing a book about a 1970s case dealing with the murder of several young schoolgirls in Paracuán by a man known as el Chacal. Cabrera realizes that whoever killed Blanco wanted to keep the truth about el Chacal from being revealed, and he becomes determined to discover that truth. The Black Minutes chronicles both Cabrera’s investigation into Blanco’s murder and goes back in time to follow detective Vicente Rangel’s investigation of the original el Chacal case. Both narratives expose worlds of corruption, from cops who are content to close the door on a case without true justice to powerful politicians who can pay their way out of their families’ crimes. Full of dark twists and turns, and populated by a cast of captivating—and mostly corrupt—characters, The Black Minutes is an electrifying novel from a brilliant new voice.

The Red Fox


Anthony Hyde - 1985
    This book sets the standard for Cold War suspense novels."High entertainment of the first order."THE BOSTON GLOBE

Resurrection Man


Eoin McNamee - 1995
    In this, his brilliant and shocking debut novel, Eoin McNamee announced his arrival as one of the leading chroniclers of Ireland's fractured past.

36 Righteous Men


Steven Pressfield - 2019
    They are real, and they are being murdered.As the bodies pile up and the world tilts into chaos, Manning and Dewey must protect the righteous ones from a ruthless killer able to beguile his victims and command them against their will. The detectives find their traditional arsenal of bullets and blades of little use against a foe who seems to anticipate their every move.Joining forces with a disgraced but brilliant rabbinical scholar and a renowned anthropologist—who’s also the last of the righteous ones—Manning and Dewey set off on a perilous quest from New York to Gehenna to defeat a murderer who won’t stop until he’s killed everyone.

Revenge


Gaynor Torrance - 2014
    With no one reported missing, no apparent motive and no obvious suspect the investigation proves to be far from straightforward.As suspicion falls upon those associated with the privately-owned woodland, it soon becomes clear that there are sinister secrets they are determined to hide.Detective Inspector Jemima Huxley is put in charge of the case. But Jemima has dark secrets of her own…Can Jemima lay her personal demons to rest? Or will the case threaten to overwhelm her?And can she catch the killer before more women turn up dead…?REVENGE is the first crime novel in a new British detective series featuring DI Jemima Huxley - a chilling serial killer thriller with a dark twist.

The Hedgehog, the Fox & the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science & the Humanities


Stephen Jay Gould - 2003
    In building his case, Gould shows why the common assumption of an inescapable conflict between science and the humanities is false, mounts a spirited rebuttal to the ideas that his intellectual rival E. O. Wilson set forth in his book Consilience, and explains why the pursuit of knowledge must always operate upon the bedrock of nature' s randomness. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox is a controversial discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our time.

To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918


Edward G. Lengel - 2008
    Their commander, General John J. Pershing, believed in the superiority of American "guts" over barbed wire, machine guns, massed artillery, and poison gas. In thirty-six hours, he said, the Doughboys would crack the German defenses and open the road to Berlin. Six weeks later, after savage fighting across swamps, forests, towns, and rugged hills, the battle finally ended with the signing of the armistice that concluded the First World War. The Meuse-Argonne had fallen, at the cost of more than 120,000 American casualties, including 26,000 dead. In the bloodiest battle the country had ever seen, an entire generation of young Americans had been transformed forever. To Conquer Hell is gripping in its accounts of combat, studded with portraits of remarkable soldiers like Pershing, Harry Truman, George Patton, and Alvin York, and authoritative in presenting the big picture. It is military history of the first rank and, incredibly, the first in-depth account of this fascinating and important battle.

The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers


Virginia Spencer Carr - 1975
    Author of such landmarks of modern American fiction as Reflections in a Golden Eye and The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers was the enfant terrible of the literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Gifted but tormented, vulnerable but exploitative, McCullers led a life that had all the elements--and more--of a tragic novel.From McCullers's birth in Columbus, Georgia, in 1917 to her death in upstate New York in 1967, The Lonely Hunter thoroughly covers every significant event in, and aspect of, the writer's life: her rise as a young literary sensation; her emotional, artistic, and sexual eccentricities and entanglements; her debilitating illnesses; her travels in America and Europe; and the provenance of her works from their earliest drafts through their book, stage, and film versions.To research her subject, Virginia Spencer Carr visited all of the important places in McCullers's life, read virtually everything written by or about her, and interviewed hundreds of McCullers's relatives, friends, and enemies. The result is an enduring, distinguished portrait of a brilliant, but deeply troubled, writer.

