Book picks similar to
Parnell: A Novel by Brian J. Cregan


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Eustace


S.J. Harris - 2013
    Convalescing in bed, his world is confined to the four walls of his grand and gloomy room. His days are spent in wild imaginings, punctuated by the occasional visit from his mother and a legion of Aunties, who fuss and smother Eustace.But then his wicked uncle arrives in a cloud of pipe smoke, accompanied by a swelling cast of prostitutes, hoodlums, drunkards and assorted hangers-on. Suddenly Eustace finds himself transformed from invalid to the star of a glittering and decadent social scene, serving drinks and holding court from his enormous bed. That is, until his Uncle's past begins to catch up with him...Eustace is blackly comic, surreal and exquisitely rendered. It marks the debut of a brilliant new graphic novelist.

Yellow Hair


Andrew Joyce - 2016
    It is losing its identity, its lands, and its dignity. He not only adapts, he perseveres and, over time, becomes a leader—and on occasion, the hand of vengeance against those who would destroy his adopted people.Yellow Hair documents the injustices done to the Sioux Nation from their first treaty with the United States in 1805 through Wounded Knee in 1890. Every death, murder, battle, and outrage written about actually took place. The historical figures that play a role in this fact-based tale of fiction were real people and the author uses their real names. Yellow Hair is an epic tale of adventure, family, love, and hate that spans most of the 19th century. This is American history.Awarded Book of the Year by Just Reviews.Awarded Best Historical Fiction of 2016 by Colleen's ReviewsAndrew Joyce is the recipient of the 2013 Editor’s Choice Award for Best Western for his novel, Redemption: The Further Adventures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

The Wedding Dress: Masquerade Bride


Samantha Bayarr - 2010
    But in order to accept it, she must move away from her childhood sweetheart, Jonathon, whom she hoped was on the verge of proposing. When a wealthy, older gentleman visits the bookstore one day, he spins a tale of Annabelle, his childhood sweetheart, and talks of a family curse that tore them apart more than fifty years ago. While searching her grandmother’s attic for the wedding dress worn by three generations before her, Amy stumbles upon clues in an old steamer trunk that could help lead the stranger to his Annabelle. But what does this curse have to do with her? When Jake, Henry’s grandson, gets involved, everything becomes more complicated than Amy bargained for. How can she help Henry and break the curse without destroying her own chance at true love?

I Am Alfonso Jones


Tony Medina - 2017
    He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her. But as he is buying his first suit, an off-duty police officer mistakes a clothes hanger for a gun, and he shoots Alfonso.When Alfonso wakes up in the afterlife, he’s on a ghost train guided by well-known victims of police shootings, who teach him what he needs to know about this subterranean spiritual world. Meanwhile, Alfonso’s family and friends struggle with their grief and seek justice for Alfonso in the streets. As they confront their new realities, both Alfonso and those he loves realize the work that lies ahead in the fight for justice.In the first graphic novel for young readers to focus on police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, as in Hamlet, the dead shall speak—and the living yield even more surprises.Foreword by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy.

Bad Faith


Annie Jocoby - 2017
    Her former client, John Robinson, who she walked on a technicality, went on to kill again. John's second victim was a young, vibrant mother of two. After suffering with the devastating guilt about the evil that she unleashed back onto the street, Harper retreats to her old haunt, a bar called Charlie Hooper's, as she confronts her old demons.Before she has a chance to completely drown her sorrows, Harper is called to defend Heather Morrison, a transgendered youth who is accused of killing her mother in cold blood. Heather insists that it was self-defense; Harper has her doubts.As Harper gets further into investigation of the case, she discovers an evil beyond anything that she knew was possible. Her investigation of a church leads her to a Reverend who preaches hatred from the pulpit and possibly more.Harper gets closer to the truth, yet further away from proving anything in a court of law. Her case seems to be sinking, and nothing can possibly save it.

The Outlaws


Jason Vail - 2014
    Eustace is the bastard son of an earl, Giselle the sheltered daughter of a dotting gentry father, and Robert the son of an impoverished village carpenter. In ordinary times, their lives would not intersect. But when Robert breaks his uncle out of Earl Roger FitzWalter’s gaol, he sets in motion a series of events that sends their lives colliding in a maelstrom of murder and revenge that drives them all outside the laws and customs of England. Step into the tumultuous years of the Twelfth Century, and stand alongside Eustace as he schemes to inherit his father’s title, lands, and power, using every means within his grasp; Giselle as she fights to free herself from a forced marriage and to save her inheritance; and Robert as he struggles to rise above the limitations of his birth in the face of Eustace’s quest for vengeance. A saga to rival Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, The Outlaws sweeps from serene English villages and quiet forest glens, to French battlefields, remote Welsh fortresses, and even the court of King Henry II, where nobles and clergy vie for power and wealth, and disputes are often decided with steel and blood. The Outlaws is sure to please fans of the Stephen Attebrook mysteries, for it reveals the truth about the founding of the powerful Attebrook family — a secret that family would sooner forget.

The Storyteller and his Three Daughters


Lian Hearn - 2013
    But now he is starting to wonder if the new world has left him behind.Just when he thinks he will never write again, his own life and the lives of the people around him begin to spiral out of control – providing the inspiration for the greatest story he has ever told. A story of love, jealousy, intrigue, and betrayal.Set against the background of Japan's first incursions into Korea, Sei offers a wise and witty reflection on the nature of storytelling, its perils and delights, its lies and, ultimately, its truth.

