All of Mr. Boddy’s enigmatic guests are made suspects after he is killed at Hill House.
When Thomas McFadden, a convicted English drug trafficker who offered tours inside Bolivia’s famed San Pedro prison, was discovered, backpacker Rusty Young was traveling throughout South America. Young Australian journalists traveled to La Paz to attend one of Thomas’s illicit tours out of curiosity. As they worked together to document Thomas’s experiences in jail, they quickly became friends and then collaborators. For the following three months, Rusty lived within the prison, sharing a cell with Thomas, and documenting one of the oddest and most captivating prison tales ever. He did this by bribing the guards to let him stay. Marching Powder is the end product.
The premise of this book is that San Pedro is not your typical jail. It is predicted that inmates will purchase their cells from real estate agents. Some people own and operate businesses. Families who are in prison house women and kids. It is a place where drug lords and dishonest politicians reside in opulent homes while the lowest inmates endure conditions of poverty and misery.
Violence is a constant threat, and at night, some of Bolivia’s busiest cocaine labs are located in parts of San Pedro that during the daytime echo with the sound of children. Cocaine, often known as “Bolivian marching powder,” makes life bearable in San Pedro. Even the prison feline is dependent. Marching Powder is also a story of camaraderie; it takes place in a world where humor can balance out terror and where compassion and brutality may coexist in the same prison cell. This is an interesting narrative of penetration into the South American drug society and cutting-edge travel writing.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“You have fallen badly, señor gringo. Bribery is a very serious crime in this country. You will have to pay.”
“San Pedro prison, apart from being a social microcosm, is also a microeconomy that operates under basic capitalist principles. In fact, it’s probably more efficient than the whole Bolivian national economy. And more democratic, too, but I’ll explain the prison election system to you another day.”
Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Sisterhood Bond are depicted in this True Story. When Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word “mom” after more than a decade, it triggers memories that they have kept hidden since they were young and nails like an eagle’s talons. Before now. Their evil mother, Shelly, tortured and mistreated her daughters for years in secret in their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, subjecting them to unspeakable humiliation, abuse, and mental terrors. Despite everything, Nikki, Sami, and Tori formed a resilient friendship that made them less exposed than Shelly had anticipated. The sisters discovered the fortitude and strength to flee an intensifying nightmare that resulted in several murders, even as others were dragged into their mother’s sinister web.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I loved my mother because I didn’t know I had a choice. I had to love her.”
“that 10 percent of a nightmare is still a nightmare.”
“Her perpetual despondency preserved forever in black and white.”
“Randy had an inkling that something else was afoot. Shelly’s father appeared too eager to pass his daughter off to another man.”
“Humor was the curtain she put around everything.”
Private eye Nathan Heller might be willing to put his life in danger to make a Depression dollar in 1932’s mob-ridden Chicago, but he never compromises his razor-sharp wit. That’s why both mystery enthusiasts and critics place the historical thriller True Detective at the top of their lists, and why the book won the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award for best novel. Author Max Allan Collins (Road to Perdition) has just released a new edition of the modern classic that features Nathan Heller in all his guts and glory. Nathan Heller of the pickpocket detail, the city’s youngest plainclothes officer, is tasked with cleaning up Chicago’s tarnished reputation in time for the World’s Fair.
Heller finds himself an inadvertent and unwilling participant in an assassination attempt on Frank Nitti, the heir to Al Capone when the Mayor’s “Hoodlum Squad” drags him along on a raid with no instructions other than to keep his mouth shut and his gun nearby. He soon finds himself in the thick of a mob vs. mayor power struggle, and the young detective must foil a political assassination that could have global repercussions in Miami Beach. Readers interact with historical figures like “Dutch” Reagan, George Raft, and FDR himself as Collins’ explosive and evocative large-landscape historical thriller mixes the complex history of Chicago’s Century of Progress with a classic noir mystery.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“they maybe didn’t deserve respect, exactly, but I knew enough to give them some.”
“for work these days; nobody had been hired in janitorial”
Steve Harmon, a 16-year-old, is on trial for murder. According to reports, Steve acted as the lookout when the proprietor of a drugstore in Harlem was shot and killed inside of his business. Steve is used as a pawn by “the system,” which is filled with cynical officials and dishonest inmates who will turn anyone in to reduce their own sentences, whether or not they are guilty. Steve is forced to consider his identity for the first time as he prepares to enter prison, where he may spend the rest of his days.
