Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth’s deepest cave—the supercave—remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.
Burke's newest client is a woman named Flood, who has the face of an angel, the body of a high-priced stripper, and the skills of a professional executioner. She wants Burke to find a monster for her—so she can kill him with her bare hands. In this cauterizing thriller, Andrew Vachss' renegade private eye teams up with a lethally gifted avenger to follow a child's murderer through the catacombs of New York, where every alley is blind and the penthouses are as dangerous as the basements. Fearfully knowing, crackling with narrative tension, and written in prose as forceful as a hollow-point slug, Flood is Burke at his deadliest—and Vachss at the peak of his form.
The story begins in New York, with Reacher confronting and beating up two thugs sent to collect money from the diner he was eating in as part of a protection racket, implying that he is a member of a rival gang. Reacher is then pulled up by the FBI and questioned over who he is working for, but explains he is a loner and has been since he mustered out of the army. He is then questioned about two women whose cases of sexual harassment he dealt with when he was an MP and it is revealed they have both been killed in the last few months and a criminal profiling team have come to the conclusion that the person who did was someone exactly like Reacher.
In this latest thriller from perennial bestselling author James Patterson, Washington cop Alex Cross gets involved in his partner's effort to save the life of an old Army buddy who's facing execution for a horrendous and inexplicable murder spree in North Carolina. The Army's evidence against Sergeant Ellis Cooper, a decorated Vietnam vet, is overwhelming, which isn't surprising since it's all been planted by a quartet of killers whose reason for framing the erstwhile hero isn't revealed until long after they are.
With the holidays over and the long cold winter looming, January can be a bleak month in Minneapolis. So what better way to bring a little cheer to the good people of the city than by sponsoring an old-fashioned snowman-building contest? In a matter of hours, a local park is filled with the innocent laughter of children and their frosty creations. But things take an awful turn when the dead bodies of police officers are discovered inside two of the snowmen - sending the entire department and Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth on high alert.
