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AnemicOak · 06-29-2014, 01:07 AM

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It's going to be a tough trial. Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper's case, involving an attack on investment banker Paige Vallis, would be difficult to prove even without the latest development -- it seems that Paige has something to hide.

Most of her story is clear. She'd had dinner with New York consultant Andrew Tripping three times before the March evening when she accepted his invitation to accompany him to his apartment. But what occurred that night? Why didn't she leave the apartment when he started to act strangely? What about Tripping's little boy, Dulles? What happened to the child that fateful evening? And who is the strange man whose appearance in the courtroom seems to terrify Paige?

While Alex's police detective friend Mercer Wallace helps her learn more of the sad details behind the increasingly puzzling rape case, colleague Mike Chapman is uptown in a decaying Harlem brownstone where eighty-two-year-old McQueen Ransome has been murdered, her apartment ransacked.

What could this impoverished, elderly woman have possessed that could have inspired such violence? Photographs on the wall suggest that "Queenie" was once a beautiful and voluptuous young woman who traveled to faraway places. Could there be a clue to her murder in her exotic background?
Her murder will be only the first. Others follow, as the tragic strands of the Paige Vallis and McQueen Ransome cases begin to converge in a poignant alliance of two women from very different worlds.

Faced with formidable personal and professional choices, Alex must learn the old lesson that appearances can deceive, even as she heads for a showdown in which her wits and her courage will be tested as never before.

With its winning combination of courtroom drama, historical detail, and the intriguing lore of a rare object whose fabled provenance provides a glistening thread through the story, The Kills is powerful, stylish writing from a hugely appealing crime-writing star.

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The highway from Los Angeles to the Palm Springs desert is parched, unforgiving, and deadly. In the suffocating stillness of a car trunk, a man -- his mouth and hands bound with tape -- waits to learn his fate. Fortunately for him, he'll never know. What possible enemy could be bitter enough to commit such a heinous crime? And when will the monster make another move?

Ali Reynolds is traveling that same blistering, lonesome highway, looking forward to putting her past behind her. She'd left Los Angeles for the home comforts of Sedona, Arizona, and the satisfaction of a blog. But her cheating husband is in a hurry for a divorce; his very young and very pregnant fiancée has a wedding planned for the next day. And the television network that wrongfully dismissed Ali for the sole sin of being over forty will face her in court as well. So Ali must return to the scene of those crimes. As she passes the site of a horrifying accident, she thanks goodness it's no longer her job to report the news. Until she finds out the news is her own.... For the victim is Ali's cheating husband, and soon she'll find herself the prime suspect at the center of a terrifying web of evil.

Web of Evil gives us J. A. Jance at her most masterful in a twisted and lethal drama of heart-pounding suspense that asks the question: If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, just what punishment could that fury unleash?