Krimi & Thriller

From the author of Jurassic Park, Timeline, and Sphere comes an electrifying thriller in which a shocking accusation of sexual harassment triggers a gripping psychological game of cat and mouse and threatens to derail a brilliant career. #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A fresh and provocative story."-People An up-and-coming executive at the computer firm DigiCom, Tom Sanders is a man whose corporate future is certain. But after a closed-door meeting with his new boss-a woman who is his former lover and has been promoted to the position he expected to have-Sanders finds himself caught in a nightmarish web of deceit in which he is branded the villain. As Sanders scrambles to defend himself, he uncovers an electronic trail into the company's secrets-and begins to grasp that a cynical and manipulative scheme has been devised to bring him down. "Crichton writes superbly. . . . The excitement rises with each page."-Chicago Tribune "A heart-stop story running on several tracks at once. Disclosure is up to [Crichton's] usual locomotive speed."-The Boston Globe "Expertly crafted, ingenious and absorbing."-The Philadelphia Inquirer

A chilling and seductive story of loneliness, desperation, and murder, Villain is the English-language debut of one of Japan's most popular writers. A woman is killed at a ghostly mountain pass in southern Japan and the local police quickly pinpoint a suspect. But as the puzzle pieces of the crime slowly click into place, new questions arise. Is a villain simply the person who commits a crime or are those who feel no remorse for malicious behavior just as guilty? Moving from office parks and claustrophobic love hotels to desolate seaside towns and lighthouses, Shuichi Yoshida's dark thriller reveals the inner lives of men and women who all have something to hide.

MYSTERY. Tom Pasmore, ten years old, survives a near fatal accident. During his long recovery, he becomes obsessed with an unsolved murder and finds he has clues to solving it that he shouldn't. Lamont von Heilitz has spent his life solving mysteries, until he wanted to know nothing more of the terror of life and the horror of death. When a new murder disrupts their world of wealth, power, and pleasure, the two must form an unlikely partnership to confront demons from the past and the dark secrets that still haunt the present.

In this ambitious novel of madness and release, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Doris Lessing imagines the fantastical "inner-space" life of an amnesiac.Charles Watkins, a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has suffered a breakdown, confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality. But Watkins has embarked on a tremendous pyschological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory and the farther reaches of imagination, his doctors try to subdue him with ever more powerful drugs in a competition for his soul. In this provocative novel, Lessing takes us on a harrowing voyage into the rarely glimpsed territory of the inner mind.

After a truffle-hunting dog unearths a human hand instead of a precious fungus, Chief Inspector Wexford and his team proceed to interrogate everyone who lives nearby to see if they can turn up a match for the errant appendage among the eighty-five people who have disappeared over the past decade in this part of England. Then, when a second body is discovered nearby, Wexford experiences a feeling that's become a rarity for the veteran policeman: surprise. As Wexford painstakingly moves to resolve these multiple mysteries, long-buried secrets are brought to daylight, and Ruth Rendell once again proves why she has been hailed as our greatest living mystery writer.

In Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle, Matthew Stover created a new kind of fantasy novel, and a new kind of hero to go with it: Caine, a street thug turned superstar, battling in a future where reality shows take place in another dimension, on a world where magic exists and gods are up close and personal. In that beautiful, savage land, Caine is an assassin without peer, a living legend born from one of the highest-rated reality shows ever made. That season, Caine almost single-handedly defeated-and all but exterminated-the fiercest of all tribes: the Black Knives. But the shocking truth of what really took place during that blood-drenched adventure has never been revealed . . . until now.Thirty years later, Caine returns to the scene of his greatest triumph-some would say greatest crime-at the request of his adopted brother Orbek, the last of the true Black Knives. But where Caine goes, danger follows, and he soon finds himself back in familiar territory: fighting for his life against impossible odds, with the fate of two worlds hanging in the balance. Just the way Caine likes it.

ALLAH IS NOT OBLIGED TO BE FAIR ABOUT ALL THE THINGS HE DOES HERE ON EARTH.These are the words of the boy soldier Birahima in the final masterpiece by one of Africa's most celebrated writers, Ahmadou Kourouma. When ten-year-old Birahima's mother dies, he leaves his native village in the Ivory Coast, accompanied by the sorcerer and cook Yacouba, to search for his aunt Mahan. Crossing the border into Liberia, they are seized by rebels and forced into military service. Birahima is given a Kalashnikov, minimal rations of food, a small supply of dope and a tiny wage. Fighting in a chaotic civil war alongside many other boys, Birahima sees death, torture, dismemberment and madness but somehow manages to retain his own sanity. Raw and unforgettable, despairing yet filled with laughter, Allah Is Not Obliged reveals the ways in which children's innocence and youth are compromised by war.

After morphing into 187 very large white rats in the name of self-preservation, Jules Duchon is back to his portly self, a member of that secret class of New Orleans citizens known as the undead. Though he would like nothing better than to spend his nights raising hell and biting flesh in his beloved French Quarter, duty calls when an exclusive club of blue blood vampires demands that the 450-pound cabbie find out who is attacking its young and beautiful members. Adding insult to injury, he has to enlist the help of a former foe: a black vampire named Preston. What's a vampire to do? Without the love of a woman to ease his pain, Jules isn't convinced that his undead life is worth living. He doesn't desire Doodlebug (she may be a woman now but Jules knew her back when she was just a boy) any more than he longs for Daphne, a rat catcher who nourishes a crush the size of Jules. No, only Maureen will do. Once a beautiful stripper with nothing but curve after curve to her bodacious body, now she is mere dust in a jar. But Jules will move heaven and earth to get her back . . . even if it means pulling her back from the dead.

Each death is unique. Will you recognize when yours begins?John Camden doesn't realize he's dying, yet the physical signs are becoming more clear, and he's having recurring visions where he is trapped in a tight space.Everything changes when his best friend Robbie convinces him to go on a poorly planned caving trip as a form of immersion therapy.Soon the lines of reality blur as John finds himself lost and alone, deep underground where all is not as it seems, and the person he trusted most may have sinister intentions.

Die Residenzstadt B*** mit ihrem alles überragenden, lange schon verlassenen 'Puppenturm' bildet den Schauplatz, das sagenhafte Schicksal eines italienischen Grafen und seiner einsamen Tochter, denen eine Puppe mit magisch glänzenden Augen zum Verhängnis wurde, das Leitmotiv dieser schaurigen Novelle.Erzählt wird die Geschichte des angesehenen Justizrats Fürchtegott Stiefhut, der nach dem Tod seiner geliebten Frau Bellis mit seiner Tochter Susanna zurückgezogen in seinem großen, düsteren Haus lebt und von Traurigkeit, Zorn und frevelhaften Fantasien geplagt wird. Eines Morgens wird ihm ein aus Elfenbein gefertigtes Kästchen zugestellt. Darin finden Vater und Tochter eine kleine Puppe, 'zerbrechlich und wunderschön', deren Antlitz die beiden erschaudern lässt.Nach dem Vorbild der im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert so beliebten Schauerliteratur erzählt Klaus Klopschinski eine märchenhafte Geschichte von Liebe, Trauer und der Verführungskraft teuflischen Zuckerwerks.