Sepulchre by Kate Mosse
Synopsis :October 1891: A young girl, Leonie Vernier, and her brother, Anatole, are invited to leave the gas-lit streets of Paris and travel south to a mysterious country house - La Domaine de la Cade - near Carcassonne.
There, in the ancient, dark woods, Leonie comes across a ruined sepulchre and is drawn into a century's old mystery of murder, ghosts and a strange set of tarot cards that seem to hold enormous power over life and death.
October 2007: Meredith Martin decides to take a break from her research trip in Paris - where she is studying Claude Debussy - and head down south to a beautiful hotel in the woods. She becomes fascinated by the history of the place and particularly by the tragic events of one Halloween night more than a century before that shocked the small community.
Thus her fate becomes entwined with that of Leonie.
But it is only when she too stumbles over a secluded glade in the forest that she realises that the secrets it contains are far from dead and buried...
A haunting mystery of revenge and obsession, set against the rich backdrop of southern France, SEPULCHRE is the stunning new novel from the bestselling author of LABYRINTH.
The Alibi Man by Tami Hoag
Synopsis
She was a vision. She was a siren. She was a nightmare. She was dead.
Now he needed her to disappear. And he knew just how to make it happen.
The Palm Beach elite go to great lengths to protect their own-and their own no longer includes Elena Estes. Once a child of wealth and privilege, Elena turned her back on that life. Betrayed and disillusioned by those closest to her, she chose the life of an undercover cop, the hunt for justice her own personal passion. Then a tragic, haunting mistake ended her career.
Now Elena exists on the fringes of her old life. But a shocking event is about to draw her back into the painful vortex she's fought so hard to leave behind. First she finds the body-a young woman used, murdered, and dumped in a canal.
Not just a victim, but a friend. As Elena delves into her dead friend's secret life, she discovers ties not only to the Russian mob but also to a group of powerful and wealthy Palm Beach bad boys known for giving each other alibis to cover a multitude of sins.
A group that includes a man Elena once knew very well-her former fiance, Bennett Walker, a man she knows has already escaped justice at least once in his life.
Finding her friend's killer will put Elena at odds with her old life, with her new lover, and with herself. But she is determined to reveal the truth-a truth that will shock Palm Beach society to its core, and could very well get her killed.
The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling
Synopsis
This work is set in Lambeth, London, in the year 1859. By the time Dora Damage discovers that there is something wrong with her husband, Peter, it is too late. His arthritic hands are crippled, putting his book-binding business into huge debt and his family in danger of entering the poorhouse. Summoning her courage, Dora proves that she is more than just a housewife and mother. Taking to the streets, she resolves to rescue her family at any price - and finds herself illegally binding expensive volumes of pornography commissioned by aristocrats.Then, when a mysterious fugitive slave arrives at her door, Dora realises she's entangled in a web of sex, money, deceit and the law. Now the very family she fought so hard for is under threat from a host of new, more dangerous foes. Belinda Starling's debut novel is a startling vision of Victorian London, juxtaposing its filth and poverty with its affluence. In "Dora Damage" we meet a daring young heroine, struggling in a very modern way against the constraints of the day, and whose resourcefulness and bravery have us rooting for her all the way.
The Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky
Synopsis
This perfect gem of a novel by the author of the posthumously acclaimed and bestselling "Suite Francaise" has never previously been published and was discovered only recently in separate archive files. A couple of pages were in the famous suitcase which her daughters saved, and the balance had been deposited with a family friend and editor during the war. A morality tale with doubtful morals, a story of murder, love and betrayal in rural France, "Fire in the Blood", planned in 1937, written in 1941, is set in a small village, based on Issy-l'Eveque where "Suite Francaise" was written, and brilliantly prefigures the village community in her later masterpiece.An old man looks back on a chequered life with secret regrets, concealing a truth he will not reveal until the end. "Fire in the Blood" is a small and beautiful chamber piece which starts quietly, lyrically, but then races away with revelations and narrative twists in a story about young women forced into marriages with old men, about mothers and daughters, stepmothers and stepdaughters, youthful passions and the regrets of old age, about peasant communities and the way they hide their secrets. Nemirovsky looks at her characters, both young and old, with the same clear-eyed distance and humanity as she displayed in "Suite Francaise", unpeeling layer after layer. Atmospheric and haunting as "Embers" and with the crystalline perfection of "Chekhov", "Fire in the Blood" is a gripping literary find..
