Product Description
Michael and Anna, best friends and next door neighbors during childhood, accidentally meet again as adults. In an all-white room, two people reenact their childhood fears, fantasies and mutual love as a chilling secret is revealed. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Mary StuartMasterson (born June 28, 1966) is anAmerican film, stage and television actress anddirector. Masterson was born in New York City towriter/director Peter Masterson and actress CarlinGlynn. She has two siblings: Peter Masterson Jr., and Alexandra Masterson,who are both involved in the entertainment industry. ... Read more

Product Description
The ties that bind us--to our families, to our pasts--are at the heart of this rich and engrossing novel.Musical prodigy Venus Arinelli saw her promising future as a classical pianist shattered when her father was charged with complicity in a terrible act of violence and died in jail.Now, at twenty-nine, Venus wears her survival skills like a suit of armor.And when a stranger emerges from her parents' long-ago past with an offer too good to refuse, all Venus's suspicions flare up.

Military-trained Gib Cameron looks like a vice cop when he descends on the smoky Chicago bar where Venus and her sister are performing, but he is the representative of a family as distinguished, as rooted in American history, as Venus's is notorious and fly-by-night.Yet the Camerons need Venus, for reasons that have to do with reverence for the past, with loyalty, with an almost mystical bond that must be honored if they are to regain hope after their own recent tragedies.

With the extraordinary mix of humor, pathos, sexiness, and pure storytelling virtuosity that made A Place to Call Home so beloved, When Venus Fell will capture listeners' hearts with the story of Venus's journey to Tennessee, to the Camerons' glorious mountain inn--whose very first guests were Venus's wildly in love parents--a journey that teaches two families what matters most.Amazon.com Review
Musical prodigy Venus Arinelli's life shattered at the age of 19 whenher father was arrested for anti-government activity. When he died of aheart attack a week later while in custody, Venus took her younger sisterand ran from accusations and harassment. Ten years later, she's stillrunning from the government agencies that are eager to place the blame onher every time a subversive group explodes a bomb in the United States.

Gib Cameron was a child of 5 when Venus's parents were married at CameronHall. Steeped in tradition, Gib's family is well respected and firmlyrooted in American history, while Venus's is notorious and barely ageneration away from immigration. But tragedy has come knocking on thevenerable door of the Cameron stronghold high in the Tennessee hills, andthe matriarchal great-aunt of the clan orders Gib to find the Arinellisisters and bring them to the Hall. Shari Kirk and Max Arinelli were thefirst guests to stay there, and the great-aunt believes that theirdaughters hold the key to the survival of the Hall and the healing of herfamily.

Gib and Venus are worlds apart on the surface--she with her pierced navel,wild clothing, and career as a lounge musician, and he with his conservativeclothing, schooling at the Citadel, and career as a Secret Service agent. But they are soul mates under their skins, for each is deeply honorable,wary of love, and fiercely protective of their families.

The two share in an arduous journey of the heart, searching the past to healthe present and find a future. They take with them a collection offascinating, well-developed secondary characters in a story that mixespathos with humor and is rich with human emotion, lush landscapes, and aplot so well conceived that it resonates like a finely tuned Steinway. --Lois Faye Dyer ... Read more

Customer Reviews (37)

Vivid Imagery and Characters
Fall in love with Venus and Gib. The story jumps right off the page and into your heart.This is a fun read!

Great fun
Great reading for anytime.
Wonderfully eccentric and vivid characters. Plenty of time to get to know them.
Rich sense of place and time.
Wonderful pacing.
This is my second Deborah Smith and I am thinking this is
an author to search the bookshelfs for.
The way she writes is very fluid and I reiterate FUN.
The characters were so interesting I could easily imagine some follow-up adventures from them.

Amazing!!
I first bought this book "because the title sounded good."I had no idea that I would fall in love with Venus and Gib and their complicated, beautiful story.I love the vivid imagery, the "clashing of cultures" and the sardonic, dry humor Venus conveys throughout the story.It is now my favorite book in the entire world!A must-read for anyone who has ever felt different and like they didn't quite belong!

