FICTION
Darian North
Also known as: North, Darian.
FOUR SHACKLES. CHAINS POUNDED INTO GRANITE BY the blows of the blacksmith's hammer.
— from Thief of souls
Most acclaimed
Thief of souls
With her acclaimed novels The Plague Tales and The Burning Road, Ann Benson has carved out a unique place on the literary landscape with her fascinating alchemy of mystery, history, and psychological terror. Now this gifted storyteller returns with an astounding tale of two crime waves separated by nearly 600 years. In each, the victims are children. In each, the perpetrator is a man of power and renown. And in each, the pursuit of justice is spearheaded by a woman who has seen the face of evil up close—and whose own life is entwined with a madman’s. In the city of Nantes, in the year 1440, a woman hurries through the cobblestoned streets. Her world of faith, loyalty, and family is buckling under the weight of her suspicions about a dead child…and others who may have met the same fate—all at the hands of the same killer—the infamous Gilles de Rais. Soon Guillemette le Drappière, companion to the Bishop of Nantes, is investigating the young nobleman she helped raise from infancy. To unravel the truth, Guillemette must enter a dark realm of power, perversion, bloodlust—and bring to it the unforgiving light of the church she serves. In the city of Los Angeles, in the year 2002, a detective gets the kind of call she dreads most: "My child is gone." Lany Dunbar, a mother, a cop, and a veteran of human horrors, cannot be prepared for where this search will lead her. For within days, Lany is certain that this missing-child case has exposed the work of a serial killer. At odds with her own department, sure that her killer is becoming more emboldened, Lany zeroes in on a suspect—while a suspect zeroes in on her.… Two horrific crime sprees. Two extraordinary eras. The connections between them are at once eerie, compelling, and surprising. Only Ann Benson can weave together the strands of history and suspense with such mastery. Skillfully blending past and present, myth and reality, Benson catapults us from an age when wolves ran wild through the streets of Paris to an age of high-tech criminal profiling. A riveting, rousing adventure through time, history, and forensic science, Thief of Souls introduces two unforgettable characters, separated by centuries, linked by a passionate quest for justice. For in a race to stop monsters from more monstrous crimes, both women will discover a frightening truth: that within a killer is a child, and within a child are seeds of both innocence and evil.
Bone deep
Mila's lived her whole life with one goal: destroying the upir, and sometimes their lesser evil cousins, vampires. She's fought and trained for almost all of her eighteen years so that she'd be ready to lead the Ouroboros order, a society of hunters that has been around since Dracula was known simply as Vlad the Impaler. She's successfully executed many kills, led hundreds of hunting parties, and honed her abilities as a runemaster. But something's coming, something that even a life like Mila's couldn't prepare her for. Hunters are dropping all around her, and monsters are doing the unheard of. Working together. Rogen's second life has been about one thing: protecting his people. He's long since accepted his role in the vast supernatural world, and what's more, he's learned to relish in the power. Which is why it pisses him off so much when something shows up announced, screwing with the order of things. With only one option left to him, Rogen undergoes the unthinkable, guising himself as a moroi hunter in the Ouroboros order. There was a time when he respected their services, but having been corrupted some centuries back, his opinion of them has since altered. He's going to have to convince them to join forces if they're ever going to stop whatever's coming. The only problem is, doing so might actually be more impossible than stopping the biggest evil the world's ever seen.
Criminal seduction
1993
El escritor Owen Byrne consigue por fín dar el gran saldto, el que le permite alejarse del Midwest por primera vez en su vida y trasladarse a las despiadadas calles de Nueva York. Byrne pretende escribir una crónica del asesinato de la década, el homicidio de Bram Serian, un artista de fama mundial. La bella esposa asiática de Seria, la misteriosa y solitaria mujer a la que la prensa ha bautizado como la Viuda Negra, es la acusada. El proceso, sueño de la acusación, pesadilla de la defensa y bautismo de un autor inédito, está a punto de ir a juicio y en él se conjugan las llamas de la muerte, que han borrado las pruebas esenciales del crimen, y el ardor de la relación sentimiental con una bella mujer que es o una víctima o una asesina desalmada y sin escrúpulos.