Steve, an aspiring filmmaker, attempts to turn his trial into a script in order to cope with the horrifying circumstances that surround him. Scene by scene, he records the entire account of how his entire life was abruptly changed. But despite his efforts, reality becomes hazy and his vision becomes distorted to the point where he is unable to distinguish between himself and the truth. The writing of Walter Dean Myers is at its finest in this gripping book.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I’ll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.”
“They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can’t kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.”
“The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.”
“he was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t guilty.”
“Think about all the tomorrows of your life.”
“The movie is more real in so many ways than the life I am leading. No, that’s not true. I just desperately wish this was only a movie.”
The Hartes and the Golds have shared everything from Chinese food to chicken pox to carpool duties over the course of their eighteen years of living next to one another. They have become so close that it appears as though they have known each other forever. It’s hardly surprising that Chris and Emily’s friendship develops into something more in high school since they’ve always been best friends—parents and kids alike. Ever since they were born, they have been soul mates.
No one is prepared for the shocking reality that Emily is dead at the age of 17 after suffering a head injury from a gunshot when midnight hospital calls start coming in. The firearm Chris grabbed from his father’s cabinet had one live round that is still in it; Chris claims to have intended to use it for himself. But the suicide pact Chris has outlined raises questions in the mind of a nearby detective.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I, um, I have this problem. I broke up with my boyfriend, you see. And I’m pretty upset about it, so I wanted to talk to my best friend. […] The thing is, they’re both you.”
“You know, the mind is a remarkable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting. It scars all the time, but it heals.”
“She was all the things I wasn’t. And i was all the things she wasn’t. she could paint circles around anyone; I couldn’t even draw a straight line. She was never into sports; I’ve always been. Her hand, it fit mine.”
“No matter who you are, there is always some part of you that wishes you were someone else, and when, for a millisecond, you get that wish, it’s a miracle.”
“The mind is a remarcable thing. Just because you can’t see the wound doesn’t mean it isn’t hurting”
This is how the enormous, captivating first book, which is set in the underground of modern Bombay, begins. Lin, an ex-convict with a fake passport who escapes from an Australian maximum security prison in search of a city’s bustling streets where he may vanish, tells the story of Shantaram. The two enter Bombay’s secret society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and performers, Indians and exiles from other nations, who look for what they cannot find elsewhere in this amazing location, accompanied by his guide and devoted buddy Prabaker.
Lin is a guy on the run who has no family, home, or identification. He runs a clinic in one of the city’s most impoverished slums while learning the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. He discovers war, torture in detention, murder, and a string of sinister betrayals as a result of his search. Two people possess the keys that can free Lin from the secrets and intrigues that have bound her. The first is Khader Khan, a mafia figurehead, criminal philosopher, and saint who served as Lin’s tutor in the Golden City’s criminal underworld. The second is Karla, who is attractive, secretive, and motivated by secrets that torture her but endow her with frightening power.
This massive novel encompasses the entirety of human existence, with a deep love for India at its core. It includes burning slums and five-star hotels, passionate love and jail agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood movies, spiritual gurus, and mujaheddin guerrillas. It is unquestionably the literary debut of an amazing voice, based on the author’s life.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Sometimes we love with nothing more than hope. Sometimes we cry with everything except tears.”
“Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t know what frightens me more, the power that crushes us, or our endless ability to endure it.”
“The best revenge, like the best sex, is performed slowly, and with the eyes open.”
“Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.”
A frantic race against the clock…and an unforgiving foe. An unidentified young woman was killed in a run-down hotel, her identifying features destroyed by acid. In the sweltering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square, a parent was executed publicly. An infamous Syrian biotech expert was discovered blind in a junkyard near Damascus. Human remains in flames on an isolated Afghan mountainside. A perfect scheme to execute a terrible crime against humanity. Only one man may travel the route that connects them all.’
Best Quotes from this Book:
“nobody’s ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.”
“If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.”
“You can kill a thinker, but you can’t kill the thought.”
“The world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.”
“In war, the first casualty is truth.”
Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter is a dour narrative of crime, retribution, and the search for ever-elusive forgiveness. It is a story of being down and out but never down for good. The story revolves around the exploits of Jack Levitt, an orphaned youngster scraping by in the dingy pool halls and sleazy hotels of Portland, Oregon. Billy Lancing, a talented pool hustler and young black runaway, becomes pals with Jack. Jack is transferred to a reform school after a failed theft, where he is abused and placed in seclusion until being released. Billy has since become a member of the middle class, getting married, having a son, owning a business, and having a mistress. However, neither Jack nor Billy can avoid their troubled pasts, and before their unusual double drama reaches to a violent and revelatory conclusion, they will reunite in San Quentin.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All night long, in his cell, he burned with hatred. It did not matter what he thought, it was how he felt; and alone in the darkness of his cell, with the muttering noises of the tank around him, he felt like murdering the universe.”
“He did not want to see the war movie. It would be full of shit.”
“When you lose you lose forever, and when you win it only lasts a second or two.”
“He promptly forgot all about being the hero of a coward’s nightmare,”
“He came to see that marriage was not an institution, not even an idea, but a rational social process whose function was to raise children properly.”
Years after his escape, Hannibal enjoys the good life in Florence, pretending to be the learned Dr. Fell, curator of a wealthy family’s home, while playing wonderful music composed by the notorious serial killer and murderer Henry VIII and killing very few people himself. Clarice is less fortunate because her nemesis, Paul Krendler, makes her the fall guy after she survives a botched FBI shootout in the book’s action-movie-like opening scene. Due to Clarice’s suspension, Pazzi, an Italian who bears resemblance to the avaricious traitors portrayed in Dante’s Inferno, is the first cop to come upon Hannibal. Mason Verger, a figure as terrifying as Hannibal, is paying Pazzi. Verger avoided jail time when he was a young man and was caught raping youngsters thanks to his enormous riches. All he required was some Dr. Lecter-led psychotherapy. Verger is now on a respirator, paralyzed save from one hand that resembles a crab, and watching his massive, ferocious moray eel swim figure eights and eat fish as a result of the treatment. Lecter is his obsessional pet, which he feeds to other vicious animals.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”
“If I saw you everyday forever, I would remember this time.”
“We can only learn so much and live.”
“The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.”
“There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.”
Stephen King’s THE GREEN MILE was an incredible publishing success when it originally came out, one book per month. All six volumes wound up on the New York Times bestseller lists at the same time, delighting millions of admirers around the globe.
Welcome to Cold Mountain Penitentiary, where the E Block’s grizzled inmates call home. Each convicted murderer is waiting for his turn to walk the Green Mile while retaining a time slot for “Old Sparky,” the electric chair at Cold Mountain. Paul Edgecombe, a prison guard, has worked the Mile for many years and has seen his share of peculiar things. But John Coffey, a man with a gigantic body and a child’s mentality, has never been seen by him before. He was found guilty of a crime that was startling in its depravity and horrifying in its violence. Edgecombe is about to learn the horrible, wonderful truth about Coffey in this realm of ultimate vengeance, a knowledge that will contradict his most cherished beliefs—and yours.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not.”
“Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation.”
“It’s strange how pain marks our faces, and makes us look like family.”
“Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.”
“He killed them with their love”
Raskolnikov, a former student who is homeless and miserable, goes through the slums of St. Petersburg and kills someone at random without feeling guilty or sorrowful. He sees himself as a great man, like Napoleon, who goes above and beyond the bounds of morality. Raskolnikov, meanwhile, is being pursued by his conscience as he engages in a risky game of cat and mouse with a dubious police investigator, and he feels the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. The only person who can give the option of redemption is Sonya, a victimized sex worker.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”
“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.”
“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity.”
1961 in New Bremen, Minnesota. Ice-cold root beers were flying off the shelves at Halderson’s Drugstore’s soda fountain, and Hot Stuff comic books were a staple on every barbershop magazine rack as the Twins played their inaugural season. It was an era of optimism and innocence for a nation led by a new, young president. However, for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum, it was a gloomy summer marked by frequent and varied visits from death. a natural occurrence. Murder and suicide.
When tragedy unexpectedly strikes Frank’s family—which also includes his Methodist minister father, his passionate, creative mother, his older sister, who is headed to Juilliard, and his wise-beyond-his-years younger brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal and is suddenly required to show maturity and gumption beyond his years. Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy.
Ordinary Grace is a profoundly compelling narrative of a youngster attempting to make sense of a world that seems to be disintegrating around him, told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that tragic summer. This fascinating book explores the dreadful cost of wisdom and God’s unfailing grace.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The dead are never far from us. They’re in our hearts and on our minds and in the end all that separates us from them is a single breath, one final puff of air.”
“The miracle is this: that you will rise in the morning and be able to see again the startling beauty of the day.”
“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain, which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful graces of God.”
“Loss, once it’s become a certainty, is like a rock you hold in your hand. It has weight and dimension and texture. It’s solid and can be assessed and dealt with. You can use it to beat yourself or you can throw it away.”
“And what is happiness, Nathan? In my experience, it’s only a moment’s pause here and there on what is otherwise a long and difficult road. No one can be happy all the time.”
“The Wettest County in the World,” a suspenseful tale of brotherhood, greed, and murder, is based on the real-life experiences of Matt Bondurant’s grandfather and two granduncles. During Prohibition and the years that followed, the Franklin County, Virginia, area was traversed by the renowned band of roughnecks and moonshiners known as The Bondurant Boys. Howard, the middle brother, is an ox of a man beset by the horrors he witnessed in the Great War; Forrest, the oldest brother, is fierce, mythically indestructible, and the consummate businessman; Jack, the youngest, has a taste for luxury and a dream to escape Franklin; and Forrest, the middle brother, is an ox of a man.
These men are driven and haunted, and as they witness their family perish, their family’s company collapse, and the world they knew crumble under the Depression and drought, they form a business, fall madly in love, and strive to survive. Whatever name you gave it, Franklin County was awash in moonshine in the 1920s, whether it was named white mule, white lightning, firewater, popskull, wild cat, stump whiskey, or rotgut. It was dubbed the “wettest county in the world” by journalist and “Winesburg, Ohio” author Sherwood Anderson while he was there for a story.
As his career comes to an end, Anderson finds himself navigating dusty red roads in an effort to track down the Bondurant brothers, and piece together the evidence connecting them to “The Great Franklin County Moonshine Conspiracy,” and breach the cloak of secrecy surrounding Franklin County. Matt Bondurant vividly and powerfully describes these individuals, their sinister actions, their protracted silences, and their intense needs. It is both painful and amazing how well he grasps the love, violence, and desperation at the core of this world.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The constant assertion of masculinity is always the most obvious tell of a fake. You do not constantly assert what you know you have.”
“It amazed Forrest that so many men seemed to wake up in the morning needing some kind of beating or another, men saying and doing fantastic things for the sake of getting another man to smash his face.”
“Without that fear, we are all as good as dead.”
“A man who likes to get hit is the one to watch out for.”
“The only way through is to bury it deep in your gut and let the hot juices work on it for a while. Soon enough you forget whatever it was that pained you to begin with.”
A middle-aged mercenary paid to find rare editions for wealthy and dishonest clients, Lucas Corso is a book detective. Corso is called in to authenticate a piece of The Three Musketeers’ original manuscript after a well-known bibliophile is discovered dead and leaves behind some of it. He is immediately sucked into a complex narrative involving occult rituals, devil worship, and daring swashbuckling among a group of people that suspiciously resembles the cast of Dumas’s classic. In this twisting cerebral adventure through the literary world, Corso journeys from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer’s track with the help of a strange beauty named after a Conan Doyle heroine.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“One is never alone with a book nearby, don’t you agree? Every page reminds us of a day that has passed and makes us relive the emotions that filled it. Happy hours underlined in red pencil, dark ones in black…”
“Everyone gets the devil he deserves.”
“Because God and the devil could be one and the same thing, and everybody understood it in his own way.”
“Becoming a book collector is like joining a religion: it’s for life.”
“The world is full of banks and rivers running between them, of men and women crossing bridges and fords, unaware of the consequences, not looking back or beneath their feet, and with no loose change for the boatman.”
The setting is New York City in the year 1896. A friend and former Harvard classmate, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a “alienist,” summons New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore to the East River on a chilly March night. They see the horrifyingly dismembered body of a young boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan’s notorious brothels, on the incomplete Williamsburg Bridge.
