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The Burning Wire, Lincoln Rhyme book #9 by Jeffery Deaver

Lincoln Rhyme is back, on the trail of a killer whose weapon of choice cripples New York City with fear.

The weapon is invisible and omnipresent. Without it, modern society grinds to a halt. It is electricity. The killer harnesses and steers huge arc flashes with voltage so high and heat so searing that steel melts and his victims are set afire.

When the first explosion occurs in broad daylight, reducing a city bus to a pile of molten, shrapnel-riddled metal, officials fear terrorism. Rhyme, a world-class forensic criminologist known for his successful apprehension of the most devious criminals, is immediately tapped for the investigation. Long a quadriplegic, he assembles NYPD detective Amelia Sachs and officer Ron Pulaski as his eyes, ears and legs on crime sites, and FBI agent Fred Dellray as his undercover man on the street. As the attacks continue across the city at a sickening pace, and terrifying demand letters begin appearing, the team works desperately against time and with maddeningly little forensic evidence to try to find the killer. Or is it killers . . . ?

Meanwhile, Rhyme is consulting on another high-profile investigation in Mexico with a most coveted quarry in his crosshairs: the hired killer known as the Watchmaker, one of the few criminals to have eluded Rhyme’s net.

Juggling two massive investigations against a cruel ticking clock takes a toll on Rhyme’s health. Soon Rhyme is fighting on yet another front – and his determination to work despite his physical limitations threatens to drive away his closest allies when he needs them most . . .

Supreme Justice by Phillip Margolin

New York Times bestselling author Phillip Margolin returns to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., with an exciting thriller about a ghost ship and the President’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sarah Woodruff, on death row in Oregon for murdering her lover, John Finley, has appealed her case to the Supreme Court just when a prominent justice resigns, leaving a vacancy.

Then, for no apparent reason, another justice is mysteriously attacked. Dana Cutler – one of the heroes from Margolin’s bestselling Executive Privilege – is quietly called in to investigate. She looks for links between the Woodruff appeal and the ominous incidents in the justices’ chambers, which eventually lead her to a shoot-out that took place years ago on a small freighter docked upriver in Shelby, Oregon, containing a dead crew and illegal drugs. The only survivor on board? John Finley.

With the help of Brad Miller and Keith Evans, Dana uncovers a plot by a rogue element in the American intelligence community involving the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court, and soon the trio is thrown back into the grips of a deadly, executive danger.

With nonstop action, Supreme Justice picks up where Executive Privilege left off, putting readers right back where they were – on the edge of their seats.

The Rebellion of Jane Clarke by Sally Gunning

Jane Clarke leads a simple yet rich life in the small village of Satucket on Cape Cod. The vibrant scent of the ocean breeze, the stark beauty of the dunes, the stillness of the millpond are among the daily joys she treasures. Her days are full attending to her father’s needs, minding her younger siblings, working with the local midwife. But at twenty-two, Jane knows things will change. Someday, perhaps soon, she will be expected to move out of her father’s home and start a household of her own.

Yet some things – including the bitter feud between her father and a fellow miller named Winslow – appear likely to remain the same. When the dispute erupts into a shocking act of violence, Jane’s lifelong trust in her father is shaken. Adding to her unease is Phinnie Paine, the young man Jane’s father has picked out as son-in-law as well as business partner. When Jane defies her father and refuses to accept Phinnie’s marriage proposal, she is sent away to Boston to make her living as she can.

Arriving in this strange, bustling city awash with red coats and rebellious fervor, Jane plunges into new conflicts and carries with her old ones she’d hoped to leave behind. Father against daughter, Clarke against Winslow, loyalist against rebel, command against free will – the battles are complicated when her growing attachment to her frail aunt, her friendship with the bookseller Henry Knox, and the unexpected kindness of the British soldiers pit her against the townspeople who taunt them and her own beloved brother, Nate, a law clerk working for John Adams.

But when Jane witnesses British soldiers killing five colonists on a cold March evening in 1770, an event now dubbed “the Boston Massacre,” she must question seeming truths and face one of the most difficult choices of her life, alone except for the two people who continue to stand by her – her grandparents Lyddie and Eben Freeman.

Grippingly rendered, filled with some of the lesser known but most influential figures of America’s struggle for independence – John and Samuel Adams, Henry Knox, James Otis – The Rebellion of Jane Clarke is a compelling story of one woman’s struggle to find her own place and leave her own mark on a new country as it is born.

The Queen’s Daughter by Susan Coventry

Joan’s mother is Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, the most beautiful woman in the world. Her father is Henry II, the king of England. She loves them both – so what can she do when she’s forced to choose between them? As her parents’ arguments grow ever more vicious, Joan begins to feel like a political pawn. When her parents marry her off to the king of Sicily, Joan finds herself with a man ten years her senior. She doesn’t love him, and she can’t quite forget her childhood crush, the handsome Lord Raymond. As Joan grows up, she begins to understand that her parents’ worldview is warped by their political ambitions, and hers, in turn, has been warped by theirs. Is it too late to figure out whom to trust? And, more important, whom to love?

The Outer Banks House by Diann DuCharme

As the wounds of the Civil War are just beginning to heal, one fateful summer would forever alter the course of a young girl’s life.

In 1868, on the barren shores of post-war Outer Banks North Carolina, the once wealthy Sinclair family moves for the summer to one of the first cottages on the ocean side of the resort village of Nags Head. Seventeen-year-old Abigail is beautiful, book-smart, but sheltered by her plantation life and hemmed-in by her emotionally distant family. To make good use of time, she is encouraged by her family to teach her father’s fishing guide, the good-natured but penniless Benjamin Whimble, how to read and write. And in a twist of fate unforeseen by anyone around them, there on the porch of the cottage, the two come to love each other deeply, and to understand each other in a way that no one else does.

But when, against everything he claims to represent, Ben becomes entangled in Abby’s father’s Ku Klux Klan work, the terrible tragedy and surprising revelations that one hot Outer Banks night brings forth threaten to tear them apart forever.

Ice Cold(Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles book #8) by Tess Gerritsen

In Wyoming for a medical conference, Boston medical examiner Maura Isles joins a group of friends on a spur-of-the-moment ski trip. But when their SUV stalls on a snow-choked mountain road, they’re stranded with no help in sight.
As night falls, the group seeks refuge from the blizzard in the remote village of Kingdom Come, where twelve eerily identical houses stand dark and abandoned. Something terrible has happened in Kingdom Come: Meals sit untouched on tables, cars are still parked in garages. The town’s previous residents seem to have vanished into thin air, but footprints in the snow betray the presence of someone who still lurks in the cold darkness—someone who is watching Maura and her friends.

Days later, Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli receives the grim news that Maura’s charred body has been found in a mountain ravine. Shocked and grieving, Jane is determined to learn what happened to her friend. The investigation plunges Jane into the twisted history of Kingdom Come, where a gruesome discovery lies buried beneath the snow. As horrifying revelations come to light, Jane closes in on an enemy both powerful and merciless—and the chilling truth about Maura’s fate.

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