Posts Tagged ‘The Double Comfort Safari Club’

Books Make Great Gifts: For The Mystery Maven

December 8th, 2011

Attractive, smart, thoughtful, unique, and easy to wrap—books are definitely the perfect gifts. In honor of the holiday season, we’ve put together a series of thematic gift guides that will help you pick a great book for everyone on your list.

Today’s gift guide is all about the mysterious, the spooky, and the thrilling. From tough detective tales to amateur sleuth stories, haunting villains to classic monsters, these are the books that will keep your favorite Mystery Mavens guessing.

Don’t forget to check out our lists for The Literary Lover. Still to come, books for The History Buff, The Nonfiction Aficionado, The Humorist, and The Nonconformist. For more suggestions in the meantime, check out Random House’s holiday gift guides.

The Girl With the Dragon TattooThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
By Stieg Larsson
Stieg Larsson’s #1 bestselling mystery featuring Lisbeth Salander is now a major motion picture directed by David Fincher, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, from Columbia Pictures/Sony. The first volume in the Millennium Trilogy, and an international publishing sensation, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo combines murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel.

Read an Excerpt | Watch the Trailer | Buy the Book

The Man From BeijingThe Man From Beijing
By Henning Mankell
The best-selling, award-winning author of the Kurt Wallander series delivers an incredible stand-alone masterpiece: a bone-chilling mystery that spans two centuries and four continents. In the far north of Sweden a small, quiet village has been almost entirely wiped out by a mass murderer. The only clue left at the scene is a red ribbon. Among the victims are the grandparents of Judge Birgitta Roslin, who sets out to find the killer. Despite being brushed off by the police, Birgitta is determined to prove that the murders were not a random act of violence but are part of something far more dark and complex. Her investigation leads to the highest echelons of power and into the recesses of history where the seeds of evil deeds were planted.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

Rules of BetrayalRules of Betrayal
By Christopher Reich
The most riveting novel yet in Christopher Reich’s New York Times bestselling series—featuring Dr. Jonathan Ransom and his undercover-agent wife Emma, a dangerous woman with a mysterious past who has gone rogue in the high-stakes, serpentine world of international spies. In 1980, a secret American B-52 crashes high in a remote mountain range on the Pakistan–Afghanistan border. Nearly thirty years later, and spanning locales from those peaks to New York City, a terrible truth will be revealed. Rules of Betrayal is a masterfully plotted novel that cements Christopher Reich’s reputation as one of the most admired espionage thriller writers today.

Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

FragileFragile
By Lisa Unger
Maggie and Jones live with their teenage son, Rick, in The Hollows, a small town outside of New York City. The cozy intimacy of the town is broken when Rick’s girlfriend, Charlene, mysteriously disappears. The investigation has Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely and Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn. Maggie finds herself drawn in both as a trained psychologist and as a mother, walking a tightrope that threatens the stability of her family. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene’s disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret—one that could destroy everything she holds dear.
Read an Excerpt | Lisa Unger’s Hit List | Buy the Book

DamagedDamaged
By Alex Kava
While the Coast Guard is preparing Pensacola Beach for a severe hurricane, they find an oversized fishing cooler filled with body parts tightly wrapped in plastic floating offshore. Special Agent Maggie O’Dell is sent to investigate, despite the fact that she is putting herself in the projected path of the hurricane. She’s able to trace the torso in the cooler back to a man who mysteriously disappeared weeks earlier after a hurricane hit the Atlantic coast of Florida. How did his body end up six hundred miles away in the Gulf of Mexico? Using her signature keen instincts and fearless investigating, O’Dell discovers Florida’s seedy underworld and the shady characters who inhabit it. Damaged is Alex Kava’s most terrifying thriller yet.
Read an Excerpt | The Making of Maggie O’Dell | Buy the Book

