In one of the most stunning debuts to come along in years, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s best work and P. D. James’ classic The Children of Men, David Oppegaard gives us a world whose near future presents some terrifying realities.
The Despair has plagued the earth for five years. Most of the world’s population has inexplicably died by its own hand, and the few survivors struggle to remain alive. A mysterious, shadowy group called the Collectors has emerged, inevitably appearing to remove the bodies of the dead.
Added by: susan6th | Karma: 3133.44 | Fiction literature | 2 November 2010
5
Murder on the Menu
Annie, Eve, and their former cooking teacher are in the trenches, trying to keep a new restaurant, Bellywasher's, from going belly up.
Everything's simmering along just fine until Annie and Eve find their friend Sarah, staffer to a powerful congressman, lying dead in her tub. The cops want to write it off as a suicide, but the facts just don't add up. Then, after a series of suspicious "accidents," Annie and Eve realize that this kitchen fire isn't about to put itself out.
Anna Pigeon, a park ranger at Colorado's Mesa Verde National Park, is a woman on the mend. She's a widow, she's battling alcohol dependence, and she's recently changed jobs. Despite her pain, she reaches tentatively toward Stacey Meyer, a ranger trainee who has also endured his share of middle-aged pain. Shortly after he mishandles a crisis that results in a child's death, Stacey himself is found dead. Suicide? Anna thinks it unlikely. Murder? Possibly, but who and why? When the husband of another park employee is killed in a suspicious car wreck, the case takes on broader implications.
The novel opens in a post-apocalyptic Southern California, in a hellish world shattered by nuclear war decades before. Several surviving police states have emerged in place of the former USA. Hurricane-force winds above five hundred feet prevent any sort of air travel from one state to the next, and sudden, violent, and unpredictable storms make day-to-day life a mini-hell. Hell Tanner, an imprisoned killer, is offered a full pardon in exchange for taking on a suicide mission - a drive through "Damnation Alley" across a ruined America from Los Angeles to Boston — as one of three vehicles attempting to deliver urgently needed plague vaccine.
The Cat Who Went Into the Closet by Lilian Jackson Braun
Jim Qwilleran and his Siamese companions, Koko and Yum Yum, move into Junior Goodwinter's grandma's home. Everything goes well until the discovery that this apparently happy and healthy 88-year-old seems to have commited suicide.
