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And So to Murder | John Dickson Carr | null | Monica Stanton, the pretty and rather naive daughter of a British clergyman, is the author of a surprisingly scandalous best-seller. As a result, she has been hired as a script writer for Albion Films, working with William Cartwright, a script writer from the world of detective novels. However, she is not going to be working on her own novel—she is helping Cartwright adapt his latest detective novel, And So to Murder. Tilly Parsons is a dumpy, bustling chain-smoking American woman in her early fifties who is the highest-paid scenario writer in the world, imported from Hollywood at great expense to adapt "punch up" the screenplay of another Albion film. Glamorous movie star Frances Fleur, whose punctilious husband Kurt von Gagern selects all her parts, will be the star. Against the backdrop of Pineham Studios and Fleur's current movie, a series of mysterious attempts on Monica's life begin—they are exceptionally nasty and completely inexplicable, involving sulphuric acid. When someone poisons Tilly Parsons' cigarette and nearly kills her, Sir Henry Merrivale helps Chief Inspector Masters to bring home the crimes to their unlikely perpetrator. |
Murder in the Submarine Zone | John Dickson Carr | null | Nine oddly-assorted passengers aboard the S.S. Edwardic are crossing the Atlantic during World War II, with the constant threat of attack by German submarines. When one passenger is murdered, apparently for a military secret, Sir Henry Merrivale must solve the mystery. But can he contend with the fact that the killer's fingerprint doesn't match anybody on the ship? |
Confessions of A Video Vixen | null | 2,005 | Confessions of a Video Vixen recounts Steffans' life from her troubled girlhood living in poverty in St. Thomas, through abuse, drugs, rape and living as a teenage runaway who turns to stripping and hip hop modeling to support herself and, later, her young son. Originally published in 2005 by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, the book was immediately a New York Times bestseller. (The 2006 paperback edition includes bonus material, and also made the NYT bestseller list.) The book created a stir when it went on sale because of Steffans' allegations of abuse at the hands of her then-husband rapper, Kool G Rap and her claims that she had sexual relationships with numerous famous music stars and athletes, including Jay-Z, Ja Rule, Bobby Brown, Dr. Dre, DMX, Xzibit, Diddy, Usher, Shaquille O'Neal and Irv Gotti. |
Desert of the Heart | Jane Rule | 1,964 | Evelyn Hall is an English professor from the University of California. She arrives in Reno to establish a six-week residency to attain a divorce. After being married for 15 years, she is overwhelmed with guilt for feeling as if she is ruining her husband's mental health. While in Reno, she stays in the guest home of Frances Packer with other women who are also awaiting their divorces. Frances also lives with Walter, her 18-year-old son and her late lover's 25-year-old daughter, Ann Childs. Evelyn and Ann are startled at how alike they are in appearance, despite their 15-year age difference. Ann works as a change operator at a local casino and a relatively successful cartoonist. Ann is revealed to reject significant relationships in her life and although is romantic with both men and women, refuses to become attached to anyone. She is ending a relationship with her boss named Bill, that was significant enough to make her friends believe they were to be married. Ann's best friend is Silver who works with her at the casino as a dealer, and is also a sometime lover. Evelyn and Ann begin a friendship that evolves into a romantic relationship in which Evelyn must deal with her guilt after being asked by her husband's doctor to divorce him for his own good. Despite the symptoms of his deep and chronic depression, Evelyn takes the responsibility for the failure of the marriage and his depression upon herself, but after divulging how caustic she is to Ann, she is relieved to realize that the responsibility is not hers to take. And Ann must deal with committing to a relationship wholeheartedly. Being employed by the casino, she is rather well-paid, but is stifled within the atmosphere there, though she continues to work despite her abilities. Ann is fired from the casino after a slot machine is stolen on her shift when she is distracted by Evelyn being at the casino. Her previous split with Bill is not amicable, despite Bill beginning to date another of his employees. There is some suspicion that Bill is spying on Ann and Evelyn, and he threatens to contact Evelyn's husband's lawyer to notify him of Ann and Evelyn's lesbian relationship, but the divorce is finalized without his interference. Immediately after the final hearing, Evelyn and Ann decide to live together "for a while." |
The Cat and the King | Louis Auchincloss | 1,981 | Mixing fact and fiction, the Duc de Saint-Simon recounts three episodes in which he and his wife involve themselves in the notorious schemings of King Louis XIV's Versailles. Throughout, the famous courtier's attitudes toward the King and court shift. In the first story, the young Duc, appalled at the King's calculating matches of his illegitimate offspring with prominent aristocrats, works to subvert the wedding of one of Louis' nephews, but is thwarted when his adversaries threaten an exposé of the homosexuality of both the King's brother and the narrator's patron, the Prince de Conti. In the second, Saint-Simon is maneuvered into acting as messenger between Conti (who is briefly King of Poland in 1697) and Conti's mistress, Madame la Duchesse. In this the Duc is subverted by his own wife's schemings. Finally, in later years, rumors of incest are deployed by both sides in a struggle to determine which of two ill-pedigreed "princesses" will be matched with one of the King's legitimate grandsons. The high-minded Saint-Simon emerges from these intrigues disillusioned ("We had all...been made part of the Versailles system"), but resolves (after the King's death) to record the monarch's "great style" and quest for glory. |
L'Ève future | Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam | 1,886 | Villiers opens the novel with his main character, a fictionalized Thomas Edison, contemplating the effects of his inventions on the world and the tragedy that they were not available until his invention. Interrupted in his reverie, Edison receives a message from his friend Lord Ewald, who saved his life some years before and to whom he feels indebted. When Ewald calls, he reveals that he is close to suicide because of his fiancée, Miss Alicia Clary. Alicia is described as being physically perfect but emotionally and intellectually empty. She will say whatever she believes others want to hear. Far from having any ambition or goals of her own, she lives her life based on what she believes is expected of her. Ewald describes his frustration with the disparity between her appearance and her self and confides that though he can have no other, she is so hopeless that he has resolved to kill himself. Edison replies by offering to construct for Ewald a machine-woman in the form of Alicia but without any of her bothersome personality. He shows Ewald the prototype of the android, named Hadaly, and Ewald is intrigued and accepts Edison’s offer. Edison reveals that he has invited Alicia to his residence at Menlo Park in order to set the process in motion. He then explains to the still somewhat doubtful Ewald how he will interact with the android and how natural it will all feel. Ewald then presses Edison to tell him why he created Hadaly in the first place. Edison relates a long story about Mr. Edward Anderson who was tempted into infidelity by a young woman named Miss Evelyn. His indiscretion, brought about by the guile of Miss Evelyn, ruins his life completely. Edison then says that he tracked down Miss Evelyn only to discover that she was not as she appeared, rather she was horribly ugly and her beauty was entirely the work of cosmetics, wigs, and other accessories. Edison created Hadaly in an effort to overcome the flaws and artificiality of real women and create a perfect and natural woman who could bring a man true happiness. Edison then takes Ewald back to Hadaly and explains to him the exact mechanical details of her functioning: how she moves and talks and breathes and bathes, all the while explaining how natural and normal Hadaly’s robotic needs are, comparing them to similar human actions and functions. After the details of the android's functioning and construction are covered, Alicia arrives and is escorted in. Edison convinces her that she is being considered for an important theater role. Over the course of the next weeks, she poses for Edison and her exact physical likeness is duplicated and recordings of her voice are made. Eventually, Edison sends Alicia away and introduces Ewald to his android-Alicia without revealing that it is not the real thing. Ewald is very taken with her and she secretly reveals to him that she is in fact not simply an android but has been supernaturally endowed with the spirit of Sowana, Edison’s mystical assistant. Ewald does not reveal this fact to Edison but instead leaves with Hadaly-Alicia-Sowana. However, before he can reach home to his new life with his new lover, Ewald’s ship sinks and the android, who was traveling with the cargo, is destroyed. |
Seeing is Believing | John Dickson Carr | null | Arthur Fane arranges an unusual entertainment for his uncle, a long-term guest, and a few other witnesses—he hires Dr. Rich to hypnotise his wife Victoria. The guests, but not Victoria, have been shown that a gun in the room is actually harmless; everyone, including Victoria, is aware that a dagger provided is made of rubber. The hypnotised Victoria is invited to shoot her husband, and refuses; when told to stab him, though, she agrees. Unfortunately, someone has substituted a real dagger for the rubber one, even though everyone in the room agrees that it would have been impossible to make the substitution. Although Sir Henry Merrivale is busily engaged in dictating his scandalous and slanderous memoirs to a ghost writer, he takes a hand to solve the murder with his friend Chief Inspector Masters, and brings things to a head just as another death occurs. |
The Gilded Man | John Dickson Carr | null | Wealthy art connoisseur Dwight Stanhope, his glamorous wife Christabel and his pretty daughters, sensible Betty and neurotic Eleanor, have invited a couple of guests to their mansion "Waldemere"; Vincent James, the "weekend perennial -- charming and a bit thick" and Nick Wood, an attractive young man about whom little is known. What is odd is that Dwight Stanhope's valuable paintings, including a Rembrandt, have been moved from the burglarproof gallery to the main floor, and their insurance policy has been cancelled. Everyone in the mansion (built by Flavia Jenner, a Victorian actress of easy virtue, and including her own private theatre) has the jitters. No one is really surprised when there's a huge clatter in the middle of the night and a masked burglar is found stabbed in front of the paintings—but everyone is amazed to see that the dead burglar is Dwight Stanhope. Sir Henry Merrivale arrives and suspicious events begin to happen thick and fast; he mixes investigation with an uproarious performance as a stage magician at a children's show and solves the crime. |
She Died a Lady | John Dickson Carr | null | Elderly Dr. Luke Croxley narrates a story with a very old theme set against the English village of Lynmouth. Rita Wainwright is 38, "a mature beauty with a weakness for younger men". Her gentle husband, Alec, more than 20 years older, seems more interested in radio broadcasts of World War II news than in his wife's notorious affair with a handsome young American actor, Barry Sullivan. Rita and Barry decide to run away together but a radio performance of Romeo and Juliet apparently turns their minds to a romantic double suicide. After the broadcast, their twin lines of footprints lead up to the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean, and none return. When their bodies are found, though, it is found that both of them had been shot through the heart at very close range, "body range, with some small-calibre weapon". Sir Henry Merrivale is in the neighbourhood posing for a portrait by a local artist (in the garb of a Roman Senator), and agrees to investigate this baffling mystery, which he solves just in time to take his place in the House of Lords. |
Lost Luggage | Colin Brake | null | When the TARDIS goes missing in a busy spaceport, the Doctor and you must race against time and across space to find it, before the Doctor's incredible spaceship is lost forever. |
Soul Circus | George Pelecanos | null | Strange is working on the defence of Granville Oliver. Oliver has been charged with the murder of his uncle and is facing the death penalty. Strange is trying to locate Devra Stokes who can discredit the testimony of the prosecution's witness Phillip Wood. Strange finds that Stokes is working in a beauty salon that is paid for by Wood's successor Horace McKinley. She refuses to testify. Quinn is working on a separate case for his girlfriend. He believes a group of young men have the information he needs but is unable to get them to talk to him. Dewayne Durham and Horace McKinley are considering eliminating one another's organizations to cut down on competition. McKinley's enforcers James and Jeremy Coates perform a drive by shooting on Jerome Long and Alante Jones as they deal drugs for Durham. Durham is forced to respond and instructs Long to kill the Coates brothers. McKinley learns of Stokes taling to Strange and tries to intimidate her by sexually assaulting her. Stokes is enraged by his actions and decides to testify. Strange and Quinn are employed to locate Olivia Elliot by Mario Durham. They find her quickly and pass the information to Durham. Durham rents a gun from Ulysses Foreman and approaches Elliot. They argue and he murders her and conceals her body in the woods. He returns the gun to Foreman and admits to firing it but claims he did not shoot anyone. Foreman rents the gun to Mario's brother Dewayne for Jerome Long. Mario goes into hiding with his friend Donut. Long manages to kill Jeremy Coates but is shot by James immediately afterwards. Jones drives his car at James Coates and kills him but is shot as he does so. The police tie the shooting to the murder of Olivia Elliot by matching the gun. Durham learns of the link between the incidents when the police question him; he puts Mario into hiding and begins to suspect that Foreman is working against him. Strange and Quinn are questioned by the police and give them Durham's identity. They try to track Mario themselves as they feel partly responsible for Elliot's murder but the police beat them to Donut. Donut refuses to give up Mario's whereabouts to either the investigators or the police. Mario begins to follow in Donut's footsteps and sells fake narcotics on the street. One of his customers returns and murders him. Strange finds that his home has been burgaled and his files relating to the Oliver case stolen. He has an answerphone message threatening him with obstruction of justice as one of the witnesses he interviewed gave him information that he should have passed to the police. Strange was unaware of the requirement and seeks advice from Oliver's legal team. Strange meets with Devra and agrees to relocate her for safety. He begins to follow McKinley and tracks him to Foreman's home where he sells weapons. Strange has Quinn meet him there and Quinn tails McKinley back to his home but is noticed. Strange tracks an employee of Foreman's to a gun store and observes him buying a weapon under false pretences. Strange passes the information to a contact in the police. He asks Quinn to watch over Devra. Quinn leaves Devra unwatched to return to question the men about his missing girl but is again unsuccessful. He is increasingly agitated about being intimidated by the men. Strange and Quinn meet at the beauty salon and find that McKinley has abducted Stokes. They ambush him at his home and rescue Stokes. McKinley has had his enforcer Mike Montgomery take her son to a separate location. Quinn takes Stokes home and is relieved to find that Montgomery has had a change of heart and returned the boy. Strange cuts McKinley and McKinley threatens him in a way similar to the answerphone message. Strange leaves McKinley injured but alive. McKinley calls Foreman for help when he is unable to get hold of Montgomery and tries to recruit him into attacking Durham. When they confront Durham Foreman shoots McKinley and rants about not taking orders from drug dealers. Despite their success with Stokes Quinn is unable to let go of his failure with the other case. He again visits the group of men, this time taking his gun, he intimidates them into giving him the information he needs which he writes down. As he drives away the men ambush and murder him at a stop sign. Months later Oliver is convicted and faces the death penalty despite Stokes testimony. Dewayne Durham and Ulysses Foreman have been arrested and are facing trial. Quinn's missing girl is found using the information he wrote down. Angry at his partners violent death Strange returns to the gun store at night and burns it down. |
Nayanmani | Binod Bihari Verma | 1,997 | It is a social novel which describes the situation of Mithila in the decade after Indian independence. It depicts the superstitious beliefs of the people, folk culture, and human values in the background of a natural calamity. |
He Wouldn't Kill Patience | John Dickson Carr | null | The Dell mapback edition of 1950 is subtitled "Murder in the Zoo". Edward Benton, director of the Royal Albert Zoological Gardens, is worried about what the year 1941 will bring to his beloved collection of snakes and reptiles; it seems as if they will be destroyed, at the request of the Department of Home Security, to prevent poisonous snakes from escaping in the case of an air raid. Nevertheless, he is still making arrangements to add to the exhibits, including a recent acquisition, "Patience", a Bornese tree-snake. Accomplished stage magicians Carey Quint and Madge Palliser, whose professional rivalry goes back four generations, are visiting the zoo, each to research certain snakes in connection with an illusion which both claim was invented by an ancestor. They quarrel, and somehow the glass cage breaks that encloses a tropical American lizard. The lizard immediately attacks Sir Henry Merrivale, also a visitor. After the lizard is subdued, all three are led by the security guard to Dr. Benton's home on the grounds, to make their explanations and apologies. He is easily mollified, and his daughter Louise invites all three to dinner that evening. Louise is worried about her father's mental equilibrium. When the three arrive to find what seems to be an empty house, with dinner burning away merrily in the kitchen, they are perplexed—when they discover Dr. Benton has apparently locked all the doors and windows of his study, sealed them with paper strips, and gassed himself, they are aghast. Louise asks Sir Henry to investigate because she is sure that, even in committing suicide, her father would not have killed the innocent tree-snake, Patience. Sir Henry must investigate against the backdrop of England in 1940, with airplanes constantly buzzing overhead. The involvement of two professional magicians, however, points out a path to a solution—to make people think they've experienced something which indeed they have not. Sir Henry corners the murderer and extracts a confession in a dramatic climax that involves a rattlesnake, a mamba and a cobra. |
Hey Rube | null | null | Most of the columns were written primarily as sports commentary, but tend to branch into other subjects -- commonly politics and social commentary -- either due to a perceived relevance to the sports news, or as a result of Thompson's natural discursive tendencies. Some articles are focused on subjects entirely outside sports. like 'Love Blooms in the Rockies' and 'Fear and Loathing in America', which deal with the 9/11 attacks and Thompson's marriage. Thompson also chimes in on world events at the time of writing the articles. He voices his distaste for the 2000 presidential election, promotes warning as he writes through September 11, and tells of his crusade to free Lisl Auman from a harsh lifetime in prison sentence. Included in Hey Rube is a copy of a personal report written about Thompson during his time in the United States Air Force at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. It requests that he be reassigned duties and advises that Thompson should not do any unauthorized writing or accept outside employment with local media. Thompson also includes a personal political statement and an “Honor Roll” which includes the names of such figures as Johnny Depp, Fidel Castro, Al Gore, and Anita Thompson. The title is taken from the 19th century slogan Hey, Rube!, a slang term of circus folk used to rally other carnies to their aid during a fight with a patron from the local town. Thompson elaborates in the introduction on the meaning of the term and the zeitgeist of old-fashioned circuses from the golden era that spawned the term. |
The Curse of the Bronze Lamp | John Dickson Carr | null | Lady Helen Loring doesn't believe in the ancient Egyptian curse associated with an ancient artifact, a bronze lamp that is a gift from the Egyptian government. It comes from a tomb that Helen and her father, Lord Severn, helped excavate. In defiance of the dire predictions of an Egyptian soothsayer, she brings the lamp back to Severn Hall, her ancestral home in England. At the door, Helen stepped out of the car, leaving her friends to follow her into the Hall. Less than three minutes later, they did—and Helen had vanished. On the floor, in the middle of the vast entrance hall, were her coat and the bronze lamp. Luckily, Sir Henry Merrivale is nearby and unafraid of any and all spirits and soothsayers; after another murder shocks the inhabitants of Severn Hall, he solves both the disappearance and the murder. |
My Late Wives | John Dickson Carr | null | Roger Bewlay is a murderer; the British police are sure he's a murderer, and so is noted detective and explainer of the impossible, Sir Henry Merrivale. Bewlay has married at least four women who promptly vanish on their honeymoons. Unfortunately, Bewlay himself has also vanished. Years later, a well-known actor receives the script of a play about Roger Bewlay from an anonymous source, which he determines to produce and in which he will star. The script contains information known only to the police, one witness and Roger Bewlay himself. That reopens the old case and involves the actor, his good-looking female director, and a woman named Mildred Lyons who soon turns up dead in the actor's bedroom. Sir Henry Merrivale must identify Roger Bewlay's new identity and work out an extremely ingenious place to hide a corpse. |
Mercury | Ben Bova | 2,005 | Mance was the chief visionary and engineer behind the skytower, a super space elevator which ran from Ecuador all the way into low Earth orbit. When religious fundamentalists and agents of the scheming Yamagata Corporation sabotage the skytower, however, millions are killed; Mance is faced with his own guilt for the tragedy and sees himself as ostensibly responsible. He is arrested and put on trial. Things turn out even worse for Mance when his friends, bioengineer Victor Molina and Rev. Elliott Danvers, abandon him, and he is exiled to a life of hard work and misery in the Asteroid Belt, far from his beloved wife Lara—upon whom the double-crossing Victor Molina had always harbored designs. For a time, he escapes his fate in the Belt by being inducted into the crew of an ore hauler, where for a while he contemplates his life and comes to the conclusion that he was set up. Ultimately he falls for the captain's beautiful young daughter Addie. When the same forces responsible for the destruction of the skytower destroy the freighter, Mance manages to survive by having been outside, tethered to the ship as punishment from the captain for having been caught with his daughter. Rescued against all odds, Mance is brought to the moon to recuperate, where is able to assume the identity of the ships' late first officer, Dante Alexios, by undergoing extensive nano reconstruction to make him appear outwardly identical to Dante Alexios. With his new persona, Mance/Dante leads up a successful engineering career, which empowers him to plot his revenge against those whom he blames for his downfall: the simple but good-natured New Morality clergyman Elliott Danvers, and Molina (who has since married Lara with whom he has a child) and the Yamagata Corporation. Mance lures the three to Mercury where he manages to infiltrate the Yamagata operations and cause financially ruinous delays to their Mercurian project by planting Martian rock samples containing organic compounds there. These he allows to be discovered by Molina, who believes them to be authentically Mercurian and heralds them as a great discovery. Finally, he frames the Rev. Danvers for the trickery in order to also ruin his career, which succeeds flawlessly—to the extent that Danvers takes his own life. Yet things go awry for Mance when he confesses to Lara that it was he who set up Molina for the fall. However justified it may have been, Lara cannot accept it, nor can she return to Mance/Dante. Crushed, Bracknell turns the focus of his ruined life to consummating his final revenge on the leader of the Yamagata Corporation himself. However, it is in trying to slowly and agonizingly destroy the life of Yamagata, by exposing him to the brutal elements of the planet Mercury for a prolonged period of time, that Mance perhaps finally realizes that revenge has ruined him, and feels regret upon hearing of Danvers' fate. Furthermore, he had caught the wrong Yamagata; it was the son of the billionaire industrialist who'd been culpable in he skytower disaster. In the end, both Yamagata and Bracknell perish in the Mercurian wastes, but the reader is led to believe, through his last will and testament, that Bracknell in his final moments beat his demons and became human again by taping a confession of his schemes while waiting to die. At the same time, Yamagata, who was gladly willing to die if only to protect his son, tapes a message to his son, imploring him to continue his true work in taking humanity to the stars in the near future. |
The Hercules Text | Jack McDevitt | 1,986 | The story emphasizes the various characters' reactions to the event, according to their specific scientific background. For example a priest's speculations on the implications for religion, a psychologist's theorizing about the aliens' psyches, the scientists' consideration of the implications of the new knowledge for their own specialties, and the president's concern for the implications for national defense. The novel is set in an ongoing Cold War scenario. Unlike other First Contact stories, there is no dialogue between the senders of the message and mankind, as the received radio signals have travelled through space for several thousand years. The message is received with a large radio telescope, the fictional Hercules Array, which was built on the far side of the Moon. It is later discovered, that the message was sent with an artificial Pulsar built by the alien race. This pulsar with the name Althea has been known by the scientists for years. It was believed to be a normal pulsar. However, what made it special was its almost perfectly regular interval between the observed pulses. One day some of the pulses suddenly fail to appear. This incident draws more attention to this particular pulsar, as the newly discovered gaps show a remarkable pattern. The first gap consists of one missing pulse, the second of two missing pulses and the third gap consists of four missing pulses. The following gaps also consist of numbers representing powers of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ...). The transmission of these numbers goes on for a couple of days until the pulsar falls completely silent. The silence lasts for several weeks until it breaks again. This time, not just a simple sequence of numbers is received by the Hercules Array. Now, a very large and complex amount of binary data is sent from somewhere close to Althea. Scientists are able to decipher this data. It consists of several mathematical and physical formulae and simple graphical information. Later, more complex information is found, e.g., parts of the sender's DNA, schematics for very advanced technology, philosophical texts or poems. Jack McDevitt addresses a couple of questions which are likely to arise if mankind should receive a message of extraterrestrial origin someday. The protagonists discuss the possible impacts on mankind following the announcement of the receipt of the message. * How would religious groups react upon coming to know of a second creation? * How would the proven existence of extraterrestrial life affect our daily life and culture? * What would be the reaction of people who do not believe in the authenticity of the message? The deciphered message contains a lot of information about advanced technology. How do people deal with this newly discovered advanced knowledge? * What ideas on using it do scientists, politicians, and the military have? * Would mankind be prepared for the great responsibility that would come together with this powerful technology? * How risky would it be for mankind to play with these totally new and not yet fully understood technologies? |
