Staff Picks for August 2001

Lelia's August Picks

Mrs. Pollifax And The Whirling Dervish by Dorothy Gilman

All Mrs. Pollifax has to do is masquerade as the aunt of an inept CIA representative while he confirms the identities of seven undercover agents in Morocco---and keep him from making an unpleasant ass of himself. Immediately, things go horribly wrong. The first informant is murdered minutes after Mrs. Pollifax and her companion identify him in his brassware stall in Fez. Worse, she senses that her colleague is not who---or what---he says he is...

$6.50

Callie & the dealer & a Dog Named Jake by Wendy Howell Mills

Callie, a restaurateur on North Carolina's Outer Banks, has problems. Someone is stealing from the storeroom, her past is haunting her and a hurricane is blowing in...but things really get interesting when she finds a dead man in her freezer.

$8.95
prior to 15% bestseller discount

Off Season by Philip R. Craig

J. W. Jackson loves these crisp Vineyard autumn days after the season has ended. Now that the "off-islanders" are finally off the island, the ex-Boston cop is free to relax, fish and make future plans with his lady love Zee.

But this fall, the natives are getting seriously restless. Animal rights activists are squaring off against the deer slayers; environmentalists are at odds with land developers. And when verbal arrows become real ones---and a most unlikely victim is caught in the lethal crossfire---it is J. W. who must lead the hunt for the unfortunate soul's murderer.

$5.99

Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones

Rupert Venables is the junior Magid of Earth. All over the Multiverse the Magids, powerful magicians, are at work to maintain the balance between positive and negative magic for the good of all. They use their powers to push people into doing the right thing at the right time. But Rupert's senior has died and Rupert, aided by the ghost of the deceased, must search the Earth for a new junior, while preventing civilization from descending into chaos. It seemed like a good idea to cause all five candidates to attend one SF convention in England. But then all magic breaks loose.

$6.99

Permed to Death by Nancy J. Cohen

Marla was already having a bad hair day, but when one of her clients dies while getting a perm in her salon, her day just can't get any worse...until the smugly competent Detective Vail accuses her of poisoning the wealthy widow's coffee creamer! Granted, Bertha Kravitz was hardly her favorite customer, but Marla could have never murdered the ornery woman. Now it's up to the savvy stylist to find out just who did.

Combing the woman's privileged world for clues, Marla soon discovers that the town is crawling with potential suspects. As the case grows more snarled, Marla becomes determined to unmask a cunning killer before she's outwitted---and dead.

$5.99
prior to 15% bestseller discount

Andrew's August Picks

The Shining, by Stephen King

Jack Torrance takes a job as the caretaker of a hotel in the mountains of Colorado, thinking that an entire winter's isolation from the outside world will help his family recover from recent stress as well as giving him a prime opportunity to begin his long-delayed novel. But what he hasn't planned on is that the hotel is haunted. Will his 5-year old son Danny's latent mental powers be enough to save the entire family from madness and murder?

This is one of King's early horror classics that established him as leader of the genre. and readers who've only seen the rather oblique Stanley Kubrick-directed movie are missing out on a great deal of the book's intricate storyline-which is well worth the price of admission.

$7.99

Radio Free Albemuth, by Philip K. Dick

In the late 1960s a paranoid incompetent has schemed his way into the White House and convulsed America in a vicious war against imaginary internal enemies. A struggling science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick is trying to keep from becoming one of that war's casualties. And Dick's best friend, a record executive named Nicholas Brady, is receiving transmissions from an extraterrestrial entity that may also happen to be God-an entity that apparently wants him to overthrow the President.

In this, his last novel, Philip K. Dick morphed and recombined themes that had informed his fiction from A Scanner Darkly to VALIS and produced a wild, impassioned work that reads like a visionary alternate history of the United States. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick's stature as our century's greatest prankster-prophet.

$11.00

Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza, Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about Infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous. you'll recognize it immediately.

$12.95

Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened-something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever.

Twenty-five years later, Sean Devine is a homicide detective. Jimmy Marcus is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave Boyle is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay-demons that urge him to do terrible things.

When Jimmy Marcus's daughter is found murdered, Sean Devine is assigned to the case. His personal life unraveling, he must go back into a world he thought he'd left behind to confront not only the violence of the present but the nightmares of his past. His investigation brings him into conflict with Jimmy Marcus, who finds that his old criminal impulses tempt him to solve the crime with brutal justice. And then there is Dave Boyle, who came home the night Jimmy's daughter died covered in someone else's blood.

$25.00

The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood

The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Laura's story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.

Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin is a richly layered and uniquely rewarding experience. The novel has many threads and a series of events that follow one another at a breathtaking pace. As everything comes together, readers will discover that the story that Atwood is telling is not only what it seems to be-but is in fact, much more.

$26.00

Eric's August Picks

The Organ Grinders by Bill Fitzhugh

Paul Symon is an environmentalist who's out to make the world a better place, but he faces too much disjointed information, public apathy and self-serving talk. Not to mention greedy despoiler Jerry Landis, a venture capitalist dying of a rare disease that accelerates the aging process.

Landis cares only about making more money and finding a way to arrest his medical condition. That brings him and his fortune to the wild frontier of biotechnology, where his people are illegally experimenting with cross-species organ transplantation in California while breeding genetically altered primates at a secret site in the piney woods of south central Mississippi. There's also an eco-terrorist on the loose, bent on teaching hard lessons to people who think the Earth and its creatures are theirs to destroy.

