Readers > New Books > Fiction, December 2006
Fiction, December 2006
General Fiction |Mysteries |Horror/Science Fiction/Fantasy
General Fiction
- Avery, Ellis
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This sweeping debut novel follows two women — one American, one Japanese — whose fates become entwined in the rapidly changing world of late 19th century Japan.
- Crowther, Yasmin
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This passionate and timely debut is about mothers and daughers, roots and exile, from the remote mountains and riotous streets of Iran to the rain-soaked suburbs of London.
- Cusk, Rachel
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Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb very much like its American counterparts, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilization: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters’ lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.
- Cussler, Clive
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A mysterious Mongolian mogul is conducting covert deals for supplying oil to the Chinese while wreaking havoc on global oil markets. The Mongolian harbors a dream of restoring the conquests of his ancestors, and holds a dark secret about Genghis Khan that just might give him the wealth and power to make that dream come true.
- Doyle, Roddy
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One of Ireland's most popular novelists depicts a woman, both strong and fragile, who is fighting back and finally equipped to be a mother to her children. But now that they're mostly grown up, is it too late?
- Fitzgerald, Laura
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This debut follows one spirited young woman from the confines of Iran to the intoxicating freedom of America — where she discovers not only an enticing new country but the roots of her own independence.
- Garwood, Julie
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The sizzling and long-awaited pairing of Jordan Buchanan and Noah Clayborne arrives in this novel that shuttles between glamorous metropolitan Boston and small-town Texas.
- Hamilton, Laurell K.
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The time has come for Meredith Gentry to put aside her detective work and fulfill her ultimate obligation to the world of Faerie where her efforts to conceive an heir to the throne of the Unseelie Court are crucial to restoring magic, and life itself, to the fey kingdom in this fifth volume of Hamilton's best-selling series.
- Highland, Frederick
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Set in 1930s French-occupied Syria, Highland's third novel follows the efforts of Nikolai Faroun, chief of the Damascus civil police force, to solve the murder of Vera Tamiri, a beautiful, modern woman from a prominent Damascus family.
- Iles, Greg
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Dr. Chris Shepard, a busy young doctor in Natchez, Mississippi, has never seen his new patient Alex Morse before. But the attractive young woman with the scarred face has come to Dr. Shepard's office on a mission to rip his idyllic life inside out.
- Kellerman, Jonathan & Faye
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The husband-and-wife authors team up again for a collaborative work of suspense featuring Jonathan Kellerman's beloved Alex Delaware, and Faye Kellerman's popular duo Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus.
- K'wan
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Hood Rat (n.): A woman of questionable repute, one who has been known to "get around" in the 'hood. Harlem has never seen four friends as scandalous as Yoshi, Billy, Reese and Rhonda. The neighborhood will never be the same again.
- McCarthy, Erin
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The author of High Stakes returns to Vegas, where falling for a vampire isn't the weirdest thing that can happen there by a long shot as Cara Kim — sultry, shy and a good girl in Vegas — finds out when she attracts the attention of vampire Seamus Fox.
- Navarro, Julia
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A fire at the Cathedral of Turin and the discovery of a strangely mutilated body attract the attention of Italy's special Art Crimes Department. Chief Marco Valoni leads a crack team of investigators in a race to solve a crime he's certain is about to shock the world — someone is planning to steal the Holy Shroud.
- Pynchon, Thomas
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Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness and evil intent in high places. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx. As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.
- Shields, Jody
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Set in England during World War I, this haunting love story by the author of The Fig Eater makes the ravages of love and war unforgettably real.
- Smith, Kyle
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The Devil Wears Prada meets A Christmas Carol in the hilarious new holiday offering by the author of The Love Monkey.
- Twining, James
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The second book in the Tom Kirk series is an engaging mystery concerning the whereabouts of a train carrying an enormous cache of goods plundered by the Nazis.
- Willig, Lauren
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Mistaken identities and surprise romance provide the backdrop to the third novel of Willig's successful Pink Carnation series, a blend of historical romance and contemporary chick-lit.
Mysteries
- Bannister, Jo
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Brodie Farrell runs a business — or a finding agency, as she calls it — aptly named "Looking for Something." When her friend Daniel's seemingly innocuous accident with a hysterical girl on the roads leaves Daniel shaken, Brodie is on the case.
- Hart, Ellen
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Minneapolis amateur sleuth Jane Lawless tackles a terrifying case of a film star's stalker who reemerges to taunt his victim after years of silence.
- Napier, Robert S.
