Fiction and Non Fiction

Brief summary A collection of pulse-pounding tales featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan—including the untold story of her first case! The #1 New York Times bestselling author behind the hit Fox series Bones, Kathy Reichs is renowned for chilling suspense and fascinating forensic detail. The Bone Collection presents her trademark artistry in this collection of thrilling short fiction. In First Bones, a prequel to Reichs’s first novel, Déjà Dead, she at last reveals the tale of how Tempe became a forensic anthropologist. In this never-before-published story, Tempe recalls the case that lured her from a promising career in academia into the grim but addictive world of criminal investigation. (It all began with a visit from a pair of detectives—and a John Doe recovered from an arson scene in a trailer.) The collection is rounded out with three more stories that take Tempe from the low country of the Florida Everglades, where she makes a grisly discovery in the stomach of an eighteen-foot Burmese python, to the heights of Mount Everest, where a frozen corpse is unearthed. No matter where she goes, Tempe’s cases make for the most gripping reading. ISBN:9780399593222 Author:Kathy Reichs

Brief summary From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman. The fireman is coming. Stay cool. No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe. Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child. Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged. In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke. ISBN:9780062200631 Author:Joe Hill

Brief Summary Set on the French Riviera in the late 1920s, Tender Is the Night is the tragic romance of the young actress Rosemary Hoyt and the stylish American couple Dick and Nicole Diver. A brilliant young psychiatrist at the time of his marriage, Dick is both husband and doctor to Nicole, whose wealth goads him into a lifestyle not his own, and whose growing strength highlights Dick's harrowing demise. A profound study of the romantic concept of character, Tender Is the Night is lyrical, expansive, and hauntingly evocative. ISBN:9780684801544 Author:F. Scott Fitzgerald

Brief summary Four years ago Erin Joyce left Dublin under a cloud and bought a guesthouse in the remote, beautiful village of Dunbarra. The Gatehouse attracts a strange clutch of guests who, once ensconced, never want to leave. There's Hazel, a shy artist, and her sweet, silent daughter Gracie. Sandra, a brash American, wants to know everything about everyone. Then there's wise old easy-going PJ, who's seemingly part of the furniture. But Erin's fragile happiness is thrown off-balance by the arrival of A-list Hollywood actor Sebastian Grey. Erin finds herself drawn to this handsome enigmatic man, who used to walk with a swagger but now prowls the country lanes with haunted eyes. What trauma could have brought about this devastating change? Sebastian isn't the only one in the Gatehouse with a secret. Why is Hazel cast so adrift? Where does PJ go each week without fail, and what really brought Sandra to Dunbarra? As Erin finds herself embroiled in her guests' secrets she starts to ask herself: will she be ready to reveal her own? ISBN:9781847393340 Author:Colette Caddle

Brief summary Alix Gower may be poor but she's also ambitious, and she'd do anything to secure her dream job in one of Paris' premier fashion houses. But Alix also has a secret: she supports her family by stealing from the very houses she so adores. Then Alix is unexpectedly given a break - a way to support her elderly grandmother and a future she can believe in . . . but it comes at a terrible price. Will Alix risk her reputation, her relationships and even her personal safety for a dream? And is the handsome English reporter she keeps bumping into really to be trusted? The Dress Thiefis an award-winning, atmospheric novel about love, dreams and betrayal. ISBN:9781848665880 Author:Natalie Meg Evans

Brief summary When newlywed Penny turns her hand to some casual wedding planning she only wants to help other women afford the big day of their dreams. But taming bridezillas turns out to be a full-time occupation, and what began as a hobby becomes a personal and professional nightmare. Soon Penny is struggling to keep her day job and prevent her own marriage from collapsing under the strain: tired, stressed and knee-deep in ivory satin, is Penny's life and livelihood hanging by a thread? " ISBN:9781848663664 Author:Anna Bell

Brief summary The best-selling and award-winning journalist Anders Roslund and ex-criminal Borge Hellstrom are Sweden's most acclaimed fiction duo. Roslund and Hellstrom combine inside knowledge of the brutal reality of criminal life with searing social criticism in complex, intelligent plots, propelling them to the forefront of the recent Scandinavian crime fiction sensation and winning them numerous awards, like the prestigious CWA International Dagger. Heirs apparent to masters of Scandinavian crime Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, "For crime with a political purpose, it's hard to beat Cell 8... where an outburst of violence on a late-night ferry heading for Sweden links to the fate of an American on death row," said the Sunday Times. A cheap crooner by the name of John Schwarz earns his keep on a ferry between Sweden and Finland singing evergreens for drunken passengers. One night, he loses his temper with a man harassing women in the crowd, beating him unconscious. As drunken brawls are commonplace on the Baltic cruising ferries, no one raises an eyebrow. No one, that is, but Detective Ewert Grens. Concerned by the details of the case report, Grens can't help but think someone capable of such violence must have a history of it. Suspicion turns to shock when Grens discovers that John Schwarz is not who he says he is, but instead John Meyer Frey--an American citizen from Marcusville, Ohio; shock because John Meyer Frey died on Death Row the previous year. This mystery initiates the most remarkable criminal investigation of Grens's career, the reverberations of which will reach the highest tier of international politics, and blow the worldwide debate on the death penalty wide open. ISBN:9781623651282 Author:Anders Roslund & Borge Hellstrom

Brief summary The Bestselling New Detective Series of the Decade Just Got Hotter, Deadlier, and More Suspenseful. In a deadly late-night showdown, San Francisco police lieutenant Lindsay Boxer fires her weapon and sets off a dramatic chain of events that leaves a police force disgraced, a family destroyed, and Lindsay herself at the mercy of twelve jurors. During a break in the trial, she retreats to a picturesque town that is reeling from a string of grisly murders-crimes that bear a link to a haunting, unsolved case from her rookie years.Now, with her friends in the Women's Murder Club, Lindsay must battle for her life on two fronts: in a trial rushing to a climax, and against an unknown adversary willing to do anything to hide the truth about the homicides-including kill again?