A Thriller Award winner, Best Paperback Original Novel. For three years, Detective Jude Fontaine was kept from the outside world. Held in an underground cell, her only contact was with her sadistic captor, and reading his face was her entire existence. Learning his every line, every movement, and every flicker of thought is what kept her alive. After her experience with isolation and torture, she is left with a fierce desire for justice--and a heightened ability to interpret the body language of both the living and the dead. Despite colleagues' doubts about her mental state, she resumes her role at Homicide. Her new partner, Detective Uriah Ashby, doesn't trust her sanity, and he has a story of his own he'd rather keep hidden. But a killer is on the loose, murdering young women, so the detectives have no choice: they must work together to catch the madman before he strikes again. And no one knows madmen like Jude Fontaine.

As every detective novel addict knows, there's no greater high than figuring out "whodunit" before the final revelation, resulting in the kind of intellectual satisfaction a shot of bourbon can never offer. Dove takes this reader/writer play to a new level by critically assessing the genre through the principles of Reader Response Theory, outlining the detective story as a special case of reading governed by rules and a specialized formula that traces its genealogy back to Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The first mystery in a truly unique crime series. 'There comes a time when a novel raises the bar for a particular genre, and The Sea Detective does just that for Scottish crime fiction' (Scotsman) Cal McGill is an Edinburgh-based oceanographer, environmentalist and one-of-a-kind investigator. Using his knowledge of the waves - ocean currents, prevailing winds, shipping records - McGill can track where objects have come from, or where they've gone. It's a unique skill that can help solve all sorts of mysteries. Such as when two severed feet wash up miles apart on two different islands off the coast of Scotland. Most strangely, forensic tests reveal that the feet belong to the same body. As Cal McGill investigates, he unravels a web of corruption, exploitation and violence, which threatens many lives across the globe - very soon including his own... Praise for The Sea Detective: 'Raises the bar for Scottish crime fiction ... elegantly written and compelling' The Scotsman 'Excellent' The Literary Review - top five crime books of the year 'Promises to be a fine series of detective novels' Sunday Times Crime Book of the Month 'An unusual, interesting and enthralling read' Shotsmag 'A compelling protagonist' The Times Literary Supplement

When Georgie Giraffe decides to become a detective, his family and friends encourage him and bring him cases.

The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit. Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me." As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.