Listening Woman

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Kelley Armstrong

Protect the innocent. If there is any one principle that drives hitwoman Nadia Stafford it's this. When she was 13 she failed to protect her older cousin Amy from being raped and murdered. As Wild Justice opens, she fails again, disastrously, when she botches a hit on a man who's been beating his wife. Before she's had a chance to fix things, the wife is murdered and Nadia plunges into despair. To help her find equilibrium again, her mentor, Jack, brings her a gift: the location and new identity of the serial predator who killed her cousin. Vengeance, justice? With the predator in her sights, nothing seems more right, more straightforward, more simple. But fierce as Nadia is, she is shaken to the core by what she discovers about the real events of her past. The wounds inscribed on her soul during the long night when her cousin was killed have shaped her, and justice is wild indeed.

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William Landay

Former D.A. William Landay explodes onto the suspense scene with an electrifying novel about the true price of crime and the hidden corners of the criminal justice system. Only an insider could so vividly capture Boston's gritty underworld of cops and criminals. And only a natural storyteller could weave this mesmerizing tale of murder and memory, a story about the hold of time past over time present--and the story of one unforgettable young policeman who ventures into the most dangerous place of all.By a gleaming lake in the forests of western Maine, outside a sleepy town called Versailles, the body of a man lies sprawled in a deserted cabin. The dead man was an elite D.A. from Boston, and his beat was that city's toughest neighborhood: Mission Flats.Now, for small-town police chief Ben Truman, investigating the murder will mean leaving his quiet, haunted home and journeying to an alien world of hard streets and hard bargains, where the fierce struggle between police and criminals is fought for the ultimate stakes.Ben joins a manhunt through Mission Flats, where cops are scrambling to find their number-one suspect: Harold Braxton, a ruthless predator targeted for prosecution by the murdered D.A. To the Boston police, Braxton is a marked man. But as Ben watches the shadow dance of cops and suspects, he begins to voice doubts about Braxton's guilt...especially when he uncovers a secret history of murder and retribution stretching back twenty years...back to a brutal killing now nearly forgotten. As past and present collide and a bloody mystery unfolds, only one thing remains certain: the most powerful revelations are yet to come.Mission Flats is at once a relentless page-turning mystery and a vivid portrait of a cop's life. Here are the street corners, courtrooms, and stationhouses; the deal makers, thugs, and quiet heroes. An unforgettable world--and the luminous, boundary-breaking debut of a new voice in suspense fiction--Mission Flats will haunt you long after the final pages.From the Hardcover edition.

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Ken Follet

A missing canister of a deadly virus. A lab technician bleeding from the eyes. Toni Gallo, the security director of a Scottish medical research firm, knows she has problems, but she has no idea of the nightmare to come. As a Christmas Eve blizzard whips out of the north, several people converge on a remote family house. Stanley Oxenford, the research company’s director, has everything riding on the drug he is developing to fight the virus – but he isn’t the only one: His grown children, who have come to spend Christmas, have their eyes on the money it will bring. Toni Gallo, forced to resign from the police department in disgrace, is betting her career on keeping the drug safe; a local television reporter, determined to move up, has sniffed the story, even if he has to bend the facts to tell it; and a violent trio of thugs is on its way to steal it for a client already waiting – though what the client really has in mind is something that will shock them all. As the storm worsens, the emotional sparks – jealousies, distrust, sexual attraction, rivalries – crackle; desperate secrets are revealed; hidden traitors and unexpected heroes emerge…

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Åke Edwardson

Chief Inspector Erik Winter works to solve a murder that seems to orginate from the cult world of the gothic which may have links into the police force.