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In "No Second Chance" Dr. Marc Seidman is living in a suburb of New Jersey with his new wife, Monica, and their baby daughter, Tara, when the shocking attack occurs. Marc is left barely clinging to life. When he wakes up at the hospital, he learns that Monica is dead and that Tara is missing from her crib. For two weeks there is no word. Then a ransom demand is made for Tara's return. But Marc makes a mistake. Something goes terribly wrong during the money drop. The ransom money vanishes. The kidnappers get away. Crushed, Marc waits by the phone for another call. Days turn to weeks as Marc remembers the ransom note's ominous warning: THERE WILL BE NO SECOND CHANCE. But eighteen months later he gets a package with a chilling note: WANT A SECOND CHANCE? And inside the package the kidnapper provides proof that Tara is still alive... |
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"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" is an astonishing novel - funny, sad and utterly unputdownable. Fifteen-year-old Christopher has a photographic memory. He understands maths. He understands science. But this intelligent youth lives in the functional hinterland of autism - and what he can't understand are other human beings. Every day is an investigation for him, because of all the aspects of human life that he does not quite get. When the dog next door is killed with a garden fork, Christopher becomes quietly persistent in his desire to find out what has happened and tugs away at the world around him until a lot of secrets unravel messily. |
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Tragedy is a word too often used. Nevertheless, in "The Star of the Sea" Joseph O'Connor manages to achieve a real sense of the tragic, as personal dramas play themselves out against the background of the Irish potato famine. As passengers die of starvation and disease in steerage, a drama of adultery, inadvertent incest and inherited disease plays itself out in first class. O'Connor raises, and does not attempt definitively to answer, real questions about responsibility and choice. Bankrupt aristocrat Meredith is emigrating, pursued by the hatred of his tenants and the memory of his mad hero father. His children's nurse, Mary has memories of lost love to torment her, as well as of the husband and child who died of hunger. And the ballad singer Mulvey has both his monstrous past and the certain promise that he will be tortured to death by the Liable Men should he not kill Meredith. |
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In "31 Songs" Nick Hornby writes about 31 songs - most of them loved, some of them once loved, all of them significant to him. He begins with Teenage Fanclub's "Your Love is the Place that I Come From" and ends with Patti Smith's "Pissing in a River", encompassing varied singers along the way, such as Van Morrison and Nelly Furtado, and songs as different as "Thunder Road" and "Puff the Magic Dragon" (reggae style). Along the way, he discusses, among other things, guitar solos, llosing your virginity to a Rod Stewart song, singers whose teeth whistle and the sort of music you hear in the Body Shop. He also talks movingly and intelligently about other matters on which those songs impinge - his relationship with his autistic son, his limited but real capacity for spirituality - but the songs rather than Hornby and his life are his real subject. |
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"The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency", published in 1998, introduced the world to the one and only Precious Ramotswe, the engaging and sassy owner of Botswana's only detective agency. "Tears of the Giraffe" took us further into this world, and now, continuing the adventures of Mma Ramotswe, "Morality for Beautiful Girls" finds her expanding her business to take in the world of car repair and a beauty pageant. Like the earlier books, this one critiques forces of progress and modernisation as well as patriarchalism, and aims to portray a positive picture of modern Africa, one all too rarely seen in the West. As always, the story is delivered in a delightfully fluid and simple well-paced prose. |
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At the end of "City of Bones" Harry Bosch quit the LAPD, but in "Lost Light" he's back in a new role: one that will give him more freedom to pursue the cases that compel him. When he left the LAPD Bosch took a file with him: the case of a film production assistant murdered four years earlier during a $2 million robbery on a movie set. The LAPD, now operating under post 9/11 rules, think the stolen money was used to finance a terrorist training camp. Thoughts of the original murder victim were lost in the federal zeal, and when Bosch decides to re-investigate, he quickly falls fouls of both his old colleagues and the FBI. But it's not just the case which is keeping Bosch awake at night. When the investigation enables him to meet up with an old friend, shadows from his past come back to haunt him... |
Top 30 Literature and Fiction Books
