Grim Reaper

Charlie Asher is a pretty normal guy with a normal life, married to a bright and pretty woman who actually loves him for his normalcy. They're even about to have their first child. Yes, Charlie's doing okay-until people start dropping dead around him, and everywhere he goes a dark presence whispers to him from under the streets. Charlie Asher, it seems, has been recruited for a new position: as Death. It's a dirty job. But, hey! Somebody's gotta do it.

In San Francisco, the souls of the dead are mysteriously disappearing-and you know that can't be good-in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore's delightfully funny sequel to A Dirty Job. Something really strange is happening in the City by the Bay. People are dying, but their souls are not being collected. Someone-or something-is stealing them and no one knows where they are going, or why, but it has something to do with that big orange bridge. Death Merchant Charlie Asher is just as flummoxed as everyone else. He's trapped in the body of a fourteen-inch-tall "meat puppet" waiting for his Buddhist nun girlfriend, Audrey, to find him a suitable new body to play host. To get to the bottom of this abomination, a motley crew of heroes will band together: the seven-foot-tall death merchant Minty Fresh; retired policeman turned bookseller Alphonse Rivera; the Emperor of San Francisco and his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus; and Lily, the former Goth girl. Now if only they can get little Sophie to stop babbling about the coming battle for the very soul of humankind . . .

ALA Book Club October Pick, 2018 Casey Maldonado is haunted by the deaths of her husband and young son. She hopes traveling through the vast reaches of Idaho will offer peace. Instead, she fights off three drunken locals before escaping to a quiet town where she wants to heal from her injuries and constant sorrow. Her traveling companion, invisible to all but Casey, is Death, wearing a series of disguises and offering expert commentary on her difficulties. Unfortunately, the village of Armstrong carries its own darkness. Casey finds a job and a comfortable guest room with the proprietor of the small general store, Vern and his ill wife, Dottie. Death keeps a close watch on Casey. She's surrounded by trouble. She captures a teen spray-painting nasty graffiti on the store's wall. The town shuns Dottie and blames Vern for jilting his fiancée to marry an outsider-forty-five years ago. The woman's still stalking Vern today. Casey finds a hateful letter accusing Dottie of tragedy based on a Halloween party, a fatality, and a woman missing for forty-five years. Residents ignore the couple at a free outdoor movie they sponsor. Casey stops another attempt to spray-paint graffiti on the store. Danger and cruelty range free beneath the calm surface of the town. When Dottie dies in the hospital, brutality overrides grief. A resident notifies the three attackers, who arrive to finish what they started with Casey. Finally, the painful truth explodes in violence based on revenge.

"Readers who enjoy British procedurals will find this multidimensional, multigenerational case very satisfying." -Booklist The magnificent Dungeon House and gardens overlook Cumbria's remote western coast with its mix of beaches, dunes, and fells, Roman ruins, and nuclear plant. Twenty years ago, the wealthy Whiteleys called it home. But not a happy one. Malcolm Whiteley had begun to disintegrate under financial and emotional pressures. He suspected various men in their social circle of being his wife's lover. After a disastrous party for the neighbours, Lysette told Malcolm their marriage was over. Sadly an old Winchester rifle he had been hiding was at hand… Fast forward to today. Hannah Scarlett's cold case team is looking into the three-year-old disappearance of Lily Elstone whose father Gray had been Malcolm's accountant. The investigation coincides with yet another disappearance of a teenage girl: Shona Whiteley, daughter of Malcolm's nephew Nigel, who now lives in the Dungeon House despite its tragic history. As Hannah's team digs down into the past, doubts arise about what really happened the night Malcolm killed his wife and 16-year-old daughter Amber, then himself. Most of the people once close to the Whiteleys still live nearby. And one Joanna Footit, and her secrets, now returns from London. While Hannah leads the complex police inquiries, it is her lover, historian Daniel Kind, who supplies Hannah with the lead that unlocks the whole. Does it come too late?

Arizona, 1940. Deputy U.S. Marshall and Spanish Civil War veteran J.D. Fitzpatrick arrives in Tucson, a shell-shock case. His job should be a low pressure, but the insensitive local BIA agent provokes a gunfight over registering the Papagos men for the draft. Fitzpatrick is sent to the reservation to arrest the ringleader, Jujul, and his band of renegades, but they have disappeared into the desert. Why should they serve in the military of a country that refuses to recognize their citizenship? Meanwhile, a Japanese military police corps agent is sent to America to stir up discontent among the tribes and encourage the Papago rebellion in order to buy more preparation time for Japan's Pacific campaign. All these forces, including ghosts from J.D.'s stint in Spain, collide along the Gulf of California, in this unexpected mystery.

2011 - Mississippi Author Award Winner "Evans has written a fascinating tale linking the history of New Orleans' levee system to the present and weaving into the story aspects of the city's widely diverse cultures." -Booklist STARRED review Centuries of tragedy shadow New Orleans: wars, slavery, and a monumental flood that killed a thousand people and still threatens to wash all that history away. Faye Longchamp and her team of archaeologists, fighting to save New Orleans' past, are horrified when they discover a corpse that's far too new to be an archaeological find. The police presume it's just another dead body in the long, sad sequence of bodies left by Hurricane Katrina, until Faye shows them a truth that only an archaeologist could see: the debris piled on top of the dead woman is all wrong. Someone brought Shelly Broussard to this flooded-out house and left her dead body behind. Faye and her assistant Joe Wolf Mantooth are drawn into the investigation by a detective who believes their professional expertise is critical to the case. They quickly learn that trouble swirled around the victim like winds around the eye of a hurricane. Is Shelly's heroic rescue work in the aftermath of Katrina the reason for her death? Or does the sheaf of photos in her work files hold the answer? Will Faye and Joe be the next victims engulfed in this deadly deception?

Scotland Yard is hunting the worst kind of serial killer-one with a sense of humor. When children's book author Oliver Swithin, reluctant creator of the notorious "Finsbury the Ferret," finds an old friend's body floating in a Trafalgar Square fountain, he can't convince the police to treat the death as a murder. But then more corpses turn up daily-on a tube station platform, in a botanical gardens hothouse, even in the middle of Piccadilly Circus-each murdered in an increasingly bizarre manner. It seems that a serial killer is at play, using London's landscape as his game board. Oliver joins his uncle, Detective Superintendent Tim Mallard, in a race to uncover the pattern behind the growing number of deaths. But even if they solve the murderer's puzzle, will it help them identify the next victim before the killer strikes again? And will Oliver ever reveal his secret passion for Mallard's assistant, the forbidding Detective Sergeant Effie Strongitharm? And what does any of this have to do with a battery-operated ferret, the works of Lewis Carroll, the great London Scorpion Scare, the episode of the nude Macbeth, and Underwood Tooth, the world's leading expert on being ignored?