The House of the Wolfings | William Morris | 1,889 | The House of the Wolfings is Morris' romantically reconstructed portrait of the lives of the Germanic Gothic tribes, written in an archaic style and incorporating a large amount of poetry. It combines his own idealistic views with what was actually known at the time of his subjects' folkways and language. He portrays them as simple and hardworking, galvanized into heroic action to defend their families and liberty by the attacks of imperial Rome. Morris' Goths inhabit an area called the Mark on a river in the forest of Mirkwood, divided according into the Upper-mark, the Mid-mark and the Nether-mark. They worship their gods Odin and Tyr by sacrificing horses and rely on seers who foretell the future and serve as psychic news-gatherers. The men of the Mark choose two War Dukes to lead them against their enemies, one each from the House of the Wolfings and the House of the Laxings. The Wolfing war leader is Thiodolf, a man of mysterious and perhaps divine antecedents whose ability to lead is threatened by his possession of a magnificent dwarf-made mail-shirt which, unknown to him, is cursed. He is supported by his lover the Wood Sun and their daughter the Hall Sun, who are related to the gods. |
Heaven Eyes | David Almond | 2,000 | The novel is told from the first person, the first sentence being, “My name is Erin Law.” The author then introduces the other characters, and indeed, tells the entire story, through her. Erin lives at Whitegates, a home for "damaged children". Erin's father was a foreign sailor who left her mother after a brief affair. Years later, Errin was grief-stricken when her mother died. Many of the other children at Whitegates. Whitegates is run by a well-meaning but flawed woman named Maureen. Erin and January Carr and some other children frequently reject her superficial, half-hearted attempts at therapy. January Carr is Erin’s “running-away-friend”, and the two often escape from comfortable but suppressive Whitegates to live out of dumpsters in the city. One day, January decides to build a raft and float away down the river. Before leaving, Wilson Cairns tries to show Erin that the clay figures he is constantly molding actually come to life. Erin and January leave with their raft, but Mouse Gullane and his pet mouse Squeak insist on coming with them, Mouse tries to bribe them with money and small plastic toys he has dug out of the ground (one day Mouse hopes to uncover something really important buried in the earth). The others eventually allow him to come, even though they worry for the younger child’s safety. And indeed, they all almost die, as the raft is hurled along the fast-moving, polluted river and carried into the Black Middens, where they are all nearly engulfed by the mud. However, a strange young girl named Heaven Eyes rescues them. She cries, “Is you my sister? Is these mine brothers?” An old man whom Heaven Eyes refers to as Grampa tells her that they are not and that they should be dug back into the Middens. But she insists on bringing Erin, January, Mouse and Squeak into their home; a huge old stone building decorated with stone statues of angels. It is very close to the river. The building contains an old printing press, as well as boxes of corned beef, raisins, and chocolates. Grampa is still distrustful of the new children. Grampa is constantly writing in a book in which he records every thing he sees in and around the middens. Heaven Eyes shows them around the building, and Erin gets lost in a deep cellar, where she becomes spiritually lost and her despair over the death of her mother overcomes her. Heaven Eyes rescues her once more, stating that she must be careful as there are holes where one can slip into another place, a place of darkness. Grampa becomes more tolerant of Erin and her friends and allows them to help him dig in the Middens, which Mouse particularly enjoys. January, whoever, is very distrustful of Grampa and thinks they should leave. He begins to snoop around, despite Grampa’s warning, “No shenanigans”, and discovers evidence that Heaven Eyes was a child aboard a ship with her family. He suspects Grampa of kidnap and murder. When they find a body in the Black Middens, January feels vindicated, to the point that he threatens to leave the others behind and escape on his own if they refuse to come. Grampa becomes enraged and dangerous when he discovers January has been snooping. Heaven Eyes claims the body is a “saint”. That night, Errin and January dig up the body and discover that it is the mummified body of a dock-side worker that has lain in the mud for many, many years. They bring the body (or the”Saint”), back to land, and Heaven Eyes makes a bed for him. Grampa’s affection for all of them strengthens, and then, to their grief (especially Heaven Eyes’), he dies. “Lovely as lovely,” he says when Heaven Eyes tells him that Erin and her friends are her brothers and sisters. Then he becomes “Dead as dead,” according to Heaven Eyes. Then the mummified body of the Saint comes to life and guides Grampa’s spirit over the Black Middens and down into sparkling waters. When construction vehicles come to tear down the old building, and erect modern businesses in its place, Errin and her friends manage to rescue many of the treasures, including Grampa’s huge book. Then they take Heaven Eyes, whom they now call Anna May, back to Whitegates, where the extraordinary child is able to heal Maureen’s “damaged” soul. Maureen is able to finally become a true mother to the abandoned and orphaned children of Whitegates. Miraculously, January’s mother appears to take him home, and she is just as he imagined her. At Whitegates, Wison Cairns’ clay figures really do come to life. Erin and her friends vow to solve the mysteries of bygone decades recorded in Grampa’s book, and to continue his work. Errin explains that this story has no end and is part of all the other stories of the world. |
Assault on the Senses | null | null | Still suffering heartache over his lost love, Jill—the on-again, off-again girlfriend who most recently left for another ex-boyfriend—Kal's world becomes even gloomier when the whole college assumes he is the attempted rapist pictured in a wanted poster displayed throughout campus. After establishing an unlikely alliance with Katie, a vivacious campus newspaper reporter, the pair set out to prove Kal's innocence, find the true culprit, and possibly develop their own relationship in the process. The major theme the novel approaches is the wandering mentality quickly becoming synonymous with college students and recent graduates. Kal represents an extreme of that theme, constantly worrying if he's making the right choices about school, his major, his social life, his drinking problems and so on to the point of neuroticism. In his moments of deep pondering and worry, Kal often floats deep into a trance he coins "The Stare," similar to the "1,000-mile Stare" war veterans are known to have. During The Stare, Kal is oblivious to his surroundings, somehow focusing only on an internal voice in his head, imaginarily personified by a 16-year-old version of himself who is thoroughly disappointed with how the present version of himself has turned out. The book juggles a variety of subplots into one, as opposed to following a singular, linear story line. As the story unfolds, it takes turns between focusing on Kal and Katie's quest to find the real assailant and Kal's attempts to pull himself out of his self-made puddle of misery. |
The Skeleton in the Clock | John Dickson Carr | null | Martin Drake meets Jennifer West in an auction house. Three years ago, he had fallen in love with her during a brief but intense encounter on a railway platform—after which she vanished. Now it seems she is engaged to Richard Fleet, whom she's known since they were children together. And when they were children, Richard's father Sir George died when he fell off the roof of their home, Fleet House. It was generally accepted as an accident, but a series of mysterious happenings cause the case to be re-opened. Sir Henry Merrivale, detective and explainer of the impossible, is also at the auction and revives his old antagonism with Sophia, Dowager Countess of Brale, who is Jenny's grandmother. Arthur Puckston keeps the pub across the road from Fleet House and was an eyewitness to Sir George's death. When his daughter, Enid Puckston, is found murdered in what might be a haunted prison, Sir Henry takes a hand and reveals not only the identity of the murderer but the unusual psychology that underlies the case. |
A Graveyard to Let | John Dickson Carr | null | Sir Henry Merrivale, detective and explainer of the impossible, is visiting the United States. He has been invited to visit millionaire Frederick Manning, to "witness a miracle" at his country home. Manning's three children are nervous about a secret which their father has threatened to reveal very soon—although it is probably not his relationship with a lady named Irene Stanley, whom Manning freely admits he is "keeping". The morning after Sir Henry's arrival, and just as the house party hears police sirens drawing closer to the Manning home, Frederick Manning dives into the swimming pool, fully clothed, and vanishes. His clothes and hat float to the surface, but he is nowhere to be found. Sir Henry must untangle Manning's personal and business dealings and follow the trail of clues to find Manning and reveal a criminal. |
Night at the Mocking Widow | John Dickson Carr | null | The English village of Stoke Druid in Somerset has been plagued by a series of vicious anonymous letters written by a poison-pen who becomes known as the "Mocking Widow", after a forty-foot high rocky feature on the outskirts of the village. A middle-aged spinster who has been tormented by the letters' suggestions of sexual immorality commits suicide. Sir Henry Merrivale is offered an incredibly rare volume of memoirs by the village bookseller if he exposes the poison-pen, and accepts. During the investigation, a young woman is frightened nearly to death by the Widow's threats to visit her in her bedroom—she sees the Widow in her bedroom at the time and place previously announced, in circumstances that seem impossible for anyone to have been there. Then a village blackmailer who may have been the Widow's assistant is murdered, and Sir Henry brings the series of crimes home to their perpetrator. ja:魔女が笑う夜 |
Behind the Crimson Blind | John Dickson Carr | null | Sir Henry Merrivale is on vacation in Tangier, but cannot resist the opportunity to meet the challenge of a world-class criminal known as "Iron Chest", who always carried an ornate iron chest during his thefts. No one knows what Iron Chest really looks like, or how he manages to vanish without a trace after his thefts. After a red-carpet welcome from the local constabulary, Sir Henry becomes friendly with two young English couples resident in Tangier and works closely with them to solve the mystery of Iron Chest's identity. |
The Cavalier's Cup | John Dickson Carr | null | At Telford Old Hall, the past is a constant reminder in the present. Long-dead Cavalier Sir Byng Rawdon still haunts the house, and lately has been making his ghostly presence known, it seems. During his lifetime, he etched a poem into a leaded-glass window with a diamond that is a showpiece of the historic house, along with the heavily jeweled Cavalier's Cup, a family heirloom. When Sir Henry Merrivale and Chief Inspector Masters arrive to debunk the ghost, Masters agrees to spend the night in the Oak Room with the doors locked and windows latched. Masters falls asleep and, when he wakes up, he finds that the Cavalier's Cup has been moved from the locked safe and left standing on a nearby table. Also, Sir Byng's sword, which was hanging outside the Oak Room, has been placed at Masters' feet. Sir Henry and Masters must cope with Telford Old Hall's present-day inhabitants, a visiting American Congressman and Sir Henry's singing teacher in order to reveal who is behind the ghostly manifestations. |
Angel Pavement | John Boynton Priestley | 1,930 | The prologue depicts the arrival in London of Mr Golspie, who has come by steamship from an unnamed Baltic country. He discusses his immediate plans with the crew. The first chapter contains a detailed description of a fictional street in the EC postcode area called Angel Pavement, and the employees at Twigg & Dersingham. Business has not been good, and Mr Dersingham is trying to decide whom to sack. Mr Golspie arrives with a dispatch case containing a sample book of veneers and inlays, and asks to see Mr Dersingham. After a short delay, he is admitted to Mr Dersingham's office, and there is a long discussion, after which both men leave mysteriously. Mr Smeeth is baffled, especially when Mr Dersingham rings up and tells him to sack their senior traveller, Mr Goath. The second chapter introduces the tobacconist T. Benenden, and shows Mr Smeeth's family and home life. The next morning, Dersingham still has not returned to the office, and during lunch Mr Smeeth hears an unpleasant story about the failure of an umbrella firm called Claridge & Molton. He wonders if Mr Dersingham's absence indicates that they are all about to lose their jobs. But at five, Mr Dersingham returns and informs Mr Smeeth that the newcomer has offered a cheap supply of veneers from the Baltic, and their immediate future is assured. The next evening, Mr Golspie takes Mr Smeeth out for a drink at the White Horse, and tells him he ought to ask for a rise. A new typist is employed, Poppy Sellers, and Mr Dersingham invites Mr Golspie to a black tie dinner party at his home. The party is not a success, firstly because of the incompetence of the servants and secondly because of the unexpected arrival of the daughter, Lena Golspie, who quarrels with Miss Verever and Mrs Dersingham. The fourth chapter depicts one of the miserable weekends of the lonely young clerk, Mr Turgis, who wanders around London taking in any amusements he can afford. On the Monday after, he sees Lena Golspie for the first time, and is smitten. The fifth chapter depicts the narrow world of the typist, Miss Matfield, and her disastrous date with Norman Birtley, which is enlivened only by an accidental meeting with Mr Golspie, who gives her a box of chocolates on a whim. Later on Mr Golspie seems even more glamorous, when, shortly before leaving for a short trip, he asks her to take down letters on board the moored steamship Lemmala, and pours her some vodka. Mr Smeeth obtains a rise in salary, and after talking to Benenden, he celebrates by going to a concert at Queen's Hall, where he enjoys Brahms's First Symphony. On returning home he finds out that his daughter Edna has been sacked, but he is not terribly dismayed; he admits to his wife that he has been given a rise, something which he had been planning to keep secret. On Saturday night his wife's cousin, Fred Mitty, and his family, arrive for a party, and Mr Smeeth quickly comes to loathe them after they wreck the parlour and damage some of his clothes. Mr. Turgis has become obsessed with Lena Golspie, and jumps on a chance to see her again when he delivers some money from her father. She is bored, and takes him out to the cinema, flirting with him afterwards. They go on a second date, but she does not turn up to a third date, and he is devastated. Mr Golspie returns shortly before Christmas, goes away again on Christmas Eve, and returns again in time for New Year's Eve, on which he contrives to take Miss Matfield out for the night. They begin to go on dates secretly. Mr. Smeeth falls out with his wife, and is later disturbed by the departure of the office boy Stanley and a road accident involving the tobacconist Benenden. His son George seems to be employed by crooks, and Mr Golspie makes an arrangement with Mr Dersingham which strikes Smeeth as suspicious. He goes to visit Benenden at the hospital. Mr Turgis is consumed with jealousy, and one Friday night he turns up unannounced at Lena's home and fights with her. Thinking he has strangled her, he wanders at random through London before arriving at Twigg & Dersingham, where Mr Golspie and Miss Matfield are "working late". He admits everything in despair, and they drive to Carrington Villas, but Lena is not there — she has run off. Mr Golspie sacks Mr Turgis. He returns to his rented room and considers suicide. The next morning, Poppy Sellers arrives to deliver his last pay packet, and they have a long talk which reconciles him to the idea of spending time with her. In Chapter 11, Mr. Dersingham breaks the news to Mr Smeeth that Mr. Golspie has swindled them all and fled; the firm faces inevitable bankruptcy very soon. Mr. Dersingham returns home, obviously tipsy in front of their friends, and his wife is infuriated, turning panicky when she hears the news of the ruin. Mr. Smeeth returns home, and finding the Mittys there, throws them out. The epilogue depicts the unabashed Golspies on their way to South America. |
Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth | E. L. Konigsburg | 1,967 | Jennifer is narrated by the protagonist, Elizabeth in the title. She has moved into a big apartment building in a town where almost everyone lives in a house.Third Aladdin edition, p. 4. She doesn't yet have any friends when she meets Jennifer on her way back to school after lunch on Halloween day. Although dressed as a Pilgrim, Jennifer claims to be a real witch. After one Saturday meeting, Jennifer takes Elizabeth as an apprentice and sets weekly meetings with assignments. "For the first week ... you must eat a raw egg every day. And you must bring me an egg every day. Make mine hard boiled."Third Aladdin edition, p. 32. They meet only in school, the library, the park, or the woods between home and school. The apprenticeship is difficult for Elizabeth. Sometimes she gets mad at Jennifer, but "before I'd got Jennifer, I'd had no one."Third Aladdin edition, p. 40. After several weeks they choose a long project, to prepare an ointment that conveys the ability to fly. It will also be a test for Elizabeth's promotion from apprentice. The final ingredient will be a live toad, selected in advance. During the intervening months, the toad becomes a pet. Elizabeth stops Jennifer from adding him to the brew, which terminates the ointment and their friendship. Later she realizes that her affection for the toad was part of the test. Finally Elizabeth deduces that Jennifer's father is gardener at "The Estate" across the street, and they live on site. As Elizabeth proudly puts the clues together, Jennifer is walking to her door. Inside, Jennifer soon laughs and admits that she is not a real witch. The two girls become normal friends. |
The Mad King | Edgar Rice Burroughs | 1,926 | Set in the fictional European kingdom of Lutha, the protagonist is a young American named Barney Custer, of Beatrice, Nebraska, who is the son of an American farmer and a runaway Luthan princess, Victoria Rubinroth. Unaware of his royal blood, much less that he is a dead ringer for his relative Leopold, the current king of Lutha, Barney visits Lutha on the eve of the First World War to see for himself his mother's native land. As he arrives in Lutha, King Leopold has just escaped from his ten years' imprisonment at the hands of his scheming uncle, Prince Peter of Blentz. Much to his own and everyone else's confusion, Barney is naturally mistaken for the king, leading to numerous complications. Barney meets and falls in love with Princess Emma Von Der Tann, Leopold's promised bride and then becomes intimately involved in Luthan affairs, working to help the king and ultimately allowing himself to be proclaimed as king while impersonating Leopold to prevent Prince Peter from seizing the throne. He finally succeeds in foiling Peter's plans to become king himself by rescuing and fighting for the real king. Unfortunately, after his coronation, King Leopold discovers the shared love between Barney and Princess Emma, and Barney is forced to leave Lutha, mimicking the flight of his father years earlier, though his father left with a princess—Barney has only a soldier. Thus ends part one. In the second part of the novel, the European skies are darkening as World War I has begun. In Lutha, King Leopold has proven himself to be a bad ruler and has not yet persuaded Princess Emma to marry him. In Nebraska, Barney's soldier friend leaves the farm to return to Lutha. Barney himself is attacked by one of Prince Peter's henchmen and he decides to return to Lutha as well. After an adventurous trip across war-torn Europe, which includes being mistaken for a spy by the Austrians and barely escaping a firing squad, Barney finally reaches Lutha, where he once again is forced to impersonate the king in order to save Lutha from the advancing Austrians. He makes a diplomatic alliance with Serbia, and defeats the Austrians in person, thereby saving Lutha. The real king Leopold, who has been his antagonist throughout the second part of the novel, is mistaken for Barney and killed by one of Prince Peter's henchmen. Barney then consents to remain as king of Lutha, married at last to Princess Emma. |
The Grass-Cutting Sword | Catherynne M. Valente | 2,006 | The tale is a postmodern interpretation of the Japanese folk-tale of Ame-no-Murakumo-no-Tsurugi ("Heaven's Cloud-Gathering Sword"), which is taken from the collection of folk-lore in the Kojiki. The action shifts between the journey of the storm-god Susanoo who has been banished to earth in human form by his sister, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, as he attempts to slay the eight-headed serpent Yamata-no-Orochi. Valente also portrays the serpent's side of the story with a twist; the tale told by Orochi is intercut or added to by the seven maidens who have been sacrificed to the monster. |
A Man of the People | Chinua Achebe | 1,966 | A Man of the People is a first-person account of Odili, a school teacher in a fictional country closely resembling post-colonial Nigeria. Odili receives an invitation from a former teacher of his, Chief Nanga, who is now the powerful but corrupt Minister of Culture. As Minister, Nanga's job is to protect the traditions of his country, and though he is known as "A Man of the People," he instead uses his position to increase his personal wealth. The Minister's riches and power prove particularly impressive to Odili's girlfriend, who cheats on him with the minister. Seeking revenge, Odili begins to pursue the minister's fiancee. Odili agrees to lead an opposition party in the face of both bribes and violent threats. Odili triumphs over the Minister, however, when a military coup forces his old teacher from office. The book ends with the line: "you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest -- without asking to be paid." |
In Milton Lumky Territory | Philip K. Dick | 1,985 | It's 1958 and Bruce Stevens is a buyer for a national warehouse chain who passes through his hometown of Montario, Idaho whilst enroute to Boise on business. His reason involves hormones more than nostalgia, however, as a one-time girlfriend named Peg lives there now. It is at a party at her place where he meets, and quickly falls into a relationship with, a strangely familiar older woman who turns out to be one of his former, and least favorite, elementary school teachers, Susan Faine. She simultaneously hires him on as manager of her typewriter shop. Travelling salesman Milton Lumky informs Bruce of a warehouse full of imported, Japanese-made surplus typewriters, and so Stevens drives to Seattle to see this potential bounty for himself. He belatedly discovers that the typewriters all have Spanish language keyboards, and so he tries to pass these hot potatoes down along the line to his former warehouse employer. He reveals his nefarious intentions to Susan, who passes the information onto the warehouse chain which nevertheless decides to take them off his hands at a fair but unprofitable price for Bruce. He then enters a period of waffling and indecision, ultimately deciding to try altering all of the machines himself and selling them at the shop. Returning to Boise he informs Susan of his decision and sets to work, only to return the next morning to find that Susan has fired him and all of the typewriters are being loaded into a truck by one of his former co-workers at the warehouse chain. Distraught by this turn of events he rents a room and recalls one of his first encounters with Susan as his fifth grade teacher which evolves into a day dream about the pair opening up shop in Montarioand ultimately moving to Denver following the purchase of an expanded facility there and living happily ever after. |
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike | Philip K. Dick | 1,984 | Sometime between 1958 and 1962, Leo Runcible, a Liberal Jew, is working in the real estate field. On learning that Walt Dombrosio, Leo's neighbor, has had a Black visitor to his house in a "lily-white" suburb of Marin County, California, potential purchasers interrogate Runcible about the matter and ultimately incur his wrath over their narrow-minded bigotry. He thereby fails to close the deal and forfeits their friendship and a precious commission as well. But according to Leo's tortured logic it is Walt who's at fault for this unforeseen little debacle. So in retaliation Runcible opportunistically reports Dombrosio's later episode of drunk driving, leading to the loss of the latter's motor vehicle operator's license for a period of six months. Walt's wife Sherry then drives him to and from work every day, eventually landing a job working alongside her husband. Walt, however, being as he is an insecure, misogynistic, manipulating headcase, quits his own position over this incident and continues to fume over it as the weeks and months roll by. He eventually humiliates and manhandles his wife in front of their neighbors as a prelude to forcefully impregnating her with an unwanted child which she unsuccessfully threatens to abort. At the same time, Runcible has found what he believes to be Neanderthal remains in Carquinez, Marin County, and envisages rising property prices due to incipient archaeological interest and the avalanche of media coverage that naturally follows. As it turns out, however, Dombrosio is the culprit who modified and planted the modern human remains there to begin with. They are a legacy of the local 'chuppers' who developed facial, cranial and spinal deformations as a supposed result of the pollution of the local water supply. The novel ends with Walt Dombrosio, by far the most despicable character of the novel, essentially coming out on top. He discusses his flirtation with bankruptcy, via his purchase of the local substandard water company, with the local grammar school teacher, and he makes himself out as quite the unflinching hero in the process. There is also an extended scene, dovetailing almost imperceptibly into this conversation, in which Dombrosio visualizes his little family several years later after Sherry has presumably given birth to a malformed baby boy due to the possible teratogenic properties of the local water supply. |
