John Glatt

With The Doctor's Wife, Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrote Flaubert's Madame Bovary, exploring the heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life. A woman with a secret, adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make The Doctor's Wife a classic women's sensation novel. The novel is also self-consciously literary, however, and Braddon attempts to transcend the sensation genre.

Melanie McGuire, a mother and a well respected nurse decides she's had enough of her husband Bill. Not only does she kill him but she dismembers him, packs his body parts in a designer suitcase and dumps him in the Chesapeake Bay. She almost got away with it....

Kirsten's best friend is found murdered in a way that is reminiscent of a crime years earlier, but when the bodies of girls start to pile up, Kirsten wonders if the killer will ever be caught.

They went from praying to preying... Priests, pasters, ministers, and nuns: they are the men and women of God. We trust them unconditionally, tell them our darkest deeds, turn to them in our most desperate hour. We would never, in our wildest dreams, expect them to be...cold-blooded murderers. Now, peek into the confessionals of eleven clergymen and -women who did the unthinkable-- who broke the most sacred commandment: Thou shalt not kill. Pastor Edmund Lopes could bring a congregation to its knees. Little did they know that years before, after murdering his wife and stabbing his girlfriend, he had found religion in prison and jumped parole to become a Baptist minister-- until police caught up with him, ten years after his escape. Sister Sheila Ryan De Luca, having left her Franciscan convent after allegations of a lesbian affair with another nun, stands accused of brutally murdering a man who she claims raped her. Ultimately she served ten years in prison until her conviction was overturned. Reverend Freddie Armstrong heard the voice of God telling him to "kill the Antichrist," so the schizophrenic ordained priest took a sharp butcher's knife and proceeded to stab and decapitate 81-year-old Fred Neal, a beloved local minister who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Ben Novack, Jr. was born into a life of luxury and opulence. Heir to the legendary Fontainebleau hotel, he spent his childhood surrounded by some of the world's biggest stars, including Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, Elvis Presley, and Ann-Margret, who performed regularly at the Fontainebleau's La Ronde Room. He sat by while his parents entertained presidents and movie stars, as they reigned over Miami Beach in the '50's and '60's, and when the family business went sour he became wealthy in his own right, founding a multi-million dollar business using connections he made at the Fontainebleau. But Ben, Jr.'s luxurious, celebrity-studded lifestyle would end in another hotel room--a thousand miles away from the one where he grew up--when police found him bound up in duct tape, beaten to death. Seven years earlier, police found Novack in an eerily similar situation--when his wife Narcy duct-taped him to a chair for twenty-four hours and robbed him. Claiming it was a sex game, he never pressed charges and never followed through with a divorce. Now prosecutors claimed Narcy let the vicious killers into the room and watched as they beat her husband with dumbbells. They also suspected she was involved in the horrendous death of Novack's mother, just three months before. But it would be Narcy's own daughter who implicated her to the police--in this twisted case of passion, perversion, and paradise lost."--Provided by publisher.

When the defiantly northern Wyverdale District Council fails to satisfy a government audit, a New Labour fixer, Alex Clifton, is despatched from the capital to formulate a robust recovery plan. But resources spent on websites, 'faith festivals' and council leaflets in Bengali seem beside the point to the Labour old guard, struggling as they are to provide basic services to an alienated and divided electorate. What's more, the reforms seem only to fan the flames of racial tension, and when riots break out, everyone starts looking for someone to blame.

A loving father-- a missing daughter-- and the awful truth that lay hidden just below. The true story of the Austrian incest case that shocked the world.

x, 464 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : 18 cm