Title: Vertical Burn Author: Earl Emerson File Type: Mobi Subject:Fiction:Suspense Description:Amazon.com ReviewThis fact-based thriller is more facts than thrills, as Earl Emerson, a lieutenant in the Seattle Fire Department who's penned a series of solid mysteries featuring detective Thomas Black, puts his professional expertise front and center. That may be a plus, as the book's centerpiece is an arson fire in a skyscraper, a scene that brings the NYFD's heroism on 911 sadly to mind, giving this book in timeliness what it lacks in narrative drama. There's a plot somewhere here which has to do with a few venal, scheming bad guys in a (fictional) Seattle Fire Department who keep a hero fireman from upsetting their big score by discrediting him, and when that doesn't work, trying to kill him. But Emerson concentrates less on character, story, and pacing than on the highly technical details of urban firefighting, which, while perhaps widening Emerson's appeal to a general audience, may make this title less than compelling to the devoted fans of his mysteries. --Jane AdamsFrom Publishers WeeklySeattle fireman Emerson, of Shamus Award¤winning Thomas Black detective series fame, returns with his 12th novel¢a tale of arson, intrigue and sublimated rivalries among Seattle firefighters. John Finney, son of a retired fire chief and brother of a 21-year veteran, is haunted by the fire that killed one of his colleagues and placed him under departmental suspicion. Finney thinks the fire was arson, but can't prove it¢until two other fires erupt under even more suspicious circumstances, killing another one of his partners. In short order, the mistrust of Finney's colleagues flares dangerously close to criminal prosecution, while a mysterious rogue fire engine tries to run him down. Finney starts up his own investigation of the fires, and even manages to spark up a romance with Diana Moore, the department's only female firefighter. But when Finney's amateur sleuthing turns up a crooked business tycoon and an arson insurance scam involving Seattle's tallest tower, Emerson turns up the heat. The novel is, as expected, long on details of firefighting and its incipient hazards, though there is little mention of the real and enduring conflicts between the investigative arm of firefighters and law enforcement. Newcomers to Emerson's work who enjoy thrillers like Suzanne Chazin's The Fourth Angel should find little to complain about; as an example of the genre, however, in plotting and dialogue ( I ain't seen nothing but this goddamn smoke. Thought maybe my first wife was in there cooking dinner. ) this is at best a two-alarmer. br 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Title: There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Ki
Author: Liudmila Petrushevskaia
File Type: Mobi
Subject:Horror
Description:
**The literary event of Halloween: a book of otherworldly power from Russia's preeminent contemporary fiction writer**
Vanishings and aparitions, nightmares and twists of fate, mysterious ailments and supernatural interventions haunt these stories by the Russian master Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, heir to the spellbinding tradition of Gogol and Poe. Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today.
Title: A Room With a View
Author: E. M. Forster
File Type: Mobi
Subject:classics
Description:
The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: British Italy Fiction; Young women Fiction; Florence (Italy); England; British; Young women; Humorous stories; England - Fiction; British - Italy; Fiction Classics; Fiction Literary; Fiction General; Fiction Classics; Fiction Humorous; Fiction Literary; Foreign Language Study English as a Second Language; Foreign Language Study Japanese; History Europe Italy; Language Arts
Title: The Year of the Hare
Author: Arto Paasilinna
File Type: Mobi
Subject:Fiction:Humor
Description:From Publishers WeeklyFirst published in 1975 at the height of the back-to-nature movement, Paasilinna's charming, low-key allegory pursues a journalist abandoning his Helsinki life for the companionship of a pet hare. Approaching middle age--the hopes of youth had not been realized, far from it--Kaarlo Vatanen takes off after a hare he and his friend have accidentally hit while driving. He tends to the hare's leg, befriends the critter, deserts his friend, gradually sheds his former life, and eventually refits a cozy cabin in the wilds of Lapland. Paasilinna fashions in each step of Kaarlo's transformation a test of society's institutions, and finds each, not surprisingly, wanting, from law enforcement and the construction industry to the army. The hare, meanwhile, is innocently plucky, leaving his droppings on the altar of a church and in the soup of a Swedish lady. It's cute enough, if baldly obvious in the way that parables often are. (Jan.) br (c) PWxyz, LLC. FromA Finnish journalist and a photographer out on assignment one June evening suddenly hit a young hare on a country road. The photographer, ultimately unsympathetic, abandons his journalist companion Vatanen, who sets off to find the wounded hare. Vatanen develops a close bond with the hare and in their adventures together, they witness people's avarice, inhumaneness, hypocrisy, cruelty, participation in bureaucracy, and mere existence, rather than living, in the world. This last realization in particular is life altering for Vatanen: he quits his job, discards his hopeless marriage, sacrifices financial security, and sells his most prized possession (a boat). All this Vatanen replaces with a life of odd jobs and on-the-road experiences. This picaresque novel could simply depict a middle-age crisis, but it reaches beyond fantasy or fiction, becoming mythic in its universal themes. The story is inventive, satirical, and quite humorous. It is also refreshingly sentimental in the sense that Paasilinna reaffirms our connection with the animal world and our inherent need for happiness and freedom to maintain quality of life. Janet St. John
Title: The Optimist's Daughter
Author: Eudora Welty
File Type: Mobi
Subject:Fiction
Description:
This story of a young woman's confrontation with death and her past is a poetic study of human relations.
