“Poet. Teacher. Warrior. The best trial lawyers are all three at once,” observes Ty Buchanan in Bell’s good-natured third suspense novel to feature the quixotic L.A. lawyer (after Try Darkness) who lives in a trailer and provides legal services at St. Monica’s, a little Benedictine community. When Buchanan defends a client who insists on fighting a DUI charge despite the score the client registered on the Intoximeter, he fulfills the teacher function by giving the attractive prosecuting attorney, Kimberly Pincus, a lesson she’ll never forget. He turns warrior after an anonymous e-mailer’s ominous threats to Sister Mary Veritas, a sparky St. Monica’s nun, escalate. And poetically, Buchanan, uses a Beatles tune at a critical juncture. Bell infuses the legal maneuverings with enough humor, insight and intelligence to merit an exception to Shakespeare’s admonition to kill all the lawyers.
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Every bit as good as the better-known Jim Butcher, Carey hits his stride with his third hard-boiled supernatural thriller (after Vicious Circle). Felix “Fix” Castor, a London-based exorcist who uses music to fight evil spirits and other paranormal creatures, faces two major challenges. The burial of Fix’s friend John Gittings is disrupted by a lawyer with a court order mandating that the corpse be cremated; Gittings’s widow retains Fix to prevent the body’s exhumation. Meanwhile, a woman asks Fix to clear her husband of rape and murder charges by proving that Myriam Seaforth Kale, a gangster who’s been dead for 40 years, is actually responsible. While looking into how Kale has come back from the dead to resume killing people, Fix finds links to a larger threat from the dark side. Carey has a way with words (a character dresses “like someone who’d taken The Matrix a little too seriously”) as well as a gift for creating a plausible alternate reality.
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(Publisher’s Weekly, May 18)
In Edgar-winner Liss’s enjoyable third thriller to feature the estimable Benjamin Weaver, an 18th-century London “thieftaker” (after A Spectacle of Corruption and A Conspiracy of Paper), Weaver finds himself working reluctantly for a mysterious gentleman, Jerome Cobb. On Cobb’s orders, Weaver takes employment as a security man at the British East India Company’s headquarters, where he tries to obtain information about the death of one Absalom Pepper, of whom virtually nothing is known. To keep Weaver in line, Cobb has blackmailed Weaver’s friend Moses Franco, close confederate Elias Gordon and his beloved uncle Miguel. As usual, several beautiful women play roles in the complicated plot, which involves industrial spying and the international textile trade. Weaver’s two previous adventures could sometimes bog down in arcane financial and political detail, but Liss keeps the suspense at full boil and the action rolling swiftly ahead.
Order your signed copy of The Devil’s Company by David Liss at www.vjbooks.com
(Publisher’s Weekly, May 18)
“Something wrong here, a cold whisper of evil. The house was a modernist relic, glass and stone and redwood, sixty years old and gone creaky; not all haunted house were Victorian. Sometimes at night… she’d feel a sudden coolness, as though somebody, or some thing, had just slipped by. This was different. She couldn’t pin it down, but it was palpable. She thought about stepping back into the garage. ‘Who’s there?’ she called. She got nothing back but an echo.”
(Opening lines of Phantom Prey. John Sandford’s Wicked Prey published May 12)
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“People think of the First Family as being in a bubble, but the President and First Lady have family outside the bubble. I’ve never written about this extended family until now. I also go way outside the power corridors of Washington. All the way to an antebellum plantation inthe Deep South. It’s David versus Goliath only not in the way you think.”
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(Publisher’s Weekly, May 18)
Doubleday launched Pygmy (copies in print: 124,600) with an East coast tour to Boston; New York; Baltimore; Philadelphia; and Washingotn, D.C. Palahniuk’s events drew sellout crowds of 300-600 people at each venue. Famous for his interaction with audiences, the author threw 250 inflatable, three-foot penguins-blown-up, signed, then deflated and shipped to the stores by Palahniuk – to the fans. Significance of the penguin? It was the power animal in Fight Club, and this year is the 10th anniversary of the Brad Pitt flick.
Order your signed copy of Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk at www.vjbooks.com
THE SCARECROW has a bonus included in the hardcover – an excerpt from Michael Connelly’s next book, NINE DRAGONS. This Harry Bosch novel will be released in October 2009. And there are even more extras in THE SCARECROW. Michael created 12 fictional web sites in the story. As you come across them during your reading, you may have fun looking them up online. You’ll find some pretty cool bonus material there.
Click here to see bonus material found on one of the fictional websites.
Click to order your signed copy of The Scarecrow and 9 Dragons by Michael Connelly at www.vjbooks.com
Then enter THE SCARECROW Book Trivia Contest. Read the book and test your knowledge. One winner will be randomly selected from all of the correct entries to have his or her name used for a character’s name in Michael’s next Harry Bosch novel, NINE DRAGONS. The winner will also receive a signed copy of the book when it’s released. This contest will run for only two weeks, from May 26 through June 9, 2009. SPOILER ALERT! The questions include spoilers for the book. Do not enter until after you’ve read THE SCARECROW.Order your signed copy of The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly at www.vjbooks.com
The author’s 43rd novel brings back bank robber Jack Foley, who was portrayed by George Clooney in ‘Out of Sight.’ Cowboy movies and Hemingway made Leonard a writer. Screenplays made him rich.1. Visualize Harry Dean Stanton.
Head north out of Detroit on I-75 past 8 Mile Road and you get to Bloomfield Hills, the wealthy suburb where Elmore Leonard lives. Although he was born in New Orleans in 1925, the 83-year-old novelist grew up in Detroit and has lived in the area all his life. In several of his novels, Bloomfield Hills is the scene of home invasions, shootouts and kidnappings.
Leonard writes at an oak table in an airy ground-floor sitting room. The table has a few neat piles of research paper, the yellow legal pads he uses to write longhand and a big ashtray. He and his second wife, Joan, bought this house in 1987. She died of cancer in 1993, and now Leonard lives here with his third wife, Christine. He has four grown children from his first marriage, a dozen grandkids and three great-grandchildren.
Every one of Leonard‘s books is still in print. Virtually every novel he has written has been sold to Hollywood. This month, he’s publishing his 43rd novel, “Road Dogs” (William Morrow: 262 pp.).
“Road Dogs” is a sequel of sorts to “Out of Sight,” which was made into a movie by Steven Soderbergh, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. In this new book, bank robber Jack Foley (Clooney’s character) has been sprung from prison and is living in Venice, Calif., where his life (more…)
Bestseller James Rollins delivers his sixth Sigma Force thriller, The Doomsday Key
How do you get started on a book?
It starts with a box, a cardboard lawyer’s file box. Into that box goes anything that might make a story: a stray idea that pops into my head, an article from the latest Scientific American, a note jotted while watching the History Channel and so on. Once a month, I sift through that box and cull anything that no longer interests me. But during that process, by pure chance, odd bits end up next to each other on the floor: a piece of history that ends in a question mark, a bit of science that makes me go “what if?” And in that moment, I discover a possible story.
Do you know when you start where you’re going to end up?
Here you raise a common author conundrum: do you outline your stories or do you write organically? I’ve sat on conference panels where authors on both sides of this divide have discussed their process. In the end, the panel usually ends up in a fistfight—sometimes figuratively, (more…)
