New Additions to the English Book Library Catalog

The books featured below have all been added to the LCS English Book Library in the last 30 days. Click on the cover images for more information. Donations are always welcome.

Title: Caveat Emptor


Author: Downie, Ruth

Pub Year: 2011
Publisher: Penguin

Media: TradePaper
Genre: :Historical Fiction:
Location: DOWN

Description:

In her fourth novel, Ruth Downie brings to life the corruption and treachery of Roman-occupied Britain, as it closes in on her winsome leading man, Gaius Petreius Ruso. Ruso and Tilla, now newlyweds, have moved back to Britannia, where Ruso's old friend and colleague Valens has promised to help him find work. But it isn't the kind of work he'd had in mind-Ruso is tasked with hunting down a missing tax man named Julius Asper. Of course, there's also something else missing: money. And the council of the town of Verulamium is bickering over what's become of it. Compelled to delve deeper by a threat from his old sparring partner, Metellus, Ruso discovers that the good townsfolk may not be as loyal to Rome as they like to appear.
Caveat Emptor
Title: Doctor Faustus


Author: Mann, Thomas; Woods, John E.

Pub Year: 1997
Publisher:

Media: TradePaper
Genre: :Historical Fiction:
Location: MANN

Description:

The new translation, by the masterly John E. Woods, of one of Thomas Mann's most famous and important novels: his modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which twentieth-century Germany sells its soul to the devil. Mann's protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, is one of the most significant characters in the literature of our era, for it is in him that Mann centers the tragedy of Germany's seduction by evil. This modern Faust is a great artist: Leverkühn is a musical genius who trades body and soul in a Mephistophelian bargain for twenty-four years of triumph as the world's greatest composer. He is isolated, brilliant, a radical experimenter who both plays and thinks at the very edges of artistic possibility. The story of his life becomes an apocalyptic narrative of his country's moral collapse as it surges into the catastrophe of World War II. No simple symbolic figure, Leverkühn is himself, almost paradoxically, a morally driven man in the vortex of an entire culture's self-destruction.
Doctor Faustus
Title: King of Kings


Author: Sidebottom, Harry

Pub Year: 2011
Publisher: Overlook

Media: TradePaper
Genre: :Historical Fiction: :Mystery/Suspense: :War:
Location: SIDE

Description:

AD256 - the spectre of treachery hangs ominously over the Roman world. The sparks of Christian fervour have spread through the empire like wildfire, and the imperium is alive with the machinations of dangerous and powerful men. All the while, Sassanid forces press forward relentlessly along the eastern frontier. The battle-bloodied general Ballista returns to the imperial court from the fallen city of Arete - only to find that there are those who would rather see him dead than alive. Ballista is soon caught in a sinister web of intrigue and religious fanaticism ...his courage and loyalty will be put to the ultimate test in the service of Rome and the emperor. The Warrior of Rome is back...
King of Kings
Title: Perdition


Author: Brassett, Pete

Pub Year: 2018
Publisher: The Book Folks

Media: TradePaper
Genre: :Mystery/Suspense:
Location: BRAS

Description:

A drug-induced suicide, misadventure, or a cleverly calculated murder? London detective Charlotte West takes on Scotland. An employee of an investment bank is found dead in his car by a freshwater loch in Ayrshire, Scotland, but there are few signs of foul play. Indeed, that the man had enough opioid painkillers in him to fell a shire horse, might easily be put down to over-exuberant self-indulgence. But newly promoted and in charge of the investigation, DI Charlie West wants to probe further. And when the victim's links to a minor crime involving a dead goat and an assault on an associate come to light, a suspicious motive begins to emerge. DI West must explore shady financial dealings in the up-market parts of Glasgow, and connections to illicit drugs in its poorer quarters, to track the killer in what is now being treated as a murder investigation.
Perdition
Title: Tabula Rasa


Author: Downie, Ruth

Pub Year: 2014
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Media: Hardcover
Genre: :Historical Fiction: :Mystery/Suspense:
Location: DOWN

Description:

The medicus Ruso and his wife, Tilla, are back in the borderlands of Britannia, where he is tending the builders of Hadrian's Great Wall. Having been forced to move off their land, the Britons are distinctly on edge and are still smarting from the failure of a recent rebellion that claimed many lives. The tension grows when Ruso's recently arrived clerk goes missing and things go from bad to worse when the young son of a local family also vanishes. While struggling to keep the peace between the Britons and the Romans, Ruso and Tilla uncover an intricate deception involving slavery and fur trappers, and it becomes imperative that they solve the mystery of the two disappearances before it's too late.
Tabula Rasa
Title: Terra Incognita


Author: Downie, Ruth

Pub Year: 2008
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Media: TradePaper
Genre: :Historical Fiction:
Location: DOWN

Description:

It is spring in the year of 118, and Hadrian has been Emperor of Rome for less than a year. After getting involved with the murders of local prostitutes in the town of Deva, Doctor Gaius Petreius Ruso needs to get out of town, so has volunteered for a posting with the Army on the volatile border where the Roman-controlled half of Britannia meets the independent tribes of the North. Not only is he going to the hinterlands of the hinterlands, but it his slave Tilla's homeland and she has some scores to settle there. Soon they find that Tilla's tribespeople are being encouraged to rebel against Roman control by a mysterious leader known as the Stag Man, and her former lover is implicated in the grisly murder of a soldier. Ruso, unwillingly involved in the investigation of the murder, is appalled to find that Tilla is still spending time with the lover. Worse, he is honour bound to try to prove the man innocent - and the Army wrong - by finding another suspect. Soon both Ruso's and Tilla's lives are in jeopardy, as is the future of their burgeoning romantic relationship.
Terra Incognita
Title: Testimony


Author: Turow, Scott

Pub Year: 2017
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Media: Hardcover
Genre: :Mystery/Suspense:
Location: TURO

Description:

At the age of fifty, former prosecutor Bill ten Boom has walked out on everything he thought was important to him: his law career, his wife, Kindle County, even his country. Still, when he is tapped by the International Criminal Court--an organization charged with prosecuting crimes against humanity--he feels drawn to what will become the most elusive case of his career. Over ten years ago, in the apocalyptic chaos following the Bosnian war, an entire Roma refugee camp vanished. Now for the first time, a witness has stepped forward: Ferko Rincic claims that armed men marched the camp's Gypsy residents to a cave in the middle of the night--and then with a hand grenade set off an avalanche, burying 400 people alive. Only Ferko survived. Boom's task is to examine Ferko's claims and determinine who might have massacred the Roma. His investigation takes him from the International Criminal Court's base in Holland to the cities and villages of Bosnia and secret meetings in Washington, DC, as Boom sorts through a host of suspects, ranging from Serb paramilitaries, to organized crime gangs, to the US government itself, while also maneuvering among the alliances and treacheries of those connected to the case: Layton Merriwell, a disgraced US major general desperate to salvage his reputation; Sergeant Major Atilla Doby,a vital cog in American military operations near the camp at the time of the Roma's disappearance; Laza Kajevic, the brutal former leader of the Bosnian Serbs; Esma Czarni, Ferko's alluring barrister; and of course, Ferko himself, on whose testimony the entire case rests-and who may know more than he's telling.
Testimony
Title: The Bazaar of Bad Dreams


Author: King, Stephen

Pub Year: 2015
Publisher: Pocket Books

Media: Paperback
Genre: :Horror::Short Stories:
Location: KING

Description:

There are thrilling connections between stories; themes of morality, the afterlife, guilt, what we would do differently if we could see into the future or correct the mistakes of the past. In "Afterlife," a man who died of colon cancer keeps reliving the same life, repeating his mistakes over and over again. Several stories feature characters at the end of life, revisiting their crimes and misdemeanors. Others address what happens when someone discovers that he has supernatural powers, the columnist who kills people by writing their obituaries in "Obits;" the old judge in "The Dune" who, as a boy, canoed to a deserted island and saw names written in the sand, people who then died in freak accidents. In "Morality," King looks at how a marriage and two lives fall apart after the wife and husband enter into what seems, at first, a devil's pact they can win. "I made these stories especially for you," says King. "Feel free to examine them, but please be careful. The best of them have teeth."
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams