As touching as it is humorous, The Garden of Eden is a parable for our time with a powerful and ultimately redemptive ending that speaks to oft underappreciated virtues such as loyalty (sticking with those you love even when they screw up royally), tolerance, and forgiveness. It's also about the values that keep America together--the simple solutions ordinary people find to keep their small communities strong.
With more than 35 million copies of his novels in print in over 40 languages worldwide, Henning Mankell is an international phenomenon. In this powerful work, he tells the story of a young African orphan adopted by a Swedish man and whisked away to his new father’s country. There, the boy, dubbed Daniel, finds himself swallowed by a bizarre landscape of snow and mud. Always in his mind are thoughts of his murdered parents, calling him back to Africa. But Daniel’s path is marked by tragedy, and his homecoming seems an impossible dream.
When a bulldozer in the Everglades unearths the skull of an infamous kidnapper, the Cold Case Squad is brought in to investigate. Miami crime reporter Britt Montero was the last person to see him alive, and the detectives have questions only she can answer. Meanwhile, on a remote island where she has sought solace, Britt finds a camera on an isolated beach. The film inside yields photos of a happy young couple on their honeymoon. Soon after, Britt is shocked to learn the newlyweds were lost at sea.
Byers's a careful mathematician of the heart when calculating the trajectory of affection. Just as the planets influence one another, tugging and stretching their orbits as they sweep around the sun, so all these characters cause perturbations in each other's lives. And Byers writes with a sweet mixture of humor and sympathy about lunacy and manhood during a period of extraordinary disruption.
U.S. Marshal Michael Venturi of the Witness Protection Program relocates a mobster, now a government witness, to a small rural town after creating a new identity for him. The man proves to be a monster unleashed on an unsuspecting community.