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Former soldier and investigative reporter Jack Lorentz was content with his modest business selling baby boomer collectible toys until the day she walked into his office. She was Amanda, the woman who left him 15 years earlier to marry Michael Howard, scion of a wealthy Northwest family. Now her husband had troubles. The discovery of human remains on vacation property belonging to the Howard family threatened a scandal that would damage his plans. Can Jack keep his distance from Amanda and find whoever placed the corpse on the property?
- O'Hehir, Diana
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O'Hehir's new novel features Carla Day and her elderly father, an Egyptologist suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
- Rozan, S. J.
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Three years ago, a child’s death blew open a vortex of corruption inside Manhattan’s lucrative construction industry and sent one innocent man to jail. Joe Cole is a former city investigator who now lives a broken life, cut off from his wife and daughter, and from the city he once knew so well. But for Joe, everything changes when a woman’s murder and a teenager’s rooftop freefall rip open old wound — and reveal a shocking layer of rage and deception.
- Shannon, John
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Shannon's latest mystery takes private investigator Jack Liffey to Los Angeles' exotic Koreatown, where a young film student, Soon-Lin Kim, has apparently gone missing. But Jack is not the only one looking for Soon-Lin. Her association with a sinister militant group of radical Asians has also set Homeland Security in her pursuit. Bizarre details and compounding mysteries envelop Jack, and ultimately he finds himself under intense interrogation at a secret compound in the desert, ill-prepared for a climax as explosive as the violent lightning storm approaching on the horizon.
- Wilson, Derek
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A haunting on F staircase in St. Thomas's College, Cambridge bitterly divides the college, and the Cambridge branch of the Psychic Investigation Unit (PIU) is invited to carry out an experiment. The main opponent of the plan, Professor Hawkridge, insists on being present for the nocturnal investigation by the 'ghostbusters', only to drop dead of a heart attack. Sir Joseph Zuylestein, the College Master, asks Dr. Nathaniel Gye, a parapsychologist, if he can make some discreet enquiries with a view to closing the whole sorry business — the affair could not have come at a worse time, as St. Thomas's is about to accept a major donation from a publicity-shy billionaire. But Zuylestein has another reason for wanting everything hushed up — he has received anonymous letters indicating that the undergraduate Tom Sutton, whose unquiet spirit supposedly haunts F staircase, did not commit suicide ten years earlier, but was murdered.
Horror/Science Fiction/Fantasy
- Bowling, Drew
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This debut from college sophomore Bowling turns on the battle of good vs. evil as embodied by Corin and Cade Starcross, brothers whose childhood loss of their parents leaves Corin's morality intact but twists Cade, the elder, with a lust for revenge.
- Butcher, Jim
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In the conclusion to the Codex Alera trilogy, Gaius Sextus, the First Lord of Alera, plants Tavi in a new legion, where Tavi can gather information about the rebellious High Lord of Kalare. Treachery destroys the army's command structure and leaves Tavi leading an inexperienced, poorly equipped legion as the only force standing between the realm and the Canim horde.
- Flint, Eric
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A mysterious cosmic force has hurled the town of Grantville from 20th century West Virginia back to 17th century Europe and into the heart of the Thirty Years War. With their seemingly magical technology and radical ideas of freedom and justice, the time-lost West Virginians set about changing the course of thistory — in ways both small and large.
- Kelleher, Anne
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This prequel to Silver's Edge continues Kelleher's Through the Shadowlands series featuring three powerful women whose lives are interwoven throughout an epic quest.
- Kurland, Lynn
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The fate of the Nine Kingdoms rests in the hands of a woman destined to wield one of the two magical blades. In this land of dragons and mages, warrior maids and magical swords, nothing is at it seems, and Morgan will find that the magic in her blood brings her troubles she cannot face with a sword and a love more powerful than she has ever imagined.
- Kurtz, Katherine
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Alaric Morgan has been pledged to the king's service, for his Deryni blood makes him ideal to safeguard the Haldane kings and ensure that Prince Brion shall have protection of his hereditary magic. But Alaric is only four years old, and first he must survive to reach manhood.
- Resnick, Mike
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In Book 2 of the Starship Series, Captain Wilson Cole, a political scapegoat despite years of dedicated military service, turns to a life of piracy aboard the "Teddy R." Since Captain Cole is a moral man, he must figure out a way to practice piracy without actually harming anyone — at least, anyone who doesn't have it coming.
- White, Steve
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Once before, the sentient races in the known part of the galaxy — humans, Orions, Ophiuchi and Gorm — united to defeat alien invaders. Now the "bugs" are back, and this time they face new generations that have grown complacent.