Customer Picks
March 2004

Dragon and Thief by Timothy Zahn

"Jack Morgan has been framed for theft. He's hiding on a distant planet and must clear his name before the cops get him. A firefight in the skies leaves a downed ship near Jack's hiding place, with a single unlikely survivor--a dragon, and it must join with a human host within six hours or die. The only available host is Jack."
Recommended by Pam Kinney

$5.99

Tropic of Night by Michael Gruber

"Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she's nothing, a shadow: after faking her own suicide, she's living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes.

Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased -- as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa.

These clues point Paz inexorably toward the fugitive, Jane Doe, and force Jane to realize that the darkness she has fled is seeking her out, hunting her down. By the time her path intersects with Jimmy Paz's, the two will be thrust into a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil unimaginable to the Western mind."
Recommended by Marcia Talley

$7.50

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

"Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none--not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory. Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger. While Isaac's experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger--and more consuming--by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon--and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes."
Recommended by Jennifer Hancock

$7.99 mass market and $18.95 trade paperback

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

"Overpowered by a stranger and injected with an unknown substance, Dylan O'Connor is told he's a "carrier," not of a disease but of something wondrous that will transform his life in remarkable ways -- if it doesn't kill him in the next 24 hours."
Recommended by Matthew Warner

$6.95

Sanibel Flats by Randy Wayne White

"Its cool gulf breezes lured him from a life of danger. Its dark undercurrents threatened to destroy him. After ten years of living life on the edge, it was hard for Doc Ford to get that addiction to danger out of his system. But spending each day watching the sun melt into Dinkins Bay and the moon rise over the mangrove trees, cooking dinner for his beautiful neighbor, and dispensing advice to the locals over a cold beer lulled him into letting his guard down.

Then Rafe Hollins appeared. How could he refuse his old friend's request-even if it would put him back on the firing line? Even if it would change forever the life he'd built here on Sanibel Island?"
Recommended by Tracy Dunham

$6.99