Theodore Roosevelt, the recently appointed police commissioner, recruits the two men for the murder investigation in a highly unconventional move, relying on the quiet Kreizler’s intelligence and Moore’s familiarity with New York’s extensive criminal underground. Sara Howard, a courageous and tenacious lady who works as a police department secretary, is welcomed to the group.
The unlikely team begins what is a revolutionary effort in criminology while working in secret (because alienists and the newly emerging field of psychology are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), compiling a psychological analysis of the man they’re looking for based on the specifics of his crimes. They enter the torturous history and deranged brain of a killer who has killed before and will murder again before the hunt is finished as a result of their perilous mission. The Alienist brings back the Gilded Age and its unscarred underside: filthy tenements and magnificent mansions, corrupt cops and showy criminals, glittering opera theatres, and seedy gin mills. It is fast-paced and riveting, with a historian’s exactitude. This is New York in a time when it was dangerous to dispute the social assumption that all murderers are born, not made.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.”
“Change isn’t something that most people enjoy, even if it’s progressive change.”
“It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves “New York Society.”
“Scientists’ minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.”
“How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?”
The renowned Orient Express is stopped in its tracks as it passes through the hilly Balkans just after midnight by a snowdrift. For this time of year, the opulent train is unexpectedly packed, yet by morning, there is one less person on board. An American businessman who had been stabbed a dozen times lies dead in his compartment with a sealed door from the inside.
Nobody other than detective Hercule Poirot is among the passengers. on a trip. Poirot, who is alone and in a boat with a killer, must find the murderer so that he or she cannot retaliate.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”
“If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it – often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.”
“What’s wrong with my proposition?” Poirot rose. “If you will forgive me for being personal-I do not like your face, M. Ratchett.”
“At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction – it fascinated rather than repelled.”
“The body—the cage—is everything of the most respectable—but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.”
In order to decipher a mysterious sign carved into the chest of a slain physicist, famed Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is called to a Swiss research center. What he finds is unthinkable: the Illuminati, a centuries-old secret society, is on a murderous vengeance against the Catholic Church. Langdon teams up with the attractive and enigmatic scientist Vittoria Vetra in Rome as they race against time to stop a powerful time bomb from destroying the Vatican. Together, they set out on a frenetic search that takes them through impenetrable tombs, perilous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and deep inside the world’s most secret vault—the long-forgotten Illuminati lair.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.”
“God answers all prayers, but sometimes his answer is ‘no’.”
“Nothing captures human interest more than human tragedy.”
“Our minds sometimes see what our hearts wish were true.”
“God, grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.”
It is the year 1954. To look into the disappearance of a patient, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his fresh companion Chuck Aule traveled to Shutter Island, the location of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Several murderers Despite being confined in a closed cell and under close observation, Rachel Solando is still somewhere on this desolate island. A bizarre case assumes even deeper, more sinister hues as a deadly hurricane closes down on them. There are signs of radical experimentation, horrible procedures, and deadly counterattacks carried out in the service of a clandestine shadow war. Nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems, therefore no one will be able to leave Shutter Island undamaged. But Teddy Daniels isn’t either, either.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?”
“This world can only give me reminders of what I don’t have, can never have, didn’t have for long enough.”
“Maybe there are some things we were put on this earth not to know.”
“Everyone sees different things.”
“The world didn’t give a shit. It didn’t bestow. It took”
At Westworld, the ultimate resort, you can live out your desires for $1,000 per day. Any human need, including murder, violence, and wild sexual abandonment, is satisfied by fully automated, humanoid robots created solely for your amusement.
Up until a single man stands alone against the crazy machines bent on complete carnage as a little computer casualty spreads like wildfire!
Best Quotes from this Book:
“What is your itinerary?”
“To meet my maker.”
“Ah. Well. You’re in luck. And what do you want to say to your maker?”
“A most mechanical and dirty hand [laughs]. I shall have such revenge on you…both. The things I will do, what they are, yet I know not. But they will be the terrors of the earth. You don’t know where you are, do you? You’re in a prison for your own sins.”
― Michael Crichton, Westworld
“Welcome to Westworld, where nothing can go wrong…go wrong…go wrong.”
― Michael Crichton, Westworld