Title: Procession of the Dead (The City)
Author: Darren Shan
File Type: Mobi
Subject:Science-Fiction
Description:From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Shan's dystopic thriller, the first in a trilogy already published in the U.K., is an excellent, twisting foray into a world of deceit, murder, and mystery. Capac Raimi arrives in an unnamed city, a place ruled by a man known as the Cardinal, and quickly realizes that he has no memory of his life elsewhere. When the Cardinal kills Capac's uncle and offers Capac a job based on a dream and Capac's Incan name, the young man's life takes a turn for the fantastical. While training to serve the Cardinal, Capac embarks on a strange, gripping search for clues to both the disappearances of his friends and his own past. The dialogue is realistic, the characters and settings are vivid, and the plotting is tight, complemented perfectly by a bleak, desolate tone. Any fan of postapocalyptic fiction will find it absolutely riveting. (June) br Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. FromPopular YA author Darren Shan's first adult novel is a combination of horror and near-future thriller set in “The City,” which is the center of Capac Raimi's world. Moving into the city to work with his small-time gangster uncle, Capac soon finds himself at the service of the Cardinal, the leader of all the criminal gangs and the ruler of the city. Capac enjoys his new life except for a few small details, including the enigmatic blind and mute monks who have a way of appearing at significant moments in Capac's life, and the fact that he can't really remember any of his life before he came to the City. Then he meets and immediately falls in love with a young woman who is determined to dig out the Cardinal's secrets. Fast-paced and exciting, Procession of the Dead is a gritty, creepy, and completely successful story with an ending that leaves openings for future series entries. Suggest to readers who enjoyed Miéville's The City and the City (2009) for its slightly fantastical setting combined with a thrilling story. --Jessica Moyer
Title: The Handbook for Lightning Strike Surviv
Author: Michele Young-Stone
File Type: Mobi
Subject:Contemporary
Fiction
Description:
**When lightning strikes, lives are changed.**** **BECCA *On a sunny day in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, eight-year-old Becca Burke was struck by lightning. No one believed her—not her philandering father or her drunk, love-sick mother—not even when her watch kept losing time and a spooky halo of light appeared overhead in photographs. Becca was struck again when she was sixteen. She survived, but over time she would learn that outsmarting lightning was the least of her concerns.* BUCKLEY *In rural Arkansas, Buckley R. Pitank’s world seemed plagued by disaster. Ashamed but protective of his obese mother, fearful of his scathing grandmother, and always running from bullies (including his pseudo-evangelical stepfather), he needed a miracle to set him free. At thirteen years old, Buckley witnessed a lightning strike that would change everything.* Now an art student in New York City, Becca Burke is a gifted but tortured painter who strives to recapture the intensity of her lightning-strike memories on canvas. On the night of her first gallery opening, a stranger appears and is captivated by her art. Who is this odd young man with whom she shares a mysterious connection? When Buckley and Becca finally meet, neither is prepared for the charge of emotions—or for the perilous event that will bring them even closer to one another, and to the families they’ve been running from for as long as they can remember. Crackling with atmosphere and eccentric characters, *The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors* explores the magic of nature and the power of redemption in a novel as beautiful and unpredictable as lightning itself.