Chasing the elusive Green Diamonds...

A Fistful of Diamonds: A Gemstone Thriller (The Gemstone Thrillers)

by John B. Robinson

We have all heard the term "Blood Diamonds" and many have seen the film, Robinson throws the grity reality of the diamond trade in the Congo in your face in this fast paced thriller!

Lonny, diamontaire from a family tradition of diamontaires is looking to cement his personal reputation in the industry...how better to do that than to capture the elusive suite of "green diamonds" that is the talk of the Industry. His adventures through the Congo are made more difficult due to his committment to help a beautiful Seminary Student locate her missing father.

Trouble abounds - and not just from the obvious "child soldiers" and unscrupulous miners - Africa is not a culture that believes that women should be in advisory (especially religious) positions over men!

This is a thrill a minute - I am going to go back and pick up Robinson's previous book The Sapphire Sea!

Product Description from Amazon

Fast-talking gem expert Lonny Cushman encounters the dangerous and malevolent world of the African gem industry as he accompanies a young female seminarian from New York to Rwanda in search of her missing father. Once they reach Africa, Lonny chases a collection of flawless green diamonds through the killing fields of the Congo. Their survival depends upon negotiating the bloody network of the conflict-ridden African diamond trade, including Islamic jihadists, corrupt military officers, Israeli agents, Ukrainian arms dealers, and a whole host of con men. Can Lonny save himself and the young seminarian from a tragic demise?

Meet Vish Puri - India's Most Private Investigator

The Case of the Missing Servant

By Tarquin Hall

There is no escaping the inevitable comparisons with Precious Ramotswe and her #1 Ladies Detective Agency...Hall gives you the provincal tradition and ways of the Indian culture in much the same way that McCall brings you African culture.

Vish Puri is the gentleman PI with his crew of undercover partners - FaceCream, TubeLight and Flush...and the interfering Mummy. Puri works within a changing Indian Culture  - the changing face of the caste system sets limits on the questions and avenues that can be persued.  

This India is a modern day country where girls are leaving the safety of their villages for the lure of the big city and prosperity - and many are in the words of Puri...

"...just one of the dozens of personages who go missing across India every year."

The Glossary of Indian terms at the end of the book is extremely helpful.  I really love the feel this book gave me for the Indian people and the respect for it's ancient culture.

Product Description from Amazon
Meet Vish Puri, India's most private investigator. Portly, persistent, and unmistakably Punjabi, he cuts a determined swath through modern India's swindlers, cheats, and murderers.

In hot and dusty Delhi, where call centers and malls are changing the ancient fabric of Indian life, Puri's main work comes from screening prospective marriage partners, a job once the preserve of aunties and family priests.

But when an honest public litigator is accused of murdering his maidservant, it takes all of Puri's resources to investigate. How will he trace the fate of the girl, known only as Mary, in a population of more than one billion? Who is taking potshots at him and his prize chili plants? And why is his widowed "Mummy-ji" attempting to play sleuth when everyone knows mummies are not detectives?

With his team of undercover operatives -- Tubelight, Flush, and Facecream -- Puri ingeniously combines modern techniques with principles of detection established in India more than two thousand years ago -- long before "that Johnny-come-lately" Sherlock Holmes donned his deerstalker.

The search for Mary takes him to the desert oasis of Jaipur and the remote mines of Jharkhand. From Puri's well-heeled Gymkhana Club to the slums where the servant classes live, his adventures reveal modern India in all its seething complexity. 

The Thirteenth Child

Thirteenth Child (Frontier Magic Book)

by Patricia C. Wrede

This is a great alternate history of the western expansion where witches and wizards are just as important as the founding fathers!

When Eff receives nothing but grief from neighbors and family alike for being the 13th child her parents decide to take a postion at a University on the edge of the magical divide. The kids are excited and afraid of what awaits in this new frontier...the boys can't wait to see the Wooly Mammoths but Eff can't wait to be in a place where no one knows she is the 13th child!

Wrede does a wonderful job of character development and I love the introduction of the Realists who believe that they can conquer the frontier without magic.

This book will keep you captivated from the first page - I loved it!