Humpty Dumpty in Oakland | Philip K. Dick | 1,986 | In 1960, 58-year-old Jim Fergesson decides to sell his Oakland-based auto repair business and retire. This threatens to greatly inconvenience his business tenant, used car salesman Al Miller, who rents a lot from Fergesson to sell his battered but superficially reconditioned old jalopies. Chris Harmon, an entrepreneur, advises Fergesson to invest in a new super-garage located in Marin Country Gardens. Jim takes a fall in the mud and has a minor heart attack during a visit to the property to personally verify its existence. Miller is convinced that Harmon is corrupt and makes an amateurish attempt at blackmailing him over his alleged (then-illegal) sale of salacious audio recordings. At the same time Al enters employment with Harmon as a curiously unqualified salesman of Classical Music. This, as it turns out, was an innocent administrative error. Al's actual assignment now involves the mass marketing of, wait for it now, Barbershop Music. He sees conspiracies, machinations and double-dealings where there are none and strives mightily, but ultimately fails, to disrupt the final contract-signing between Fergesson and Harmon by playing on old Jim's paranoia. The strain of it all takes its toll on a recently injured, weakened, ailing Fergesson and he dies later that night at home. Al then discovers that his used car lot has been ferociously vandalised, although the exact time and date remain uncertain. This plays an unexpectedly important role in the unfoldment of subsequent events. Things are not quite what they seem, and coincidence plays a starring role here. His wife Julie quits her job and they run off together across Nevada, whilst Lydia, Jim's widow, discovers that her late husband's deal with Harmon was, contrary to what Al had sincerely believed, completely legitimate. Al is temporarily detained after Lydia threatens to sue him for fraud. Julie leaves him forever. In a moment of true serendipity Al starts a new relationship with his married real estate vendor, a vivacious, attractive "colored" woman by the name of Mrs. Lane. |
Nick and the Glimmung | Philip K. Dick | 1,988 | Nick, his family, and cat Horace leave Earth in 1992, because pet ownership has been criminalised on that world. Arriving at their new home, Plowman's Planet, the family encounter a series of mishaps at the hands of the planet's varied indigenous inhabitants. A wub carries their luggage, but eats a map, while werjes attack Horace, but their family befriend the aliens, leading to a gift, which turns out to be a history of Plowman's Planet itself. They make the acquaintance of the non-indigenous alien Glimmung, who secures travel for them in return for his lost history of their adopted world. The Graham family encounter duplicates of themselves, and trobes steal Horace. Nick tries to find his pet, but locates their driver, slain in a car accident, and still possessing the book. Nick has it copied, wounding the Glimmung, who rediscovers it. Nick then finds Horace with a Nick duplicate, and the cat chooses his original owner over the simulacrum. |
Wintle's Wonders | Noel Streatfeild | 1,957 | As the book begins, Rachel and her adopted sister Hilary are living with Rachel's mother. Rachel's father was a budding film star, but died just as his career was taking off, when the children were seven. As a result, the family is not well off; they must take in boarders in order to make ends meet. Hilary's mother was a dancer, and so Rachel and her mother are determined that Hilary will also become a ballet dancer. Hilary does have a talent for ballet, but is not at all interested in it. Their mother dies when the girls are ten, just before Hilary's audition for the Royal Ballet School, and the girls go to live with their Uncle Tom (their father's brother), his wife Cora and their child, Dulcie. Aunt Cora runs a dancing school to teach girls how to perform in troupes for pantomimes, musicals and reviews; the troupes are referred to as "Mrs Wintle's Little Wonders". Dulcie, who is almost a year older than Rachel and Hilary, is very attractive and a talented dancer, but also very spoiled by her mother. Mrs Wintle intended to take only Rachel, as she is a blood relative, but she decides to keep Hilary also, when she realizes how talented a dancer Hilary is. Rachel is horrified by the type of dancing taught at Mrs Wintle's school, which ranges from tap to acrobatics, and remains determined that Hilary will continue with her ballet. Rachel must also train as a Little Wonder, and though she works hard, she has no talent for the dancing required of the "Wonders". She only excels at elocution and acting lessons, which puts her in competition with her cousin Dulcie for theatrical roles. Mrs Storm, their tutor, decides to teach Rachel extra elocution, because it makes her happy. Hilary continues dancing and through the book enjoys acrobatics and musical theatre. Although Rachel tries to bribe her with money to finish ballet, Hilary continues to excel at acrobatics. This makes Rachel upset. |
Once Upon a Time in the North | Philip Pullman | null | Lee Scoresby, a 24 year old young Texan aeronaut, and his dæmon, the jackrabbit Hester, make a rough landing in Novy Odense, a harbour town on an island in the White Sea, in Muscovy. After paying for the storage of their balloon, Lee and Hester make their way into town, where Lee notes with surprise the presence of bears: some working, some just loitering about. He enters a bar to get something to eat and drink, and falls into conversation with a local journalist, Oskar Siggurdson, who explains that an election for Mayor of Novy Odense will take place later in the week. Siggurdson tells Lee that the overwhelming favourite — not the incumbent mayor, but a man called Ivan Dimitrovich Poliakov — has as a central policy a campaign to deal with the bears which hang around the town. Oskar mentions that the bears, once a proud race, now rank as "worthless vagrants". Lee learns with amazement that these bears are intelligent, can speak, and make and wear their own armour, though laws make it illegal for the bears to wear their armour in Novy Odense. At this point Lee intervenes in a conflict elsewhere in the bar, preventing the barkeeper from beating a drunk Dutch captain called van Breda, who has a ship tied up in the harbour but does not have permission to load his cargo and leave. Lee and van Breda get thrown out of the bar. Lee finds lodgings at a boarding-house and meets some of the fellow-guests over the evening meal: a young librarian called Miss Lund, a photographer, and an economist called Mikhail Ivanovich Vassiliev. Lee and Vassilev attend a meeting at the town hall organised by the mayoral candidate Poliakov. Armed men in purple uniforms patrol the meeting: Lee takes them for customs officers. Vassilev corrects him, explaining that they are security men from Larsen Manganese, a large mining company that are in league with Poliakov. Vassilew mentions that they have a large gun they are looking to use in a riot situation, but their conversation is interrupted when Lee runs into Siggurdson. Siggurdson introduces him to Olga Poliakova, Poliakov's daughter. While he is initially attracted to her, Lee is put off by her lack of intelligence. Lee falls asleep and therefore misses Poliakov's speech, but once it is over Siggurdson insists on introducing Lee to the politician. Poliakov offers to employ Lee as a mercenary, to help him take care of a situation at the harbour. Lee is about to agree when he spots another of Poliakov's associates, a man Poliakov introduces as Pierre Morton. Lee recognises the man, whom he met using the name Pierre McConville. Lee met McConville while working for a rancher called Lloyd, who got into a boundary dispute with a neighbour. This neighbour hired McConville to kill Lloyd's men one by one, including Lloyd's nephew, Jimmy Partlett, who was shot dead in front of a number of witnesses. Only one of these witnesses was willing to tell the truth in court, and when McConville was acquitted by a corrupt jury he shot the witness dead in the street and rode out of town. He was rearrested and sent to the capital of the province with an armed escort, but vanished en route. Recognising Morton as this enemy from his past, Lee turns down Poliakov's offer of employment, and leaves. In the middle of the night, back at the boarding-house, Lee hears Miss Lund crying and asks the cause. Miss Lund cryptically asks for his advice on a matter of honour. Lee gives his advice as well as he can understand the situation, to Miss Lund's gratitude. Lee returns to his bed baffled about what has just happened, but Hester berates him, saying that Miss Lund has obviously received a proposal of marriage, and Lee advised her to accept. At breakfast the next morning Vassilev explains that Miss Lund has a sweetheart in the Customs Office. During their conversation, Lee realises that the situation that Poliakov wanted him to deal with is most likely connected to Captain van Breda. Lee heads down to the harbour to investigate. He runs into van Breda again, who has still not been allowed to load his cargo. The two men head to a bar for a drink. Lee learns that van Breda's cargo, mining equipment and rock samples, is being held on a legal technicality, and will be impounded and sold at auction unless he loads it by the next day. Unfortunately, van Breda is being prevented from loading his cargo. The captain insists that Poliakov is waiting for his cargo to be impounded and will then buy it at a low price at auction. Lee, disgusted by Poliakov's behaviour, offers to help break into the warehouse and stand guard while van Breda loads his cargo. van Breda gratefully accepts, and the two head for the harbour. On the pavement outside the bar Lee is waylaid by one of the bears, who introduces himself as Iorek Byrnison. Iorek also offers to help van Breda, in order to get back at Poliakov. Iorek puts on the only piece of armour he currently has - a battered helmet - and the group set off, attracting a large crowd of onlookers as they near the harbour. Talking his way past the Harbour Master, Lee stands off against a group of men guarding the warehouse. Lee shoots one of them in the hip, knocking him into the water. The other men pull him out and then scatter. At that point the Larsen Manganese men deploy the riot gun mentioned by Vassilev earlier, but before they can do anything with it Iorek overturns it and pushes it into the harbour. With Iorek's help, Lee breaks into the warehouse. Van Breda gives him the Winchester rifle kept on-board his boat, and Lee heads up the floors to deal with the two gunmen positioned up there. He shoots the first in the shoulder and gets into a firefight with the second. The wounded man tries to strangle Hester, but Lee shoots him dead. The remaining gunman turns out to be Morton, who manages to shoot Lee in the shoulder and ear. Taunting him with the story of how he killed his armed escorts — by tying one of them to the ground, binding his daemon to a horse and forcing the two apart to an unbearable distance, causing the man to die an agonising death — Morton moves in for the kill, his snake daemon advancing ahead of him. Hester pounces on Morton's daemon and drags it towards Lee, forcing Morton to come stumbling out of his hiding place in pain. Lee shoots him in the chest, declares this revenge for what happened to Jimmy Partlett, and then shoots him dead. Outside, Larsen Manganese security men led by Poliakov have surrounded the warehouse. Before they can do anything, a group of Customs officers led by Lieutenant Haugland arrive, disperse the soldiers and crowd, and arrest Lee. Van Breda leaves with his ship and cargo, insisting that Lee keep the rifle as a token of thanks. It emerges that this is the same rifle Lee has when he is killed in his final gunfight, thirty-five years later. Haugland takes Lee back to the depot where his balloon is stored. On the way he explains that there is little the Customs board will be able to do to punish Poliakov, but they are still grateful to Lee for acting as he did. His balloon has been provisioned and made ready for departure, with all his belongings brought from the boarding house. Iorek arrives, and tends to Lee's wounds using bloodmoss. Lee has lost part of his ear. Oskar Siggurdson also arrives, but Lee pushes him into the harbour rather than giving an interview. Lee prepares to leave, thanking Haugland for his help. Haugland says that he should thank Miss Lund, who has just agreed to become his fiancée. Vassilev comes running into the depot, warning them that Larsen Manganese men are on the way with orders to kill Lee and Iorek. Lee suggests the bear should escape with him on his balloon, and the armoured bear agrees, saying that the aeronaut is obviously a man of the Arctic. When Lee asks what he means, Iorek points to his daemon as an Arctic hare, much to Hester and Lee's surprise. The balloon then leaves and Lee, Hester and Iorek fly away together. The book ends with Lee remarking that he was amazed to learn Hester is a hare, to which she replies, "I always knew I had more class than a rabbit." |
Torchlight to Valhalla | null | 1,938 | Morgen Teutenberg is an introverted 21-year-old woman nursing her dying father Fritz, who is a painter. She is developing a novel with her father's assistance. Out walking one day, she meets a very handsome young man, Royal St. Gabriel, a piainist who is quite taken with her. Royal pursues her romantically despite Morgen's lack of enthusiasm. Fritz dies very soon after Morgen meets Royal, and she is devastated by his loss and nonplussed by Royal's attention, not seeming to welcome it, but flattered by his gentlemanly manners and thoughtfulness. He buys her a radio and has it delivered to her house with a letter telling her when to tune in to a station. When she does, she hears a composition he has written for her that she imagines describes her perfectly. For five months they have a friendship characterized by Royal's unabashed love for Morgen, and her not sure how to tell him that she is grateful for his friendship, but does not want to pursue anything deeper with him. On Christmas Eve, overwhelmed with missing her father again, she turns to Royal and they sleep together. Royal is overcome with gratitude, not believing she has given herself to him at last, but Morgen does not enjoy the experience and realizes she went to him out of loneliness. She tells him this and he is hurt by it. He travels frequently and leaves her again, unsure of how to reach her. In his absence, she meets new neighbors who have moved in to a house nearby. A 16-year-old woman named Toni lives with her aunt. They have known each other before as children and Morgen is thrilled to have Toni back so close by. In sharp contrast to her relationship with Royal, she and Toni find themselves kindred almost immediately. They spend several nights together, and are quite hesitant to leave each other. When Royal returns, he notices something with Morgen is wrong immediately. She tells him, "I am two and the other is Toni." He is stunned, but when he accepts it, for the first time she realizes how much she likes him. Soon before Fritz dies, he comments that he is on will be on his way to Valhalla soon, and he is prepared for it because he is so very happy since Morgen has just finished a very good novel. He tells her that his happiness will serve as his torch in order to arrive there safely. His comment serves as the impetus for her to realize what should make her happy in her life. |
Land of the Living | Nicci Gerrard | 2,003 | One day, Abbie Deveraux wakes up in the dark to find she has been kidnapped and tied to a chair. She can't remember how she got there, all she knows is her loved ones may be looking for her and she wants to escape this prison. She manages to escape. Going back to her friends and boyfriend she realises that her last few days with them had been strange. Ending her relationship with her boyfriend and quitting her job, she couldn't remember any of this, not even the fact that she had been seeing someone else. As well as this her friends don't believe her kidnapping and being tied up. In a fear that he knows everything about her, where she lives, where she goes, she wants to trace back her steps of what she had done the days before she had disappeared. In an attempt for him not to find her, she changes her image and style. But the mysterious incident continues to haunt her, she can't think of anything else other than getting the man who had tormented her and to find the other girls that he mentioned he had killed. |
The Dragon's Teeth | Frederic Dannay | null | An eccentric millionaire, Cadmus Cole, visits the newly-founded offices of Ellery Queen, Confidential Investigations, in a rare incidence of disembarkment from his yacht. The investigation company is actually the brainchild and sole responsibility of his partner, "Beau" Rummell, an established private eye. The eccentric Mr. Cole pays $15,000 as a retainer to hire Ellery Queen for an investigation—the details of which he refuses to divulge, saying only "You'll know when the time comes." Upon his departure, he leaves behind a well-chewed fountain pen with which he's signed the retainer cheque. Almost immediately, Ellery's appendix bursts, and Cadmus Cole is reported dead and buried at sea. Rummell, in the guise of Ellery Queen, begins to investigate both the circumstances of Cole's death and his heirs; he soon meets two beautiful young women and the case becomes complicated by romance and the appearance of a claimant under the will. When the claimant is murdered, and Rummell married to one of the beauties, the real Ellery Queen must take a hand and solve the case, using the vital clue of the chewed fountain pen. |
The Winter of Frankie Machine | Don Winslow | 2,006 | Frank Machianno, a retired San Diego mafia hitman, cut his ties with the mafia many years ago. However, one day, his past catches up with him as the boss of Los Angeles family calls in for a past favor. Frank must oversee a meeting between the Detroit Combination and the Los Angeles crime family. Unfortunately, the meeting is revealed to be a "set-up", a scheme to kill Frankie. Someone from Frank's past wants him dead, and Frank has to find out why, how, and when. The problem is that the list of candidates is about the size of a phone book, and Frankie is rapidly running out of time. |
Calamity Town | Frederic Dannay | null | Ellery Queen moves into the small town of Wrightsville, somewhere in New England, in order to get some peace and quiet so that he can write a book. As a result of renting a furnished house, he becomes peripherally involved in the story of Jim Haight and Nora Wright. Nora's father is president of the Wrightsville National bank, "oldest family in town", and when the head cashier Jim Haight became engaged to his daughter Nora, he built and furnished a house for them as a wedding present. That was three years ago—the day before the wedding, Jim Haight disappeared, the wedding was called off, and the "jinxed" house became known as "Calamity House". Ellery rents it, just before the return of Jim Haight, and the wedding is soon on again. Ellery finds some evidence that Jim is planning to poison Nora and, after the wedding, she does display some symptoms of arsenic poisoning. But it is Jim's sister Rosemary who dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail. Jim is tried for the murder and it is only after some startling and tragic events that Ellery reveals the identity of the murderer. |
There Was an Old Woman | Frederic Dannay | null | Mrs. Cornelia Potts is the elderly matriarch of the Potts family, and their large fortune was earned by the manufacture of shoes, so when a murder mystery takes place at their New York estate, it's not surprising that the newspapers refer frequently to "the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe". Cornelia has had two husbands—one deceased, one living in the household—and three children by each. Her children by her first husband are all extremely eccentric. Thurlow Potts engages in dozens of lawsuits to protect the family honor; Louella believes herself to be a great chemist and inventor, a sentiment shared by no one else; and Horatio, an adult, is determined to live the lifestyle of a child of six. By contrast, her other three children by her second husband are relatively sane—the twins Robert and Maclyn, who run the business, and the beautiful Sheila. Thurlow's lawyer Charley Paxton is engaged to Sheila and invites Ellery Queen to dinner at the Potts mansion to meet the family. Thurlow challenges Robert to a duel, using revolvers from which the bullets have been carefully extracted but, when the duel is fought, Robert is shot dead because the bullets have been returned to the gun. Next, his twin Maclyn is shot in his bed, and the body is found with whip marks on his face next to a dish of broth. As Ellery postulates that the murders are somehow tied to the nursery rhyme, the next death is that of the Old Woman herself. She dies of heart failure and leaves behind a confession to the first two murders. It is only at the marriage of Charley and Sheila that Ellery finally realizes the truth of the bizarre events and unmasks the real criminal. |
The Murderer is a Fox | Frederic Dannay | null | Ellery Queen investigates a murder that took place a number of years ago and has blighted the present-day lives of members of the Fox family. "For the twelve years following the death of Davy's mother Jessica, and the trial of his father, Davy Fox has suffered inner torture. Davy knew he loved his wife ... as well as he knew he was going to kill her. He didn't know just when it was going to happen -- but when a man is born to be a murderer, it's only a matter of time before he claims his birthright. Love turns out to be a matter of life and death -- and it's up to Ellery Queen to make the choice!" |
Ten Days' Wonder | Frederic Dannay | null | Howard Van Horn, son of millionaire Diedrich Van Horn, comes to Ellery Queen with the request that Ellery investigate what Howard has been doing during a recent bout with amnesia. The trail leads to the small New England town of Wrightsville and what seems to be a love triangle with Howard's stepmother, the beautiful young Sally, from the "wrong side of the tracks" in class-conscious Wrightsville. A series of small and unusual crimes over the next nine days seem to be committed by Howard during amnesiac blackouts, and Ellery Queen suddenly realizes the bizarre pattern that underpins the series of crimes. But it is only after the murder of one Van Horn and the suicide of another that Ellery Queen can reveal the true pattern underlying events and bring a crime home to the criminal. |
Cat of Many Tails | Frederic Dannay | null | A strangler is killing Manhattanites, seemingly at random. The only common thread is the unusual silk cords that are used for the killings; blue for men and pink for women. Other than that, the victims come from all social classes and backgrounds, ethnicities, races, neighbourhoods, etc. The city is in a panic. Ellery Queen forms together a small group of people related to some of the victims, and some consultants, and works to determine the killer's reason for selecting these particular victims. When he finally realizes the thread that connects the victims, the murderer is revealed and peace returns to the city. |
Double, Double | Frederic Dannay | null | Ellery Queen investigates a series of murders that seem to be related by an old rhyme: "Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief". And at least one person in Wrightsville calls Ellery Queen "Chief". |
The Origin of Evil | Frederic Dannay | null | The beautiful young Laurel Hill asks Ellery Queen to investigate a series of unusual anonymous gifts that have been received by her father, Leander Hill, half of Hill and Priam, Wholesale Jewelers. Roger Priam is Leander's partner, who uses a wheelchair. The latest gift, a dead dog with a mysterious note in a silver casket around its neck, has caused Leander to have a heart attack and die. Now Roger Priam (and his sultry wife Delia, who attracts Ellery like a carnivorous plant) has started to receive unusual anonymous gifts as well. Delia's nudist son Crowe, who is Laurel's boyfriend, and a cast of servants, are also on the scene. The mysterious gifts include some poisoned tuna fish salad, a green alligator wallet, a burned book and a bundle of worthless stocks and bonds, all accompanied by cryptic and ominous notes, and it seems as though they date back to a mysterious and possibly violent incident in the past of both Hill and Priam that gets them started in the wholesale jewelry business. Ellery Queen works out the significance of the series of gifts and the link that connects the notes and arranges a dramatic surprise that traps the criminal—although the true criminal is not known until the final moments of the book. |
Right as Rain | George Pelecanos | 2,001 | The novel follows private investigators Derek Strange as he works on several cases in Washington DC. Strange's main case is to investigate the death of Chris Wilson. Strange focuses on ex-cop Terry Quinn who shot Wilson. Both were police officers and the shooting led to Quinn's discharge from the police department. The shooting was high profile and characterised as racially motivated; Quinn is caucasian while Wilson was African American. Quinn becomes involved in the investigation himself as he is desperate to clear his conscience. The internal police investigation of Quinn's shooting of Wilson determined that Quinn was blameless, that the shooting was "right as rain." |
A Drink Before the War | Dennis Lehane | 1,994 | Boston private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro receive a job from three state politicians, Sterling Mulkern, Jim Vurnan and Brian Paulson, to recover documents from a former cleaning lady, Jenna Angeline. Tracking Ms. Angeline to her sister's house outside Boston, they learn she has hidden the documents in a safe deposit box in a bank back in the city. Kenzie escorts Angeline to the bank, where she gives him one photo before being gunned down by Curtis Moore, a street enforcer for notorious gangster and pimp Marion Socia. The photo shows Socia with Paulson, who has stripped down to his socks and underwear. Angeline had only hidden one photo in the safe deposit box, and it is up to Kenzie and Gennaro to find the rest. The ensuing investigation takes the detectives from swanky Boston hotels to housing projects in the poorest ghettos of Dorchester. Kenzie wrestles with problems of race, class, urban violence, corruption, abuse, and love. A gang war erupts between Socia and his son Roland, who has taken his own gang independent, culminating in the bloodiest night of gang violence in Boston history. A street terrorism bill that would have curbed the violence is suspiciously stalled before coming to a vote. All these events are connected to the photographs, and as they pursue the evidence, Kenzie and Gennaro find themselves hunted by both sides. Eventually the detectives find the photos, and learn that Socia prostituted his young son with Angeline, Roland, to Paulson years ago, ironically leading the boy to become a stone-cold killer. Roland gains the upper hand in the war, and Socia demands the pictures back, hoping to blackmail Roland and save himself. At a meeting with Socia, Kenzie loses control and kills him. Releasing a photo to the press with Roland's face obscured, Paulson is disgraced, and a victorious Roland agrees not to come after Kenzie and Gennaro. |
Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair | William Morris | 1,895 | Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair, set in the forested land of Oakenrealm, was Morris' reimagining and recasting of the medieval Lay of Havelock the Dane, with his displaced royal heirs Christopher and Goldilind standing in for the original story's Havelock and Goldborough. In contrast to his source, Morris emphasizes the romantic aspect of the story, giving a prominent place to the heroine's misfortunes and bringing to the forefront the love story between her and the hero; the warfare by which the hero regains his heritage is relegated to a secondary role. Also unlike both the source and most of Morris's other fantasies, there is little or no supernatural element in this version of the story. Christopher is portrayed as initially ignorant of his true identity, leading to an emotional conflict between the protagonists to reconcile their mutual love and attraction with what they believe to be the profound disparity in their social status and shame of their forced marriage. This situation is resolved when the two fall in with Jack of the Tofts, who gives refuge to Christopher after his sons rescue the hero from an assassination attempt by a servant of the usurper Earl Rolf. Jack informs Christopher of his true station and gathers together an army to help him challenge the usurper. When the hosts meet, the commander of Rolf's forces, Baron Gandolf of Brimside, challenges Jack to single combat, but Christopher claims the honor from Jack and proves his worth by defeating the opposing champion. |
