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.”
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.”
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”
All of Mr. Boddy’s enigmatic guests are made suspects after he is killed at Hill House.
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.”
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