Product Description from Amazon:

Eff was born a thirteenth child. Her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son. This means he's supposed to possess amazing talent -- and she's supposed to bring only bad things to her family and her town. Undeterred, her family moves to the frontier, where her father will be a professor of magic at a school perilously close to the magical divide that separates settlers from the beasts of the wild.

With wit and wonder, Patricia Wrede creates an alternate history of westward expansion that will delight fans of both J. K. Rowling and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

The Time Thief - Book Two of The Gideon Trilogy

The Time Thief (The Gideon Trilogy)

By Linda Buckley-Archer

Whether you read it as "Gideon, the Cut-purse" or the "The Time Travelers" you may recall that book one in "The Gideon Trilogy" ends with a bang!!! Just as the Peter & Kate are about to return to their own time with Kate's father Dr. Dyer, Peter is thrown aside by the 18th century villain "The Tar Man".

This is where we pick up the story with the Tar Man learning to work with technology to further his evil goals and raise him to a position in society that he could never have attained in the 1700's.

Meanwhile, Kate takes matters into her own hands and goes back to rescue Peter and ends up taking his father back in time with her. But that rescue attempt goes arry when the coordinates are changed and they end up going back to an England where Peter has lived and grown to manhood.

The sequel was even better than the first book and if this ever hit the big screen it would give Harry Potter and Twilight a run for the money!!! I can't wait for part three!!!

______________________

Product Review from Amazon: An accident with an antigravity machine catapulted Peter Schock and Kate Dyer back to 1763. A bungled rescue attempt leaves Peter stranded in the eighteenth century while a terrifying villain, the Tar Man, takes his place and explodes onto twenty-first-century London. Concerned about the potentially catastrophic effects of time travel, the NASA scientists responsible for the situation question whether it is right to rescue Peter. Kate decides to take matters into her own hands, but things don't go as planned. Soon the physical effects of time travel begin to have a disturbing effect on her. Meanwhile, in our century, the Tar Man wreaks havoc in a city whose police force is powerless to stop him. Set against a backdrop of contemporary London and revolutionary France, The Time Thief is the sequel to the acclaimed The Time Travelers.

What Book Got You Hooked?

We asked and you answered! After launching this year’s What Book Got You Hooked? campaign, we’ve already received great quotes, memories and books that hooked you, making you a reader for life. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, Ethel Glere Chamberlin’s Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who are just a few of the titles mentioned by you as you recalled the memorable books that got you hooked on reading.

But don’t stop there! We still have a few milestones to pass before meeting our goal of $100,000 by the end of August, and we need your help.

 

Your donation of just $20 will make 10 books available for the 50,000 book giveaway to be awarded to the winning state of the What Book Got You Hooked? voting contest that will take place later this summer.

 

So think back to the stories you read over and over again or the first book you just couldn’t put down. Remember the sense of accomplishment, the thrill, the feeling of pure bliss when the last page was turned.

 

Won’t you help make that feeling a reality for the millions of children waiting for their first book? Join the What Book Got You Hooked? movement today by making a donation…no matter how big or small.

 

All my best,

 

Tonya Shive

Director, Community Development

 

P.S. Father’s Day is just around the corner. Make bedtime stories possible for other Dads and their kids by making a donation in honor of your father 

I can hear the dialogue coming out of Bogie's mouth...

Spade & Archer: The Prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon

By Joe Gores


That Joe Gores is a huge fan of Dashiell Hammett is no secret - if your missed his Hammett (Crime Masterworks)- you will want to go back and order it after reading Spade & Archer.

This book gives you everything you expect from a Sam Spade novel - mysteries, keen detective work, shootings, damsels in distress, slimey partners, and the quick hard and fast dialogue that Humphrey Bogart pushed to iconic!

Spade & Archer will draw you in from the beginning with Spade impersonating a Port Authority Officer and accidentally getting involved in the search for stolen British gold while investigating a missing persons case on the docks.

The author does a great job of recreating 1920's San Francisco - from the trolley cars to the seedy underside of the docks and formation of the longshoremen unions.

I picked the book up in the evening and couldn't put it down - yes - I finally got to sleep at 2am!!!

