In stores this week:
 Pretty Little Things
by Jilliane Hoffman
Thirteen-year-old Lainey Emerson is the middle child in a household that
police are already familiar with: her mother works too much and her
step-father favors his own blood over another man's problems - namely,
Lainey and her wild older sister, Liza. So when Lainey does not come home
from a Friday night out with her friends, it is dismissed by the Coral
Springs Police Department as just another disillusioned South Florida teen
running away from suburban drama and an unhappy home life.
But Special Agent Bobby Dees, who has headed up the department's diffcult
Crimes Against Children (CAC) Squad in Miami for more than a decade, is not
quite so sure. Nicknamed “The Shepherd" by colleagues, he has an uncanny
ability to find the missing and bring them back home - dead or alive.
Haunted by the still unsolved disappearance of his own daughter, Bobby
recognizes the all too familiar up-swell inside him, the gut feeling that
Lainey Emerson is no runaway.
A search of Lainey's computer and a talk with her best friend reveal Lainey
was involved in a secret Internet relationship, spawned over a chat room,
and nurtured through untraceable instant messages. Bobby fears she may be
the victim of an on-line predator, and he fears she may not be the only one.
Zero History by William Gibson
The new novel from William Gibson, "one of the most visionary, original, and
quietly influential writers currently working." ("The Boston Globe")
Hollis Henry worked for the global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend once
before. She never meant to repeat the experience. But she's broke, and
Bigend never feels it's beneath him to use whatever power comes his way --
in this case, the power of money to bring Hollis onto his team again. Not
that she knows what the "team" is up to, not at first.
Milgrim is even more thoroughly owned by Bigend. He's worth owning for his
useful gift of seeming to disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian
is perfectly idiomatic - so much so that he spoke Russian with his
therapist, in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured
of the addiction that would have killed him.
Garreth has a passion for extreme sports. Most recently he jumped off the
highest building in the world, opening his chute at the last moment, and he
has a new thighbone made of rattan baked into bone, entirely experimental,
to show for it. Garreth isn't owned by Bigend at all. Garreth has friends
from whom he can call in the kinds of favors that a man like Bigend will
find he needs, when things go unexpectedly sideways, in a world a man like
Bigend is accustomed to controlling.
As when a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the
gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy that even Bigend, whose subtlety
and power in the private sector would be hard to overstate, finds himself
outmaneuvered and adrift in a seriously dangerous world.
See all new releases this
week...
FREEDOM, by Jonathan Franzen.
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A family of
Midwestern liberals during the Bush years; by the author of “The
Corrections.”
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S
NEST, by Stieg Larsson.
(Knopf, $27.95.) The third volume of a trilogy about a Swedish
hacker and a journalist.
DARK PERIL, by Christine Feehan.
(Berkley, $25.95.) A Dragonseeker on a deadly
mission; a Carpathian novel.
LOST EMPIRE, by Clive Cussler with
Grant Blackwood. (Putnam, $27.95.) Sam
and Remi Fargo, a husband-and-wife treasure-hunting team, pursue an
important relic.
THE POSTCARD KILLERS, by James
Patterson and Liza Marklund. (Little,
Brown, $27.99.) An N.Y.P.D. detective joins a Swedish reporter in a
search for the killer of young couples in Europe, including his
daughter and her boyfriend.
THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett. (Amy
Einhorn/Putnam, $24.95.) A young white woman and two black maids in
1960s Mississippi.
THE WAY OF KINGS, by Brandon
Sanderson. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $27.99.)
In the first book of a new series, the Stormlight Archive, war
ravages the world of Roshar.
 The
Girls of Murder City by Douglas Perry
The true story of the murderesses who became media sensations and
inspired the musical "Chicago" Chicago, 1924.
