Never fear

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Faye Kellerman

A man walks into a trendy Los Angeles restaurant -- a disgruntled ex-employee with an automatic weapon -- and seconds later, thirteen people are dead and thirty-two more have been wounded. It is a heinous act of mass slaughter that haunts Homicide Detective Peter Decker.But, though eyewitnesses saw only the lone gunman -- who apparently took his own life after his bloody work was done -- evidence suggests more than one weapon was fired. It is a disturbing inconsistency that sends Decker racing headlong into a sordid, labyrinthine world of Southern California money and power, on an investigation that threatens to destroy his reputation and his career.

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James Ellroy

The internationally acclaimed author of the L.A. Quartet and The Underworld USA Trilogy, James Ellroy, presents another literary noir masterpiece of historical paranoia. Los Angeles, 1958. Killings, beatings, bribes, shakedowns-it's standard procedure for Lieutenant Dave Klein, LAPD. He's a slumlord, a bagman, an enforcer-a power in his own small corner of hell. Then the Feds announce a full-out investigation into local police corruption, and everything goes haywire. Klein's been hung out as bait, ""a bad cop to draw the heat,"" and the heat's coming from all sides: from local politicians, from LAPD brass, from racketeers and drug kingpins-all of them hell-bent on keeping their own secrets hidden. For Klein, ""forty-two and going on dead,"" it's dues time. Klein tells his own story-his voice clipped, sharp, often as brutal as the events he's describing-taking us with him on a journey through a world shaped by monstrous ambition, avarice, and perversion. It's a world he created, but now he'll do anything to get out of it alive. Fierce, riveting, and honed to a razor edge, White Jazz is crime fiction at its most shattering.

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Faye Kellerman

Los Angeles Police Detective Peter Decker had grown very close to Rina's young sons, Sammy and Jake, as he had to their mother, and he looked forward to spending a day of his vacation camping with the boys. A nice reprieve from the grueling work of a homicide cop-until Sammy stumbles upon a gruesome sight... Two human skeletons, charred beyond recognition, are identified by a forensic dentist as teenage girls--and for Decker, the father of a sixteen-year-old daughter, vacation time is over. Throwing himself professionally and emotionally into the murder case, he launches a very personal investigation: a quest that pulls him deep into the crack dens of Hollywood Boulevard and painfully close to the children of the streets and a nightmare world he must make his own.

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Velda Johnston

Musically talented, but not the prodigy her doting mother believes her to be, twenty-year-old Sara Hargeaves is content to pick up extra money playing cocktail piano at a local San Jimenez hotel lounge--and even happier when she attracts the attention of handsome Dr. Manuelo Covarrubias. When attraction quickens into passion, Sara goes to play for Manuelo's plastic surgery patients at his fashionable California sanatorium. Cherished, looking forward to marrying her sophisticated lover, Sara is stunned when her world falls apart overnight. Manuelo jilts her--and then he is murdered. Dubbed by journalists a "young Jean Harris," Sara is wrongfully jailed for Manuelo's murder. Now, four years later, she escapes from prison to be with her dying mother--only to arrive too late. Befriended by an attractive young law student, Mike Rolfe, Sara must risk her new chance at love and happiness by returning to the sanatorium. Hunted by the police, hounded by memories of the past and present regrets, Sara knows her only hope of lasting freedom lies in uncovering the truth about who really killed Manuelo four years ago, while avoiding an all-too likely reunion with her dead ex-lover. (book cover description)