$6.50

The Quorum by Kim Newman

Supernatural horror and social satire mix in this dazzling pop variation on the Faustian bargain. In 1961, Derek Leech emerges fully formed from the polluted Thames, destined to found an global media empire of pop music, Hollywood movie studios, newspapers, publishers, and television. In 1978, three ambitious young men strike a deal with Leech. They are offered wealth, glamour, and success, but a price must be paid, a sacrifice must be made.a conspiracy of lifelong pain against their best friend. In 1994, Leech's diabolical purpose moves to its conclusion, and as the young men struggle against damnation, they realize what the ultimate price really is. With a devil for the 1990s, fame becomes a fate worse than death.

$5.95

Practical Demonkeeping by Christopher Moore

The good looking one is one-hundred-year-old ex-seminarian and 'road' scholar Travis O'Hearn. The green one is Catch, a demon with a nasty habit of eating most of the people he meets. Behind the fake Tudor façade of Pine Cove, Catch sees a four-star buffet. Travis, on the other hand, thinks he sees a way of ridding himself of his toothy traveling companion. The winos, Neo-pagans, and deadbeat Lotharios of Pine Cove, meanwhile, have other ideas. And none of them is quite prepared when all hell breaks loose.

$6.99

Down on Ponce by Fred Willard

A rollercoaster ride through an underworld filled with wonderfully skewed characters, as dangerous as they are perverse, whiplash dialogue that will have you laughing out loud, and more twists than a hangman's noose. Willard's hard boiled, hilarious and harrowing page turner deserves a standing ovation.

$12.00

The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Roger Zelazny, known for his additions to the sci-fi genres, presents his epic fantasy series set in the wonderful world of Amber. This, for the first time ever, is the entire ten book series in one omnibus.

$20.00

Annie's August Picks

Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn't get out much. Not because she's not pretty. She is. It's just that, well, Sookie has this sort of "disability." She can read minds. And that doesn't make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He's tall, dark, handsome -- and Sookie can't hear a word he's thinking. He's exactly the type of guy she's been waiting for all her life...

But Bill has a disability of his own: He's a vampire with a bad reputation. He hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of -- big surprise -- murder. And when one of Sookie's coworkers is killed, she fears she's next...

$5.99
Bestseller - 15% discount

The Color of Magic, by Terry Pratchett

The Color of Magic is Terry Pratchett's maiden voyage through the now-legendary land of Discworld. This is where it all begins -- with the tourist Twoflower and his wizard guide, Rincewind.

$6.50

Lirael by Garth Nix

Lirael has never felt like a true daughter of the Clayr. Abandoned by her mother, ignorant of her father's identity, Lirael resembles no one else in her large extended family living in the Clayr's glacier. She doesn't even have the Sight -- the ability to See into the present and possible futures -- that is the very birthright of the Clayr.

Nonetheless, it is Lirael in whose hands the fate of the Old Kingdom lies. She must undertake a desperate mission under the growing shadow of an ancient evil -- one that opposes the Royal Family, blocks the Sight of the Clayr, and threatens to break the very boundary between Life and Death itself. With only her faithful companion, the Disreputable Dog, to help her, Lirael must find the courage to seek her own destiny.

$16.95
New release - 25% discount

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Shadow spent three years in prison, keeping his head down, doing his time. All he wanted was to get back to the loving arms of his wife and to stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. But days before his scheduled release, he learns that his wife has been killed in an accident, and his world becomes a colder place.

On the plane ride home to the funeral, Shadow meets a grizzled man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A self-styled grifter and rogue, Wednesday offers Shadow a job. And Shadow, a man with nothing to lose, accepts.

But working for the enigmatic Wednesday is not without its price, and Shadow soon learns that his role in Wednesday's schemes will be far more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. Entangled in a world of secrets, he embarks on a wild road trip and encounters, among others, the murderous Czernobog, the impish Mr. Nancy, and the beautiful Easter -- all of whom seem to know more about Shadow than he himself does.

Shadow will learn that the past does not die, that everyone, including his late wife, had secrets, and that the stakes are higher than anyone could have imagined.

All around them a storm of epic proportions threatens to break. Soon Shadow and Wednesday will be swept up into a conflict as old as humanity itself. For beneath the placid surface of everyday life a war is being fought -- and the prize is the very soul of America.

$26.00
New release - 25% discount

Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey

Born with a scarlet mote in her left eye, Phedre no Delaunay is sold into indentured servitude as a child. When her bond is purchased by an enigmatic nobleman, she is trained in history, theology, politics, foreign languages, the arts of pleasure. And above all, the ability to observe, remember, and analyze. Exquisite courtesan, talented spy...and unlikely heroine. But when Phedre stumbles upon a plot that threatens her homeland, Terre d'Ange, she has no choice.

Betrayed into captivity in the barbarous northland of Skaldia and accompanied only by a disdainful young warrior-priest, Phedre makes a harrowing escape and an even more harrowing journey to return to her people and deliver a warning of the impending invasion. And that proves only the first step in a quest that will take her to the edge of despair and beyond.

Phedre no Delaunay is the woman who holds the keys to her realm's deadly secrets, and whose courage will decide the very future of her world.

$25.95
New release - 25% discount