Seeing Red


Kathryn Erskine - 2013
    He's a kid growing up around black car grease, white fence paint, and the backward attitudes of the folks who live in his hometown, Stony Gap, Virginia.Red's daddy, his idol, has just died, leaving Red and Mama with some hard decisions and a whole lot of doubt. Should they sell the Porter family business, a gas station, repair shop, and convenience store rolled into one, where the slogan -- "Porter's: We Fix it Right!" -- has been shouting the family's pride for as long as anyone can remember?With Daddy gone, everything's different. Through his friendship with Thomas, Beau, and Miss Georgia, Red starts to see there's a lot more than car motors and rusty fenders that need fixing in his world.When Red discovers the injustices that have been happening in Stony Gap since before he was born, he's faced with unsettling questions about his family's legacy.

Lucky Bastard


Charles McCarry - 1998
    John Fitzgerald Adams, a charming liar and womanizer who is convinced that he is the bastard son of JFK, runs for President in a campaign organized and financed by a foreign secret service. A darkly entertaining study of sex and power in the era of the Clinton White House.

September, September


Shelby Foote - 1978
    And in Memphis, two white men and a white woman are planning to capitalize on the confrontation between the races by kidnapping the grandson of a wealthy black entrepreneur and pinning the crime on white supremacists. The problem is that Podjo, Rufus, and Reeny have only an amateur's understanding of what a kidnapping entails -- and a total, terrifying incomprehension of their victims.In September September a magisterial historian of the Civil War charts its distant repercussions in the streets of the contemporary South. By turns wryly comic, ribald, and chilling, Shelby Foote's novel is at once a convincing thriller and a powerful tragicomedy of race.September September has been adapted by Larry McMurtry for the Turner Network Television film Memphis, starring Cybill Shepherd.

The James Version


Ruth Dugdall - 2010
    The story of 'The Murder in the Red Barn', this book describes the events through the eyes of Ann Marten, a woman suffering guilt and despair following the terrible history of her family, as she tells her tale to a reluctant young rector. James Coyte has taken up his called in Suffolk, but sinks into his own despair as Ann's story unfolds.

The Autobiography of an Execution


David R. Dow - 2010
    "People think that because I am against the death penalty and don't think people should be executed, that I forgive those people for what they did. Well, it isn't my place to forgive people, and if it were, I probably wouldn't. I'm a judgmental and not very forgiving guy. Just ask my wife."It this spellbinding true crime narrative, Dow takes us inside of prisons, inside the complicated minds of judges, inside execution-administration chambers, into the lives of death row inmates (some shown to be innocent, others not) and even into his own home--where the toll of working on these gnarled and difficult cases is perhaps inevitably paid. He sheds insight onto unexpected phenomena-- how even religious lawyer and justices can evince deep rooted support for putting criminals to death-- and makes palpable the suspense that clings to every word and action when human lives hang in the balance.

Whisper on the Wind


Elizabeth Elgin - 1992
    For men, an era of terrible devastation, broken lives and perhaps a glimpse of heroism. But for many women, a time of opportunity, a new-found freedom, a challenge in a changing world. For Kath Allen and Roz Fairchild it’s a time for shadowy secrest and forbidden love…Against the express wishes of her long-absent husband Barney, Kath joins up as a landgirl and moves from the bustle of Birmingham to work on Mat Ramsden’s farm in the Yorkshire countryside. For the first time in her life she feels she belongs. Kath blossoms there like a flower in the sun and, free from the rigid restrictions of Barney and his family, begins to believe that she has a right to happiness on her own terms. But freedom can bring temptation. And temptation can be dangerous.Next door the Fairchild estate has been harnessed for the war effort. Roz, exempted from call-up to work on the land, has something to hide from her grandmother…but her grandmother too has secrets of her own.

Lunatic Soup


Andrew Fraser - 2008
    After being convicted and disbarred, Fraser became the confidant of one of Australia’s most notorious serial killers, Peter Dupas. What he learned made him the Homicide Squad’s secret weapon. Angry at his treatment in jail and his excessive sentence, the long–time defence lawyer enjoyed the irony of his situation: the authorities who destroyed his career now needed his cooperation. There was never any doubt that Andrew would give evidence, even though he knew that the defence would try to destroy his credibility by bringing up the past he desperately wanted to forget. Fraser paints a vivid picture of the grim, terrifying, and futile reality of maximum security prison life and of his time spent with the murderers, psychopaths, and paedophiles. Lunatic Soup relates his harrowing experiences of the justice system as a prisoner and on the stand as a witness in a murder trial.

The Girl in the Picture


Melissa Wiesner - 2021
    And as she reads the words in the article, Tegan almost stops breathing. Was coming here a terrible mistake?When Tegan’s family is torn apart by a terrible tragedy, she runs away in search of somewhere to keep safe from the past that haunts her, and the painful secrets she’s never told anyone. Arriving in Copper Canyon, Colorado, where wooden storefronts line the quiet streets and no-one knows her name, Tegan breathes easy for the first time in years. And when she grows close with Jack, another lost soul who won’t talk about his home, it seems she’s found the perfect companion to explore the mountain landscapes with.But just as Tegan starts to think maybe safety isn’t a place, it’s a person, she notices the box of photos and newspaper clippings that Jack takes everywhere in the trunk of his car. Who is the woman in every frame? And why does she look so familiar…?Tegan knows the only way to protect herself, and keep her dark family history locked away, is to discover more about the woman in Jack’s photos. But when she does, will the truth help her build a new life, or will it send her running once more?An absolutely unforgettable and breathtaking novel about love, loss, and the secrets we’re all hiding. Perfect for fans of Kerry Fisher, Diane Chamberlain, and Kerry Lonsdale.