The Third RailThe Third Rail
By Michael Harvey
A woman is shot as she waits for her train to work. An hour later, a second woman is killed as she rides an elevated train through the Loop. Then, a church becomes the target of a chemical weapons attack. The city of Chicago is under siege, and Michael Kelly, former cop turned private investigator, happens to be on the scene when all hell breaks loose. Kelly’s brassy investigating and razor-sharp instincts lead him into an intricate plot involving a retired cop, a shady train company, and a quietly ticking weapon nestled deep in the city’s underbelly. But when his girlfriend—the gorgeous judge Rachel Swenson—is abducted, Kelly realizes that the only way he’s going to find the killer is to excavate his own stormy past.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

Good Morning, KillerGood Morning, Killer
By April Smith
FBI Special Agent Ana Grey returns in this psychologically acute, completely and unstoppably suspenseful thriller from April Smith. A fifteen-year-old girl has been abducted and Ana Grey is sent to investigate. When the girl reappears, completely traumatized, Ana realises she is far too emotionally invested in the case. She can no longer separate her own life from the victim’s. And if the situation wasn’t already sufficiently disturbing, her partner on the investigation is Andrew Berringer, her on-again, off-again lover. As her personal and professional lives converge, Ana reaches a breaking point. She no longer knows who she can trust, no even Berringer, and in a moment of anger fires her gun. Suddenly more than just the case is on the line–it’s her whole career. Now a TNT Original Movie on TNT Mystery Movie Night.
Read an Excerpt | Ana Grey’s Journey to the Screen | Buy the Book

The StandThe Stand
By Stephen King
When a man escapes from a biological testing facility, he sets in motion a deadly domino effect, spreading a mutated strain of the flu that will wipe out 99 percent of humanity within a few weeks. The survivors who remain are scared, bewildered, and in need of a leader. Two emerge–Mother Abagail, the benevolent 108-year-old woman who urges them to build a community in Boulder, Colorado; and Randall Flagg, the nefarious “Dark Man,” who delights in chaos and violence. And for the Stephen King completist, consider our newly repackaged editions of Carrie and Night Shift.
Read an Excerpt | Buy the Book

Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!
Edited By Otto Penzler
Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! is the darkest, the living-deadliest, scariest–and dare we say most tasteful–collection of zombie stories ever assembled. It’s so good, it’s a no-brainer. There is never a dull moment in the world of zombies. They are superstars of horror and they are everywhere, storming the world of print and visual media. Their endless march will never be stopped. It’s the Zombie Zeitgeist! Now, with his wide sweep of knowledge and keen eye for great storytelling, Otto Penzler offers a remarkable catalog of zombie literature. Including unstoppable tales from world-renowned authors like Stephen King, Joe R. Lansdale, Robert McCammon, Robert E. Howard, and Richard Matheson to the writer who started it all, W.B. Seabrook, Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! will delight and devour horror fans from coast to coast.
Read an Excerpt | Table of Contents | Buy the Book

The Double Comfort Safari ClubThe Double Comfort Safari Club
By Alexander McCall Smith
Readers will agree that this touching and dramatic new installment in Alexander McCall Smith’s beloved and best-selling series is the finest yet. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi head to a safari camp to carry out a delicate mission on behalf of a former guest who has left one of the guides a large sum of money. But once they find their man, Precious begins to sense that something is not right. To make matters worse, shortly before their departure Mma Makutsi’s fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, suffers a debilitating accident, and when his aunt moves in to take care of him, she also pushes Mma Makutsi out of the picture. Could she be trying to break up the relationship? Finally, a local priest and his wife independently approach Mma Ramotswe with concerns of infidelity, creating a rather unusual and tricky situation. Nevertheless, Precious is confident that with a little patience, kindness and good sense things will work out for the best, something that will delight her many fans.
Read an Excerpt | Alexander McCall Smith’s Official Site | Buy the Book

More books for The Mystery Maven: Headhunters, by Jo Nesbø; The Godfather of Kathmandu, by John Burdett; The Dark Vineyard, by Martin Walker; The Woman in Black, by Susan Hill; Once a Spy, by Keith Thomson.