Staff Picks for July 2001

Featured Author -- Mike Ashley

Eric's July Picks

Big Trouble by Dave Barry

This is a Garry Trudeau send-up of hard-boiled crime novels featuring a drifter who sleeps in a tree, two arms-dealing Russian hoods, a pair of two bit losers who hustle tourists, a pretty, illegal alien, a boozy embezzler, Elizabeth Dole, a psychedelic South American toad, and two klutzy New Jersey hit men. More twists that the I-95 Miami airport interchange and more pratfalls than a Three Stooges comedy.

$7.50

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

If you have to send a group of people to a newly discovered planet to contact a totally unknown species, whom would you send? How about four Jesuit priests, a young astronomer, a physician, her engineer husband, and a child prostitute turned computer expert? That's who Mary Doria Russell sends in her new novel, The Sparrow. This motley combination of agnostics, true believers, and misfits becomes the first to explore the Alpha Centauri world of Rakhat with both enlightening and disastrous results.

However, Emilio Sandoz is the only survivor of the Jesuit mission to the planet Rakhat. Learn through flashbacks the story of the ill-fated trip. The Sparrow tackles a difficult subject with grace and intelligence.

$12.95

Herb, the Vegetarian Dragon by Jules Bass

Follow the adventures of Herb and Meathook when the knights of Castle Dark decide that the time has come to rid their land of man-eating dragons!

$15.95

Asylum by Patrick McGrath

An institution for the criminally insane. A beautiful woamn with an unexplored capacity for passion. A seductive madman with a hideous crime in his past. In Asylum, a master of the psychological thriller works these figures into a nerve racking yet eerily beautiful tapestry of erotic obsession and violence.

Stella Rapahael is elegant, headstrong, and formidably intelligent. Her psychiatrist husband, Max, is staid and unimaginative. When Max takes a position at a maximum security mental hospital in the English countryside, Stella quickly falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a sculptor who has been confined for the ghastly murder of his wife. Neither the strictures of convention nor the knowledge of Stark's past is any match for the volcanic attraction that ensues, an attraction that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.

$13.00

Corrupting Dr Nice by John Kessel

Take a pair of time-hopping con artists looking for their next mark. Add a naïve and incredibly rich young scientist waiting to be fleeced. Stir together in the volatile political atmosphere of Roman-occupied Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion. The result: a wickedly entertaining blend of screwball comedy and biting social satire from one of science fiction's most honored authors.

$14.95

Andrew's July Picks

Edgeworks Vol. 1: Over the Edge and An Edge in My Voice by Harlan Ellison

Here, in more that 600 pages of fiction and essays, White Wolf commences its bold program of collecting virtually all of Ellison. This first volume of a projected 20 part library contains a rare collection of Ellison artifacts unseen for more than 25 years, Over the Edge, featuring a new introduction and a new foreword by the international favorite, Norman Spinrad; and a blazing book of his best essays, An Edge in My Voice, with a foreword by the host of CBS's Late Late Show, Tom Snyder. This is the cream of the crop.

$16.99

Nothing Burns in Hell by Philip Jose Farmer

There's murder and mystery, revenge and blackmail; the stark differences (and startling similarities) of economic class in Illinois, as anywhere; the gentle nods and silly slaps at the area and some of its inhabitants; and a fully realized novel, with brisk pacing, a complex story line, substance, humor, good, evil, and the gray around in the middle where most of us live.

$6.99

Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

On a quiet fall evening in the small, peaceful town of Mill Valley, California, Dr. Miles Bennell discovered an insidious, horrifying plot. Silently, subtly, almost imperceptibly, alien lifeforms were taking over the bodies and minds of his neighbors, his friends, his family, the woman he loved -- the world as he knew it. First published in 1955, this classic thriller of the ultimate alien invasion and the triumph of the human spirit over an invisible enemy inspired three major motion pictures.

$11.00

It by Stephen King

Welcome to Derry, Maine... it's a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry, the haunting is real... They were just kids when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But none of them can withstand the force that has drawn them back to Derry to face the nightmare without an end, and the evil without a name.

$7.99

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor.

Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from the Hitchhiker's Guide ("a towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have") and a galaxy-full of fellow travelers: Zaphod Beeblebrox--the two-headed, three-armed ex-hippie and totally out-to-lunch president of the galaxy; Trillian, Zaphod's girlfriend (formerly Tricia McMillan), whom Arthur tried to pick up at a cocktail party once upon a time zone; Marvin, a paranoid, brilliant, and chronically depressed robot; Veet Voojagig, a former graduate student who is obsessed with the disappearance of all the ballpoint pens he bought over the years.

Where are these pens? Why are we born? Why do we die? Why do we spend so much time in between wearing digital watches? For all the answers, stick your thumb to the stars. And don't forget to bring a towel!

$6.99

Lelia's July Picks

Guilty Mind by Irene Marcuse

On Friday night, Anita and Benno Servi were sitting on the front stoop of their Manhattan apartment building, necking like teenagers. By Monday afternooon, Benno was the prime suspect in the murder of their babysitter, Ellen Chapman.

Benno had walked the young Columbia University grad student back to her new apartment and then come home. When she didn't show up on Monday to pick up the Servi's daughter, Clea, Anita went to Ellen's apartment. That's when she found the body, stabbed with the screwdriver that Benno had given the murdered girl. The only fingerprints on the tool were his. And the questions began...

Anita had to clear Benno's name, and free herself of the fear that not only might he have murdered someone but also that she might not know him at all.

$23.95
prior to 25% new hardcover release discount

Do or Die by Barbara Fradkin

When a popular university student from a wealthy family is found stabbed to death in an academic library, tenacious police inspector Michael Green is called in.

As he sifts through the evidence, several suspects emerge. Was the killing a crime of passion and revenge or a consequence of competition and ambition in the cut-throat world of university politics?

Putting his reputation and his rocky marriage on the line, Green is determined to uncover the truth behind this bizarre killing, at any cost.

$9.95

Innkeeping with Murder by Tim Myers

The closer Alex got to the watch room and higher observation balcony located directly below the lens area, the more certain he became that something was wrong. He felt a kinship to the tower, as if they shared a common pulse. Something was screaming inside his head that the sentinel was out of balance. When Alex noticed that the door to the lens itself was slightly ajar, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

There was no sign that the lock had been forced, but Alex owned the only key, and the door had been securely locked the night before. He climbed the last few steep stairs carefully, then looked out on the narrow walkway that surrounded the top part of the tower.

There was a body lying faceup on the catwalk, the head lolling eerily toward Alex...

$5.99
Meet Tim on Saturday, July 14th, from 12 Noon to 2PM
15% discount will apply and books may be reserved in advance

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

We hear the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. Unfortunately, Sister Mary Loquacious of the Chattering Order has misplaced the Antichrist. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride motorcycles. And the representatives from Heaven and Hell have decided they actually like the human race...

$6.99

Irene's Last Waltz by Carole Nelson Douglas

Irene Adler (the only woman ever to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes), her dashing barrister husband Godfrey Norton and their companion, the indomitable Miss Nell Huxleigh, have come home to Paris, to rest and recuperate after their latest adventures. But rest is fleeting, for Irene is soon approached by a royal princess who is faced with a loveless husband -- and a puzzling dilemma that could destroy several European nations.

Irene is drawn by this puzzle, like some beautiful fly to a deadly spider's web. For the husband in question is none other than the King of Bohemia -- the man whose advances Irene once spurned...and who has sought her ever since. Irene decides she must accept this challenge, and the hunt is on.

But who is the hunted, and who the prize?

$4.99
prior to 50% used book discount