Help up choose a book as the June 2010 eBook for the Mobile Read Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. We will start the discussion thread for this book on June 20th. Select from the following books.
Thin Blood by MR member author Vicki Tyley
A stockbroker’s wife disappears. Blood on his hands and an adulterous affair with the missing woman’s younger sister sees him charged with murder. With no body and only circumstantial evidence he walks free. Ten years later, journalist Jacinta Deller decides to investigate, only to become embroiled in a warped game of delusion and murder. Available at smashwords.
Shutter Island by Dennis LeHane
The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades--with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan.
Reviews on Amazon say: An effortless adventure classic that spans the void between dime shocker and quality literature. The rapid elaboration of the plot, that is so well known that it has passed many images into popular conciousness, is still satisfying after many reads....It was not until recently that actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and others learned and revealed the information that John Buchan, author of "The Thirty-nine Steps" as well as the highly successful Greenmantle series, had been the head of the secretive British domestic intelligence agency which parallels the FBI in the United States, MI-5. With that knowledge it is increasingly easier to see how the Scotland-born Buchan was able to write such penetrating spy stories, which contain such a strong tone of believability....John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps is the prototype of the modern thriller novel, what he called a "shocker." In it, Buchan introduced Richard Hannay, the prototype of the resourceful, intelligent, and tenacious hero of the modern thriller. And while the story may not be as intricate or exciting as its descendents', The Thirty-Nine Steps still succeeds at what Buchan set out to do--entertain.
Last Man Standing by David Baldacci.
Quote:
It took ten seconds for Web London to lose everything: his friends, his team, his reputation. Point man of the FBI's super-elite Hostage Rescue Team, Web roared into a blind alley toward a drug dealer's lair, only to meet a high-tech, custom-designed ambush that killed everyone around him. Now coping with the blame-filled words of anguished widows and the suspicions of colleagues, Web tries to put his life back together with the help of his psychiatrist, Dr. Claire Daniels. To do so, he must discover why he was the one man who lived through the ambush--and find the only other person who came out of that alley alive...a ten-year-old boy who has since disappeared.
Web's search leads him from inner-city Washington, D.C., to the rolling hills of Virginia horse country--while people connected to him are violently silenced. Acting on his instincts, Web believes he knows where the killer will strike next. Only this time, he may not survive the attack. LAST MAN STANDING is an explosive psychological thriller about a man desperate to find answers--from the secret terrors he has kept from himself to his unbearable guilt. His fight to save himself and those he cares for will come at a high cost...and threaten everything he has grown to believe in. With vividly realized characters and a breathtaking pace, this is another spellbinding novel from David Baldacci, one of today's best storytellers.
Resurrection by Gabriel May
On the eve of a new Millennium, Jon York expected midnight to come and go without incident. Instead, a brutal home invasion left Jon in a coma, his wife dead, and his daughter beaten and raped.
Eight years later Jon awakens from the coma with no recollection of the attack. Fueled by rage, he will stop at nothing to avenge what has been done to his family.
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car drove up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay-demons that urge him to do horrific things.
When Jimmy's daughter is found murdered, Sean is assigned to the case. His investigation brings him into serious conflict with Jimmy. And then there is Dave, who came home covered in someone else's blood the night Jimmy's daughter died. While Sean attempts to use the law to return peace and order to the neighborhood, Jimmy finds his need for vengeance pushing him ever closer to a moral abyss from which he won't be able to return.
A tense and unnerving psychological thriller, Mystic River is also an epic novel of love, loyalty, faith, and family.
Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell
Wikipedia:
Inside an almost isolated Skåne farmhouse in Lunnarp, an old man, Johannes Lovgren is tortured to death and his wife Maria savagely beaten and left for dead with a noose around her neck. Inspector Kurt Wallander, a forty-two-year-old Ystad police detective, and his team – Rydberg, an aging detective with a rheumatism; Martinsson, a 29-year-old rookie; Naslund, a thirty-year veteran; Svedberg, a balding, forty-something-year-old detective; Hansson; and Peters – are put on the case. Maria Lovgren is taken to a hospital, but dies anyway. Her last word: "foreign"
Rydberg has been examining the noose around Mrs Lovgren's neck and "has never seen one like it before". He thinks that Mrs Lovgren's last word is accurate, and that the murderers are foreign. But his conclusion leads to several racially-motivated attacks after the information is leaked to the press.
The story focuses on Sweden's liberal attitude regarding immigration, and explores themes of racism and national identity.
Casino Royale (1953) by Ian Fleming
The allure of James Bond was best described by Raymond Chandler, who insisted that 007 is "what every man would like to be and what every woman would like to have between her sheets." Who can argue with that? This month marks the 40th anniversary of the film release of Dr. No, which was the first Bond adventure to make the big screen, and two big coffee-table books are being published to honor the occasion (LJ 10/1/02, p. 96). Shockingly, Fleming's original novels have gone out of print, but Penguin here reproduces a trio of the British secret agent's early outings, released in 1952, 1958, and 1959, respectively, sporting stylish cover art. These stories were racy for the nifty Fifties but are quite tame by today's standards. Still, they can be fun.
Killing Floor by Lee Child
All is not well in Margrave, Georgia.
The sleepy, forgotten town hasn't seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses events that leave everyone stunned. An unidentified man is found beaten and shot to death on a lonely country road. The police chief and his wife are butchered on a quiet Sunday morning. Then a bank executive disappears from his home, leaving his keys on the table and his wife frozen with fear.
The easiest suspect is Jack Reacher - an outsider, a man just passing through. But Reacher is not just any drifter. He is a tough ex-military policeman, trained to think fast and act faster. He has lived with and hunted the worst: the hard men of the American military gone bad.
Dead(ish) by by MR member author Naomi Kramer
Linda’s had a bad day. First her boyfriend killed her. Then she woke up, still on this boring plane of existence, and with an odd obsession about her missing body. Mike won’t tell her what he did with her body, and she can’t find the stupid thing herself. There’s only one thing she can do - torment the bastard until he coughs up the information.