This way for a shroud

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K.J. Howe

Kidnap negotiator Thea Paris has spent her entire life with survivor's guilt, following an unspeakable childhood tragedy. At eight years old, she watched, frozen in fear, as her twelve-year-old brother, Nikos, was abducted from their home in Kanzi, Africa. Although he was recovered nine months later, he was never the same after that; worse, Thea discovers that she was supposed to have been the target. This defining experience drives Thea to become one of the top operatives in the field of kidnap-and-ransom consultancy. Nicknamed "Liberata" because she once secured the release of a captive from the Sicilian mob without her client paying a cent, she travels the globe trying to bring hostages home--mostly through negotiation, but occasionally through more forceful means. She is very good at her job.

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Martin Cruz Smith

Gypsy antique dealer Roman Grey is back in one of Martin Cruz Smith's most beloved novels--​the exciting and fast-paced Canto for a Gypsy . The priceless Royal Crown of Hungary is on display in St Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Guarded by many, including the NYPD and the gypsy antique dealer Roman Grey, a heist is impossible. But everybody wants the legendary Crown of Saint Stephen. The Hungarian government wants it as a symbol of national greatness. Exiled rebels want it simply to rob the Communists of their pleasure. And an ex-Nazi art plunderer wants it to settle a very old score. Then the unthinkable happens, and murder, mayhem, and all hell breaks loose...and only Grey knows the century's old secret about the crown.

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Brian Neary

Young CIA agent, Quentin Hawk, a former pro athlete with a bum knee, a high I.Q. and a bad attitude, is the only person who sees the connection between the death of an eminent U.S. scientist in France and a terrorist placement of a bomb in Minnesota's Mall of America and a 50 lb. bomb under the Mormon's Winter Quarters in Omaha.

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Janette Turner Hospital

Haunted by the memory of the hijacked Paris-New York flight on which his mother was killed when he was a teenager, Lowell has been receiving calls from a stranger obsessed with learning the whole truth about Air France 64 badgering him for information about the flight she was also on as a child. The story’s action occurs in flashbacks to 1987, when an Air France flight to New York is seized by the group “Black Death” as a means to liberating jailed “Muslim freedom fighters,” with fatal consequences—and in a present time set 13 years later, when survivors and victims of the incident undertake to solve mysteries still surrounding it. Boston-area painting contractor Lowell Hawthorne, whose adulterous mother had perished when that plane exploded, is contacted by Georgetown University student Samantha Raleigh, who lost her parents in the same catastrophe and was furthermore one of 40 children on board released to safety by the terrorists. Samantha’s pursuit of the truth about Black Death (ostensibly her master’s thesis project), at first avoided and later abetted by Lowell, is juxtaposed against the experiences of people who did and did not board that plane—and complicated when Lowell acquires a collection of “coded journals” and videotapes left for him following the accidental death of his father Mather, a CIA “spook” who knew a great deal about the fatal flight, the origins and larger ambitions of Black Death, and the sinister involved figures code-named “Salamander” and “Sirocco.” The interlocking connections and revelations are quite cleverly made, and the imagery of plague (linked to epigraph quotations from Boccaccio, Camus, and Defoe) is ingeniously expressed by both the horror of “a politically necessary exercise that got out of hand” and the technique of chemical warfare, explicated with chilling factuality in Mather’s explosive journals. Several other surprises lie in wait, as the past bears in on, and threatens to devour, the present. ([Kirkus Reviews][1]) [1]: