Mike Vance

John Nova Lomax

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Texas

Historic Bayou City Crime

"Explore the history of homicide in Houston, Texas"--

Murder and Mayhem in Houston:

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The Silent Land

Lionel Dahmer

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

"On July 23, 1991, Milwaukee chemist Lionel Dahmer discovered - along with the rest of the world - that his son Jeffrey was a murderer who, over a period of many years, had carried out some of the most ghastly crimes ever committed in the United States." "These crimes were so grisly that for a time Dahmer entered a world of complete denial - first convinced that Jeff was innocent, then later that he had been no more than the tool of some other, far more evil human being. But as the evidence accumulated, it became clear that Jeffrey Dahmer had acted alone and that the "evil" that had compelled him was far more disturbing than any Lionel Dahmer might have imagined." "As the trial progressed, and the crimes of his son were graphically detailed, Lionel Dahmer began to place himself in the dock beside his son. In the torturous weeks following Jeff's conviction, he continued descent toward that harrowing point at which the line of his own life inevitably intersected with his son's. In doing so, he completed the darkest journey ever made by a stricken father - one that ultimately led one painful step at a time from his initial denial to a final admission of shattering intensity." "A Father's Story cannot claim to have discovered the ultimate solution to the enigma of either the criminal or his deeds. It is, in fact, not the story of Jeffrey Dahmer at all, but of a father who, by slow, incremental degrees, came to realize the saddest truth that any parent may ever know: that following some unknowable process, his child had somewhere crossed the line that divides the human from the monstrous." "This memoir is not a refutation of charges, an attempt to change the record. It is both a touching family memoir and a haunting confession - the searing account of a man who never relented in his effort to fathom the deepest quarters of his son's affliction, even as they pointed to his own. It is an important document on the nature of fatherhood, the origins of madness, and the role of kinship in the legacy of evil."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Father's Story

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Gillian Flynn

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Story by the Author of Gone Girl

When a charlatan "psychic" visits her Victorian home to find the source of her terror and grief, Susan, the psychic, and her teenage stepson are soon forced to confront the truth about ghosts.

The Grownup

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Jennette McCurdy

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor--including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother--and how she retook control of her life.

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother's dream was for her only daughter to become a star, and Jennette would do anything to make her mother happy. So she went along with what Mom called "calorie restriction," eating little and weighing herself five times a day. She endured extensive at-home makeovers while Mom chided, "Your eyelashes are invisible, okay? You think Dakota Fanning doesn't tint hers?" She was even showered by Mom until age sixteen while sharing her diaries, email, and all her income.

In I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail--just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi ("Hi Gale!"), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I'm Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

I'm Glad My Mom Died

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Shoko’s Smile

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Caroline O'Donoghue

A Novel

A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three

"If you've ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you've ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start...if you've ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time...In short, if you've ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did." --Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times best-selling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it's love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever.  Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred's glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.

The Rachel Incident

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Gabino Iglesias

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

From an award-winning author comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what's left of his family--even if it means a descent into violence.

Buried in debt due to his young daughter's illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel's cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won't return the same.



The Devil Takes You Home is a panoramic odyssey for fans of S.A. Cosby's southern noir, Blacktop Wasteland, by way of the boundary-defying storytelling of Stephen Graham Jones and Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

The Devil Takes You Home

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E. M. Forster

"Let her go to Italy!" he cried. "Let her meddle with what she doesn't understand! Look at this letter! The man who wrote it will marry her, or murder her, or do for her somehow. He's a bounder, but he's not an English bounder. He's mysterious and terrible. He's got a country behind him that's upset people from the beginning of the world."

When a young English widow takes off on the grand tour and along the way marries a penniless Italian, her in-laws are not amused. That the marriage should fail and poor Lilia die tragically are only to be expected. But that Lilia should have had a baby -- and that the baby should be raised as an Italian! -- are matters requiring immediate correction by Philip Herriton, his dour sister Harriet, and their well-meaning friend Miss Abbott.

In his first novel, E. M. Forster anticipated the themes of cultural collision and the sterility of the English middle class that he would develop in A Room with a View and A Passage to India. Where Angels Fear to Tread is an accomplished, harrowing, and malevolently funny book, in which familiar notions of vice and virtue collapse underfoot and the best intentions go mortally awry.

Where Angels Fear to Tread

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Bret Easton Ellis

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • A novel of sensational literary and psychological suspense from the best-selling author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho that tracks a group of privileged high school friends in a vibrantly fictionalized 1980s Los Angeles as a serial killer strikes across the city “A thrilling page turner from Ellis, who revisits the world that made him a literary star with a stylish scary new story that doesn't disappoint.” –Town & Country Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city. Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision. Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.

