The muralist

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Julia Heaberlin

When Emily Page and her husband move from Manhattan to the wealthy enclave of Clairmont, Texas, she hopes she can finally escape her haunted past and outrun the nameless stalker who has been taunting her for years. Pregnant with her first child, Emily just wants to start over. But as she is drawn into a nest of secretive Texas women and into the unnerving company of their queen, Caroline Warwick, Emily finds that acceptance is a very dangerous game. It isn't long before Caroline mysteriously disappears and Emily is facing a rash of anonymous threats. Are they linked to the missing Caroline? Or to Emily's terrifying encounter in college, years earlier? As the dark truth about Caroline emerges, Emily realizes that some secrets are impossible to hide and that whoever came for Caroline is now coming for her.

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David Morrell

In 1244, at the infamous fortress of Montségur in southwestern France, Christian Inquisitors massacred the last vestige of a heresy known as Mithraism, once the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. But was the heresy in fact destroyed? In today’s New York City, reporter Tess Drake discovers a mysterious altar in the apartment of a friend whose charred body was discovered in a nearby park. The altar (a version of it exists in the British Museum) depicts a man astride a bull, plunging a knife into its neck while a dog, a scorpion, and a snake drink the blood. The meaning of that altar propels Tess on a furious hunt for the truth about what happened to her friend, a labyrinth of intrigue and danger that leads to the highest levels of power as well as to the depths of a secret cave in Spain.

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Kinky Friedman

"Alone in his New York loft, the private detective Kinky Friedman, reflects on friendship and why all his friends are out of town. With time on his hands and feeling a little melancholy his mind turns to Stephanie DuPont - very hot but pretty much resistant to all his advances. The phone rings and Kinky's old contact Hoover from Honolulu is on the blower to report that Kinky's great friend Mike McGovern has disappeared while in the process of researching and writing his cookbook Eat, Drink and Be Kinky. He was last seen heading for the beach. Our hero flies to Hawaii, and in a series of farcical wild goose chases, that includes identifying a faceless corpse in the morgue and trying to ensnare what turn out to be hoax kidnappers, Kinky ends up visiting the local museum on the island and in a room full of ancient relics he stumbles upon a full size, sculpted wooden head that is a dead ringer for McGovern." -- Back cover.

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Lauren Henderson

In London, metal sculptor Samantha Jones investigates the death of a bank guard in a case of drugs, blackmail and murder. The probe takes her into high society, which she analyzes with an ethnologist's eye.