The second book in the series lives up to the first. Do you know the best part about this series? These two are New York Times best seller authors.
Of course, they had an offer from a major publisher to publish these books, but they didn't want to wait and they self-published them. Can I say how grateful I am? P.S. I adore the covers.
From the NY Times Bestselling duo that wrote Agnes and the Hitman, the second book in the Liz Danger series.
Liz Danger is a ghostwriter, trapped in her old hometown for the summer. Good thing she has Vince Cooper, her recurring one-night stand living down by the river in his old diner car, making her feel happy and safe and normal until September when sheāll be leaving again, although sheās starting to wonder if she really wants to.
Vince Cooper is a cop in a town with a shady new housing development thatās bringing a lot of armed strangers, aā¦
Craig Novaās beautifully sad novel Trombonewas much overlooked when it was first published. As melancholy as the trombone solos that neāer-do-well father and arsonist Dean Golancz plays every time one of his many affairs ends, this book is about dangerous criminals, love, familial loyalty, and big moral questions. Mostly itās a father-son story and love triangle in the guise of a crime novel, with beautiful, lush, gritty use of language throughout.
Craig Nova's classic novel Trombone is a powerful and poignant portrait of the complexities between an arsonist father and his good son. Dean Gollancz is an easygoing man of modest means. He longs for the Big Time, and when his job at the Print Shop doesn't pay the bills, he commits arson for a Chinese gangster in Los Angeles. His son Ray feels deep love and loyalty for his father, but when he wins an Ivy League scholarship, Ray must decide how much of his own life to sacrifice for Dean's respect. The destructive nature of their relationship is broughtā¦
There's something about broken people trying to do good that has always resonated with me. In basic training, a drill sergeant with debilitating PTSD told us what combat would be like through a storm of choking sobs and a haze of tears. He needed us to know. Even if it broke him. Working as an investigator in Denver and Washington, I watched people with complicated pasts and uncertain futures fight tooth and nail (sometimes literally) to put human traffickers behind bars. Literature has always been a bridle for that wildness I saw in the world. A tool for taking the ghashing, stomping, unruliness of the human experience and making it rideable, relatable, survivable.
The first of the Virgil Flowers novels, which is an offshoot of the (also spectacular) Lucas Davenport series. The story follows BCA investigator Virgil Flowers through the Minnesota backwoods as he works an arson/murder case. This book is different from a few of the others on this list in that it isnāt going to ruin you emotionally. Itās funny. Hell, its just fun. The hero is a well-meaning horndog who regularly forgets to bring his gun to work. The case is twisty and satisfying and the characters are so well fleshed out that when itās over you just want to pick up your phone and invite them out for a burger. I eat this series like candy.
The first Virgil Flowers novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.
"Virgil Flowers, introduced in bestseller Sandford's Prey series, gets a chance to shine...The thrice-divorced, affable member of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), who reports to Prey series hero Lucas Davenport, operates pretty much on his own.."*
He's been doing the hard stuff for three years, but he's never seen anything like this. In the small rural town of Bluestem, an old man is bound in his basement, doused with gasoline and set on fire. Three weeks before, a doctor and his wife were murdered.ā¦
I am a former wildland firefighter, so I am passionate about writing about it. Iāve included several personal experiences in my books, and I learned integrity and an outstanding work ethic with the firefighters who trained me in the wildland fire community. I met my husband on another fire crew, so I had to write these fire stories in the romance genre. I have friends who also met their spouses in the world of firefighting, and I loved their romances. While not all wildfire stories in real life may have happy endings, I choose to write these as romances because a happily-ever-after is required for the romance genre.
I loved this book because it shows her female character's resilience and strength in reinventing her career in fire after a debilitating accident on the job as a firefighter. Split-second decisions matter in the perilous world of fighting fire.
When Anne Ashburn finds a new career as a fire investigator, she must investigate a string of suspicious fires that endanger the lives of her former colleagues. The hero in the story teams up with Anne to find answers, and a heated attraction soon ignites. This story has enough twists and turns to confuse even the best GPS.
The Darwin Affair
dropped and immersed me into hard times in Victorian England with a frustrated
detective based on a Charles Dickens character who investigates a conspiracy to
murder either Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and/or Charles Darwin, who is
promoting his On the Origin Of Species.
I not only learned a bit about
Victorian England and Darwin, but this historical fiction was a fast-paced
thriller to boot! I read it in four days.
"Intellectually stimulating and viscerally exciting, The Darwin Affair is breathtaking from start to stop." -The Wall Street Journal A Barnes & Noble Discover Pick * A Wall Street Journal Best Mystery Book of the Year * A Reader's Digest Best Summer Book * A Forbes.com Best Historical Novel of the SummerGet ready for one of the most inventive and entertaining novels of 2019-an edge-of-your-seat Victorian-era thriller, where the controversial publication On the Origin of Species sets off a string of unspeakable crimes.London, June 1860: When an assassination attempt is made on Queen Victoria, and a petty thief is gruesomely murderedā¦
My heart almost broke when I found out that this fifth book in the Butler & West series by Louisa Scarr would be the last.
I fell in love with grumpy Robin Butler and diligent Freya West, two police detectives who the reader canāt help but become invested in. And Scarr finishes off the seriesā narrative arc perfectly, while delivering a cracker of an investigation (this time into an arsonist) to boot. The Butler & West books are that brilliant mix of police procedural and out-of-the-box adventure, with characters that you can really believe in, and root for.
Definitely worth a try if you havenāt delved into this sort of thriller before.
Stalking. Arson. Murder.Butler and West are back together... and the stakes have never been higher.
When an old friend tells DS Freya West that she's being stalked by someone she met online, Freya promises to help. But there are no leads, and the dating site refuses to give up their data.
To make matters more complicated, DI Robin Butler is back in town. He's investigating a string of arson attacks that have escalated to murder, and the cases seem to be connected somehow. They're going to need their wits about them...
I believe in democracy. I think the US has the opportunity to be the worldās first multicultural and inclusive democracy. And I think thatās a very, very hard thing to do. Iāve been writing about democracy through the lens of presidential history my whole career, and I think the US has done some things so impressively well while at the same time it frustratingly keeps failing to live up to its own ideals. The tensions and contradictions in our history as we try to expand and enact those ideas are endlessly fascinating. And Iām nervous that we may be seeing the end of a national commitment to democracy.
I love this book because itās political science at its best; it uses a lot of great data to study how history affects us in the present; it shows us how hard change is and also what makes it possible. Itās depressing and hopeful and super smart. Itās social science but itās also very readable.
The lasting effects of slavery on contemporary political attitudes in the American South
Despite dramatic social transformations in the United States during the last 150 years, the South has remained staunchly conservative. Southerners are more likely to support Republican candidates, gun rights, and the death penalty, and southern whites harbor higher levels of racial resentment than whites in other parts of the country. Why haven't these sentiments evolved? Deep Roots shows that the entrenched views of white southerners are a direct consequence of the region's slaveholding history. Today, southern whites who live in areas once reliant on slavery-compared to areasā¦
As a writer, Iāve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe thatās because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lowsāeverything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
Itās not often that a thirty-something man nails the depiction of the interior life of a seventeen-year-old girl, but Jesse Ball did exactly that in his 2016 novel. Scrappy, arson-obsessed Lucia Stanton just might be my favorite literary teenage hero of all time. I think of her as a mix between Holden Caulfieldās charming disaffection and Junoās precocious wit.
Ball imbues Luciaās voice with intelligence and a hint of world-weariness, but he still manages to convey her innocence. You learn a lot from her, but you also want to protect her. My copy is dog-eared and underlined into oblivion. Itās one of those books I think is woefully underrated, and I recommend it any chance I get.
āBall has created a voice that echoes the beloved narrators of J. D. Salinger and John Green. . . . With her tragic past, brilliant mind and subversive potential, Lucia could be thought of as a young Lisbeth Salander, or a high-IQ, antiheroic Katniss Everdeen, but with a better sense of humor.ā āNewsday
Lucia Stantonās father is dead, her mother is in a mental hospital, and sheās recently been kicked out of schoolāagain. Living with her aunt in a garage-turned-bedroom, and armed with only a book, a Zippo lighter, and a pocketful of stolen licorice, she spends her days ridingā¦
Iām the best-selling romance author of 29 books which span six series. I love creating whole worlds for readers to enter and spend time with smoking-hot bodyguards, motorcycle club members, ex-military bad boys, sexy cowboys, and MMA fighters. Although I love pretty much everything about writing for a living, I do get special joy from having characters from one series wander into a different series and interact with a totally different group of people ā keeping track of all the relationships definitely keeps me on my toes! I have three new books coming out this year, so Iām really looking forward to sharing some new stories with my wonderful readers.
Is there anything hotter than a man willing to launch himself into a wilderness fire to save complete strangers? If you think there isn't, may I direct you to Marshās three-book series with action, suspense, drama ā and scorching-hot men risking everything to help others. Burning Up introduces the reader to a close-knit group of smokejumpers, vengeful arsonists, regrets, and lost loveā¦ and reminds us that the riskiest jobs often result in heartbreak. I doubt that I could handle the stress of loving someone who lays down their life every single time they go to work, but I do find the psychology of the risk-taker fascinating and sexy: real heroes are rare and maybe thatās what makes them so irresistibleā¦ even if they are fictional.
It takes a special kind of hero to be a smoke jumper. To take the greatest risks. To live or die in the raging heat of the moment. And it takes a special kind of woman to love him. . .
Where There's Smoke. . .
For Jack Donovan, smoke jumping is a way of life. He lives for the adrenaline rush--the thrill of flying over the burning California hills, the intensity of diving straight into the inferno, the glory of taming the forces of nature. Love is a distant ember compared to the feeling he gets fighting fires--until anā¦
I am a long-time lover of mysteries. Whether it be books, TV, or movies, I love when there is an unknown element to puzzle out. I remember staying up long past my bedtime as a child, reading because I just had to know what happened. I write across a number of genres for different age groups, but at the heart of every story I take on is a mystery that I want to figure out for myself. I love it when readers and audiences come along for the ride, joining me for the plot twists and turns.
I started this book for the unlikely main characterāSister Holiday, a chain-smoking, tattooed, queer nunābut it was the mystery that kept me reading. I always love it when a writer can make me feel like I am the one on the line, like I am fighting for my life or to prove my innocence. This book did just that.
I found I was holding myself tightly as Sister Holiday investigated but just kept finding more evidence against herself. The snippets of her past life made me feel for her more and more, taking the character from an unlikely hero to someone I cared deeply about. I canāt wait to get my hands on the second in the series.
Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, queer nun, puts her amateur sleuthing skills to the test in this "unique and confident" debut crime novel (Gillian Flynn).
When Saint Sebastian's School becomes the target of a shocking arson spree, the Sisters of the Sublime Blood and their surrounding New Orleans community are thrust into chaos.
Patience is a virtue, but punk rocker turned nun Sister Holiday isn't satisfied to just wait around for officials to return her home and sanctuary to its former peace, instead deciding to unveil the mysterious attacker herself. Her investigation leads her down a twisty path ofā¦