The Shards

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Rumaan Alam

"A ... novel about two families--strangers to each other--who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong"--

Leave the World Behind

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Clare Chambers

Now available in the US--the dark horse literary novel that has taken Britain by storm! In the best tradition of Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ann Patchett--an astonishing, keenly observed period piece about an ordinary British woman in the 1950s whose dutiful life takes a sudden turn into a pitched battle between propriety and unexpected passion. LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION A BEST BOOK OF 2020 PICK: Daily Telegraph, Sunday Times Ireland, Daily Express 1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It's a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape. That all changes when a young woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth. Jean seizes onto the bizarre story and sets out to discover whether Gretchen is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys, including Gretchen's gentle and thoughtful husband Howard, who mostly believes his wife, and their quirky and charming daughter Margaret, who becomes a sort of surrogate child for Jean. Gretchen, too, becomes a much-needed friend in an otherwise empty social life. Jean cannot bring herself to discard what seems like her one chance at happiness, even as the story that she is researching starts to send dark ripples across all their lives...with unimaginable consequences. Both a mystery and a love story, Small Pleasures is a quintessentially British novel in the style of The Remains of the Day, about conflict between personal fulfilment and duty; a novel that celebrates the beauty and potential for joy in all things plain and unfashionable.

Small Pleasures

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Maggie O'Farrell

*A New York Times Best Seller* *One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year* A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year "Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare's life... here is a novel ... so gorgeously written that it transports you. --The Boston Globe In 1580's England, during the Black Plague a young Latin tutor falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman in this "exceptional historical novel" (The New Yorker) and best-selling winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelists.

Hamnet

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Kwon Kwon Yeo-sun

Janet Hong

NAMED A MOST-ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY MS. MAGAZINE AND CRIMEREADS Parasite meets The Good Son in this piercing psychological portrait of three women haunted by a brutal, unsolved crime. In the summer of 2002, when Korea is abuzz over hosting the FIFA World Cup, eighteen-year-old Kim Hae-on is killed in what becomes known as the High School Beauty Murder. Two suspects quickly emerge: rich kid Shin Jeongjun, whose car Hae-on was last seen in, and delivery boy Han Manu, who witnessed her there just a few hours before her death. But when Jeongjun’s alibi checks out, and no evidence can be pinned on Manu, the case goes cold. Seventeen years pass without any resolution for those close to Hae-on, and the grief and uncertainty take a cruel toll on her younger sister, Da-on, in particular. Unable to move on with her life, Da-on tries in her own twisted way to recover some of what she’s lost, ultimately setting out to find the truth of what happened. Shifting between the perspectives of Da-on and two of Hae-on’s classmates struck in different ways by her otherworldly beauty, Lemon ostensibly takes the shape of a crime novel. But identifying the perpetrator is not the main objective here: Kwon Yeo-sun uses this well-worn form to craft a searing, timely exploration of privilege, jealousy, trauma, and how we live with the wrongs we have endured and inflicted in turn.

Lemon

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The Laurel and the Poppy

Carola Dunn

In early 1925, the Honourable Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher, recent mother of twins, resumes her journalistic career by agreeing to write a piece about the Tower of London - the Bloody Tower - for an American magazine. Invited to observe the centuries old ritual Ceremony of the Keys, she's spending the night (her first time away from her babies) since the complex is locked and guarded, and the high walls are surrounded by a disused moat. Having been given a tour of the Crown Jewels, interviewed and observed the Yeoman Warders, and met the Ravenmaster, Daisy has more than enough material for her article and decides to leave as early as possible the next morning to return to her family. But when walking down the stairs, she almost trips over the dead body of one of the Yeoman Warders. That there's something seriously amiss cannot be denied, due to the pike sticking out of his back. With her husband, Scotland Yard DCI Alec Fletcher assigned to resolve the case, Daisy once again finds herself in the middle of a case of murder most foul.

The Bloody Tower

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Melanie Benjamin

There are a couple pages with underlined sections 

Includes a reader's guide with discussion questions.

The Swans of Fifth Avenue

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Anthony Doerr

A cloth bag containing 20 paperback copies of the title that may also include a folder with sign out sheets.

