Five roundabouts to heaven

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Joyce Carol Oates

A collection of darkly compelling tales from the unique imagination of Joyce Carol Oates. A young professor is convinced she's being followed, but when she confronts her shadow events take an unexpected turn ... A promising student attempts to save her brother from his descent into madness, but she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers ... A renowned author embarks on a grand tour of Europe, but soon his bad manners threaten to cost him more than he has to give ... These biting and beautiful stories force us to confront, one by one, the demons within.

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Chris Brookmyre

Private investigator Jasmine Sharp's father was murdered before she was born, and her mother went to self-sacrificing lengths in order to shield her from the world in which he moved. Since her mother's death, all she has been able to learn is his first name - and that only through a strange bond she has forged with the man who killed him: Glen Fallan. But when Fallan is arrested for the murder of a criminal her mother knew since childhood, Jasmine is finally forced to enter his domain: a place where violence is a way of life and vengeance spans generations. Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod has one major Glaswegian gangster in the mortuary and another in the cells for killing him - which ought to be cause for celebration. Catherine is not smiling, however. From the moment she discovered a symbol daubed on the victim's head, she has understood that this case is far more dangerous than it appears on the surface: deeper than skin, darker than blood; something that could threaten her family and end her career. As one battles her demons and the other chases her ghosts, these two very different detectives will ultimately confront the secrets that have entangled both of their fates since before Jasmine was even born.

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Anthony Quinn

In Northern Ireland's darkest corner, the Troubles have never ended. Though bombs no longer rock Belfast, for some the fight goes on. Retired Special Branch agent David Hughes disappears after looking into the previously closed case of Oliver Jordan, who went missing at the hands of the IRA decades ago. Soon after, a former spy is found bludgeoned to death, the day after placing his own obituary in the newspaper. Beneath Northern Ireland's modern calm, ancient jealousies threaten to rend the country asunder once more. A Catholic detective in a Protestant nation, Celcius Daly knows too well the agonies of sectarian strife. To solve this string of murders, he must reach decades into the past, confronting a painful history that Ireland would prefer to forget.

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Laird Hunt

"Laird Hunt's debut follows the amusing but deadly debacles of its narrator, an anonymous secret operative embroiled in the dark underworld of transnational organized crime. When he botches an assignment for the clandestine organization that employs him, everyone in his life - including his new girlfriend - is revealed to be either true-blue or double operative. As he frugally doles out clues about his dangerous work, the reader inevitably becomes both confidante and fellow gumshoe. The narrator's final assignment - to identify his own assassin - dismantles the reader's own analysis of the evidence and reveals that things are not always what they seem."--BOOK JACKET.