I thoroughly enjoyed this wonderful story
A fun and entertaining read.I wished I lived in that enchanting forest with all those amazing and endearing characters.A book I'll read over and over again just for the pure joy of it.

another winner
This is the fourth Deborah Smith's book that I read and once again I struggled to put it down.
I love her writing style, her interesting characters and unusual twists to the story, her detailed description of scenery, emotions and relationships.
I'm already looking for more work from this author ... Read more

Product Description
Lauren Stillwell is not your average damsel in distress. When the NYPD cop discovers her husband leaving a hotel with another woman, she decides to beat him at his own game. But her revenge goes dangerously awry, and she finds her world spiraling into a hell that becomes more terrifying by the hour.
In a further twist of fate, Lauren must take on a job that threatens everything she stands for. Now, she's paralyzed by a deadly secret that could tear her life apart. With her job and marriage on the line, Lauren's desire for retribution becomes a lethal inferno as she fights to save her livelihood--and her life.
Patterson takes us on a twisting roller-coaster ride of thrills in his most gripping audiobook yet. This story of love, lust and dangerous secrets will have listeners' hearts pounding to the very last page. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (383)

Bones on the beach
Book was an easily and great read! the condition of the book was excellent too.
thanks Amazon.Com

Awesome authors
I love James Patterson.I always look forward to reading his books.I can't wait for the next book to come out, which is next month.I had the pleasure to meet James Patterson at a book signing last year.Keep up the awesome writing.

Great book
I loved this book!! It was eventful from the very begining to the very end!!

Interesting
I really didn't know what to think of this book.I'm a big fan of James Patterson's Alex Cross series as well as the Women Murder Club books.I've only recently ventured into his other books; first with Swimsuit and now The Quickie.

I have to admit I almost gave up on this book in the beginning.The characters were uninteresting and flat.The main character Lauren was extremely boring.I stuck with the book and towards the middle things finally started livening up a little.

I won't give anything away but Lauren was described as being very intelligent and at the top of her game in her occupation; however, the seemed to overlook MAJOR character deficiencies in both her husband and the recipient of "The Quickie".

There were good twists and turns throughout the book that kept me reading until the end.

It was a quickie for me. 78 pages and in the fireplace.
The 78th page of the paperback was the end of Chapter 27. It's beyond me why I read that much. I thought I'd go to Amazon and see what others had opined. I went to the one star reviews. They confirmed what I was thinking; throwing this book in the fireplace was the right choice. Any one star review would parrot what I thought of this piece of dreck. ... Read more

Product Description
From the author of the best-selling Three Junes comes an intimate new work of fiction: a tale of two sisters, together and apart, told in their alternating voices over twenty-five years.

Louisa Jardine is the older one, the conscientious student, precise and careful: the one who years for a good marriage, an artistic career, a family. Clem, the archetypal youngest, is the rebel: uncontainable, iconoclastic, committed to her work but not to the men who fall for her daring nature. Louisa resents that the charismatic Clem has always been the favorite; yet as Clem puts it, “On the other side of the fence–mine–every expectation you fulfill . . . puts you one stop closer to that Grand Canyon rim from which you could one day rule the world–or plummet in very grand style.”

In this vivid, heartrending story of what we can and cannot do for those we love, the sisters grow closer as they move farther apart. Louis settles in New York while Clem, a wildlife biologist, moves restlessly about until she lands in the Rocky Mountains. Their complex bond, Louisa observes, is “like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching.”

Alive with all the sensual detail and riveting characterization that mark Glass’s previous work, I See You Everywhere is a piercingly candid story of life and death, companionship and sorrow, and the nature of sisterhood itself.


From the Hardcover edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (80)

I didn't hate it; I also didn't love it
I liked this book of two sisters who do not get along because of their totally different lifestyles, until the death of one of them. Their mother is a hound-breeding matriarch and probably the strongest character in the story, sometimes not in a good way. I liked the female relationships which were richly layered. However I thought the male characters were one dimensional and pushed to the background. The male characters had the potential of becoming very interesting but the author decided not to do this for some unknown reason. If you read this book pay close attention to the information in the copyright. It explains that the book was written and published in several different magazines as short stories. It is vaguely obvious the chapters that were written as fillers to string this story together, not that there is anything wrong with that. I just find it interesting.

Joined Yet Never Touching
This is the story of Louisa and Clement Jardine, two sisters born four years apart. It's told from their alternating points of view and the story spans two and a half decades. Louisa is the oldest and we see her as a diligent student, a calm and cautious person, a planner who yearns for a happy marriage and a career as an artist. She is a Harvard graduate. Clem, on the other hand, is the proverbial wild child. She is the charismatic favorite child, she is restless, she has a wandering spirit and she likes good looking men and they like her back.

Growing up the girls seemed to compete for everything, including boys. They were raised by a mother who seemed more interested in the dogs she was raising and a father who seemed as intimidated by their mother as were her dogs.

Louisa follows a man to California, gets dumped by him and eventually winds up in New York as an arts editor for a magazine. She suffers through breast cancer, two marriages and an affair while Clem goes through some good looking, hunky guys before she winds up in the Rocky Mountains as an animal biologist.

The sisters seem closer when they are apart and just as I was wondering just where Ms. Glass was going with this, tragedy strikes and all of a sudden I knew exactly just what this book was all about. I might have given up had it not been for the gorgeous prose and the fact that Ms. Glass really made me fall in love with both of these girls. She did that to me with THREE JUNES as well. I loved just about that whole family.

