September 2011 challenge

Card Exchange September 2011

Scrapbook Layout for Exchange

Audiobook: "Blow out" by Catherine Coulter

Dear Reader:
A long weekend in the Poconos is cut short when FBI agents Sherlock and Savich are helicoptered back to Washington, D.C., to lead the investigation into the brutal murder of a Supreme Court Justice.
Savich allows Callie Markham, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, to partner with local Metro Police liaison Ben Raven since she's got the inside track – she's the stepdaughter of the murdered Justice. Is the murder a terrorist act? Or is it something more personal? Within twenty-four hours there's another murder with the same M.O.
Savich and Sherlock are up against it this time, following leads that seem impossible to connect to the madness. But are they?
Let me know how many times you check your heart monitor.

Currently reading "Remember me" by Mary Higgins Clark

A killer turns a young family's dream holiday into an unfathomable nightmare....

Menley Nichols and her husband, Adam, a criminal attorney, rent a house on Cape Cod, in the hope of restoring their faltering marriage. The birth of their daughter, Hannah, has revitalized their relationship, but Menley has never stopped blaming herself for the accidental death of her two-year-old son. The serenity of the Cape promises a new start.

In Remember House, an eighteenth-century landmark with a sinister past, strange incidents force Menley to relive the accident that killed her son, and she begins to fear for Hannah's safety. Then Adam takes on a client suspected of murder when his wealthy young bride of only three months drowns in a storm -- and the family is drawn into a rising tide of terror. A confrontation on a dark, rain-swept beach leads to a harrowing climax that only Mary Higgins Clark could have created.

Audiobook: "Gone" by Lisa Gardner

When someone you love vanishes without a trace, how far would you go to get them back?

For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it’s the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver’s seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Conner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate.

Did one of the ghosts from her troubled past finally catch up with Rainie? Or could her disappearance be the result of one of the cases they’d been working-a particularly vicious double homicide or the possible abuse of a deeply disturbed child Rainie took too close to heart? Together with his daughter, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy, Pierce is battling the local authorities, racing against time and frantically searching for answers to all the questions he’s been afraid to ask.
One man knows what happened that night. Adopting the moniker from an eighty-year old murder, he has already contacted the press. His terms are clear: he wants money, he wants power, he wants celebrity. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, Rainie will be gone for good.

Sometimes, no matter how much you love someone, it’s still not enough.

As the clock winds down on a terrifying deadline, Pierce plunges headlong into the most desperate hunt of his life, into the shattering search for a killer, a lethal truth, and for the love of his life who may forever be gone.

Quotes from "The Other Daughter" by Lisa Gardner

"A chill had moved over her, until she didn't belong to herself. She shut down, picked up the bottle of gin, and embraced the fog that blanketed her like the softest caress. She lived for the fog, she loved the fog. It was the best lover she'd ever had, and she fell graciously into its arms, smoothing it like a handful of rich soapsuds over her bare, aching breasts. She rolled languorously through the days, not thinking, not feeling, not existing, because then the pain would be too much." (p. 136)

"I think some mistakes are more like a pebble hitting a pond. They start as a small ripple, then get bigger and bigger, an exploding circle of mistakes, until they become a tidal wave and you simply drown." (p. 380)

Audiobook: "Now you see her" by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

The perfect life

A successful lawyer and loving mother, Nina Bloom would do anything to protect the life she's built in New York—including lying to everyone, even her daughter, about her past. But when an innocent man is framed for murder, she knows that she can't let him pay for the real killer's crimes.

The perfect lie

Nina's secret life began 18 years ago. She had looks to die for, a handsome police-officer husband, and a carefree life in Key West. When she learned she was pregnant with their first child, her happiness was almost overwhelming. But Nina's world is shattered when she unearths a terrible secret that causes her to run for her life and change her identity.

The perfect way to die

Now, years later, Nina risks everything she's earned to return to Florida and confront the murderous evil she fled. In a story of wrenching suspense, James Patterson gives us his most head-spinning, action-filled story yet—a Hitchcock-like blend of unquenchable drama and pleasure.

Audiobook: "Death Benefits" by Thomas Perry

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fans of Thomas Perry's popular series featuring Jane Whitefield, the Seneca Indian woman who helps people disappear (The Face-Changers, Shadow Woman, et al.) may be disappointed when they discover that Death Benefits doesn't feature the heroine who has won this writer so many new readers. But the disappointment won't last longer than the first page of this intriguing and extremely well-written new thriller, whose hero, John Walker, a data analyst for a large insurance company, deserves a series of his own.

When a security man named Max Stillman plucks Walker out of the office pool and dragoons him into investigating a fraud against the McClaren Life and Casualty, Walker's previously safe life takes a new and potentially dangerous turn. As the pair begin searching for the missing employee, who signed off on the huge (and phony) payoff of a death claim, and follow her to a grave in a Midwestern wheat field, Walker discovers talents he never knew he had and a thirst for vengeance. With the mysterious Stillman, he tracks the conspirators to a New Hampshire village and an explosive and shocking conclusion to a fraud that's much older than either of the men might have guessed. Like Don Winslow, whose California Fire and Life also focused on insurance fraud, Perry manages to make even the dusty back corners of the corporate world a likely setting for mystery and mayhem. This is a sharp, suspenseful, successful debut for a pair of unlikely compatriots, marked by Perry's edgy, noirish style, lively dialogue, and superb pacing. --Jane Adams --

From Publishers Weekly

Perry (Blood Money; The Face Changers) serves up a clever entertainment (in the Graham Greene sense of the word) set in the high-stakes insurance world. After a deliberately ambiguous prologue (just why is Ellen Snyder going to an L.A. airport hotel before dawn?), we learn that Ellen, working out of the Pasadena office of a prestigious San Francisco insurance company called McClaren's, recently authorized a 12$- million death benefit payment to a man who turned out to be an imposter. Now both the imposter and Ellen have navished, and McClaren's has called in mysterious operative Max Stillman to investigate the apparent conspiracy to defraud. Stillman oh-so-deftly draws young John Walker, an analyst in the main San Francisco office, into the investigation. Walker cooperates with Stillman because he doesn't believe Ellens's guilty; he's still a little bit in love with her from their training class days, although Ellen's career plans left no room for more than a casual interoffice romance. Casual is the operative word here: a casual remark from Walker to an enigmatic computer hacker named Serena leads to a seriously steamy interlude. And casual is the best way to describe Perry's seemingly effortless method of developing character and building suspense. His style is so assured as to be invisible, seamlessly supplying plot and character information as the chase leads from California to Chicago, Miami and finally a small town in New Hampshire. Though the finale echoes the premise of a particular Dachiell Hammett story, everything else feels as fresh as dawn. (Jan. 16) Forecast: Perry won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy, and Metzger's Dog was New York Times Notable Book of the Year. This is his finest novel yet and, if sold with enthusiasm, could chart significant numbers. The bold evocative, b&w jacket will help, as will the four-city author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Audiobook: "Power Play" by Joseph Finder

It was the perfect retreat for a troubled company. No cell phones. No BlackBerrys. No cars. Just a luxurious, remote lodge surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness.

All the top officers of the Hammond Aerospace Corporation are there. And one last-minute substitute — a junior executive named Jake Landry. He’s a steady, modest, and taciturn guy with a gift for keeping his head down and a turbulent past he’s trying to put behind him.

Jake’s uncomfortable with all the power players he's surrounded by, with all their swaggering and posturing.The only person there he knows is the female CEO’s assistant—his ex-girlfriend, Ali.

When a band of backwoods hunters crash the opening-night dinner, the executives suddenly find themselves held hostage by armed men who will do anything, to anyone, to get their hands on the largest ransom in history. Now, terrified and desperate and cut off from the rest of the world, the captives are at the mercy of hard men with guns who may not be what they seem.

The corporate big shots hadn’t wanted Jake there. But now he’s the only one who can save them.

POWER PLAY is a non-stop, pulse-pounding, high-stakes thriller that will hold the reader riveted until the very last page.