No Night is Too Long


Barbara Vine - 1994
    For months after the murder off the Alaskan coast he'd heard not a word. No policeman at his door asking questions. Nothing. And then the letters began. At first they seemed almost innocuous accounts of historical events. But a common theme emerged quickly. It was particulrly germane to Tim, and it related directly to murder. In No Night Is Too Long, Barbara Vine has written a tour de force, rich in characters and setting, a remarkable novel by an internationally celebrated master of her craft. To research the book, the author and her hushand embarked on a boat trip from Seattle up the Alaskan coast. The stark beauty of that experience provides No Night Is Too Long with an extraordinarily vivid sense of place. The novel's exploration of sexual identity and guilt represents a departure for Vine. Its resolution - as always - is a stunning surprise.

Langrishe, Go Down


Aidan Higgins - 1966
    Their relationship, told in lush, erotic, and occasionally melancholic prose, comes to represent not only the invasion and decline of this insular family, but the decline of Ireland and Western Europe as a whole in the years preceding World War II. In the tradition of great Irish writing, Higgins's prose is a direct descendent from that of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and nowhere else in his mastery of the language as evident as in Langrishe, Go Down, which the Irish Times applauded as "the best Irish novel since At Swim-Two-Birds and the novels of Beckett."

The Testament


Elie Wiesel - 1980
    In this remarkable blend of history and imagination, Paltiel Kossover meets the same fate but, unlike his real-life counterparts, he is permitted to leave a written testament. From a Jewish boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, Paltiel traveled down a road that embraced Communism, only to return to Russia and discover a Communist Party that had become his mortal enemy. Two decades later, Paltiel's son, Grisha, reads this precious record of his father's life and finds that it illuminates the shadowed planes of his own. Passionate and fierce, this story of a father's legacy to his son revisits some of the most dramatic events of our century, and confirms yet again Elie Wiesel's stature as "a writer of the highest moral imagination" ("San Francisco Chronicle").

The Trunk Murderess


Jana Bommersbach - 1992
    Then she hacked up their bodies, stuffed the pieces into a trunk, and took them by train to Los Angeles as her baggage. If history is right, she was sentenced to die but ""cheated the gallows"" by acting insane. She spent nearly 40 years in Arizona's insane asylum-flummoxing officials by escaping six times. If history is right, she only got her freedom at age 66-after serving more time than any other convicted murderer in the history of the nation--because Arizona was finally tired of punishing her. But if history is wrong, Winnie Ruth Judd's life was squandered in a horrible miscarriage of justice. Award-winning journalist Jana Bommersbach reinvestigates the twisted, bizarre murder case that has captivated the nation for decades. She not only uncovers evidence long hidden, but gets Winnie Ruth Judd to break her life-long silence and finally speak. In telling the story of this American crime legend, Bommersbach also tells the story of Phoenix, Arizona-a backwater town that would become a major American city-and the story of a unique moment in American history filled with social taboos. But most of all, she tells the story of a woman with the courage to survive.

Los Alamos


Joseph Kanon - 1997
    Former publishing executive Joseph Kanon's first novel does all of that, and adds a layer of acute perception about recent history that immediately vaults it up into the hallowed heights of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Charles McCarry's The Tears of Autumn--thrillers that deserve space next to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. In the spring of 1945, as the war in Europe is coming to an end, a former police reporter turned Army Intelligence agent named Mike Connolly arrives on the high mesa above Santa Fe, New Mexico, where J. Robert Oppenheimer and a team of scientists are rushing to finish their atomic bomb. A security man has been found battered to death, and Connolly's job is to see if it is anything more than the sordid sex crime it appears to be. Using a devilishly clever mixture of real and fictional characters, Kanon spins out a story that manages to be audacious, persuasive--and totally engrossing.

The Naked Man


Jill Amy Rosenblatt - 2015
    Be a good girl and come over here and I’ll make it worth your while.”It’s an offer NYC college student Katerina Mills should refuse. But how can she?A desperate situation....After ditching her cheating lover (and boss), she’s stuck in dead end temp jobs. Her dad just ditched her mom and his promise to pay Kat's college tuition bill.She has two weeks to come up with $14,000 or she's out of her apartment, out of school, and out of luck. A dangerous world....Katerina falls into a job as a "fixer” for New York City's wealthy and privileged men. They have problems they need “fixed,” quick and on the QT, and they’re willing to pay.The rules are simple: collect the money, use your contacts, fix the problem.Kat's first job is easy: tail a shopaholic socialite wife. But who’s tailing Kat? Kat’s second job is not so easy: steal a VHS tape hidden in an antique chest. She can’t do it alone. To be a thief, she needs a thief: handsome, reclusive Alexander Winter to be exact. Kat soon learns the real rules for a fixer: there are no rules, there are no refunds. Get in. Get results. Get gone.As every step brings her closer to her goal and closer to danger, there’s one rule left for Katerina Mills to learn: once you’re in, there’s no getting out.

Trollope


Victoria Glendinning - 1992
    But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field. The author does say that some of it is imagined and she cannot prove what she says happened or is said, but she is "sure of it" herself.