Featured Authors: The Women of Tor---Juliet Marillier, Sara Douglass, Elizabeth Haydon and Jacqueline Carey

Staff Picks for August

Andrew's Picks

Gerald's Game by Stephen King

"Alone in their bedroom, Jessie and Gerald Burlingame are playing a game of trust and control. But when her husband takes the game too far by handcuffing her to a bedpost, Jessie lashes out -- with deadly results. But now she is trapped, with no way to escape the deathly quiet of the room. Over the next twenty-eight hours, Jessie will come face-to-face with her most terrifying nightmares that exist in the last place she would ever look...her mind!"

$7.99

Florida Roadkill by Tim Dorsey

"There's five million dollars in drug money stashed in the back of a white Chrysler. The drivers are just a couple of nice guys on their way to a fishing trip in the Keys. They don't know the money's there. Unfortunately, others do, including homicidal, unbalanced Floridaphile Serge A. Storms, his brain-dead partner Coleman, and a killer, cocaine-loving stripper named Sharon Rhodes. This wild and woolly novel is full of kitschy tourist attractions, seedy hotels, and the kind of psychopaths that Hiaasen might have dreamed of but never wrote down, and includes death by Space Shuttle, Barbie doll, and Levi's 501s. This is violence at its most hilarious, sex at its most original, and criminals at their most preposterous -- a story that never takes its foot off the accelerator."

$6.99

Hammerhead Ranch Motel by Tim Dorsey

"There's a different schemer or slimeball behind every door: cocaine duckpins who have survived only by the dumbest fortune, hard-luck gigolos desperate to score, undercover cops busting undercover cops who are running sting operations on undercover cops. And just down the row, local historian and spree killer Serge A. Storms -- who has stopped keeping up with his meds -- is still looking for a briefcase stuffed with five million dollars...and is now capable of wreaking more havoc than hurricane Rolando-berto, the big wind gathering force offshore, just waiting for the opportunity to blow everything straight to hell.

Pack up your bags and head south to sunny Florida. Leave your rational mind at home and come well armed. There's a room with your number on it at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel."

$6.99

My Dark Places by James Ellroy

"In 1958 Jean Ellroy was murdered, her body dumped on a roadway in a seedy L.A. suburb. Her killer was never found, and the police dismissed her as a casualty of a cheap Saturday night. James Ellroy was ten when his mother died, and he spent the next thirty-six years running from her ghost and attempting to exorcize it through crime fiction. In 1994, Ellroy quit running. He went back to L.A., to find out the truth about his mother - and himself. In "My Dark Places," our most uncompromising crime writer - author of "American Tabloid" and "White Jazz" - tells what happened when he teamed up with a brilliant homicide cop to investigate a murder that everyone else had forgotten - and to reclaim the mother he had despised, desired, but never dared to love. What ensues is an epic of loss, fixation, and redemption, a memoir that is also a history of the American way of violence."

$14.00

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

"By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn't afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep. . . They even built humans. Emigres to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn't want to be identified, they just blended in. Rick Deckard was an officially sanctioned bounty hunter whose job was to find rogue androids, and to retire them. But cornered, androids tended to fight back, with deadly results."

$13.00

Lelia's Staff Picks

Handful of Air by J. B. Rivard

"Morton Kingsley, apartment manager, is already second-guessing an illicit romantic liaison with a tenant when they find a dead body in her apartment. The tenant promptly flees the scene, leaving Morton to muddle through the inexplicable events and clear his name with the authorities and his wife."

$12.95

Dinosaur Cat by Garrison Allen

"When the discovery of a baby Seismosaurus fossil attracts a horde of media vultures to the town of Empty Creek, Arizona, the incredible find is shadowed by an even bigger sensation. A young scientist has been murdered at the site, sending sometime sleuth Penelope Warren out to the scene. But before Penelope arrives, a mysterious explosion removes any evidence. Now, with the help of her Abyssinian cat "Big Mike, " the ex-Marine and part-time bookstore owner digs up clues buried deep in Empty Creek's history, and soon realizes that she has just scratched the surface of a very deadly mystery."

$5.99

Pawing Through the Past by Rita Mae Brown

"Each member of Harry's 1980 senior high school class receives the same threatening letter before their 20th year reunion. Most take it as a joke, but Mrs. Murphy senses trouble. And she's right when the class womanizer is found with a bullet between his eyes. While Harry tries to piece together the puzzle, Mrs. Murphy and her animal pals try to sniff out the truth."

$7.50

Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggins

See Lelia's review.

$14.00

The Reunion by Curt Autry

"In a pulse-pounding debut, World War II events propel a gut-wrenching street level murder campaign. Nine surviving members of a U-boat crew captured during World War II gather in North Carolina for their 60th reunion, only to find themselves targets for a group kill. Meanwhile, after scouring hospital records to find her biological parents, a 36 year-old unwed mother from Oklahoma stumbles upon an obscure family connection to the murders. Carolyn Baker unknowingly holds the clue that could solve the crime, explain her own past, and expose long-concealed secrets. As she thrusts herself into the FBI investigation, the killers plan shifts... Curt Autry skillfully blends vital characters with elements of the spy novel, the thriller, and a classic mystery to produce a thrilling new voice."

$24.95 prior to 25% new hardcover discount