In short, this is a very good book about two sisters who as are bonded as Ms. Glass describes, "like a double helix, two souls coiling around a common axis, joined yet never touching. Sisters everywhere will love this book. And even if you don't have a sister, I'm betting you'll love it too.

Somewhat boring!
I am definitely NOT the right kind of audience for this book and as I was not drawn to it; I gave to my wife to read and she did not enjoy it much either, even though she says she found some similarities between her relationship with her sister to the way the sisters in the book get along and the complications of their relationships. But it was not enough to keep her reading to the end. She enjoyed the descriptive nature of the way Julia Glass writes but could not get into the tragic of the book. Make sure you read a little in a preview from amazon's "Click to look inside" and if it catches you then go ahead and buy it. Good luck and good reading!

sister saga
Louisa and Clem (short for Clement) are sisters who are just too different to be really close. Louisa is an art critic, and Clem is a wildlife conservationist. We follow their adult lives for 25 years via alternating narrators to get a sense of who they are. Clem is more vivacious and attractive than her older sister, and her adventures have led to accidents on at least three occasions where her parents have had to bear the trauma of notifications by the police. Ultimately, a life-changing event occurs in each sister's life. For Louisa, it is breast cancer, which renders her unable to bear children. For Clem, it is the discovery that a grizzly cub has a heart defect. There are two schools of thought among Clem's colleagues. One faction believes that we should let nature run its course. After all, even if cardiac surgery is successful, the bear will pass the defect on to his progeny. Clem, on the other hand, can't bear to see the cub fall farther and farther behind in his development until he attracts the attention of some other predator. The outcome of this dilemma is just as devastating to Clem as cancer is to Louisa. I can't really put my finger on why I enjoyed this book so much, but I had pretty much the same reaction to Three Junes. Certainly, the writing is sublime, but also the arrival and departure of myriad friends and lovers--no two alike--and the mortifying quips tossed out by the sisters' domineering mother keep things rolling. The gimmick Glass uses here is quite effective as well. The book consists of seemingly incomplete snippets, separated in time by months or years, whose outcomes are revealed later in an indirect fashion, as though we already knew what had happened during the gaps. It's sort of like watching a soap opera where you've missed a few episodes that become less and less critical.

Definitely not one of her better books.
It is written in a really strange way, back and forth between the sisters but moving around really doesn't add any insight. The storyline is very superficial and just not that interesting.I was very disappointed. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (177)

this book is so good good.
I was walking in the store when I passed this book covere halted, and turned around to reach down and pick it up. I must admit i am not a reader. The cover caught my eye. I proceeded to read the little snap shot passage on the cover reading what if the face of a missing child was your sons..Immediately I walked to register and bought it. I am a mom of a three year old. I started reading and right away I was stuck took me only two days to fully read the book cause i couldn't put it down. I even caught myself snapping at my boyfriend cause he was trying to have a conversation with me when I was reading.
I loved this book. it was something I didn't expect I loved the story line and plot. I Loved the events and how they happen, it kept you wanting more and reading on. I have bought online several more books from this author cant wait to start in and read away.

What did they do with the real Lisa Scottoline?
I have read several of Ms. Scottoline's novels and enjoyed them immensely.There is no way 'Look Again' could have been written by the same author.Either someone is holding Lisa against her will and publishing under her name or she's had a lobotomy and will never again write a suspenseful, believable novel. This was a very dull, slow-paced, tedious book. I couldn't finish it, it was that bad. Where, oh where, has Lisa Scottoline gone?

Flawed, predictable, but I loved it!
I don't often write reviews, but this poor novel has such a wide variety of them that I was compelled to toss my two cents into the ring.Yes, the book is predictable.Very few truly are not.Yes, it probably could have been cut by a number of pages and still accomplish the same storyline.However, I could not put this book down.Perhaps it was the mother in me; perhaps I just am in my it's-getting-to-be-fall-and-I'm-gonna-sit-and-read cycle, but I stayed up an hour past my bedtime to finish this.Lisa Scottoline may be no literary genius, but she holds her own in terms of character development and storytelling.I enjoyed 'Look Again,' and will continue to look forward to new titles by Ms. Scottoline.

super fast read
Loved this book.Thought the topic might be difficult, but the narrative is so engaging I couldn't put it down!

should have been a short story
The characters were lacking to the point that I felt no sympathy for anyone.So poorly edited or written that you could literally have read every fifth page and not missed one plot point.
Would never have finished it if had not been my book club's next pick.Not sure why it is rated so high. ... Read more

Product Description
"Michael and Anna, best friends and next-door neighbors from childhood, unexpectedly meet again. As they relive their childhood games, their deepest sworn secrets, the mysteries of the world and their single-minded passion for each other rise up in the present." ... Read more

Product Description
The exhilarating new Dr. Kay Scarpetta novel from America's number-one-bestselling crime writer.