The King is Dead | Frederic Dannay | null | Munitions maker King Bendigo is the wealthiest man alive, and what the King wants, the King gets. What he wants is the investigative powers of Ellery Queen and his father, New York homicide detective Richard Queen, in order to investigate some threatening letters. Bendigo has an enormous security apparatus in place that is capable of dealing with threats that involve sovereign governments, but these threats are more personal. Ellery and his father are transported to the Bendigo private island and soon determine that the threats originate within the King's family. The King has two brothers, his assistant Abel and drunken sot Judah, and the King's beautiful wife Karla completes the list of suspects. Judah makes little secret of the fact that it is he who has originated the threats; he announces that he will shoot King at exactly midnight on June 21. At that time, King is locked in a hermetically sealed room accompanied only by his wife; Judah is under Ellery's observation and armed only with an empty gun. At midnight, Judah lifts the empty gun and fires—and King falls back, wounded with a bullet. Karla falls under suspicion but no gun is found on her person or anywhere in the room; similarly, Judah cannot have had a bullet in his possession, having been searched repeatedly. When Ellery learns that the Bendigo family is originally from his familiar haunt of Wrightsville, he travels there for an investigation of the King's early life. Upon his return to the private island, he solves the crime and dramatic and deadly effects follow in short order. |
The Scarlet Letters | Frederic Dannay | null | Dirk and Martha Lawrence are apparently not the happiest couple in New York, despite her millions of dollars and his fairly successful mystery-writing career. Martha asks for a secretive meeting to get Ellery Queen's advice because Dirk's violent jealousy is causing problems in her life—but Dirk shows up suspecting the worst and punches Ellery into unconsciousness. Dirk apologizes the next day, telling the story of how his father had killed his mother's lover, thereby causing his over-reaction. Ellery's secretary and inamorata Nikki Porter urges him to stay involved in the situation and Nikki moves in with the Lawrences to keep an eye on things (and act as Dirk's secretary on a stalled book). Nikki soon reports that Martha actually is having a series of clandestine meetings with romantic actor Van Harrison. The meetings are arranged with innocuous envelopes that look like advertising, but with Martha's name and address written in scarlet typewriter ink. Also, the envelopes contain only a day, time and a sequential letter of the alphabet—a code that is soon linked to a New York Guidebook. By the time the meetings have progressed from "A" through to "W", Dirk has found out about the affair and followed Martha to Van's home in the suburb of Darien. He breaks in, confronts the pair and shoots them both, seriously wounding Martha, who nearly dies. Van Harrison has just enough time before he dies to leave a dying clue—using his own blood, he writes an "X", then a "Y" on the wall, and dies. Ellery must consider the significance of this dying message and finally solves it, just as Dirk's murder trial is about to conclude. After Ellery gets a private conversation with the judge, a criminal then receives justice. |
The Glass Village | Frederic Dannay | null | Aunt Fanny Adams, famed artist, is the most notable citizen of the tiny New England town of Shinn Corners. A noted proponent of the naturalist school ("I paint what I see") who only began painting at age eighty, her income props up the local church, school, and almost everything else in town. When she is found murdered, suspicion immediately falls on a passing tramp named Josef Kowalczyk, and a planned lynching is nearly successful. It takes the combined efforts of the town's second-most-notable citizen, Judge Shinn, and his house guest, Major Johnny Shinn, to insist upon a trial by jury. Empaneling a jury takes every eligible citizen in the village, counsel and witnesses alike, and so the trial would never withstand legal scrutiny. But Judge Shinn and Major Shinn's investigation reveals a trail of circumstantial evidence that leads to another potential killer before the mock trial's conclusion. |
The Uncommon Reader | Alan Bennett | 2,007 | The title's "uncommon reader" (Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom) becomes obsessed with books after a chance encounter with a mobile library. The story follows the consequences of this obsession for the Queen, her household and advisers, and her constitutional position. The title is a play on the phrase "common reader". This can mean a person who reads for pleasure, as opposed to a critic or scholar. It can also mean a set text, a book that everyone in a group (for example, all students entering a university) are expected to read, so that they can have something in common. A Common Reader is used by Virginia Woolf as the title work of her 1925 essay collection. Plus a triple play – Virginia Woolf's title came from Dr. Johnson: "I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be generally decided all claims to poetical honours." In British English, "common" holds levels of connotation. A commoner is anyone other than royalty or nobility. Common can also mean vulgar, as common taste; mean, as common thief; or ordinary, as common folk. |
Old Glory: An American Voyage | Jonathan Raban | null | Old Glory describes Raban's voyage down the great Mississippi River in a 16-foot aluminium "Mirrocraft" powered by a 15 h.p. Johnson outboard engine. Inspired by his reading of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a seven-year-old boy living in Norfolk, in which his local stream is transformed into the Mississippi Valley in his imagination, Raban sets out on his own personal journey thirty years later. It is in this book that the author develops his own unique writing style (starting to emerge in Arabia Through the Looking Glass), with highly descriptive scenes of the landscape that he passes through, as well as ironic but highly incisive descriptions of the characters he meets along the way. This style is more fully developed in his later travelogues: Coasting (book), Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America and Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings. |
The Arcanum | null | null | The year is 1919 and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must investigate the murder of his mentor (and founder of the The Arcanum), Konstantin Duvall. To do so he must reunite the scattered members of the Arcanum: Harry Houdini, H. P. Lovecraft, and voodoo queen Marie Laveau. Doyle finds himself embroiled in a story of war as old as time itself, for possession of the world’s most powerful—now missing—artifact: the Book of Enoch, the chronicle of God’s mistakes, within whose pages lie the seeds for the end of everything. Peopled with the twentieth century’s most famous—and infamous—figures, the stakes go beyond the realm of humankind—into the divine. |
Surf na crvenom talasu | Aleksandar Đuričić | 2,007 | The story is divided into three parts. The first part "Zeleno" (eng. Green) is allotted 23 chapters, the second "Zuto" (Yellow) 18 chapters, and "Crveno" (Red) 16 chapters in the 57-chapter work. Names of these parts refer to three colors of the traffic light. The story follows a 15-year-old girl Marija from the moment of her moving to Belgrade from a small town where she previously lived with her parents. The young, pretty and quite immodest girl dreams about glory and wealth during the difficult years of political and economy crisis. She starts a relation with recently enriched young man Luka, who is involved in new kind of dangerous, but also profitable, street game called "Serbian Roulette" – suicidal street races against all traffic rules. Everything goes well between Marija and Luka, until he proposes to include his best friend Viktor, beautiful green-eyed playboy, into their sexual relation. She becomes confused and unsure about her feelings for Viktor, and also very jealous on Luka’s and Viktor’s friendship. Things get even worse after sudden return of Marija’s old friend Jovana, who appears to know the secret of Marija’s early sins. Her intentions to have revenge and reveal everything to Luka and Viktor threatens to ruin not only Marija’s love relation, but also her financial interests. Throughout Surf na crvenom talsu, Aleksandar Đuričić explores the influence of transition on the young people in Serbia, at the end of twentieth and the beginning of twenty-first century. The emotional story about love and friendship is told in the shadow of some political historical events, such as 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, the Zoran Đinđić assassination in 2003. * Marija - a pretty blond girl determined to achieve success, glory and wellness in the big city of Belgrade using her charms and beauty. * Luka - a young political dissident. After the fall of Milošević's regime his father unexpectedly becomes very rich, and the young Luka gets to be the perfect target for Marija. * Viktor - an attractive playboy who enjoys many vices, sharing them with his best friend Luka. * Jovana - an unattractive and plain girl, Marija's best friend, who used to be her roommate until she moved to London. * Daca Faca - Victor's faithful girlfriend who owns a beauty salon. * Željko - Marija's gay friend who used to be her first boyfriend. * Džezer - a musician who introduces "Serbian Roulette" to Luka. * Tina - Džezer's girlfriend, eccentric directress. * Bisa - Marija's mother, neurotic woman with an exaggerated affection for her daughter. |
Two Caravans | Marina Lewycka | 2,007 | A crew of migrant workers from three continents are forced to flee their English strawberry field for a journey across all of England in pursuit of their various dreams of a better future. The story centres on a group of migrant workers who hail from Eastern Europe, China, Malaysia and Africa and have come to Kent to harvest strawberries for delivery to the supermarkets, and end up living in two small caravans, a men's caravan and a women's caravan. They are all seeking a better life (and in their different ways they are also, of course, looking for love) and they've come to England, some legally, some illegally, to find it. They are supervised by Farmer Leapish, a red-faced man who treats everyone equally except for the Polish woman named Yola, the boss of the crew, who favors him with her charms in exchange for something a little extra on the side. But the two are discreet, and all is harmonious in this cozy vale – until the evening when Farmer Leaping's wife comes upon him and Yola and in retaliation she runs him down in her red sports car. By the time the police arrive the migrant workers (and a dog called Dog) have piled into one of the trailer homes and quickly leave their arcadia, thus setting off on a journey across the length and breadth of England. |
The Firm of Girdlestone | Arthur Conan Doyle | 1,890 | John Girdlestone owns the firm of Girdlestone. It is a very lucrative business and John Girdlestone and his son Ezra Girdlestone are respected by everyone. Both father and son are cynics and have no other thought but for their business; after giving a donation of £25 for charity, John Girdlestone remarks to himself that it is not a bad "investment", as it will make a favorable impression on the collector, who is a Member of Parliament, whose influence he hopes to use some day. Ezra, his son, is even more of a cynic, as the elder Girdlestone's cynicism is mitigated by his supposed religiosity. However, he manifests a great acumen for business, sometimes, even surpassing his father's sharpness in business matters. A series of disastrous speculations by the elder Girdlestone financially ruins the firm. After keeping the impending bankruptcy a secret from everyone for a time, he tells his son (whom he has fooled with a dummy ledger) about it, who is disgusted by his father's rashness. They resort to chicanery to save the firm. They plan to send an agent to the Ural mountains who will claim to have found diamond mines. They speculate that the resulting plunge in the prices of diamonds in England and South Africa will force the dealers to get rid of their diamonds quickly at absurdly cheap rates to avoid total financial ruin, which would eventually fall on them if diamonds from the Urals start pouring in the market. They will then step in and buy as many diamonds as their remaining money would allow them. Once their capital is exhausted, their agent will disappear and the discovery that the Ural diamond mines were a hoax would skyrocket the prices of diamonds once again, leaving them rich men. Their plan works perfectly and the prices go down just as they had expected. Ezra Girdlestone travels to South Africa to buy from the dealers there while John Girdlestone starts buying in London. After they spend all their money on diamonds and get ready to call their agent back from the Urals, their plan collapses with the discovery of bona fide diamond mines in South Africa. As a fellow conspirator tells Ezra in South Africa: "Russia or no Russia, the prices will not go up!" He goes back to England and both of them sell their diamonds cheaply, which leaves them in an even more precarious situation than they already were in. A very old friend of John Girdlestone had entrusted his daughter to him before dying. She was heir to £40,000 which she would inherit upon coming of age. John Girdlestone persuades his son to seduce the girl and marry her so that they could get their hands on the money. Ezra fails miserably not only because he is totally inept in romance, but because the girl is already in love with another man. Having exhausted all their means, John Girdlestone decides on a sinister plan. His friend's will provides that if the girl dies before coming of age, John Girdlestone becomes the sole heir. He plans to murder the girl. His son does not favour this plan, but his father persuades him, telling him that it will make the firm rich again. |
QED | Peter Parnell | null | Set in June, 1986, less than two years before Feynman's death, in Feynman's office at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the play follows Feynman through a day of his life. As the real Feynman does in his books What Do You Care What Other People Think? and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the stage character talks directly to the audience; we learn from this and from phone calls with off-stage characters that Feynman is to appear that night playing his bongo drums in a student production of the musical South Pacific, that he is expecting a delegation from the Russian Republic of Tuva, which Feynman is whimsically determined to visit (as detailed in Ralph Leighton's book, Tuva or Bust!), and that he is eager to make his views known in the final report of the Rogers Commission charged with the Challenger disaster. From phone conversations between Feynman and his doctors, we also learn that Feynman's cancer has returned, and that his doctors are urging him to undergo further surgical procedures, which are not without their own risk. Feynman's conversation with the audience also touches on a number of additional topics well-known to readers of his autobiographical writings: the Manhattan project and safe-cracking, how he learned to draw, his father, as well as musings on physics and, more generally, on the nature of science and knowledge. In the second act, the play returns to Feynman's study later at night on the same day, after the performance is over. We meet the only other character in addition to the main protagonist: a (fictional) young student by the name of Miriam Field, who has attended one of Feynman's lectures and both witnessed his bongo performance and attended the after-play party. Where Feynman had earlier grown dispirited both by his own condition and by memories of his long-dead wife, Miriam manages to pull him out of his depression. Feynman informs his doctors that he will consent to have surgery, after all. |
Saints of Big Harbour | null | null | In Saints of Big Harbour, Coady portrays a small community of Cape Breton Island, found off the coast of Nova Scotia. The book focuses on the perspectives of the main character, Guy Boucher, a fatherless Acadian teenager, and of those who surround him: his alcoholic uncle Isadore, a quietly wise girl named Pam, his draft-dodger English teacher and a group of boys stuck in emotional adolescence. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Guy lives in a community firmly characterized by clichés of gender, beauty, strength, family and love. |
En rade | Joris-Karl Huysmans | null | Very little happens in this avowedly anti-Romantic work. Jacques Marles seeks refuge from his Parisian creditors with his wife Louise in a dilapidated château in the village of Lourps. Far from finding contentment in an idyllic summer landscape, the couple discover the countryside is grotesque and diseased. The local peasants are greedy, cunning and obsessed with money. The novel documents the petty irritations and disappointments of the Marleses' day-to-day existence. Interspersed with these realistic descriptions are three dream sequences, recounting Jacques' fantasies in a highly Decadent style influenced by Baudelaire's Les paradis artificiels and (possibly) the poems of Lautréamont. |
China Sky | Pearl S. Buck | 1,941 | Dr. Gray Thomison grew up the only son of a wealthy American family and chose to build a hospital in Chen-li, where he is the resident doctor in charge. Dr. Sara Durand is a 28-year-old American from rural Kansas in charge of the women's ward. She was brought to the hospital two years before the novel begins. Sara and Gray both speak Chinese and English. They are very committed to helping their patients, and they admire the Chinese people and their culture. Sara and Gray have worked closely together; Sara is in love with Gray but she has not told him. The story opens during an air raid. Sara and Siu-mei, a young Chinese intern, evacuate patients and babies from the women's hospital. Sara is in charge of the hospital while Gray is away fund-raising in America. Sara stays in the women's ward with the terminal patients and those who cannot be moved, while Dr. Chung, a young Chinese doctor just out of American medical school, tends patients in the men's ward. A cable from Gray tells Sara that he is bringing his new wife to Chen-li. Sara fixes up the bungalow near the hospital for the couple. Before they arrive, Chen-ta, the leader of the local guerrillas, brings Yasuda, an injured Japanese prisoner, to the hospital. He does not trust the Chinese to keep him alive. He asks Sara to operate on him and care for him. Dr. Chung assists and gives blood for Yasuda. There is an air raid the night that Gray's wife, Louise, arrives. Gray takes her to safety in the caves, then returns to the hospital to tend the male patients. She is angry and terrified. Dr Chung and Yasuda both speak to her in English. Louise is in love with Gray, but petulant and angry to be living amidst Chinese people and Japanese bombing. She does not speak Chinese and does not like the Chinese people. She wishes to return to America with Gray. Gray's cook-boy, Siao Fah, does not respect Louise and spies on her. Louise makes friends with some English-speaking men from nearby Treaty Port, including Harry Delafield, an English businessman. Dr. Chung believes the Japanese will win the war, so he makes friends with Yasuda. Yasuda promises to make Chung governor of the province after the Japanese victory. Chung enlists his younger brother, Chung Third, to join Chen-ta's guerrillas to gather information for the Japanese. Chung convinces Louise to assist him in helping Yasuda send messages to the Japanese by writing letters in English to a man named Delafield. These messages stop the hospital from being bombed. Chung gives Yasuda a poison to make him appear sick and unable to be released back to Chen-ta. Siu-mei and Dr. Chung begin courting. He is attracted mainly by her wealthy family, but she falls in love. Chung brings letters to Louise for her to sign and mail. Siao Fah intercepts one letter, gives it to Sara, who gives it to Gray. Gray and Sara question whether Louise is being faithful to Gray, but nobody mentions the letter itself to Louise. Chen-ta's guerrillas begin losing battles. The citizens of Chen-li stop coming to the hospital because it is not suffering the same fate as the rest of the town. Sara and Gray are committed to helping the people and do not know what is going wrong. Siu-mei's father and five other elders from Chen-li visit Chen-ta in his hide-out. With the guerrillas losing, the elders are worried for the safety of Chen-li. Chen-ta begins to suspect Chung Third of spying, and he also lets Siu-mei's father know that he is interested in his daughter. One night, Sara discovers Dr. Chung and Yasuda discussing a map. Yasuda appears healthy. That same night, Ya-ching, a nurse in love with Chung, is spurned by him when she becomes pregnant by him. Ya-ching plans her revenge when she discovers that Chung is keeping the Japanese prisoner in the hospital by administering poison pills. She intercepts a message from Chung Third to Dr. Chung, but she does not tell anyone. She makes harmless substitute pills and gives them to Yasuda one night, then tells Siu-mei that Chung was poisoning Yasuda and using Chung Third to gather information about the guerrillas. Ya-ching witnesses Yasuda murder Dr. Chung, then drowns while returning to her own village. Nobody learns that Yasuda murdered Chung; Yasuda threw the body out a window to make it look like suicide. Louise discovers Chung's body. Gray and Siu-mei see a healthy Yasuda. Gray learns from Yasuda that Dr. Chung and Louise are passing information to the enemy. Yasuda promises Gray Japanese support in exchange for safety. Siu-mei and her father travel to tell Chen-ta about Dr. Chung's treachery. Chen-ta has Chung Third killed, then he goes to the hospital to collect his prisoner. Gray sends Louise back to America and goes on working with Sara, whom he now knows he loves. The Japanese resume bombing the hospital. |
The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star | Nikki Sixx | 2,007 | The book is a 413-page collection of diary entries written between Christmas of 1986 and Christmas of 1987. In considerable detail, the diaries chronicle the recording of Mötley Crüe's Girls, Girls, Girls album and the subsequent Girls Girls Girls tour, ending with Sixx's near-death from a heroin overdose in late 1987, which inspires the band to quit heroin altogether. Themes include Sixx's relationships with then-girlfriend Vanity, the other members of Mötley Crüe, and his family, as well as his drug dependency. Sixx's dark struggles with addiction and depression are leavened by humorous anecdotes about his wild lifestyle at the time. |
Letter from Peking | Pearl S. Buck | 1,957 | In September 1950, Elizabeth MacLeod is living in her childhood farm home in Raleigh, Vermont, with her 17-year-old son Rennie. The mailman arrives three mornings each week, and each time Elizabeth hopes for a letter from her husband Gerald in China, where she lived with him until Rennie was twelve. They lived in Peking until the war with Japan, then escaped to Chungking. She and her husband are very much in love, but Gerald, a Eurasian, sent her and Rennie to America because the communist uprising in China made it dangerous for white people. He was half Chinese and chose to stay in his own country. Gerald rarely writes because communication with westerners is banned by the communists. Letters must be smuggled out. Today her husband writes, "Whatever I do now, remember that it is you I love." The letter continues. She locks the letter in her desk. This is the first letter from Gerald in three months. It is mailed from Hong Kong. It is the last letter from him. Elizabeth takes care of her son and the farm. Her parents are long dead. Matt Greene helps take care of the farm. Elizabeth is aware of an American prejudice against the Chinese, and her son is one-quarter Chinese. She misses her husband very much. Over the winter she remembers their days together and the Chinese man that she loves. In the spring, after the sugaring is done, Elizabeth and Rennie go to Little Spring, Kansas, to bring Rennie's grandfather MacLeod, Baba, to live with them in Vermont. He left Peking when the Japanese invaded China. He lives in a herder's shack on Sam Blaine's farm. He wears Chinese gowns rather than western suits, reads a few old Chinese books, and he has become forgetful. Rennie is embarrassed by how Chinese his grandfather is. Baba dons western clothes for the train ride to Vermont. The local doctor, Bruce Spauldin, believes he has had strokes. Elizabeth remembers he was witty and bright when she and Gerald lived with him in Peking. "He is sweet and gentle and easy to live with, and he does not complain." Elizabeth asks Baba about Gerald's mother, Ai-lan. Elizabeth never knew her. They were married when Baba was advisor to the Emperor. Baba liked his wife Ai-lan, the sister of his friend Han Yu-Ren - but he did not love her. After Gerald was born, Ai-lan became interested in Sun Yat-sen's ideas for revolution. Baba supported the Emperor. Ai-lan believed the races could never mingle. She moved south, became a violent revolutionist, and was killed in 1930 by the secret police of the Nationalist government. Gerald saw her infrequently but longed for her. His father would not let Ai-lan "contaminate" Gerald. The next day, the postman brought a magazine mailed from a post office box in Peking. There was a picture of Gerald's mother on the cover. The magazine was dedicated to a martyr of the revolution. In this way Elizabeth learns that Gerald knew all about his mother, though he never spoke of her. That summer Rennie falls in love. He and Elizabeth talk about Rennie's Chinese relatives. Rennie wants to be all American and forget his Chinese relatives, including his father. He's worried that being part Chinese will keep a girl from liking him. Elizabeth meets Allegra, Rennie's girlfriend, and does not think her a good match for her son. Allegra's parents leave with her when Elizabeth tells them Rennie is quarter-Chinese. Her husband and Rennie were registered with the American embassy when they were born, so they are legally Americans. But she knows they must know and they would not approve Gerald and Rennie's Chinese ancenstry. Rennie is hurt and angry. She wants her son to find a love as deep as she shares with his father. Rennie leaves home to find Allegra and talk to her. Baba becomes weaker and more childish that summer. He has strokes. Bruce Spauldin comes to check him. Elizabeth notices that the unmarried Bruce "is even-tempered, inclined to silence and meditation, all good qualities in a husband." Elizabeth realizes that she is alone and lonely, closed off from Peking, though her husband is not dead. She begins to pray. Baba has more strokes and loses all care. Rennie returns. He asks, "Mother, why did you let me be born?" He is angry with the Chinese part of him. He goes to Sam Blaine's ranch for the rest of the summer. Before he goes, Elizabeth tells him about Gerald's mother, his grandmother, Ai-lan. Gerald's last letter to Elizabeth included a request that Elizabeth ignored. Now Elizabeth receives a letter from Mei-lan, sent through a silk shop in Singapore. Mei-lan requested that Gerald write the previous letter to Elizabeth. Mei-lan wishes to care for her husband in Elizabeth's absence and requests the support of her "older sister." At this point in the story, Gerald's full last-letter to Elizabeth is printed in the book. He requested her support for his decision to stay in China and protect his wife and child by sending them to America. She sends a letter expressing her love for him and her full support of Mei-lan and their husband, Gerald. Baba becomes weaker, but he remembers that he did not marry Gerald's mother to get a son; he did not want a son. Elizabeth understands how loveless Gerald's childhood was. Elizabeth pulls out Gerald's letters and reads them again. At first he believes in the new government, then his letters become listless. Elizabeth realizes that Gerald is a prisoner. Baba has another stroke. Bruce treats him, then proposes to Elizabeth. She says she is married. Bruce waits. Mei-lan writes that Gerald is sad and she wants to be friends with Elizabeth. The letter was mailed in Hong Kong, for safety. Elizabeth appreciates the letter from her "younger sister" but knows that her neighbors would not understand her love for Gerald living with Mei-lan in China. Rennie writes that he is studying physics at a mid-western college and paying his way. His roommate, George Bowen, has a very intelligent and good-looking sister. Rennie promises to come home for Christmas. Mei-lan sends letters to Ellizabeth through friends in Manila and Bangkok. She tells her how Gerald is doing. Sam Blaine comes with Rennie at Christmas. Baba does not remember Sam or Rennie very well, but the Christmas gathering is happy. Rennie has grown to become a man. Elizabeth asks about George Bowen's sister. They argue about Gerald's choice to stay in China and Baba's choice to marry a Chinese woman. Elizabeth explains that love is what matters. Sam Blaine proposes to Elizabeth. Baba dies soon after. Elizabeth sees a vision of Gerald dying, then learns from Mei-lan that Gerald died and Mei-lan has a son. Rennie marries George Bowen's twin sister Mary, with Elizabeth's blessing. George and Mary are orphans and love Rennie. Bruce and Elizabeth consider marrying. Elizabeth considers Baba's loveless life a poor example for living, something she will not endorse. |