All the Light We Cannot See

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Fiona Mozley

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST ELMET Named One of the Most-Anticipated Books of 2021 by: The Millions, BuzzFeed, The Stylist, The Guardian, and more “[An] absurdly good read . . . A rollicking tale of . . . property and posterity.” —The Guardian In the middle of the bustle of London's Soho, among the theaters and sex shops and pubs, sits a building. It isn’t particularly assuming. But it’s a prime piece of real estate, and a young millionaire, Agatha Howard, wants to convert it into luxury condos as soon as she can kick out all the tenants. The problem is, the building in question houses a brothel, and Precious and Tabitha, two of the women who live and work there, are not going to go quietly. And another problem is, just where did Agatha’s fortune come from? The fight over this piece of property also draws in the men who visit, including Robert, a one-time member of a far-right group and enforcer for Agatha’s father; Jackie, a policewoman intent on making London a safer place for all women; Bastian, a rich and dissatisfied party boy who pines for an ex-girlfriend; and a collection of vagabonds and strays who occupy the basement. In this much-anticipated follow-up to Fiona Mozley's brilliant debut, Elmet, as these characters—with surprising hidden connections and shadowy pasts—converge, the fight over the property boils over into a hot stew. Entertaining, sharply funny, and dazzlingly accomplished, Hot Stew confronts questions about wealth and inheritance, gender and power, and the things women must do to survive in an unjust world.

Hot Stew

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Elizabeth Greenwood

A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud

Is it still possible to fake your own death in the twenty-first century? With six figures of student loan debt, Elizabeth Greenwood was tempted to find out.

So she sets off on a foray into the world of death fraud, where for $30,000 a consultant can make you disappear--but your suspicious insurance company might hire a private detective to dig up your coffin...only to find it filled with rocks.

Greenwood tracks down a man who staged a kayaking accident and then returned to live in his own house while all his neighbors thought he was dead. She takes a call from Michael Jackson (yes, he's alive--or so some would have her believe), talks to people contemplating pseudocide, and gathers intel on black market morgues in the Philippines, where she may or may not succeed in obtaining some fraudulent goodies of her own. Along the way, she learns that love is a much less common motive than money, and that making your death look like a drowning virtually guarantees you'll be caught. (Disappearing while hiking, however, is a great way to go.)

Playing Dead is an utterly fascinating and charmingly bizarre investigation into our all-too-human desire to escape from the lives we lead, and the men and women desperate enough to lose their identities--and their families--to begin again.

Playing Dead

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Sophie Hannah

Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot returns in another brilliant murder mystery that can only be solved by the eponymous Belgian detective and his 'little grey cells'. 'What I intend to say to you will come as a shock . . .' Lady Athelinda Playford has planned a house party at her mansion in Clonakilty, County Cork, but it is no ordinary gathering. As guests arrive, Lady Playford summons her lawyer to make an urgent change to her will - one she intends to announce at dinner that night. She has decided to cut off her two children without a penny and leave her fortune to someone who has only weeks to live . . . Among Lady Playford's guests are two men she has never met - the famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, and Inspector Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard. Neither knows why he has been invited . . . until Poirot starts to wonder if Lady Playford expects a murderer to strike. But why does she seem so determined to provoke, in the presence of a possible killer? When the crime is committed in spite of Poirot's best efforts to stop it, and the victim is not who he expected it to be, will he be able to find the culprit and solve the mystery? Following the phenomenal global success of The Monogram Murders, which was published to critical acclaim following a co-ordinated international launch in September 2014, international best-selling crime writer Sophie Hannah has been commissioned by Agatha Christie Limited to pen a second fully-authorised Poirot novel. The new book marks the centenary of the creation of Christie's world-famous detective Hercule Poirot, introduced in her first book The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Closed Casket

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Liz Fenton

Lisa Steinke

Waking up the morning after their 20th high-school reunion to discover that they have switched bodies, childhood best friends Casey and Rachel navigate disparate challenges in the face of workaholic Casey's gossip television job and Rachel's mother-and-wife responsibilities. Original.

Your Perfect Life

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The Dollhouse

Hannah Tennant-Moore

Nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize

A boldly candid, raw portrait of a young woman's search for meaning and purpose in an indifferent world

Purposefully aimless, self-destructive, and impulsively in and out of love, Elsie is a young woman who feels lost. She's in a tumultuous relationship, is stuck in a dead-end job, and has a relentless, sharp intelligence that's at odds with her many bad decisions. When her initial attempts to improve her life go awry, Elsie decides that a dramatic change is the only solution.

While traveling through Paris and Sri Lanka, Elsie meets people who challenge and provoke her towards the change she is seeking, but ultimately she must still come face-to-face with herself.

Whole-hearted, fiercely honest and inexorably human, Wreck and Order is a stirring debut novel that, in mirroring one young woman's dizzying quest for answers, illuminates the important questions that drive us all.

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Mike Vance; John Nova Lomax