Private justice

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Diana Bretherick

1887. The brightest mind meets the darkest killer. When James Murray, a young Scottish doctor fascinated by the workings of the criminal mind, travels to the vibrant city of Turin, it is to study with Cesare Lombroso, the world-renowned criminologist. But just hours after his introduction to the unconventional Lombroso, the discovery of a horrifically mutilated body in the nearby Piazza Statuto, and a note that appears to implicate the celebrated criminologist himself, changes everything. With the help of his fellow apprentice, Ottolenghi; Tullio, a local investigator; and Lombroso's beautiful but enigmatic housekeeper, Sofia; Murray must put his learning to the test and endeavour to understand the mind of a truly evil serial killer if he is to stop the rapidly escalating bloodbath and clear the name of his mentor. Have Lombroso's many enemies attempted to frame him? Are the notes an accusation or a challenge? And will Lombroso's own influential theories about criminal behaviour help to catch a cunning and ruthless killer? Meet the world's first criminologist in this compelling, fast-paced historical thriller.

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Bernard Minier

"In a snowbound valley, deep in the French Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. The first victim is a horse: its headless, flayed body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylum's director uses, and then greatly alarmed when she realizes that drugs are disappearing from within the fortified institution while someone seems to be slipping out at night. Commandant Martin Servaz, a charismatic, Toulouse city cop fond of quoting Latin, can't believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there is something disturbing about this crime that he cannot ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum, a highly intelligent former prosecutor who is accused of killing and raping several women, is found on the corpse... and a few days later the first human murder takes place. Servaz and his colleague, the mysterious Irene Ziegler, must use all their skill to solve the terrifying mystery"--

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Lisa Scottoline

This time, justice is blonde. . . .New York Times bestselling author Lisa Scottoline delivers a riveting page-turner about love and murder that starts in the elite chambers of a sexy female judge and ends on the cold, gritty streets of Philadelphia.Cate Fante is strong and smart, but when she becomes a federal judge, even she wonders if she can do the job justice. She's in her thirties, so she feels as though she's joining the world's most exclusive retirement village. She worries inwardly that she only looks the part, in a designer suit donned like overpriced armor. After all, a job described in the United States Constitution would intimidate anybody.But Cate keeps her doubts a secret. And, as it happens, much else. For she leads a dark double life that she hides from everyone, even her best friend.Then a high-profile case in her courtroom explodes into a shocking murder-suicide, and it blasts her cover wide open. Overnight the tabloids tell her secrets, her boyfriend dumps her, and her new career hangs in tatters. But Cate's troubles are only beginning. An enemy no one anticipated sends her running for her life -- -embarking on a journey that begins in the mystery of her own childhood, where she first learned to lie. She'll have to fight her way back to the truth, or die trying.Dirty Blonde is Lisa Scottoline's most suspenseful and gripping thriller to date. Mixing poignancy with her trademark wit and wonderfully compelling characters, it showcases her remarkable talents as never before, and questions whether law and justice are always the same thing.

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Thomas H. Cook

In his latest novel of unrelenting suspense, Edgar Award--winning author Thomas Cook journeys into the darkest corners of the human heart to tell a mesmerizing story of crime and retribution--and the forces that push even good people to the breaking point.THE INTERROGATIONAlbert Jay Smalls sits in an interrogation room accused of an unspeakable crime. The police have no witnesses, no physical evidence, but they are certain he is hiding the truth. With less than twelve hours before he must be released, Smalls will be put through one final interrogation. IIt is a search that leads into the shadowed recesses of one man's shattered mind--and to the devastating secrets buried in a desolate seaside town. It is a quest that takes three desperate cops down a dark, twisting road as they race against the clock to find out what really happened one rainy autumn afternoon in 1952. The answers will be more shocking than anyone can imagine, blurring the boundaries between pursuers and prey, between the innocent and the guilty, between the truth that sets us free and the tragedies that haunt us to the grave.Against a gripping backdrop of murder and redemption, master storyteller Thomas Cook probes the uneasy, shifting bonds of family, love, and unbearable loss, proving once again why he is "perhaps the best American writer of crime fiction currently practicing" (Drood Review).From the Hardcover edition.