If you like gritty detectives and thrilling, moving story telling this is your book.
--------------------------------
Book Description When Sam Spade gets drawn into the Maltese Falcon case, we know what to expect: straight talk, hard questions, no favors, and no way for anyone to get underneath the protective shell he wears like a second skin. We know that his late partner, Miles Archer, was a son of a bitch; that Spade is sleeping with Archer’s wife, Iva; that his tomboyish secretary, Effie Perine, is the only innocent in his life. What we don’t know is how Spade became who he is. Spade & Archer completes the picture.

1921: Spade sets up his own agency in San Francisco and clients quickly start coming through the door. The next seven years will see him dealing with booze runners, waterfront thugs, stowaways, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, bumbling cops, and the illegitimate daughter of Sun Yat-sen; with murder, other men’s mistresses, and long-missing money. He’ll bring in Archer as a partner, though it was Archer who stole his girl while he was fighting in World War I. He’ll tangle with a villain who never loses his desire to make Spade pay big for ruining what should’ve been the perfect crime. And he’ll fall in love—though it won’t turn out for the best. It never does with dames . . .

Spade & Archer is a gritty, pitch-perfect, hard-boiled novel--the work of a master mystery writer--destined to become a classic in its own right.

Flint and Silver : A Prequel to Treasure Island

Flint and Silver: A Prequel to Treasure Island


By John Drake


From the Product Description: "John Silver had never killed a man. Until now, his charisma, sheer size and, when all else failed, powerful fists had been enough to dispatch his enemies. But on a smoldering deck off the coast of Madagascar, his shipmates dead or dying all around him, his cutlass has just claimed the lives of six pirates. Finding himself surrounded by their revenge-thirsty crewmates, Silver fears his promising merchant navy career is at an end. But then the pirate captain makes him an offer he can't refuse. On the other side of the world, Joseph Flint, a naval officer wronged by his superiors, plots a bloody mutiny. Strikingly handsome, brilliant but prey to sadistic tendencies, Flint is regarded as the most dangerous bandit on the high seas."
-------------------------

My hat is off to John Drake and his genius imagination - I can't think of a more genuine or thrilling backstory for some of the more popular characters from Treasure Island. This book gives you a different perspective for Ben Gunn, Black Dog, Billy Bones and, the infamous Long John Silver.

This journey follows Silver from Gentleman to Pirate and takes Flint from Seaman to Madman Captain! The partnership begins its downward spiral with the introduction of Flint's "Nubian Princess" Selena. However, Flint's slide from sanity to sadist happens faster.

Warning: Do not read this book expecting to find the Disney version of pirates...these pirates engage in bloody hand to cutlass battles - the sex and cruelty are explicit and I loved every gripping moment of it. None of it is sensational it all works within the story line.
-----------------------------

Full Product Description:
A swashbuckling triumph of storytelling, Flint and Silver provides a thrilling ride back to the rich and wondrous world of Long John Silver and his fiendish nemesis Joseph Flint in this prequel to the beloved classic Treasure Island.

John Silver had never killed a man. Until now, his charisma, sheer size and, when all else failed, powerful fists had been enough to dispatch his enemies. But on a smoldering deck off the coast of Madagascar, his shipmates dead or dying all around him, his cutlass has just claimed the lives of six pirates. Finding himself surrounded by their revenge-thirsty crewmates, Silver fears his promising merchant navy career is at an end. But then the pirate captain makes him an offer he can't refuse.

On the other side of the world, Joseph Flint, a naval officer wronged by his superiors, plots a bloody mutiny. Strikingly handsome, brilliant but prey to sadistic tendencies, Flint is regarded as the most dangerous bandit on the high seas.

Together these gentlemen of fortune forge a deadly and unstoppable partnership, steering a course through treachery and betrayal while amassing vast treasure. But the arrival of Selena, a beautiful runaway slave with a murderous past, and Flint's schemes to secure the pieces of gold for himself trigger a rivalry that will turn the best of friends into sworn enemies. And so the legend of Treasure Island begins -- an epic battle of wits and blades that unravels the mysteries of Robert Louis Stevenson's greatest work on the sweltering seas of the Caribbean.