After Alexander’s death in 323 B.C .his only direct heirs were two unborn sons and a simpleton half-brother. Every long-simmering faction exploded into the vacuum of power. Wives, distant relatives, and generals all vied for the loyalty of the increasingly undisciplined Macedonian army. Most failed and were killed in the attempt. For no one possessed the leadership to keep the great empire from crumbling. But Alexander’s legend endured to spread into worlds he had seen only in dreams.
One calm October day three men set out from Bermagui harbour in a fishing launch and disappeared into the rippleless Tasman Sea. Then the head of one of them, riddled with bullets, is brought up in a ship's trawl--it belonged to Ericson, formerly one of the Big Five at Scotland Yard. Why had he been shot and thrown overboard? Who had killed him? And where were the launchman and his mate? The bush had never defeated Bony but there were no clues in the sepulchre of the sea.
In this book, third in the series of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch novels, there are no holds barred. Detective Bosch is on trial - it is a wrongful death civil suit brought by the wife and family of a man killed by Bosch, known as the Dollmaker,so named because he paints the victim's faces after brutally murdering them. The first of many surprises is that during the trial Bosch receives a letter from the Dollmaker telling him of the location of a victim killed after Bosch supposedly eliminated him, a blonde entombed in a concrete mold.
In the late summer of a long-ago year, a killer arrived in a small city. His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a 14-year-old boy. Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, re-creating in detail Blackwood's crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family - his wife and three children - will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was 14 and killed their slayer.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11524.33 | Fiction literature | 7 December 2010
5
Death at La Fenice
A breathless beginning and an unexpected lack of reference to the lush setting mark this lively launch of a projected series of Venetian mysteries. When legendary German conductor Helmut Wellauer is found dead in his dressing room two acts into a performance of La Traviata , police commissario Guido Brunetti is called in. Among those who might have provided the cyanide poison that killed the maestro, immediate suspects include the vaunted conductor's coolly indifferent young wife and those many in the music industry who are offended by his homophobia.