Abridged CDs - 5 CDs, 6 hours ... Read more

Customer Reviews (414)

Just as bad as 'Blow Fly' and 'Trace'
I was hoping that once Patricia Cornwell got past the whole Werewolf storyline, she would regroup and get the Scarpetta series back on track, but sadly it's not to be. Like 'Blow Fly' and 'Trace' before it, 'Predator' is a confusing and badly-written mess of a novel, in which the characters do nothing but angst and the plot jumps all over the place. I really don't know what is going on with Cornwell these days; having "rebooted" Scarpetta with `The Last Precinct', she seems to have had no idea what to do next. The series is just drifting along aimlessly, with increasingly overblown storylines and one-dimensional characters.

It's a pity, because the basic plot outline of `Predator', involving multiple cases that may or may not be connected, has worked well for Cornwell before. And a better, or more interested, writer would probably have been able to pull this together really well. But as with Cornwell's last few books,the storyline is needlessly convoluted and the pacing of the book is terrible. The third-person narration is a major problem for Cornwell; she introduces too many different perspectives and sub-plots, and jumps around between them too frequently. In addition, she spends far too much time exploring how psychologically messed-up all the characters are and not enough time on the actual investigation.

So once again, this is a long book in which not much actually happens. Cornwell seems content to just let the story wander around without direction, before jamming the ending into the last twenty pages in very forced and unconvincing fashion. Think about it, that conclusion had the potential to be a really clever twist, an unexpected but plausible way to tie all the story threads together and explain some of the baffling connections between the different cases. But the way in whichCornwell breathlessly shoves it all together make it seem like nothing more than a cheap cop-out.......("oh by the way, this explains everything. The End").

And what is going on with the characters? Where they once had enough flaws and bad habits to make them seem human, they now spend literally all their time being petty, snarky, jealous, and secretive. Marino hates Scarpetta. Scarpetta hates Benton. Lucy hates herself. Everyone else either worships Scarpetta or is determined to do her in. It seems nobody can even hold a civil conversation with each other anymore, and you wonder why they all can't get together over one of Kay's delicious Italian meals and sort their issues out. Again, I think the third-person narration is part of the problem here. With Kay narrating, we experienced all her emotions and thoughts, and formed detailed impressions of other characters through her eyes. Writing in the third-person and present tense, Cornwell's style is dry and wooden ("Marino is angry....Scarpetta feels annoyed.....Benton sounds tired"), making the characters feel flat and colourless.

So unfortunately `Predator' is no improvement over `Blow Fly' and `Trace', and in fact it repeats all the negatives of those two books. Bad writing, roundabout story, unlikeable characters, a rushed ending that leaves plot points hanging. That plot device at the end WAS quite clever...if only Cornwell had written a proper story and characters to go with it.

Is this the Patricia Cornwell who wrote 'PostMortem'?!!!! Awful!
Wow. I *was* a huge fan of Patricia Cornwell. I had read Postmortem, The Body Farm, etc and found her novels gripping, fascinating, even educational, though a bit gruesome at times. As time went on I stopped reading the Scarpetta series, though I always enjoyed it. I picked this book up for free and boy am I glad I didn't pay for it. UGH!

I knew something was wrong when I was BORED reading the first few chapters. Cornwell has been known for writing true page-turners--the type of book you pick up and you just cannot put down, they are so gripping and fascinating.

Not so with this novel. I had to FORCE myself to keep reading. Basil and Scarpetta are the only interesting characters. Lucy comes across as self-indulgent and selfish. Marino has lost all his rough-edged charm.

I knew something was wrong when I started to read the end of the novel and there was only one or two very short chapters to wrap up the entire 'mystery.' Suffice to say it was completely implausible and left the reader disappointed. There was not enough fleshing out of the 'answer' to the mystery. There was very little suspense, as when Scarpetta is often in danger in past novels.

The end was deliberately left unraveled to continue the series...though I find that a shame, as this book went out with a whimper, and not a bang.

patricia cornwell book
I was very pleased with the condition of the book I ordered. It was delivered quickly and I am a content customer :)

As always - very, very good.
I have all of the Kay Scarpetta books in audio format, and had to get caught up with some.Now I'm waiting for the newest one (which comes out this year, I see) and I'll be totally up to date.

Worst Book I ever heard-Part 11
How I managed to listen to 5 discs of this trash I will never know.Actually it is because I had nothing else.This is my second Cornwell book.I somehow managed to get through At Risk.Both are awful.No more Cornewll for me. ... Read more