Sylvia's Lovers | Elizabeth Gaskell | null | The novel begins in the 1790s in the coastal town of Monkshaven against the background of the practice of impressment during the early phases of the Napoleonic Wars. Sylvia Robson lives happily with her parents on a farm, and is passionately loved by her rather dull Quaker cousin Philip. She, however, meets and falls in love with Charlie Kinraid, a dashing sailor on a whaling vessel, and they become secretly engaged. When Kinraid goes back to his ship, he is forcibly enlisted in the Royal Navy by a press gang, a scene witnessed by Philip. Philip does not tell Sylvia of the incident nor relay to her Philip's parting message and, believing her lover is dead, Sylvia eventually marries her cousin. This act is primarily prompted out of gratefulness for Philip's assistance during a difficult time following her father's imprisonment and subsequent execution for leading a revengeful raid on press-gang collaborators. They have a daughter. Inevitably, Kinraid returns to claim Sylvia and she discovers that Philip knew all the time that he was still alive. Philip leaves her in despair at her subsequent rage and rejection, but she refuses to leave with Kinraid because of her child. Philip joins the army under a pseudonym, and ends up fighting in the Napoleonic wars, where he saves Kinraid's life. Kinraid returns to Britain, and marries. His wife, who knows nothing of their history together, informs Sylvia that her husband is a great military leader. Kinraid's marriage suggests to Sylvia that he was not as faithful to her as she had remained to him, and she then realizes she is actually in love with Philip. Philip, meanwhile horribly disfigured by a shipboard explosion, returns to the small Northumbrian village to try to secretly get a glimpse of his child. He ends up staying with the sister of a servant of Sylvia's deceased parents, and rescues his child when she nearly drowns. He is fatally injured while saving his daughter, but his identity then becomes known and he is reconciled with his wife on his deathbed. |
Killer: A Journal of Murder | Thomas E. Gaddis | 1,970 | It details American serial killer Carl Panzram's entire life inside the American prison system as well as the many murders he committed. Henry Lesser was a young jail guard at the Washington DC district jail when Panzram arrived for incarceration in 1928. After hearing of Panzram's torture, Lesser befriends him, convincing him to write his life autobiography. After 40 years of searching for publication, Lesser finally achieved his life's effort in 1970 when Killer: A Journal of Murder was published. |
The Tenth Circle | Jodi Picoult | 2,006 | When freshman Trixie Stone accuses her ex-boyfriend Jason Underhill of raping her, everyone is quick to take his side when he claims their intercourse was consensual. Trixie's parents, Daniel, a mild mannered comic book artist from a harsh background, and Laura, a college professor sleeping with one of her students, become involved, and Jason, whose life is supposedly ruined, leaps from a bridge. Although first presumed to be suicide, Trixie is suspected of pushing him, and so she flees to the Yup'ik region of Alaska where her father grew up, and Daniel and Laura follow. At the end of the book, Laura confesses to Daniel that she was there when Jason died. Jason (who was drunk) came lunging at her because he thought she was Trixie. Laura pushed him off the bridge but he held on. Laura reached to his hand but then let go, thus revealing that Trixie is innocent but Laura is not. The book concludes with the final chapter of Daniel's comic showing a father reunited with his daughter after saving her from hell. The main plot and subplots are juxtaposed throughout the book with Daniel's latest comic, The Tenth Circle, which parallels Daniel's life. |
The Night Gardener | George Pelecanos | 2,006 | Set in the 1980s, a trio of murders are linked to a single suspect. All three victims have palindromic first names and are found shot through the head in community gardens. The media dubs the crimes the "palindrome murders". T.C. Cook was the lead investigator at the time and two young officers, Gus Ramone and Doc Holiday, were with him at the third crime scene,. Then, 20 years later Cook is retired and Holiday has left the police. Ramone is a veteran homicide detective and becomes involved in a case which has all the hallmarks of a palindrome murder. Also realising the similarities, the others are again drawn into the investigation. The perpetrator of the palindrome murders was given the nickname The Night Gardener by detectives. |
The Coffee Trader | David Liss | 2,003 | Miguel Lienzo is in financial trouble as a result of some trades in sugar that have gone disastrously wrong. He is being pursued by his creditors and is looking for a way out of his current problems. Fortunately for him, one of his friends, a Dutch widow called Geertruid, arranges a meeting, at which her right-hand man Hendrick is present, and tells him about a new commodity that she believes is about to take off – coffee. Miguel knows very little about it so she gives him a cup to drink and, after an initial reaction of distaste, Miguel actually starts to like it. Geertruid gives him some beans for his own personal use and he takes to grinding them and then mixing the powder with wine until he tastes the superior drink of coffee mixed with hot water. He is currently living with his younger brother Daniel and his young wife, Hannah, who is pregnant. There is a rivalry between the two brothers, enhanced by Miguel's current difficulties, and he is living in the cellar of the house made continually damp from the floods. Hannah is a Catholic who was only informed of her Jewish origins on the day of her marriage. She is unhappy with her marital situation and her domestic affairs are made worse by her pretty Dutch maid, Annetje, who has a powerful hold over her as a result of secrets revealed to her by Hannah during the early stages of a friendship that has now soured. Hannah feels sympathy for Miguel's plight but is powerless to do anything as a formal distance has to be maintained with her more attractive and characterful brother-in-law. Miguel tells Geertruid he needs to have time to think over the whole idea of coffee but finally agrees to consider its possibilities. Complicating matters for Miguel is a Dutchman named Joachim Waagenaar. Miguel invested five hundred guilders on his behalf in the same sugar trade and all the money was lost. Joachim is following him around Amsterdam in an attempt to get his money off Miguel, and his mental and physical condition is steadily deteriorating as a result of his financial plight. Miguel does his best to avoid his pursuer and believes his life is in danger when Joachim threatens to murder him. Another complication for Miguel is that the self-same Parido also is antagonistic towards him since he failed to marry his daughter, Antonia (Parido is a close friend of Daniel's and this arrangement was made to strengthen their commercial ties) after being caught in flagrante with the girl's maid. However, one day Parido comes over to Miguel on the trading floor and offers to forget their past animosities by helping Miguel sell some loss making brandy holdings to a Frenchman; Miguel does so only to see the price of brandy rise just before close of trading. He is also helped to regain financial solvency even more by Alonzo Alferonda, another Portuguese Jew, whose family Miguel helped escape the Inquisition when he was a young boy, and who now secretly wants to assist his benefactor. Alferonda is also out to obtain revenge against Parido, a rich merchant and parnass on the Jewish Ma'amad, the local council that controls the affairs of Sephardic Jews living in exile in Amsterdam. Parido was angered by Alferonda's acting against his combination in a salt trade and managed to have him excommunicated from the Jewish faith for helping unwanted and poorer "Tudesco" (the Portuguese word for Ashkenazi) Jews arriving in Amsterdam broker their jewels to Portuguese merchants (any trading with gentiles was an official transgression). One day Alferonda advises him to buy whale oil in anticipation of a price rise based on some market manipulation by Parido's combination. It is whilst making a successful trade with Ricardo, a fat Jewish broker, that he is struck by a brilliantly simple an idea that revolves around creating a monopoly in the market. Currently, only small amounts of coffee bean are dealt in, and this primarily by the East India Company that controls the trade. With Geertruid ardently backing he scheme, he starts to send out letters to various friends and agents in different countries and also arranges with a friend and broker called Isiah Nunes to arrange a shipment of ninety barrels of coffee to Amsterdam. The action switches to Hannah who secretly attends a Catholic service with Annetje. As they are making their way back, she spots Geertruid talking to some Dutchmen and she comes up to Hannah and says that their chance meeting will remain a secret. Back in the house, Miguel has an argument with Daniel and later Hannah comes down to his basement and unintentionally reveals a lock of her hair which he finds incredibly sensual (it was forbidden for a Jewish woman to show this to a man other than her husband). He starts to receive positive letters back from his brokers and chases up Ricardo for his payment which is unforthcoming. He also encounters Joachim threatening Hannah and her maid and manages to lead him away. He returns to comfort Hannah and, over bowls of steaming coffee, she takes up the courage to flirt with him which pleases rather than offends. Things now start to heat up for Miguel – Nunes demands an upfront payment for the coffee delivery, Parido is warning him off the coffee trade and Daniel is asking for a return of his loan. In addition, he is summoned before the Ma'amad but manages to evade the charge of trading with gentiles – all he receives is a one-day excommunication called a cherem. Parido also approaches Alferonda to find out what he has planned with Miguel but his advances are spurned. The head of a pig is left outside Daniel's front door which causes Hannah to faint and threatens the baby. Miguel informs his brother after a huge argument that he will have to choose between himself and Parido, and also learns that Daniel himself is in debt. He also talks intimately to Hannah and learns from her about the meeting with Geertruid Damhuis. Nunes informs him that there will be a delay with the shipment. As Miguel leaves the tavern, he encounters Joachim and pushes him violently to the ground – an offence for a Jew – but the latter does not press charges, recognising their former acquaintance. He also encounters some trickery in a tavern which leads him to conclude that Geertruid is in the service of Solomon Parido. Joachim visits Miguel at his house and a plan is hatched with Alferonda for the day they wish to corner the coffee market. Miguel then asks Geertruid for 1,500 more guilders – having spent much of the first loan to cover his debts – and she is angered but finally acquieces. Joachim also informs Miguel that Nunes is in the pay of Parido and Miguel also learns from Annetje – who is now a whore – that she was paid by Geertruid to keep an eye on Miguel's comings and goings – in fact, she was instructed to say this by Alferonda who is in the next room. On returning home, he meets Hannah and they almost embrace but Miguel backs off, aware of the full consequences if they are discovered. The day for purchasing the 90 barrels that Nunes secretly has delivered to Parido's warehouse finally comes about and Miguel is confident of beating Parido at his own game. There is a crucial moment when the price of coffee is falling and then set to rise but some Dutchmen start weighing in with their own bids and Miguel's puts. Now wealthy, Miguel purchases his own house and also claims the 2,000 guilders Daniel owes him on the whale-oil (he was the purchaser behind Ricardo). He is then able to offload his 90 barrels at a high price before his overseas agents start to sell coffee which lowers the price. Geertruid arrives at the exchange and is staggered to observe his actions and Miguel accuses her of deceiving and betraying him, but promises to return her 3,000 loan to cover the debts she now owes to the Iberian agents. Hannah deceives Daniel by informing him their baby is actually Miguel's and, along with his bankruptcy, he informs her he is leaving the city and will grant her a divorce. She goes to Miguel's house and she is taken in by him as his wife. Miguel also seeks out Geertruid, who he finds drunk one day in a pub, and she tells him she and Hendrick are the real Charming Pieter and his Goodwife Mary, a couple of renowned Dutch thieves, and informs him she is leaving Amsterdam. Hendrick turns up at Miguel's door and confirms he has beaten up Joachim according to Miguel's former instructions – given before their reconciliation – and demands his fifty guilders. Miguel is appalled but hands over the money and finds out that Joachim and his wife have fled Amsterdam fearing more retribution. Miguel and Hannah have a son, Samuel, and another boy whom he favours just as his father favoured him, and his prosperous future now lies securely in the coffee trade. |
A Secret Atlas | Michael A. Stackpole | 2,005 | Qiro Anturasi, Royal Cartographer of Nalenyr, had been instrumental for his family's reputation as the most reliable map-charter in the known world. Merchants and princes all sought his clan's maps, even as the House of Anturasi continued sending out expeditions to expand their wealth of information, surveying unmapped territories, making detail notes of fauna, flora and geography. The Anturasi had been vital to Nalenyr's growing wealth and rise in power. Considered a crucial state treasure that must not fall into the wrong hands, Qiro was confined, on orders and under protection of the Naleni princes, to his estate Anturasikun in Moriande, capital of Nalenyr. There, he continued to oversee his clan's map-making enterprise, training the scions of the clan into the family trade, ruthlessly subjecting them to rigorous training and demands, for more than half a century. Now, the family stood poised on the brink of a historical breakthrough event which could catapult their standing further and beyond the imagination of rival map-makers. Intertwined with their mission were the political ramifications for Nalenyr, the aggressive northern state of Deseiron, and Helosunde which served as buffer between the two former powers. Much of Helosunde had been under Desei occupation, and Nalenyr provided Helosundian refugees sanctuary and support to confound Desei designs on Nalenyr. Qiro's grandsons, Jorim and Keles, were tasked with undertakings that would take them in opposite directions. Jorim was to embark on a specially commissioned ship Stormwolf to make accurate longitudinal charts at sea with a secret new instrument. Keles was to tasked to rediscover the lost segment of the pre-Cataclysmic Spice Route, which would take him into ground zero of the Cataclysm, a region where the ancient wild magic still raged. Nirati, sister to Jorim and Keles, remained behind in Moriande to hold the fort, for stakes were high and there were many hidden players whose intrigues threatened her beloved brothers. Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the devastations caused by the wild magic, the jaecai who had not departed with Empress Cyrsa's expedition, continued the xidantzu tradition in their schools martial arts. Their best students became itinerant warriors who travelled the realms to help fight injustice without regard to political affiliations. Moraven Tolo was one such warrior. When hints to powerful cache of ancient weapons, imbued with magicks from their former wielders, came to his attention, the jaecais became concerned that opportunistic parties would see it as an easy means of raising a strong army without the necessary ability, discipline and experience to control the power, possibly leading to history repeating itself. |
Babar's Museum of Art | Laurent de Brunhoff | 2,003 | As the elephants in Celesteville took to motoring, the city's train station lost its original purpose. Queen Celeste decided to convert the station into an Art museum to showcase all the artworks she and Babar had collected over the years. When the museum was opened, the adult elephants patiently explained to the young elephants different perspectives on art appreciation. |
The Fall of Doctor Onslow | Frances Vernon | 1,994 | The story begins in 1858 at Charton School, a fictional English public school (i.e. secondary boys’ private school in North American usage) where Dr. George Onslow, a clergyman of great note, is headmaster. Onslow is credited with having turned around the previously poor reputation of the school: it is now seen as a very successful institution. But Onslow has a secret: he is sexually attracted to many of the pupils and has had affairs with several of them. There is also much homosexual behaviour amongst the boys themselves, a situation that may be due to Onslow's relatively permissive attitude. The plot of the story begins to unfold when one of Onslow's young lovers—Arthur Bright—reveals his affair with the headmaster to another pupil, Christian Anstey-Ward, an idealistic young man who admires the ancient Greek ideal of Platonic love between males. Christian is shocked and incredulous, but is forced to believe Arthur when the latter gives him a passionate letter indiscreetly written to him by Onslow. Christian leaves Charton that year, still in possession of the letter. The following Summer he has a homosexual experience with a boy a little younger than himself and the guilt and self-doubt precipitated by this event prompts him to consider whether he should break Arthur‘s confidence and reveal Onslow‘s secret. While on holiday in Europe, he describes the whole affair in a letter to his father. The rest of the novel relates how the latter is able to use this information to exert a powerful hold on Onslow, which radically affects not only his career, but also his personal relationships and inner life. |
The Blacker the Berry | Wallace Thurman | 1,929 | ;Part 1 Emma Lou Born in Boise, Idaho, Emma Lou Morgan is an African-American girl with dark skin, and she suffers from it. Her mother and her family have lighter skin (it shows European ancestry in her family history). Emma Lou learned that her father, who left the mother and daughter soon after she was born, was a dark-skinned black man, and she appears to take after him. Her mother's family members comment on Emma Lou's color, thinking it will reduce her appeal for marriage. Her family help the girl try to lighten her skin with commercially available creams and bleaching, but are unsuccessful. Morgan wishes that she had been born a boy, as her mother said, "a black boy could get along, but that a black girl would never know anything but sorrow and disappointment." The only "Negro pupil in the entire school," she feels conspicuous at graduation in their white robes. Her Uncle Joe encourages her to go to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (UCLA). He says she can find other black students for friends, and encourages her to study education and move to the South to teach. He believes that smaller towns like Boise "encouraged stupid color prejudice such as she encountered among the blue vein circle in her home town." Emma Lou’s maternal grandmother was closely associated with the "blue veins", those blacks who had skin light enough to show veins. Uncle Joe thought that Emma Lou could find a better life in Los Angeles, where people had more to think about. At UCLA, Morgan intends to meet the "right" crowd among other Negro students. On registration day, she happens to meet Hazel Mason, another black girl, but decides when she speaks that she is lower class and the wrong sort. Other girls are pleasant enough, but never invited Emma Lou into their circle or sorority. Hazel drops out of school and Grace Giles becomes Emma Lou’s friend. One day Grace says the sorority only took light-skinned, wealthy girls. By summer, Emma Lou felt more trapped by her skin. She began to notice that black leaders tended to have light skin or were married to women with light skin. At a picnic, she meets Weldon Taylor, a young black man. Although darker than her ideal, he attracts her. By the end of the night, she thought she was in love. Over the next two weeks, she is thrilled to be with Taylor, for "his presence and his love making." He traveled from town to town, finding work and a new girl each time. He was leaving Boise to become a Pullman porter but, Emma Lou took his departure as due to her color, and associated it with any setback. Two years later after graduation, she decides to move to New York City and Harlem. ;Part 2 Harlem Emma Lou goes to Harlem, where she soon meets John, a young man she decides is "too dark." She goes to an employment agency, seeking work as a stenographer. Lacking job experience, she encounters difficulties and pads her account of her skills. Sent to a real estate office for an interview, after she arrives, they tell her they have someone else in mind. After returning to the agency, Emma Lou was invited to lunch by its manager, Mrs. Blake. She was "warmed toward any suggestion of friendliness" and excited to have the chance "to make a welcome contact." Mrs. Blake tells her about work prospects, saying that black business men had certain images for the women they hired; they wanted them pretty and light skinned. She suggests that Emma Lou go to Columbia Teacher's College to complete training for a job in the public school system. After lunch, Emma Lou began to walk along Seventh Avenue. While stopping to check her reflection, she noticed a few young black men walking by. One said to another, "There’s a girl for you ‘Fats.’" Fats replied, "Man, you know I don’t haul no coal." ;Part 3 Alva Determined to stay in New York, Emma Lou finds a job as a maid to Arline Strange, an actress "in an alleged melodrama about Negro life in Harlem." She thinks all the characters are caricatures. Arline and her brother from Chicago take Emma Lou to her first cabaret one night, where he makes her a drink from his hip flask. Emma Lou was entranced by the people dancing, and is invited by Alva, a man from another table. When the lights go up, he returns her to sit with Arline and her brother. The next morning, Alva and his roommate Braxton discuss the previous evening; agreeing that Alva did Emma Lou a favor in dancing with her. Intrigued by the cabaret, Emma Lou talks to the stage director about being in the dance chorus. He tells her plainly the girls are chosen in part for appearance, and notes they all have lighter skin than hers. She decides to look for a new place to live, hoping to meet "the right sort of people." One evening she goes to a casino, where she recognizes Alva. After a while she approaches him and asks if he remembers her. He politely acts as if he does, and talks and dances with her, even giving her his phone number. She calls him a couple of times before they make plans. Braxton is critical of Alva's seeing her, but he thinks, "She’s just as good as the rest, and you know what they say, ‘The Blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.’" ;Part 4 Rent Party Alva generally did not take Emma Lou to parties or dances, as he didn't want his friends to meet her. He finally decides to take her to a "rent party." Usually he would take Geraldine, a woman with lighter skin, to more events where his friends were present. Used to manipulating young women for money, Alva liked Geraldine for herself. Emma Lou was very excited about the party, and worried that she would encounter more discrimination. Once there, they happened on to a conversation revolving around race: the differences between being a mulatto and a Negro, and individuals who are prejudiced or "color struck." Alva's group went on to rent party, where Emma Lou had more to drink than usual. The next morning, her landlady told her she had to leave, as she wasn't meeting her boarding house's respectable standards. Emma Lou had consumed enough alcohol to warrant a visit from her land lady the next morning. Emma Lou thought more about Alva, who seemed kinder than others in her life, but she was aware of his manipulation. Alva was having his own trouble with Braxton, who had no job and didn't pay rent. He finally moved out, but Alva did not want Emma Lou to move in. One night the couple went to a theatre show, which included jokes about skin color. Emma Lou said to Alva, "You’re always taking me some place, or placing me in some position where I’ll be insulted." One night, after an argument with Emma Lou, Alva returned to his room to find Geraldine sleeping in his bed. She told him she was pregnant with his child. ;Part 5 Pyrrhic Victory Two years later, Emma Lou works as a personal maid, more of a companion, to Clere Sloane, a retired actress. Clere is married to Campbell Kitchen, a white writer very interested in Harlem. He encouraged the young woman to seek more education in order to achieve economic independence. She often still feels out of place, with few friends. She decides to try to see Alva, although they had stopped seeing each other. As Geraldine answers the door, Emma Lou leaves without speaking to him. Alva and Geraldine struggled with the problem of their boy, who was born disfigured. Sometimes they wished he was dead, as he seemed to have brought trouble. Alvahad become alcoholic and wasted money. Geraldine worked and saved, planning to escape. Having moved to the Y.W.C.A., Emma Lou had found some new friends. She also was studying teaching. Her friend Gwendolyn Johnson tried to make Emma Lou feel better about her appearance, but she still struggled with it. She continued to work. She had started seeing Benson Brown, a light-skinned man described as a "yaller nigger." His appearance seemed reason enough to see him. Emma Lou learned that Geraldine had abandoned Alva and their son. She went to him, and this time he welcomed her to his place, to care for Alva, Jr. After six months, Emma Lou begins teaching at a Harlem public school. She helped the boy to get along, but her relationship with Alva was uneasy. At the school, Emma Lou wore a lot of make-up to disguise her dark skin, but her colleagues teased her for it. Her economic independence did not totally free her. Deciding to leave Alva and his son, Emma Lou returns to the YWCA, and calls Benson. He announces that he and Gwendolyn had been dating. They are marrying and invite her to the wedding. Emma Lou realizes she has spent her life running. She ran away from Boise to get away from the color prejudice. Then she left Los Angeles for similar reasons. But she decide she is not running away again. She knows there are many people like her, and she has to accept herself. |
