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The Second Glass of Absinthe: A Mystery of the Victorian West --by Michelle Black	Click for more info
"After the first glass [of absinthe], you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."--Oscar Wilde In the American West of 1880, Leadville, Colorado, is the wealthiest mining district on earth and by far its richest mine is the Eye Dazzler. When Lucinda Ridenour, the notorious widow-heiress to the Dazzler, chooses young Kit Randall to be her lover, Kit thinks he has the world at his feet. But when their affair sinks into depravity, he must rediscover himself and find out if he has the character to survive in a society that has more money than morals. After waking up from an absinthe-created hallucination in which unspeakable acts seem to have taken place, Kit angrily leaves the house of Lucinda and her twenty-year-old son, Christopher, feeling betrayed and exploited. Then, Lucinda is found stabbed to death. In the midst of this turmoil and of Leadville\'s anxiety over its labor unrest and the impending arrival of the railroad, Kit\'s uncle, Brad Randall, and his fiancé, Eden Murdoch, arrive in the boomtown planning to celebrate their wedding, but are instead shocked to learn Kit is the primary suspect in the sensational murder. Eden resolves to learn the truth and clear Kit Randall\'s name. To do so, she forms an uneasy alliance with Bella Valentine, Kit\'s former girlfriend and a dabbler in the occult. With this unlikely ally Eden uncovers shocking secrets of the Ridenour family just as Leadville\'s first labor strike brings the town to an armed and dangerous standstill. The Second Glass of Absinthe is a dazzling glimpse of the Victorian West and a riveting murder mystery set in the dizzying world of a boomtown where lusts-for gold, for power, for flesh-intoxicate all who come in contact with it. --©Forge

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Sunset and Sawdust --by Joe R. Lansdale	Click for more info
It begins with an explosion: Sunset Jones kills her husband with a bullet to the brain. Never mind that he was raping her. Pete Jones was constable of the small sawmill town of Camp Rapture ("Camp Rupture" to the local blacks), where no woman, least of all Pete\'s, refuses her husband what he wants. So most everyone is surprised and angry when, thanks to the unexpected understanding of her mother-in-law -- three-quarter owner of the mill -- Sunset is named the new constable. And they\'re even more surprised when she dares to take the job seriously: beginning an investigation into the murder of a woman and an unborn baby whose oil-drenched bodies are discovered buried on land belonging to the only black landowner in town. Yet no one is more surprised than Sunset herself when the murders lead her -- through a labyrinth of greed, corruption, and unspeakable malice -- not only to the shocking conclusion of the case, but to a well of inner strength she never knew she had. Lansdale brings the thick backwoods and swamps of East Texas vividly to life, and he paints a powerfully evocative picture of a time when Jim Crow and the Klan ruled virtually unopposed, when the oil boom was rolling into and over Texas, when any woman who didn\'t know her place was considered a threat and a target. In Sunset, he gives us a woman who defies all expectations, wrestling a different place for herself with spirit and spit, cunning and courage. And in Sunset and Sawdust he gives us a wildly energetic novel -- galvanizing from first to last. --©Knopf

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Blood on the Tongue --by Stephen Booth	Click for more info
The weather is cold and the clues no warmer as Peak District detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry tackle a medley of mysteries -- each one knottier than the last -- in English author Stephen Booth\'s haunting third novel, Blood on the Tongue. The unidentified body of a dead man has turned up on a frosty roadside. An abused woman is found curled in the snow on nearby Irontongue Hill, an apparent suicide. And there\'s the lingering puzzle of a Royal Air Force bomber that crashed into Irontongue back in 1945, killing everyone on board except for the pilot, who reportedly walked away from the wreckage... and was never heard from again. With leave and sickness decimating the ranks of the Edendale police force, all hands are needed to solve the modern deaths. But constable Cooper finds himself distracted by the World War II tragedy, in large part because of a beguiling young Canadian, the granddaughter of that missing pilot, who\'s come to Edendale determined to clear her ancestor\'s name. Not surprisingly, these various cases eventually intertwine. But how they\'re linked by time and tragedy provides the intrigue here. Equally involving is the prickly alliance between Cooper, the "too bloody nice" local lad, and his superior, the emotionally guarded outsider, Fry. Plotted for maximum psychological suspense, teeming with singular secondary characters, and capitalizing on Britain\'s still-poignant memories of the last world war, Blood on the Tongue is an ambitious and remarkably mature work that delivers on the promise Booth showed in his first novel, Black Dog. --J. Kingston Pierce, ©Amazon.com

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Labyrinth --by Kate Mosse	Click for more info
In this extraordinary thriller, rich in the atmospheres of medieval and contemporary France, the lives of two women born centuries apart are linked by a common destiny. July 2005. In the Pyrenees mountains near Carcassonne, Alice, a volunteer at an archaeological dig stumbles into a cave and makes a startling discovery -- two crumbling skeletons, strange writings on the walls, and the pattern of a labyrinth; between the skeletons, a stone ring, and a small leather bag. Eight hundred years earlier, on the eve of a brutal crusade to stamp out heresy that will rip apart southern France, Alais is given a ring and a mysterious book for safekeeping by her father as he leaves to fight the crusaders. The book, he says, contains the secret of the true Grail, and the ring, inscribed with a labyrinth, will identify a guardian of the Grail. As crusading armies led by Church potentates and nobles of northern France gather outside the city walls of Carcassonne, it will take great sacrifice to keep the secret of the labyrinth safe. In the present, another woman sees the find as a means to the political power she craves; while a man who has great power will kill to destroy all traces of the discovery and everyone who stands in his way. --©Putnam

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