There was nothing surprising about men turning up dead in the Second
City. Life was cheaper than a quart of illicit gin in the gangland
capital of the world. But two murders that spring were special -
worthy of celebration. So believed Maurine Watkins, a wanna-be
playwright and a "girl reporter" for the "Chicago Tribune,” the
city's "hanging paper." Newspaperwomen were supposed to write about
clubs, cooking and clothes, but the intrepid Miss Watkins, a
minister's daughter from a small town, zeroed in on murderers
instead. Looking for subjects to turn into a play, she would make
"Stylish Belva" Gaertner and "Beautiful Beulah" Annan -
both of whom had brazenly shot down their lovers - the talk of the
town.
In the tradition of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City and
Karen Abbott's Sin in the Second City, Douglas Perry vividly
captures Jazz Age Chicago and the sensationalized circus atmosphere
that gave rise to the concept of the celebrity criminal. Fueled by
rich period detail and enlivened by a cast of characters who seemed
destined for the stage, The Girls of Murder City is crackling social
history that simultaneously presents the freewheeling spirit of the
age and its sober repercussions.
 The
Devil in The White City by Erik Larson
Purchase - secure Amazon
Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to
give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel. . . . A dynamic,
enveloping book. . . . It doesn't hurt that this truth is stranger than
fiction." --The New York Times
This book came to me last year, it had been highly
recommended by a few people who love books. I was at a conference and
an Exec at Random House spoke about the fact that it was his favorite book
of all time. Devil in The White City is fascinating, it is two stories
in one, the first an account of a serial killer living and killing in the
vicinity of the Chicago Worlds Fair, the second and for me the most
interesting the story of how the 1893 worlds fair came about and its impact
on North American culture and construction. This is a book that is
hard to put down and reads like fiction but more riveting because its not.
If you pay close attention, you also get a clue as to why Disneyland ever
came to be many years later. - Dagny
more....re
Our New List - Top 100
favourite places to read a great book:
here
You now have more titles to choose from when deciding to
read great books
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Atlas Shrugged
Pillars Of The Earth
The Great Gatsby
The Caine Mutiny
The Time Travelers Wife
The Curious Incident... dog Night-Time
Water for Elephants
Spanish Fly
Valley of the Dolls
The Navigator of New York
 The Grand Design
by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
THE FIRST MAJOR WORK IN NEARLY A DECADE BY ONE OF THE WORLD'S GREAT
THINKERS-A MARVELOUSLY CONCISE BOOK WITH NEW ANSWERS TO THE ULTIMATE
QUESTIONS OF LIFE
When and how did the universe begin? Why are we here? Why is there something
rather than nothing? What is the nature of reality? Why are the laws of
nature so finely tuned as to allow for the existence of beings like
ourselves? And, finally, is the apparent "grand design" of our universe
evidence of a benevolent creator who set things in motion-or does science
offer another explanation?
The most fundamental questions about the origins of the universe and of life
itself, once the province of philosophy, now occupy the territory where
scientists, philosophers, and theologians meet-if only to disagree. In their
new book, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow present the most recent
scientific thinking about the mysteries of the universe, in nontechnical
language marked by both brilliance and simplicity.
In The Grand Design they explain that according to quantum theory, the
cosmos does not have just a single existence or history, but rather that
every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously. When applied
to the universe as a whole, this idea calls into question the very notion of
cause and effect. But the "top-down" approach to cosmology that Hawking and
Mlodinow describe would say that the fact that the past takes no definite
form means that we create history by observing it, rather than that history
creates us. The authors further explain that we ourselves are the product of
quantum fluctuations in the very early universe, and show how quantum theory
predicts the "multiverse" - the idea that ours is just one of many universes
that appeared spontaneously out of nothing, each with different laws of
nature.
Along the way Hawking and Mlodinow question the conventional concept of
reality, posing a "model-dependent" theory of reality as the best we can
hope to find. And they conclude with a riveting assessment of M-theory, an
explanation of the laws governing us and our universe that is currently the
only viable candidate for a complete "theory of everything." If confirmed,
they write, it will be the unified theory that Einstein was looking for, and
the ultimate triumph of human reason.
A succinct, startling, and lavishly illustrated guide to discoveries that
are altering our understanding and threatening some of our most cherished
belief systems, The Grand Design is a book that will inform - and provoke -
like no other.
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