Patriot Reign | null | 2,004 | The first few chapters of the work set the stage and introduce the main Patriots 'characters' and their resumes. Rather than biographical minutiae, the book focuses on matters which would be most of interest to fans. The book begins by covering the early experiences of Bill Belichick as a young coach including his tutoring under his late father, Steven Belichick, a lifelong scout and coach for the United States Naval Academy football program whom he began to help "breaking down film" and recording (analyzing upcoming opponent) plays as early as age eleven. Belichick was so skilled at film analyis that when he took a position as a graduate intern where this was his job with the Baltimore Colts, his salary was doubled after only a few weeks. The book shifts to focus on the early coaching career of Belichick (from age 23) as he went from graduate intern to jobs as various positions coach under four different coaches in three different football organizations including Ted Marchibroda in Baltimore and Rick Forzano of the Detroit Lions. Holley all but ignores Belichick's ten years or so with the New York Giants as defensive co-ordinator and (eventually) as assistant coach — where he established himself as an important defensive mind — only touching on those years in passing. Only cursory mentions are made throughout the book of the achievements of Belichick's defenses, and the dominating Giants' teams he helped construct.. The book goes back to the near-hiring of Belichick as head coach of the Phoenix Cardinals in 1987 before that team moved from St Louis. Patriot Reign addresses the era four years later when Belichick would coach the Cleveland Browns, from 1991–1995. At the time, Belichick was the youngest NFL head coach, and one considered average at the time. The media disliked Belichick's policies of restricting access to the team after they'd enjoyed years of free access. Holley relates the Cleveland press's changing views about Belichick, and that he "may be worthy of respect," as he had taken a 2-14 team to 11-5 and the AFC playoffs in just three years. At the time of Belichick's infamous resignation after one-day as coach of the New York Jets — Belichick wrote "I resign as HC of the NYJ" on a sheet of loose-leaf paper — conventional wisdom was still not that Belichick would be a sure-fire success as a head coach. Holley covers the Browns' departure from Cleveland to Baltimore, that left Browns owner Art Modell the most hated man in Cleveland — so much so that, only a few years prior, Modell wouldn't attend the funeral of a long time friend and associate, for fear of his life. Holley addresses mistakes that Belichick admits he made with the press, Browns' management and the eccentric owner Art Modell in his first position as head coach. This section reveals that Belichick resents the press's perception that he had been a Parcells disciple—which Belichick states is disrespectful of the other great coaches he worked under prior to working under Parcells. The following chapters highlight the author's opinion of Belichick as a complex man, cerebral coach, teacher and parent. The book highlights Belichick's penchant for levity and storytelling, while being profane as is needed. This part of his history concludes with how Belichick parted ways with owner Art Modell and did not follow the team in the 1996-97 off season to Baltimore where it was reincarnated as today's Baltimore Ravens and enters near-contemporary history when Belichick first joined the New England Patriots. The book continues, focusing on 1996, when Belichick was hired immediately as by his old boss Bill Parcells to be the Patriots' defensive coordinator. (Belichick had worked under Parcells previously with the New York Giants.) The passage exposes the complex interpersonal dynamics governing the management interactions of the 1996 Patriots, the relationships between the Krafts and Parcells, and exposes key points in their characters, philosophies, and history. As the new assistant head coach for the New England Patriots, Belichick soon found he'd become the ombudsman to the novice owners Robert Kraft and his son Jonathan, who had a stormy relationship with Parcells, whom they inherited when Kraft bought the team. It was noted that there was "a history" between the owners and Parcells that was leading to a deterioration in the team's relationship. The book then pauses to give a football background history of Robert Kraft, and then moving tangentially into the Krafts's business history, touches on Kraft's financial evaluation that the Patriots could not be successful economically as a franchise without also owning the stadium and its revenues. Kraft couldn't afford to buy the Patriots in 1988, but when former Patriots owner Billy Sullivan sold the team to Victor Kiam, Kraft prevented Sullivan and Foxboro Stadium from going bankrupt by purchasing the stadium, making him the team's landlord. This positioned Kraft — a lifelong Patriots fan — to purchase the team in 1994. The reader learns how former Patriots owner James Orthwein, unable to move the team as he could not break the long term lease with Foxboro Stadium, put the team up for sale in 1994; this time Kraft was able to outbid all others for the team, even though he had to pay (for the times) an unprecedented large price for the team, $200,000,000. With the purchase, Kraft inherited a strong-minded head coach with whom he had no relationship. Holley next sketches in how the Krafts' business acumen improved the team's revenues, and established an ever-increasing fan base (in no small part by ending the dubious practice of blocking out local television coverage when there were seats available) which has resulted in consecutively increasing sales every years since, and a sold-out stadium since the 1996 season, with a waiting list for season tickets that goes for years. Despite the team's marketing successes in 1996, the relationship between Kraft and Parcells was strained, and got worse with time. The new owners, with their net worth on the line, were unwilling to give a carte blanche to Parcells to spend on football operations. The Krafts believed in giving management plenty of space, but not a blank check without occasional questions and answers. Parcells felt the owner was interfering with his prerogatives and what was needed to run a successful winning football franchise, especially in light of the new NFL salary cap which took effect in 1994. The result was a stalemate that led to Belichick — as newly hired Assistant Head Coach — mediating between the two in the 1996 season. Prior to the Patriots' appearance in Super Bowl XXXI, rumors dominated the sports media that Parcells intended to leave the Patriots after the Super Bowl, despite the fact Parcells was under contract through the 1997 season. These news reports were categorized as distracting and disruptive to the team before the game. President of the Patriots, Jonathan Kraft is quoted in the book as saying "It was a very, very strange time, and when you are not an expert at this business—you know we were still very new to the business—it can be educational. Big Bill (ie. Parcells) had kept us in the dark on a lot of things. He probably misled us on some things. And we didn't know how to go about questioning it." |
Boston | Upton Sinclair, Jr. | 1,928 | Chapter 1: The Runaway Grandmother The summer of 1915. The Thornwell estate outside of Boston. Cornelia Thornwell, aged 60, is suddenly widowed after 40 disappointing years of marriage: "she had lived, a prisoner in a cell." (31) The family is patrician and powerful, part of New England's economic and cultural elite. Her 3 daughters, all married to millionaires, squabble over their inheritances during funeral preparations. They continue their disputes as relations and retainers assemble for the reading of the will. Cornelia sees their behavior as "the revelation of hidden natures." "Trembling with excitement," (32) she pens a farewell note declaring herself a "runaway grandmother" (33) and asking the family not to pursue her. She leaves by a back stairway. Chapter 2: Plymouth Rock Calling herself Mrs. Cornell, Cornelia finds work at a cordage plant in Plymouth, a town not far from Boston. She learns how hard factory work is and how hard the life of the poor. She boards with the Brini family and becomes friends with their other boarder, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, an Italian immigrant ditch digger, atheist, anarchist, and pacifist. She first thinks his political beliefs naive, "a dreamer of dreams, so simple of mind as to have no conception of the odds against him," (56) especially his opposition to reformers and all organizations, even unions. Early in 1916, shortly after a public meeting Vanzetti and his anarchist comrades hold to promote their ideas, a spontaneous strike breaks out. Chapter 3: Dago Red Cornelia participates in the strike, learns how the police work for the plant's management and attack picketers. The courts do no more than "give the police a mild rebuke for their conduct." (74) Vanzetti acquires a rusty gun, though only to protect a visiting speaker, the anarchist theoretician Galleani. Cornelia hears echoes in his speech of Thoreau and Emerson. She witnesses Vanzetti getting into violent arguments that contrast with his gentle nature. The strike ends after a month and the workers have won a raise but at the cost of lost wages. "Little by little, Cornelia came to understand the type of idealist-fanatic, which could be gentle as a child in all personal relationships, but fierce and dangerous when roused by social wrong." (82) Chapter 4: Young America One day by chance Cornelia meets her favorite granddaughter, Betty Arvin, who is excited to learn of Cornelia's year. Cornelia confesses her new attachment to pacifism even as her relatives profit from war. Betty visits the Brinis and meets Vanzetti, who explains that he is no pacifist, that he believes there are powerful people to be fought. He condemns the war in Europe and tells his life story. Betty writes Cornelia letters and reports how her enthusiasm for women's rights scares off her suitors. Cornelia attends an anarchist-sponsored picnic and a play attacking militarism in which Nicola Sacco appears. Late in November 1916, Rupert and Deborah Arvin arrive in Plymouth, having learned Cornelia's address from one of Betty's letters. Cornelia defends her views on war even as they accuse her of poisoning Betty's mind. Cornelia agrees to return to Boston to reconcile Betty and her parents. She finds the situation there already calmed and decides to return to Boston but live apart from the family, imagining she and Betty can share their ideas but only with one another. Chapter 5: The Saving Minority Cornelia, now living in a modest apartment, speaks against U.S. involvement in the war despite her family's objections. Vanzetti leaves for Mexico, mistakenly afraid he might be drafted. Cornelia and Betty march in a pacifist demonstration, provoking another family battle. Cornelia visits Jerry Walker and his family. Cornelia understands how his business plans are being frustrated by the banking establishment, members of her own family. Fall 1917. Betty enters Radcliffe and lives with her grandmother. In reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution, "city policemen, federal secret agents, and an army of spies and informers" (149) wage a violent and illegal campaign on behalf of people of property. They seize a letter from Vanzetti to Cornelia. The ensuing family battle engages Cornelia and Betty against her mother Deborah. Vanzetti appears at Cornelia's door. Chapter 6: White Terror Cornelia's sons-in-law, Henry Cabot Winters and Rupert Alvin, lie to her about their manipulations to put Walker out of business. He is ruined. The war ends. Cornelia and Betty are arrested marching with suffragists. Another Thornwell family council ensues. Government authorities terrorize everyone the political left. Vanzetti is now selling fish from a cart. Cornelia is dismayed to hear how Betty is not fazed to imagine Vanzetti in a gunfight with the police: "Where had she acquired that matter-of-fact smile, discussing the mad idea of resisting arrest?" (181) Betty leaves for Europe chaperoned by a distant cousin. Cornelia confounds the family by joining her. They travel to Russia. Chapter 7: Deportation Days The Boston police strike. Betty stays on in Budapest and Cornelia returns. Only Vanzetti and the anarchists want to learn what she has seen. She attends Christmas celebrations with the Thornwells and the Brinis. Both comment on reports of a payroll holdup in Bridgewater. Anarchists are being deported. Hundreds are arrested and Cornelia works on their behalf. Vanzetti is working on propaganda, believes anarchist mail bombs are the work of provocateurs, and describes how torture makes anarchists swear to false confessions. Betty has lost her chaperon, so Cornelia will join her for a vacation on the Italian lakes. As Cornelia is sailing to Europe, Vanzetti is arrested for the Bridgewater holdup. Chapter 8: The Detective Machine The police identify suspects in two robberies and then develop facts to make their case. Arrested, Vanzetti lies to avoid implicating any of his fellow anarchists. He is the only suspect without an acceptable American alibi. News reaches Cornelia in Italy with Betty, her suitor Joe Randall, an American social democrat, and a French communist named Pierre Leon. In a long discussion of political philosophy, Pierre warns that he has known anarchists to be capable of violence, making his point to Cornelia by citing John Brown. The two women and Joe rush to Boston for the trial and visit Vanzetti in jail. They try to help locate evidence and witnesses. Vanzetti cannot testify on his own behalf without alienating the jury as an anarchist, atheist, and draft dodger. Chapter 9: The Web of Fate Vanzetti's trial for the Bridgewater attempted robbery. Judge Thayer seats a jury of Anglo-Saxons. Attorneys on both sides are friends. Prosecution witnesses alter testimony to fit the prosecution's theory. Only Italians provide an alibi for Vanzetti. Counter witnesses describe Vanzetti's mustache. The jurors handle bullets introduced as evidence. The judge's charge to the jury is not fully recorded. After the guilty verdict, Vanzetti writes letters from prison. The Thornwells are concerned about Joe's background. The family weathers the post-war deflation and squeezes the only Jewish banker out. Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant, launches the scheme that will bear his name. Walker distresses Alvin and Winter with a lawsuit even as they plot to defeat radicals in Italy as they have in other European countries. Chapter 10: The Legal System Cornelia finds that an establishment lawyer expects to be paid thousands. Facing the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti for the Braintree robbery-murder, the anarchists select Lee Swenson as defense attorney. He is experienced in criminal cases arising from labor disputes. Cornelia briefs Swenson about the defendants, describing Sacco as a man who "does very little thinking." (291) Swenson explains that the government's dishonest prosecution, a "frame-up," (295) needs to be fought with the same methods. He will need to "build a good alibi." (296) Cornelia recognizes that she has been invited to commit perjury and "moral whirlwinds seize her thoughts." (299) She considers how lies prove effective in business and politics. The next day Betty announces she and Joe now consider themselves married without benefit of law or clergy. Cornelia will permit them to use her apartment rather than announce this to the family. Swenson reports that a certain Mrs. De Falco has offered to serve as intermediary for a bribe that will get the government will drop the case. Chapter 11: The Graft Ring The anarchist supporters want to pay the bribe, but Swenson frustrates them by publicly denouncing the scheme. Betty's mother receives an anonymous letter threatening to reveal her daughter's indiscretions. She and Cornelia debate "the ethics of free love versus purchased love." (323) Betty's older sister Priscilla's wedding. Vanzetti is upset that the justice system will condemn Mrs. De Falco, the least guilty party in the bribery scheme. He predicts that Lee's refusal to accept the bribery system will make the prosecution redouble their anti-radical efforts. More poison pen letters reach the Thornwells. When Cornelia's grandson Josiah is blackmailed for sexual misbehavior, the family's history of secret affairs is discussed along with similar behavior on the part of Boston's ruling elite and occasional bribes. Mrs. De Falco is found not guilty, but the prosecution responds as Vanzetti predicted. Chapter 12: Shadows Before Swenson is joined by attorney Fred Moore and they struggle to identify and prepare witnesses. Accounts of unreliable witnesses and others pressured to testify or to withhold information. Too much critical evidence will be discovered too late. Swenson, pessimistic about his case, confronts Cornelia and proposes she perjure herself to provide the defendants with an alibi. Cornelia can not agree to do so, even though "what was supposed to be justice was really class greed." (365) The narrator's voice proposes that by adhering to her principles she hopes to maintain: "your exclusiveness, your idea that you were something special, apart from the harsh, rough world — in short that you were 'Boston'!" (366) Just before the start of the trial, mass displays of patriotism mark Memorial Day. Cornelia attends a ceremony naming a street intersection for her grandnephew who died in France. She weeps for the dead of the wars the nation is now arming to fight. Chapter 13: Trial by Jury The scene as the Dedham trial opens, with the defendants seated in a steel cage. Judge Thayer speaks his mind to reporters, but newspaper owners decide what gets into print. Corrupted witnesses testify, and the judge intervenes with obvious prejudice. He is careful that his recorded words do not reflect the bias he shows by his body language. Walker's case against the bankers is moving forward and will make the lives of Cornelia's relations difficult. In the course of arbitrating a family marital squabble, she learns how her relations are working to punish government officials who have opposed their interests. The trial continues with testimony that proves little but has a cumulative effect. The defense struggles with a dishonest court interpreter. Ballistics testimony is crafted for Thayer to misuse in his eventual summary to the jury, though a key witness will withdraw his statements 2 years later. Chapter 14: Judge Fury Cornelia and the Thornwells attend her grandson's Harvard graduation. Defense witnesses are mostly Italians and all struggle under aggressive cross examination. Vanzetti, his English improved while in prison, testifies and recounts his life story. The judge prevents the jury from hearing about the government's persecution of anarchists, his reason for fearing arrest. The cross examination emphasizes his sojourn in Mexico as a draft dodger. Sacco's testimony is less disciplined and the prosecution mocks him on cross. Thayer invites Cornelia to his chambers and they have an angry confrontation. The judge, alleging he was misquoted, lies to a reporter. The defense is short of funds, so Cornelia sells some of her jewels to her daughter Deborah. Swenson has run out of witnesses and directly proposes perjury to Cornelia, who responds with a distraught "Don't ask me!" (434) Summations are followed by Thayer's charge to the jury, mostly about loyalty and a prejudiced restatement of the evidence. The jury returns its verdict: both guilty on all counts. Chapter 15: The Whispering Gallery Swenson withdraws and Moore takes over motions and appeals. Cornelia's plans to speak in New York rouse her relations. She discusses the affair at length with Henry Cabot Winters. Cornelia admits knowing little of Sacco. She thinks Vanzetti capable of a violent rage if confronting the police, but never of a cold-blooded murder. She insists on the unfairness of the trial, Winters on the violence inherent in the defendants' philosophy. Cornelia describes the violence she has witnessed. Betty joins this "duel of moral forces." (463) When Betty announces that Joe's divorce is final and they plan to wed, Cornelia weeps, pretending she is happy for the couple, but her tears reflect the evening's arguments. "Women, who have been but a short time emancipated, do not defy and insult the mighty males of their clan without terrific inner disturbances." (467) The press reports of the wedding of the press agent for the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense to a Boston blue blood are sensational. The defense uncovers new evidence and witnesses change their testimony, all to no avail. Chapter 16: The Law's Delay Jerry Walker's case against the banking establishment takes place in the same Dedham courtroom and lasts a year. Cornelia watches her son-in-law Rupert Arvin manage the defense's systematic lies and feigned forgetfulness. Vanzetti studies and writes in prison, while Sacco finds it harder to bear. At different times, each attempts a hunger strike, resulting in psychiatric examination and treatment. The Catholic Church campaigns against a constitutional amendment banning child labor. Judge Thayer continues to deny defense motions with tortured logic and misrepresentations of the defense arguments. He alienates friends and colleagues with his anti-anarchist rants. Walker wins a jury verdict and stands to receive more than $10 million. Managing the appeal, Rupert Arvin analyzes social connections to members of the Supreme Judicial Court through club memberships and personal ties, nothing crude. Winters transfers all his property to his sister so he can claim to be bankrupt and avoid any payment to Walker. Cornelia attends a family baptism and ponders the words "vain pomp and glory." (508) Chapter 17: The Mills of the Law Betty has a baby and allows it to be baptized. Moore's efforts are undermined by anarchist supporters and he resigns. William G. Thompson, a patrician lawyer replaces him, but he antagonizes the anarchists because he has no interest in mobilizing public opinion. His appeal to the elderly judges on the Supreme Judicial Court, all "products of the spoils system" (519) in Cornelia's view, fails. The defense develops more exculpatory evidence, including a confession by Constance Madeiros that he and the Morelli gang committed the crime. Thayer again denies a motion for a new trial, this time citing dialogue that is not in the court record. Cornelia at least manages to have Madeiros' execution for a different crime postponed. The Supreme Judicial Court hears the appeal in the Walker case and in March 1927 overturns the jury verdict: "property was safe." (532) The court also backs Thayer on the Madeiros matter. Thayer then moves promptly to sentencing. In final statements, Sacco is hardly articulate, while Vanzetti is eloquent and speaks "as one who is addressing posterity." (535) Thayer places all responsibility on the jury and the Supreme Judicial Court and then sentences the pair to be executed. Chapter 18: The Supersalesman The focus is now on Governor Fuller, a man "cold as marble, utterly selfish," (542) who can issue pardons or commute sentences. The press begins to reconsider its negative view of the accused. The Governor is deluged with letters he ignores. Cornelia, now 72, has her son-in-law Winters sound out the Governor. Winters finds that Fuller only knows what the police tell him and does not want to be contradicted: "stubbornness is his leading quality." (547) Cornelia decides to campaign behind the scenes to get Fuller to appoint a commission to review the case on his behalf, working through her upper class connections to get the Episcopal bishop to make the suggestion. Felix Frankfurter demolishes Thayer in a magazine article. Fuller conducts his own review, but he is only pretending. The bishop asks the governor to create an Advisory Commission and Fuller does. Cornelia continues to raise money from "a small minority of choice spirits." (566) The division of opinion within the Thornwell family mirrors that of the public. Chapter 19: Academic Autocracy The Advisory Commission is headed by Harvard President Lowell, who has "a remarkable talent for ungraciousness." (579) It reviews evidence and hears witnesses in secrecy. Portraits of the 3 commissioners. Cornelia is quickly disabused of any hope for an impartial review. She is near despair. The governor visits Sacco and Vanzetti in prison, but he is still play-acting. New exculpatory evidence is discovered and presented but all for naught. The defenders are in anguish. Finally, Cornelia arranges to meet with the governor. He is perfectly polite and promises to consider her views, but clearly does not grasp the details of the case. Chapter 20: The Decision Worldwide attention is focused on the governor, who releases his decision late at night in order to have the next morning's headlines to himself. The advocates for Sacco and Vanzetti are angry and mock his conclusion that "The proceedings were without flaw." (610) Cornelia is exhausted and imagines she can only leave the battle to the next generation. She is comforted by Vanzetti's words in an interview he gave earlier: "This is our career and our triumph." (613) The narrator hails Vanzetti: "You have spoken the noblest word heard in America in the two generations since Abraham Lincoln died." (616) The governor's account of the case is so poor it needs to be buttressed by that of the Advisory Commission. Details of evidence are reviewed again. Cornelia is crushed by the Commission's report, since Lowell "was her kind of person, the best she had to offer." (620) Lawyers undertake fruitless legal manoeuvres. A demonstration on Boston Common is broken up by the police. Cornelia has some of her relatives host a dinner for the governor where they plead with him to delay the executions out of concern for Cornelia. Picketers at the State House are arrested. Betty quotes Lenin: "The state is a monopoly of violence." (634) Sacco and Vanzetti write farewell letters. Their executions are postponed with only minutes to spare. Chapter 21: Days of Grace Cornelia sees Vanzetti in prison again. The police fear a general strike. Cornelia's college-age grandson joins the cause as do artists like Dos Passos and many unknown who "came as individuals, hesitating and confused." (652) They argue legal strategy vs. propaganda. Police break up demonstrations but avoid creating martyrs with arrests. Joe Randall fails to get himself arrested. The Supreme Judicial Court holds a hearing and fails once more to order a new trial. Winters says the legal community agrees reforms are needed, but first "The courts must be sustained." (661) He accompanies Cornelia to visit the governor again. When a lawyer defends the Supreme Judicial Court, Cornelia mocks him because he is arguing against that Court in the Walker trial appeal. The governor asks Cornelia if the men are innocent and she answers: "Of course I don't know that....I believe that they are innocent and I certainly know this — that they have not been proved guilty." (666-7) The governor retorts: "I know that they are guilty, so I don't care whether they had a fair trial or not." (667) His conclusion is based on evidence he has heard, nothing in the trial record. Vanzetti's sister visits him in prison. Both he and Sacco write letters to Sacco's 12-year-old son Dante. Chapter 22: The City of Fear Police enforce silence in Boston while worldwide voices grow louder. The defense holds a public meeting in a hall but speakers must limit themselves to generalities. Cornelia arranges for Vanzetti's sister to visit Boston's Catholic Cardinal. Boston has a military presence. On Sunday, August 21, thousands gather on Boston Common and there are scenes of disorder, but people of note are not arrested Supreme Court Justices Homes and Brandeis decline to intervene. Cornelia and her daughter Deborah argue loudly. Cornelia says: "I prefer the dynamiter who cares about justice to the most law-abiding person in the world who doesn't!" (690) She lectures her granddaughter Priscilla about privilege and exploitation. On Monday, with executions scheduled for midnight, a protest of the well known and elite produces arrests, including Edna St. Vincent Millay as well as Betty and Joe, who give statements to the press. Cornelia visits the governor's wife, and then the governor again, to whom shes argues the case succinctly. Finally, trembling, she denounces him, leaves him speechless, and leaves "with despair plainly written upon her aged face." (705) Chapter 23: The Last Enemy Final legal activity and meetings. Sacco's relatives visit with the governor. The Thornwell's fear for Cornelia's health. She refuses sleeping powder. Winters tells her that Fuller's decision is based on word that a drunken anarchist revealed that Sacco was in the car used at Braintree and Vanzetti knew about the robbery in advance. Cornelia, "working herself into a cold fury," (714) denounces this evidences based on gossip, unchallenged in court. She gets a pass to visit the prisoners just hours before the executions so she can confront them one last time. She passes through many layers of security and speaks to Vanzetti as Sacco listens. Vanzetti swears innocence and attests to Sacco's. She asks if he has changed his views on violence in the class struggle and he has not. He still belies many will have to die to overthrow the master class. He does not want his death to be avenged. Asked if he forgives his prosecutors and judges, he says he can not say so. He asks Cornelia not to be sad for them because they are just doing their job and dying as anarchists. Chapter 24: The Triumph More legal moves. Cornelia says she is reconciled to the executions but her lips tremble as she speaks. Betty is resolute, believing in the class struggle. They wait past midnight until Joe calls to say Sacco and Vanzetti are dead. A step-by-step account of the executions. The prisoners refuse the attention of a chaplain. At his last moment, Vanzetti says: "I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me." (742) The newsmen wire their reports. Demonstrations occur throughout Europe. The narrator summarizes: "And now Massachusetts had made her martyrs, and stood upon her pedestal of self-righteousness." (746-7) Funeral arrangements are met with police restrictions. Police disrupt the funeral procession through Boston to Forest Hills cemetery. A member of the defense committee delivers a brief, eloquent eulogy. The narrator summarizes how their fame spreads and inspires: "To a hundred million groping, and ten times as many still in slumber, the names of Sacco and Vanzetti would be the eternal symbols of a dream, identical with civilization itself, of a human society in which wealth belongs to the producers of wealth, and the rewards of labor are to the laborers." (754-5) |
