Gillian Slovo

Looks at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba and the people being held there by the United States.

A stunning young analyst-in-training keels over dead in front of three hundred guests at her Institute's annual conference. It looks like murder. But initial inquiries suggest she was liked by one and all: her teachers, supervisors, fellow-students, and even patients. New York's finest are forced to call upon Inspector Canal, an allegedly former French secret serviceman now living in Manhattan (loosely based on the inimitable Parisian psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan), to penetrate the calm demeanor of the dead womane's professional entourage.More daring than ever, changing identities and donning the most unlikely of disguises before, during, and even after a mad Halloween party, Canal feels his way through a minefield of denials and dissimulations, trying not to trigger any further detonations. As in his previous escapades, the Frenchman gets caught up in the misadventures of Eros while attempting to solve age-old and newer forms of crimes of the heart, grappling with the biggest mysteries of them all: love and death.

It is 1884. In Khartoum, General Gordon stands on the roof of his fortress as the city is besieged. He has vowed to fight the Mahdi to the death. At his side is the boy he rescued from the English dockyardslums - his reluctant last ally. Approaching with the Camel Corps is a young doctor who has joined the expedition to rescue Gordon. As the men make agonising progress across the desert, John Clarke struggles to be the hero of his imagining, while his abandoned wife, Mary, troubles his conscience. Back in London, as controversy rages over the expedition, Mary finds herself adrift and isolated. Her only release comes from laudanum, an addiction that will take her into Victorian London's darkest corners. An Honourable Man is a novel of extraordinary power that combines the intimate and the epic, exploring the folly of Empire through the fine grain of human experience and emotion.

When two little girls find an abandoned baby, good intentions go awry and three families are ruined. Now, seven years later, another child is missing and rookie homicide detective Nancy Porter must uncover the truth in a world where no one is innocent -- not even the children.Since her debut in 1997, Laura Lippman has won virtually every major prize in the mystery-writing field and earned the highest critical praise for her Tess Monaghan series, which has been called "spectacular" (New York Times), "terrific fun" (Washington Post), "a delight" (Baltimore Sun), and "the best mystery writing around" (Village Voice). Now Lippman steps outside her series to deliver her darkest, most troubling tale -- and vaults into the crime-fiction elite with a haunting story of murder, fate's accidents, and the stories we tell ourselves when we try to make sense of the unthinkable.On a July afternoon two little girls, banished from a birthday party, take a wrong turn onto an unfamiliar Baltimore street -- and encounter an abandoned stroller with a baby inside it. Dutiful Alice Manning and unpredictable Ronnie Fuller only want to be helpful, to be good. People like children who are good, Alice thinks. But whatever the girls' real intentions, things go horribly awry and three families are destroyed.Seven years later Alice and Ronnie are heading home again -- only separately this time, their fragile bond long shattered, their secrets still closely kept. Advised to avoid each other, they enter a world where they essentially have no past. In exchange, they are promised a fresh start, the chance to mold their own future.That promise is broken when a child disappears, under disturbingly similar circumstances. And the adults in Alice's and Ronnie's lives -- the parents, the lawyers, the police -- realize that they must now confront the shattering truths they couldn't face seven years earlier. Or another mother will lose her child.Homicide detective Nancy Porter was a rookie cop when she solved the original case with a bit of freakish luck -- and almost derailed her own career. Adept at finding the small things that can make or break a homicide case, now she must master the larger picture in order to understand where guilt truly lies. For no one is innocent in this world. Not even the children.