Bless the Beasts and Children | null | null | Six emotionally-disturbed teenage boys are sent from their homes throughout the United States by their affluent parents to Box Canyon Boys Camp near Prescott, Arizona, as the camp's slogan was "Send us a boy - we'll send you a cowboy", and the parents hoped that the camp would mature the boys. Each having originally been assigned to one of the six cabins, they are quickly outcast by the other campers, and find themselves together in one cabin. After a contest between the six cabins sorts out the pecking order, their cabin naturally lands in last place. The boys, in accordance with the camp rules, do manage to raid all of the superior cabins and conquer the trophies of the higher ranking cabins in order to advance in rank, but they use badly-executed subterfuge that is looked down upon by the other campers. Five of the six cabins were named after various Native American tribes and awarded mounted animal heads corresponding to each of the cabins' ranks, which are, from highest to lowest ranks: *Apache - bull buffalo *Sioux - mountain lion *Comanches - black bear *Cheyenne - bobcat *Navajo - pronghorn *Bedwetters - chamberpot All of the Bedwetters refer to each other by last names in the book and movie, including the two Lally brothers, who are referred to as Lally 1 and Lally 2, although their first names are mentioned in the book. An unpleasant confrontation between the boys and their counselor ends with Teft breaking into their counselor's footlocker, and because of the whiskey, beer, cigarettes and pornography found in the footlocker, they blackmail the counselor, who is called "Wheaties", into taking them to a ranch where they witness a canned hunt of surplus bison that had been rounded up from the surrounding area. The hunters (who won their spots at that hunt via lottery) sat or stood along a fence, while shooting at the fenced-in, nearly-tame bison. When the boys return, disgusted at the slaughter, they decide to break out of camp that night to stop the canned hunt. They ride horses into town, where Teft hotwires an old truck. After a ride into Flagstaff, Arizona on U.S. Route 66, they enter an all-night eatery to get food, but are accosted by two redneck "hippie" types, who follow the boys away from the restaurant and force them over, where they discover that the truck is hotwired. Teft pulls a .22 caliber rifle from the back of the truck and shoots out a tire on the car driven by the men harassing the boys, then orders the men to start walking or they can "wear earrings." Cotton and the other boys climb back into the truck and continue their journey to the ranch, but run out of gas just before reaching their destination. They walk the rest of the way and make their way through the fence maze on the ranch until they get the exit gate open so the bison can escape. However, the bison are content and have no intention of escaping, until Teft hotwires a state-owned truck and Cotton drives into the herd of buffalo while blowing the truck's horn, which alerts the hunters that are camped out nearby. Cotton drives the truck through the herd of buffalo and over the edge of the Mogollon Rim to his death, which ends the book as the hunters surround the other boys. |
I was a Rat! or The Scarlet Slippers | Philip Pullman | 1,999 | One evening, at the home of the cobbler old Bob and his washerwoman wife Joan, there is a knock at the door. Bob opens the door and sees a little boy in a torn and stained page's uniform. When asked "who are you?", the boy replies "I was a rat". Bob and Joan have no children and they take care of the boy by providing food and a bed. The boy was unable to eat with a spoon, and during his first evening he tore his sheets and blankets into strips. However, Bob and Joan were patient and the boy was a quick learner who, wanting to please them, carefully followed their instructions. When he spots a photograph of Princess Aurelia, the prince's fiancée, in the newspaper, he appears to recognise her as 'Mary Jane'. Joan calls the boy "Roger", the name Bob and Joan would have used for their son. Bob and Joan take Roger to the City Hall to find how to return Roger to his proper home. An official declares that there are no lost children in the city, then notices that Roger has eaten a pencil belonging to the City Council. Bob and Joan take Roger to the orphanage, the police station, and the hospital, but no one can help locate Roger's home. The Philosopher Royal learns about Roger and his belief that he was a rat, and takes Roger to the palace for tests. Roger announces that he has "been here before", and states that the Prince will marry Mary Jane, only to be told that the Prince will marry Aurelia. When confronted by a cat, Roger runs away from the palace and undergoes adventures as people exploit his ability to eat almost anything, and to wriggle through small openings. Roger escapes and lives in the sewers, but is discovered by the local paper, The Daily Scourge, who exploit Roger again by writing about "the monster of the sewers". After a publicity campaign, Roger is captured and declared a menace whose fate is to be determined by a tribunal. Bob and Joan learn that the tribunal may declare Roger to be a non-human monster that must be exterminated. Joan notices a picture of Princess Aurelia who by now has married the Prince. Joan remembers that Roger had mentioned Mary Jane, so in desperation Bob and Joan contact the Princess. When hearing about Roger and the name "Mary Jane" she announces that she will help. Due to her intervention, Roger is saved and is adopted by Bob and Joan. The Princess had been a girl who worked in the kitchen and kept a pet rat. Her wish to attend a ball at the palace was granted, and her rat was turned into a page boy as her attendant – a "Cinderella story". |
The Return of Nathan Brazil | Jack L. Chalker | 1,980 | A viral species named the Dreel, originating from outside the Milky Way galaxy, invades human territory. The central human government, known as the Com, attempts to fight back, but finds that their resources are inadequate to repel the invaders. In desperation, the records of the work of Gilgram Zinder (who had discovered the superimposed Markovian reality and built the sentient supercomputer Obie to manipulate it) are unsealed and his work is reproduced. Lacking the time to develop the technology fully, the Com builds ships called Zinder Nullifiers, which simply erase the contents of the space that they are pointed at. When they make the final stand against the Dreel invasion fleet, the Nullifiers are switched on and left on, obliterating the Dreel fleet. However, something unexpected then occurs, as the void in space begins to grow, erasing everything in its path from existence. At this point, Mavra Chang and Obie are reintroduced. It has been over 700 years since Obie faked his destruction and ran away with Mavra, and they are currently in another galaxy trying to positively influence the development of an intelligent civilization. Obie senses the malfunction in the Well World when the anomaly forms and begins to expand. He travels to the Well World, determines that it is broken and requires repair. He determines that the only person able to effect such repair is Nathan Brazil, but notes that the Well should have summoned Brazil to fix the malfunction. Obie recalls that Brazil was suffering from memory loss the last time he journeyed to the Well World; worried that this may have recurred, he and Mavra set out to locate Brazil. Once back in the Milky Way, Mavra and Obie have a problem: Brazil doesn't want to be found. The amazonian superwomen that Ben Yulin forced Obie to create, known as Olympians, founded a religious cult based on the godhood of Nathan Brazil. Their population has expanded to fill an entire planet, with the women serving as emissaries for the cult. In the face of their dogged pursuit, Brazil has gone underground. Undeterred, Mavra and Obie join forces with a mysterious human named Gypsy and his miniature dragon companion (and Com agent) Marquoz to recruit a group of Olympians to try to track down Brazil. In the process, Mavra is quite surprised to find that one of the "founding mothers" of the religion, Gilgam Zinder's daughter Nikki, is still "alive" as a computer personality. Convinced that Obie remained in the control of Yulin, and that Mavra had perished seven centuries earlier, Nikki believes that Mavra's approach is a trick, and she sets out to double-cross Mavra and Obie. Eventually, the investigators are able to track Brazil to a freighter operating in the space of the centaur-like Rhone (Dillians on the Well World). Despite the attempted interference of the Olympians, the party is able to meet with Brazil and discuss the situation with him. They find that he is very much in command of his faculties, and had not travelled to fix the Well because he didn't want to. Brazil informs them that in order to fix the malfunction, it would be necessary to temporarily shut down the Well of Souls, which would bring the Universe to the same end as if the rift in space were allowed to expand indefinitely. Although there would be a chance that the Well would short out beyond repair in the next few millennia, Brazil is willing to take the chance to give the races well beyond the reach of the rift the opportunity to achieve greatness. Obie disagrees with this assessment. By his calculation, Brazil is underestimating the odds of failure, and overestimating how much longer the Well can persist. Obie argues that the Universe will end regardless, but if Brazil acts now, he will be able to restart it afterwards, and use the Well to reseed it with intelligent life. Obie proposes to use his own immense capabilities to reprogram the entire planet full of Olympians to travel to the Well World, acting as both as foot soldiers in the inevitable fight against Brazil's return to the Well World, and also as the massive seed population needed when the Universe is restarted. Although Brazil remains reluctant, he is ultimately enfolded within Obie and forced to see the machine's logic. Brazil finally agrees to go along with the plan, but on one condition: he will go into the Well of Souls and perform the necessary repairs, but only on the orders of another person, so that the responsibility for the billions of lives ended is not his alone. With the plan thus laid out, the inner circle of Chang, Gypsy, Marquoz, and an Olympian head priestess named Yua travel to the Well World to put it into effect. Brazil indicates that he will follow sometime later, as he does not expect to receive a warm welcome. Although Obie is no longer able to help the party, he does impart them with a hint to the Well to influence the species that they are transformed into. Upon arrival at the Well World, the party arrives at the South Zone, where they are met by Serge Ortega. Ortega is a former human, transformed by the Well into a Ulik, a six-armed being that is half man, half snake. Although his species has a relatively short lifetime, Ortega has taken advantage of Well "magic" to obtain an unlimited lifespan, but this "spell" lasts only as long as he remains in the Zone. Mavra risks telling Ortega about the crisis in the Well of Souls and the impending arrival of the Olympians and Nathan Brazil. Ortega was present the last time Brazil went into the Well of Souls, and he believes that Brazil was not God, as Brazil claimed, but a megalomaniac who might do real damage if he were allowed to re-enter the Well. As the novel closes, Mavra, Marquoz, and Yua have arrived at their new hexes and are beginning to find their bearings. Marquoz is in Hakazit, a high-tech, volcanic land of massive armored lizards (though not firebreathers, to his disappointment). Yua is in Awbri, a nontechnological land of arboreal mammals in which the society is dominated by males. Mavra is in Dillia, semitechnological land of the centaurs. Gypsy resurfaces in an ocean hex, curiously untransformed. As the first waves of Olympians begin to pass through zone, an alarm sounds, and Serge Ortega is summoned to find that his guards have killed Nathan Brazil. The story is concluded in Twilight at the Well of Souls. |
The Rachel Papers | Martin Amis | 1,973 | The Rachel Papers tells the story of Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical teenager (a portrait Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university. Narrated by Charles on the eve of his twentieth birthday, the novel recounts Charles' last year of adolescence and his first love, Rachel Noyes, whom he meets in London while studying for his entrance exams into Oxford. Charles meets Rachel at a party and vows to win her over with his wit and wisdom. Unfortunately, she is seeing an American visiting student named DeForest, and Charles must employ a variety of meticulously calculated schemes to steal her away. The title is an allusion to one subset of notes that Charles works on diligently throughout the novel – detailed instructions on everything from how to convince his Oxford don of his brilliance, to how to pick up and seduce girls. Instead of studying for his exams, Charles pours most of his time into these narcissistic chronicles, and after he meets Rachel, "The Rachel Papers" become the primary outlet for his neurotic brilliance. Gradually, however, these notes evolve beyond a set of conniving machinations geared toward getting Rachel into bed with him, and into a sincere story of their brief but passionate romance. |
Defining Dulcie | null | 2,006 | The story follows 16-year-old Dulcie Morrigan Jones through journeys and trials. Her mother moves them both from Connecticut to California after Dulcie's father dies an accidental death. However Dulcie is unimpressed by this level of life change and seeks to solve this problem by stealing her father's old pick-up truck, setting out across America heading for her former home. |
Light a Penny Candle | Maeve Binchy | 1,982 | London was a very dangerous place to live during World War II and many children were evacuated to Ireland or the United States. Only child Elizabeth White is sent to live with her mother's childhood friend and her large and bustling family, the O'Connors, in Ireland. Although the mothers were childhood friends, their relationship has become one-sided with Elizabeth's mother, Violet, rarely corresponding and Aisling's mother, Eileen, remembering their closeness with detailed letters. Violet believes even though Ireland is not as refined as her London, it is a safe place for her daughter. Elizabeth quickly becomes fast friends with Aisling, who is the same age. The story follows these two girls, along with the whole O'Connor family, as they grow into young ladies. Aisling is outgoing and bold, while Elizabeth is quiet with all the manners of a well-bred child. Elizabeth is shown a caring, loving family and begins to feel part of a real family, as opposed to a visitor in her own home. After the war ends, Elizabeth goes back home to London, leaving behind a loving family and returns to the quietness of her real family. The two girls have formed a bond that remains, however, for years after the war is over. They remain in close contact through letters, supporting each other through their marriages. Their lives remain intertwined, each facing her own relationships, successes, and failures. |
A Bell for Adano | John Hersey | 1,944 | The novel is set during the Allied occupation of the Italian coastal town of Adano in 1943. The main character, Major Victor Joppolo, is the temporary administrator of the town during the occupation, and is often referred to by the people of Adano as Mister Major. Joppolo is an idealistic Italian-American who wants to bring justice and compassion to Adano, which has been hardened by the authoritarian Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. When Major Joppolo arrives at Adano, he immediately asks the people of the town what they need the most. The first spokesman of the town tells Joppolo that they are in great need of food for some people have not eaten in days. The second spokesman of the town argues that the town's immediate necessity is a new bell. Joppolo is touched by the story of a 700 year old bell that was taken away from the town by the Fascists. Mussolini had ordered that the bell be removed from the town and be melted to make weapons for the war. The people were greatly attached to the bell. To them, the bell was a source of pride and unity. Joppolo immediately sees the importance of the bell and makes persistent attempts to locate the bell. In addition to finding the bell, Joppolo spends time trying to supply the town with food and other basic necessities. He soon discovers that the town has no fish because the fishermen have not gone out in months. When he speaks to Tomasino, the leader of the fishermen, Joppolo finds out that this is because the fisherman were forced to pay 'protection' money to the corrupt Fascist government simply to go out fishing. Joppolo tells Tomasino that he will not have to pay any bribes or extra taxes to the Americans for fishing. At first, Tomasino is convinced that Joppolo is lying to him and that it is some sort of cruel trick. Tomasino hates persons of authority because he believes that they are all power-hungry and corrupt. It takes extensive persuading and a visit to the authoritarian Lieutenant Livingston's office to convince Tomasino that Joppolo's intentions are good and that his only want is for the people of Adano to have fish. Joppolo is faced with another problem in which he had to countermand the order of General Marvin in order to do what was best for the town. General Marvin is an army general who happens to pass through Adano. All day his armored car has been slowed down by mule carts that are blocking the road. Finally, on the road to Adano, he loses his temper and orders that his men shoot a mule that refuses move from the center of the road. When General Marvin arrived at Adano, he orders Major Joppolo to keep all mule carts out of the town. Joppolo is disheartened but complies with the order. Immediately, he calls for a meeting with all the officials of the town and tells them of the new order, but also that he is prepared to find a solution. The next day, Joppolo decides that countermanding General Marvin's order is more important than his own position as mayor of the town; therefore he tells the people of Adano that they may bring their carts into the town (among other things, the town has no source of water without the carts). Later in the novel, Joppolo gains the admiration of Lieutenant Livingston and the Lieutenant invites Joppolo to come have a drink with some of his navy buddies. While there, Joppolo tells them of the town's need for a bell. Commander Robertson realizes that they might have exactly the bell that Adano needs, the USS Corelli. The arrival of the bell to the town coincides with a party that the town is hosting for Joppolo to express their gratitude for all of his great doings. Although the bell has arrived at the town, the engineers say that it will take them until the next morning to install it. At the same time Sergeant Borth, one of Major Joppolo's aides, finds a note from General Marvin that says that Joppolo has been relieved of duty as administrator of Adano because he countermanded General Marvin's order. Sergeant Borth tells Joppolo that he has been relieved from duty while they are at the party and hands Joppolo the order. The next morning, Joppolo leaves Adano, but does not say goodbye to anyone because he does not think he could. As the jeep is driving away, he tells the driver to stop for a moment. They hear the clear sound of a loud bell. |
Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen | Jules Verne | 1,878 | Dick Sand is a fifteen year old boy serving on the schooner "Pilgrim" as a sailor. The crew are whale hunters that voyage every year down to New Zealand. After an unsuccessful season of hunting, as they plan to return the wife of the owner of the hunting firm, Mrs Weldon, her five year old son Jack Weldon and her cousin, Bénédict, an entomologist ask for a return passege to San Francisco. Several days into the journey they save five shipwrecked passengers from another ship and a dog who was with them at the time (Tom, Actéon, Austin, Bat, Nan, Hercule and Dingo (the dog)). Towards the end of their passage, they notice a whale and the crew, hoping for some profit after a bad season, decide to hunt it. Captain Hull reluctantly leaves Dick responsible for the ship. But the hunt goes awry and all the crew members are killed. Now Dick is left in charge of the ship with no experienced sailors to help him. He tries to teach the five survivors of the shipwreck and tries to reach the coast of South America, but Negoro, the ship's cook manages to trick them, breaking one of their compasses and their speed measuring device and eventually, after making sure the rest were lost, leads them to equatorial Africa. |
The Making of the Pentateuch | null | null | "The Making of the Pentateuch" (in fact only Genesis-Numbers, as Whybray excludes Deuteronomy) is in three parts. Part 1 examines the methodology and assumptions of source criticism and the Documentary Hypothesis; Part 2 examines the methodology of form criticism and tradition history as developed by Noth and others; and Part 3 sets out Whybray's own suggestions for the process by which the Pentateuch came to be composed. Whybray's attack on the documentary hypothesis addressed the basic methodology of source criticism, which relies on the existence of inconsistencies, repetitions and stylistic features such as alternative names for God to identify distinctive sources within the biblical text. The assumptions behind this methodology, Whybray says, are illogical and self-contradictory. If the authors of the original documents did not tolerate contradiction and repetition, why did the editors of the final work do so? And if the writers who created the final document did not mind such features, why should we suppose that the earlier sources did not contain contradiction and repetition? "Thus the hypothesis can only be maintained on the assumption that, while consistency was the hallmark of the various documents, inconsistency was the hallmark of the redactors" (p. 19). Similarly, the repetition and stylistic variation which the documentary hypothesis explains as the remains of distinct sources, may be understood quite differently. For example, since other religious texts use a variety of names for God, why should the change of divine name in Genesis from Yahweh to Elohim signal a change of source? There could be a theological reason why one name is preferred to another, or the writer may just want a change. Repetition is often done for stylistic reasons, or for emphasis, or for rhetorical effect or in poetic parallelism. The task of form and tradition critics, according to Whybray, is even more difficult than that of source critics. Where the latter are dealing with partially extant texts, the former are dealing with hypothetical reconstructions for which we have no tangible evidence: "Much of Noth's detailed reconstruction of the Pentateuchal traditions was obtained by piling one speculation upon another." (p. 20) His critique of scholars such as Rolf Rendtorff and Erhard Blum, who worked after Noth but in the same form and tradition-critical school was even more trenchant: "Rendtorff has merely replaced the comparatively simple Documentary Hypothesis which postulated only a small number of written sources and redactors with a bewildering multiplicity of sources and redactors" (p. 21), while Blum's approach was, if anything, more complex and more dogmatic - not to mention less demonstrable - than Rendtorff's. Whybray's own, alternative hypothesis, is based not on the documentary model but on a fragmentary model. He suggests that the Pentateuch was the product of a single author (not the four authors and multiple editors of the documentary hypothesis) working at some time in the 6th century BC "[with] a mass of material, most of which may have been of quite recent origin and had not necessarily formed part of any ancient Israelite tradition" (p. 242). Whybray saw this author as a national historian, aware of contemporary Greek history and writing in conscious imitation of Greek models, with the aim of extending the existing Deuteronomic history backwards in time to create a national history of the Israelites from the creation of the world. |
Lives of the Monster Dogs | Kirsten Bakis | null | A group of elegant monster dogs in top hats, tails, and bustle skirts become instant celebrities when they come to New York in 2008. Refugees from a town whose residents had been utterly isolated for a hundred years, the dogs retain the nineteenth-century Germanic culture of the humans who created them. They are wealthy and glamorous and seem to lead charmed lives – but they find adjusting to the modern world difficult, and when a young woman, Cleo Pira, befriends them, she discovers that a strange, incurable illness threatens them all with extinction. When the dogs construct their dream home, a fantastic castle on the Lower East Side, and barricade themselves inside, Cleo finds herself one of the few human witnesses to a mad, lavish party that may prove to be the final act in the drama of the lives of the monster dogs. |
The Physician | Noah Gordon | 1,986 | It is the year 1020. Rob Cole is the eldest of many children. His father is a Joiner in the Guild of Carpenters in London. His mother,Agnes Cole, is his father's wife. Robert has a particular Gift: he can sense when someone is going to die.When his mother and father both die, the Cole household is parceled out to various neighbors and friends. The Cole children are parceled out likewise. Rob is taken by the only one who wants him: a traveling barber-surgeon who goes only by the name of Barber. He is a fleshy man with fleshy appetites and a very great zest for life. Over the next years, he takes Rob as his apprentice. He teaches the boy how to juggle, to draw caricatures, to tell stories, to entertain a crowd, to sell the patent nostrum on which they make their living. He also teaches the boy all he knows of medicine - which is little. When Barber dies, Rob takes over his traveling medicine show. But he is restless, desiring to know more about the ways of medicine. He meets a Jewish physician in Malmesbury who tells him of schools in Córdoba, Toledo, even in far-away Persia, where the medical and scientific learning of the Muslim is taught. Unfortunately, besides being worlds away, the schools do not admit Christians - and even if they did, no country in Christendom would allow a person with such heathen learning to return. In a moment of epiphany, Rob decides that he shall take on the guise of a Jewish student, so that he can travel to Persia and study at the feet of Avicenna. Rob travels, as a Christian, from London throughout Europe to Constantinople. Here he becomes Jewish in appearance, and travels eastwards with a group of Jewish merchants, learning their ways as best he can. Rob arrives in Persia and tries to enter into the school of physicians there. He is not allowed access. He struggles to find a place in the city while searching for a way to enter the school. A chance encounter with the Shah of Persia opens for Rob the door to the school of physicians. Here he begins the study of medicine - the first formal study he has ever had in his life. At the same time he immerses himself in the life of a Persian Jew. Comparable to a surgical residency or similar term of practicum, Rob goes to a war-torn (and plague-torn) land to practice his medical knowledge. His journeys with the Shah's armies take him as far as India, where he encounters elephants, spices, and Wootz steel. He makes friends among the Muslim students of the school. Upon his return he encounters a woman he had met on his travels across Europe, a Scottish woman journeying with her father in search of superior Turkish sheep. Though she is Christian, they form a liaison, and are secretly wed. He is passed as a physician and helps to instruct new physicians in the school. Soon afterwards, Avicenna dies, and Isfahan is conquered by a rival king. Rob and his wife flee the rape and pillage and make their laborious way back to England, delivering her of children as they go. Rob struggles to locate his lost brothers and sisters, likewise to make his place amongst the terribly ignorant physicians of London. Despairing, he returns with his wife and family to Scotland, where he acts as physician to his wife's people high in the hills. |
A Fire in the Sun | George Alec Effinger | 1,989 | Taking place some months after the events described in When Gravity Fails, Marîd Audran, once a small-time hustler on the streets of the decadent Budayeen, finds himself as one of the lieutenants of Friedlander Bey or "Papa", the most influential man in the city. With his independence taken from him and being stationed as a liaison between Bey and the local law enforcement under the supervision of Sergeant Hajjar, Audran is forced to pair up with his colleague Jirji Shaknahyi in order to track down yet another serial killer who likes to remove some of the internal organs of their victims. Although Hajjar does not share his theory about the murders being connected, Audran begins to suspect there might be more to the recent killings than meets the eye, and wonders where the so-called Phoenix File fits in. |
Red Midnight | Ben Mikaelsen | 2,002 | 12-year-old Santiago Cruz, a Kekchi campesinos indigenos, escapes from his destroyed village, Dos Vías, Guatemala, on May 18, 1981 with his four-year-old sister, Angelina, at midnight, after his mother pushes her into his arms and wakes him up. His entire family has been killed by soldiers, and he runs as far away as he can. His Uncle Ramos gives him a map and compass and instructs him to sail away in his cayuco to the United States, to escape the civil war and hopefully find a better life. The boy and his sister (Angelina) find a horse, and ride it into the nearby village of Los Santos, where everyone has also been killed and burned. They continue into a city and sneak a ride in a maíze truck. They then sneak a ride on the back of a manure truck that a drunk rebel soldier is driving. To keep the truck from crashing because of the intoxicated driver, they put horse dung into the gas tank and escape when the truck breaks down. They then walk down to Lake Izabal and sleep at their Uncle Ramos's house. In the morning, Enrique, a friend of Ramos, finds the children. They tell him what has happened, and Enrique and his wife, Silvia, give them food for the journey. Enrique tells them everything he knows about the dangerous journey, and ride in the cayuco with them until they reach the opening to the sea. At the entrance to El Golfete, they sneak beside the shore past a military boat. Enrique leaves and Santiago and his sister sail into the ocean. They have little food, and soon go hungry and thirsty, with itches and blisters all over their bodies. They encounter tourists, pirates, many violent storms, and a shark. They encounter a river of garbage, which Santiago uses to make an amateur windshield among other spare parts to fix his cayuco, and finds Angelina a broken plastic doll. They once nearly sailed into an inland bay on the border of Belize and Mexico, and then sailed into the open Gulf. Santiago makes notches in his cayuco every dawn with his machete, as it should only take twenty to make it. They attempt to catch fish, but often fail or have to steal fish from fishing nets from a ship. They encounter a large storm, which causes the mast to fall directly on Santiago's head, and makes them lose the water pail. They experience diarrhea and sores, and almost lose hope of making the journey. They had expected to arrive in twenty days, but several more pass with no land in sight. One day, a tropical storm's eye passes over them, and they lose everything except the cayuco. As the storm passes, they land in a large city in Florida, and are taken to a hospital. They tell a nurse who can speak Spanish about their journey. They are bandaged, Angelina's doll is fixed, and they are shown on television and are fed food. They are told they will not be deported because they are child refugees and have lost everything. |
Sundays at Tiffany's | Cate Tiernan | 2,008 | The book opens with Jane Margaux and her imaginary friend, Michael, spending a Sunday at the St. Regis Plaza in New York City eating ice cream together, which they do every Sunday. Michael is an imaginary friend who is randomly assigned to children who need extra support and guidance. However, he is called away from the children when they are ten, at which point they will forget about the existence of their "friend". Jane needs extra attention because her mother, Vivienne Margaux, a Broadway producer, spends too much time with work and shopping for new husbands. Vivienne spends Sunday at Tiffany's with her daughter every week, though. The next day is Jane's 9th birthday party, which coincides with her mother's production's opening night. The cast and crew sing "happy birthday" to her, but her mother forgets about her and her father leaves quickly with his girlfriend. Jane is comforted by Michael, who tells her he must leave now that she is nine. He promises her that she will forget about him. Twenty years later, Jane lives in New York and works closely with her mother, who is now controlling. Jane has produced a small, low-budget play called "Thank Heaven", based on her childhood with Michael. The play was an overnight hit, and now Jane is in the works of making a movie based on it. Her boyfriend, Hugh McGrath (who played Michael on Broadway), wants the leading role in the movie. She hasn't forgotten about Michael. Jane isn't happy in life, though. She knows she is too dependent on her mother, and she is unwilling to face up to the fact that Hugh is an egomaniacal jerk. One night, he stands her up for a dinner date, and she returns home rejected and hurt. Michael, now on break from being an imaginary friend, catches sight of her walking into her hotel and instantly recognizes her. It's the first time he has ever seen one of his "kids" as an adult. He begins following her to work and home, but she never catches sight of him. Michael himself lives in an apartment complex across from Owen, a self-centered man who only uses women as objects. Through his conversations with Owen, we learn that Michael is caring towards everyone. He spends the night with a woman named Claire, but they just talk, and he learns about her and reassures her. A day later at work, Hugh McGrath comes and apologizes to Jane for missing dinner. We realize he is just using her to get the film role. Vivienne thinks that the role would be good for him, and she pushes Jane to accept his apology. Later, Vivienne infiltrates a "Thank Heaven" meeting and controls all aspects of production, despite the fact it is Jane's project. Jane goes out to dinner with Hugh, who flirts with another woman while Michael watches, unseen. A few days later, Hugh and Jane go to a museum exhibit together, and she learns that he set up the whole date as a way to con her into giving him the part. When she refuses, he blows up at her and leaves. She retreats to a bar where she thinks she catches sight of Michael. Later, Hugh apologizes and proposes to her in Brooklyn, making an ultimatum: a ring for a role. She finally realizes that he's scum and demands he take her home, at which point he leaves her stranded in Brooklyn. She hitches her way back to New York and shops at Tiffany's before going to the St. Regis Plaza for ice cream. Michael is at the St. Regis with Claire when he sees Jane, and she sees him. After they recognize each other and re-introduce each other, Claire leaves and Jane and Michael take a walk. They realize how much they've missed each other and need each other. They spend the rest of the day together. The next day, Vivienne controls Jane at work and Jane blows up at her, finally standing up for herself. She storms out and meets up with Michael. They go rollerblading and become closer and closer. They soon meet every day and go out every night, while Jane's professional life becomes more and more hectic. Vivienne reveals to Jane that her grandmother died of heart failure at age 34. Hugh makes one last attempt to win Jane back, but after he explodes and insults her, she punches him in front of Vivienne. Vivienne takes his side and Jane storms out, vowing never to return. Michael feels an impulse to go and meet Jane, but on his way he stops at a cathedral where he gets his message: Jane is going to die and it's his mission to help her out of life. Michael meets with Jane and they run away to spend a week in Nantucket, where they are happy and carefree mostly. However, Michael becomes increasingly worried about Jane and her health. After she loses much of her appetite, he decides that he is the thing that's keeping her from living out her life. He leaves without notice in an effort to save her. Jane finds him gone and is devastated that he has now left her twice. She goes home to New York where she collapses from stomach pains. The phone rings, and she can barely get up to answer it. Michael is out in New York when he gets a sudden impulse to go to the New York Hospital. He realizes that Jane must be there. He sprints there, but when he arrives, he finds Vivienne in the hospital bed, not Jane. He realizes that it was Vivienne whom he was sent to protect, not Jane. Jane soon arrives and lovingly reconnects with her mother before Vivienne dies peacefully. After Vivienne's funeral, Michael collapses and is taken to the hospital. Since imaginary friends never get sick, he and Jane realize that he must be human now. He soon makes a full recovery and vows to spend the rest of his life with Jane. In an epilogue, Michael and Jane have married and have two children. |
Sail | Howard Roughan | 2,008 | A tuna is caught in the Bahamas. Inside the tuna is a coca-cola bottle with a note inside stating the Dunnes are alive. The book flashes back to the beginning as the Dunnes are about to set off on a two month boat trip, a trip that hopefully will bring them closer together, despite the fact that the stepfather, Peter, is staying behind on land. Katherine, a heart surgeon from New York City had lost her first husband, Stuart, a stock investor in a boating trip several years ago. But only an hour into the trip they're already falling apart. The teenage daughter Carrie plans to drown herself, and the teenage boy Mark is high on drugs. Ten-year-old Ernie is near catatonic. But their mother Katherine, with the help of her brother-in-law Jake, is insistent on pulling everyone together, once and for all. Just when things start to take a turn for the better, disaster strikes. A storm hits the sailboat. To make matters worse the boat explodes. The boat vanishes without a trace and the family are lost, presumed dead - until now, when a message in a bottle is found. It becomes apparent that there must have been at least one survivor. Who has survived and just what happened to the boat? As it transpires there may be more sinister powers at work, the race is on to rescue the family and discover what happened aboard the luxury yacht. It turns out that Peter has hired a former CIA operative, turned private contract killer, Gerard Devoux, to kill his family. He hopes to inherit the more than 100 million USD that Katherine was worth. Also, Jake dies from wounds with the boat's explosion. Peter knows his plans to gain the Dunne fortune will be ruined if someone else finds the family. He & Devoux set out the Bahamas to find them and kill them before they are found. Peter is a licensed pilot and rents an airplane to find them. He discovers that the family washed ashore an empty island. That night he sneaks into the island, he plans to shoot Katharine first, so she doesn't have to watch her kids die. His plans are interrupted when his stepson hits him over the head, knocking him out. There is a murder trial but is eventually acquitted. He sues Katherine for defamation and she settles out of court for 16 Million USD. Peter though is betrayed by Devoux and killed. In typical Patterson style, not everything is as it appears. Throughout the story we discover that Peter was having an affair with a young law student. It turns out that she was working with Devoux and is the one that shot Peter in the gut. Devoux then kills her to ensure there are no loose ends. We discover that she was a high end prostitute from Las Vegas. Devoux gets his at the end from a rogue DEA agent he had tried to kill earlier in the book. It is also revealed that, because of an affair had by Jake and Kate, Ernie is Jake's son. |
The Secret of the Third Watch | null | 1,984 | Unlike other books in the series, this one does not take the adventuring duo (Stephen Lane and Richard Duffy) into exotic places faraway from the United States. It is the only time when the events take place wholly in their home city of New York. This is also the only instance when the day of the action can be dated - on Saint Patrick's Day, March 17. Richard received an urgent plea from an old acquaintance for a meeting at the Central Park Zoo on Saint Patrick's Day. The acquaintance was introduced only by his first name, Ralph, was a gentleman con of the old school who was described as having a rich imagination and leave his victims "still feeling good" because of the fortune they almost made. Stephen had gone along with Richard to the zoo, but his presence distressed Ralph who was alarmed at the thought of a kid getting involved as the matter was very serious. Before Ralph could reveal more, he was shot and was incapacitated, and his assaillant disappeared among the crowd. The only clue was a business card where Ralph listed himself as President of a company named Secucomp, Inc.. Ralph carried a lot of business cards listing his first name with different last names, with impressive designations for a variety of companies. But Secucomp stood out because it had a real corporate address. As it was set in their home city, this book had Stephen's mother and father playing greater roles in the story, including aiding them in their investigation. Along the way, they discovered their nemesis was only other possessor of the Kronom K-D2 watch in the world. Known as the Mole, or as the Money Master when he made threat in the New York Stock Exchange, he hacked into the Stock Exchange's computer systems and demanded submission from all world banks around the world. Too late, Richard realised that he is up against the only person in the world who knows how to use the Kronom better than himself, perhaps even better Karl Wolfmann, the Kronom's inventor. The Mole had been Wolfmann's assistant, but his active participation in the final refinements of the Kronom gave him an intimate knowledge of its capabilities and a definite edge over other users of the Kronom. |
Welcome To Camden Falls | Ann Martin | null | The book Welcome to Camden Falls is about two girls Flora Northrop and Ruby Northrop who are ten years and eight years old respectively. Flora is very quiet and loves to sew. She likes to work in her grandmother's tailoring shop called Needle and Thread which she runs with Flora's friend Olivia's grandmother Gigi. Ruby is nothing like her sister. She loves to dance and sing. She even gets the lead role in a play. When orphaned Flora and Ruby move in with their grandmother Min (their legal guardian), which is a nickname given to her by Flora because when Flora was young whenever she asked for something Min always said “in a minute”. Her real name is Mindy Read. Their parents died in a car accident on a frosty January evening. Flora's father had said that they could go out for pizza but Flora wanted to finish her homework. But anyway Flora, Ruby, their mom and dad got into the car. Although, it was January and Christmas had passed, Flora’s and Ruby’s mom had said it was the last chance for singing Christmas carols. So Ruby had shouted “Winter Wonderland”, but before she could say anything more, a truck traveling too fast for a snowy evening crossed over the center line and thundered into their car. Flora, Ruby, and her parents were taken to the hospital and Flora and Ruby found out that their parents had died. So they went to live with their grandmother Min in Camden Falls, Massachusetts after the school year got over. There was a welcoming party when they arrived. Flora had a good friend named Olivia Walter (who is a full year younger than Flora, but skipped a grade so she is in the same grade as Flora) who lived in the same strip of row houses called The Row Houses. They also become very good friends with a girl named Nikki Sherman who lives in the other side of the town. Nikki had troubles of her own. Her family is very poor. She and her sister Mae are often made fun of on the bus because they often wear clothes with holes and they smell bad. Her dad always comes home drunk. Flora and Ruby start to stitch their lives in Camden Falls with fun, frolic and gloom. The novel series Main Street revolves around two sisters named Flora and Ruby Northrop. Flora is a shy and quiet girl with a passion for sewing whilst her sister, Ruby, has different interests. She loves to sing and dance and being in the spotlight. They two are very different sisters but love each other dearly. ( Welcome to Camden Falls ) When Flora and Ruby's parents die in a car crash, they both are sent to live with their grandmother, Mindy Davis Read, whom they nicknamed 'Min'. They both are reluctant to leave their old town to move to Camden Falls but they really have no choice. Flora and Ruby learn to adjust in their new life and they both befriend Olivia Walter, a girl who was a full year younger than Flora. Flora and Ruby go through ups and downs of their lives and they try to be friends with Nikki Sherman, a lonely girl whose family is 'broken'. As Flora and Ruby begin to put their lives back together, they discover something very important. Find out in the book! |
2666 | Roberto Bolaño | 2,004 | The title of 2666 is typical of the book's mysterious qualities. This was the title of the manuscript rescued from Bolaño's desk after his death, the book having been the primary effort of the last five years of his life. There is no reference in the novel to this number, although it makes appearances in more than one of the author's other works. Henry Hitchings has noted, "The novel's cryptic title is one of its many grim jokes; there is no reference to this figure in its 900 pages. However, in another of his novels, Amulet, a road in Mexico City is identified as looking like 'a cemetery in the year 2666'. Furthermore, in the novel, The Savage Detectives, there exists the line: 'And Cesárea said something about days to come... and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something.' Why this particular date? Perhaps it's because the biblical exodus from Egypt, a vital moment of spiritual redemption, was supposed to have taken place 2,666 years after the Creation." The novel's five "parts" are as follows: The Part about the Critics, The Part About Amalfitano, The Part About Fate, The Part About the Crimes, and The Part About Archimboldi - all linked by varying degrees of concern with unsolved murders of upwards of 300 young, poor, mostly uneducated Mexican women in Ciudad Juárez (Santa Teresa in the novel). "The Part about the Critics" describes a group of four European literary critics who have forged their careers around the elusive German novelist Benno von Archimboldi. Their search for Archimboldi ultimately leads them to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa in Sonora. "The Part about Amalfitano" concentrates on Oscar Amalfitano, a mentally unstable professor of philosophy at the University of Santa Teresa, who fears his daughter will be caught up in the violence of the city. "The Part about Fate" follows Oscar Fate, an American journalist for an African-American interest magazine, who is sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match (despite knowing very little about boxing) but becomes interested in the murders. "The Part about the Crimes" chronicles the murders of dozens of women in Santa Teresa from 1993 to 1997. It also depicts the police force in their fruitless attempts to solve the crimes. "The Part about Archimboldi" reveals that the mysterious writer is Hans Reiter, born in 1920 in Prussia. This section explains how a provincial German soldier on the Eastern Front became an author in contention for the Nobel Prize. |
Luck in the Shadows | Lynn Flewelling | 1,996 | Alec of Kerry, a young hunter who has recently been orphaned, is taken prisoner under the false charge of spying. He ends up sharing a cell with Seregil, a seemingly youthful spy and noble from the exotic city of Rhiminee, who has the ability to assume various guises and trick his way out of tight situations. The two escape together, and Seregil, motivated by something he does not entirely understand, takes Alec on as his apprentice in thieving, spying and trickery. They head south towards Rhiminee, where Seregil will report on his mission to the wizard Nysander, the head of a covert group of spies known as "Watchers." But along the way, Seregil falls ill under the influence of a mysterious magic. Alec is forced to navigate their way south on his own, testing his limited resources and knowledge of the world outside his rustic homeland. When the cause of Seregil's illness finally becomes known (an ordinary wooden disk imbued with a powerful curse) it is almost too late to save his life. In his unconscious state, Seregil experiences visions of a dark entity known as the "Empty God," foreshadowing the designs of the evil Duke Mardus, who wishes to obtain the god's power for himself. In Rhiminee, the capital of Skala, Nysander heals Seregil and takes possession of the disk. Once recovered, Seregil reassumes his role as mentor to Alec, teaching him how to be a successful thief and spy. Alec meets Beka Cavish, a friend of Seregil's and member of the Queen's elite Horse Guard, and he and Seregil carry out odd jobs for the scandal-ridden nobles and citizens of Rhiminee under the guise of the "Rhiminee Cat." Seregil learns of a prophecy in which he is to become "father, brother, friend and lover" to Alec, and Alec discovers that Seregil is Aurenfaie, a race of long-lived peoples inhabiting the distant and exotic realm of Aurenen, from which magic originates. After Seregil is thrown into jail for supposedly writing treasonous letters against Queen Idrilain of Skala, it becomes clear that a plot is underway to overthrow the queen. Seregil briefly switches bodies with Thero, Nysander's apprentice, in order to assist Alec and Nysander in discovering the perpetrators. Their hunt eventually leads them to Lady Kassarie, a supporter of the "Lerans," a group of anti-Aurenfaie nobles who object to Idrilain's queenship (she is a distant descendant of Lord Corruth, an Aurenfaie consort). Alec manages to seduce a young servant of Kassarie's, allowing him and Seregil to break into her stronghold. Their discovery of Lord Corruth's decomposed skeleton, which Kassarie has set up for display like a trophy, reveals that the Lerans were behind the consort's disappearance, which had so strained the relations between Skala and Aurenen. A fight breaks out between the Skalans and the Lerans, but Nysander is able to transform Seregil and Alec into birds, ensuring their escape from Kassarie's stronghold. Kassarie is killed and Idrilain's place on the throne is preserved, but the novel ends with Nysander experiencing a vision of death and the Empty God, foreboding more dark times to come. |
Falling | Anne Provoost | 1,994 | Anne Provoost's novels are invariably related from the point of view of a young person caught up in problems of adult making which they have difficulty comprehending. In this case, the teenage Lucas is taken on a long summer visit to his late grandfather’s home in the Ardennes by his mother. He has been has brought up by her in ignorance of the fact that during World War II his grandfather had informed on the nuns in the local convent who were harbouring Jewish children. He is therefore at a loss to understand the conflicting attitudes he encounters in the town. He is particularly targeted by the political activist Benoit, for whom his grandfather was a hero, and persuaded to take reluctant part in a couple of right-wing actions against the Moroccan immigrants who have taken over a run-down quarter of the town. In the meantime he has befriended the young American-born Caitlin, who dreams of becoming a dancer. She is in fact the daughter of one of the children betrayed by his grandfather, all of whom had survived Auschwitz. She also stands for liberal attitudes and as an outsider too is not tainted by the small-town narrow mindedness from which Lucas has to suffer. Just as he is preparing to commit himself to Caitlin and what she stands for, she is involved in a crash and Lucas is only able to rescue her from the burning car by sawing off her trapped foot. At first he is treated as a hero, but Benoit, fearing denunciation by Lucas, uses his position as a journalist to question his actions. The plot of the novel has three times been adapted for theatre: in Brussels (1997), Hamme (2003) and Amsterdam (2006). In addition it was made into an English-language feature film in 2001 by Hans Herbots. Among the liberties taken with the text was the decision to move the scene of action, rather more credibly, to the south of France and the hint of a resolution through forgiveness not present in the novel. |
The Ice Palace | null | null | The vivacious 11-year-old Siss lives in a rural community in Norway. Her life is changed when the quiet girl Unn moves to the village to live with her aunt after the death of her unmarried mother. Siss and Unn can't wait to meet. They finally do, at Unn's house. They talk for a while, Unn shows Siss a picture from the family album of her father, then Unn persuades Siss that they should undress, just for fun. They do, watching each other, and Unn asks whether Siss can see if she is different. Siss says no, she can't, and Unn says she has a secret and is afraid she will not go to heaven. Soon they dress again, and the situation is rather awkward. Siss leaves Unn and runs home, overwhelmed by fear of the dark. Unn does not want to feel embarrassed when meeting Siss the next day, so she decides to skip school and instead goes to see the ice castle that has been created by a nearby waterfall. Ice castles are normal in cold winters, when the water freezes into huge structures around waterfalls. Unn climbs into this ice castle, exploring the rooms baffled by its beauty. In the 7th room she gets disoriented and cannot find her way out. She dies of hypothermia. Her last word is "Siss". When the search for Unn remains fruitless, people wonder if Siss knows more about the disappearance than she lets on. They wonder what had passed between them the night before. Siss on her part is overwhelmed by loss and loneliness, and makes a promise that she will never forget Unn. Therefore, Siss takes upon herself the role Unn had: standing alone in the school yard refusing to play or speak. Thus, she has to find her way out of her own emotional ice castle, before she can continue on the road towards adolescence and adulthood. |
The Footprints on the Ceiling | Clayton Rawson | 1,939 | Ross Harte, publicity writer, is investigating the person behind a classified ad seeking a haunted house for sale. When it turns out to be his old friend The Great Merlini, Harte drops by his store, The Magic Shop, looking for an explanation. Harte and Merlini are soon swept up into a complex and bizarre plot involving the death of Linda Skelton, an agoraphobic heiress, at her home on Skelton Island, a tiny island in the East River of New York City. The plot soon expands to involve a psychic researcher and his favourite medium, a group of treasure hunters seeking a sunken treasure, counterfeit golden guinea coins, a man with blue skin (argyria), a gangster named Charles Lamb, a second murder by "the bends", and a murder scene with a set of neat footprints marching across the ceiling. Merlini survives more than one attempt on his life before he can call in the police and conclusively bring the crimes home to the guilty. |
The Headless Lady | Clayton Rawson | 1,940 | Beautiful young Pauline Hannum, daughter of the late Major Hannum and a performer with his circus, enters The Magic Shop run by The Great Merlini and is suspiciously willing to pay much more than the going price for immediate delivery of a "Headless Lady" illusion. Merlini and his writer friend Ross Harte decide to investigate, drawn by Merlini's love of circuses. They soon learn that Major Hannum's death was probably a murder, and that the killer seems to have unfinished, and deadly, business that involves a real headless lady whose head has disappeared. Merlini, Harte and a new associate, detective writer Stuart Towne, soon learn a number of interesting background facts about goings-on at the circus—including why it's bad luck for the circus orchestra to play Suppé's Light Cavalry March, what the mummified body of John Wilkes Booth is composed of, and how to create fingerprints that have no loops or whorls. Merlini must use his magic skills to escape from an "escape-proof" jail, assemble the suspects, and identify the murderer in a surprising final scene. |
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