The Geographer's Library / Jon Fasman
When junior reporter Paul Tomm is given the job of writing the obituary for an elderly professor who taught at the University he had attended, he struggles to dig up any concrete facts about the man's life. Soon he suspects that Professor Jaan Puhapaev's death - and life - were far from usual.
As he discovers more about the increasingly mysterious professor's past, Paul is drawn deeper into a world of uncertainties. A library of rare alchemical works poses more questions that it answers. A bar run by a sinister Albanian seems to be the front for far darker operations, and Hannah - Jaan's alluring neighbour - is as enigmatic as she is seductive.
Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, a second storyline begins some nine-hundred years previously with the life a famed Arab geographer, al-Idrisi, an alchemist whose collection of powerful objects was stolen and then dispersed around the world.
Each subsequent chapter picks up the story of one of these objects in the intervening years, and shows how it has been tracked down and acquired. Gradually it becomes apparent that the objects are being reunited by some unseen hand.
Can fifteen arcane objects really be the key to the puzzle? And will they lead to the truth not only about a host of unexplained deaths, but also the secret of life itself?
Entwining Paul's chilling present day investigation with the story of a brooding and dark cabal whose influence stretches across four continents back to the time of Abraham, The Geographer's Library is a compelling novel of modern suspense, ancient mystery and forbidden alchemy.
Betrayal / John Lescroart
When District Attorney Dismas Hardy agrees to clean up the caseload of recently disappeared attorney Charlie Bowen, he thinks it will be easy. But one of the cases is far from small-time - the appeal of an apparently straight forward murder case.
National Guard reservist Evan Scholler and ex-Navy SEAL and private contractor Ron Nolan meet in Iraq when Scholler's platoon is assigned to work as convoy guards for Allstrong Security, an American Contracting Company based at Baghdad International Airport. Nolan is Allstrong's chief trouble-shooter, and he involves Scholler in a range of nasty activities that are both illegal and dangerous.
In spite of this, Scholler and Nolan strike up a friendship, and Nolan offers to personally deliver a letter to Evan's former girlfriend, when he is back in the States on business - an apparently innocent offer that leads to a fatal conflict, especially when complicated by a deadly incident in which Nolan's apparent mistake results in the death of an innocent Iraqi family as well as seven men in Evan's own platoon.
As the murky relationship between the US government and its private contractors plays out in the personal dramas of these two men, Dismas Hardy, and his old friend Detective Abe Glitsky, begin to uncover a terrible and perilous truth that takes them far beyond the case and into the realm of assassination and treason.
From the treacherous streets of Iraq to the courtrooms of California, Betrayal is complicated yet fast-moving tale, full of believable characters and with a tense and complex finale.
Burning Books & Leveling Libraries : extremist violence and cultural destruction / Rebecca Knuth
Whether the product of passion or of a cool-headed decision to use ideas to rationalize excess, the decimation of the world's libraries occurred throughout the 20th century, and there is no end in sight. As well as authoritarian governments, extremists of all types--through terrorism, war, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other forms of mass violence--are also responsible for widespread cultural destruction, as Knuth demonstrates in this book.
Burning Books and Leveling Libraries is structured in three parts. Part I is devoted to struggles by extremists over voice and power at the local level, where destruction of books and libraries is employed as a tactic of political or ethnic protest. Part II discusses the aftermath of power struggles in Germany, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, where the winners were utopians who purged libraries in efforts to purify their societies and maintain power. Part III examines the fate of libraries when there is war and a resulting power vacuum.
The book concludes with a discussion of the events in Iraq in 2003, and the responsibility of American war strategists for the widespread pillaging that ensued after the toppling of Saddam Hussein. This case poignantly demonstrates the ease with which an oppressed people, given the collapse of civil restraints, may claim freedom as license for anarchy, construing it as the right to prevail, while ignoring its implicit mandate of social responsibility. Knuth examines the relative role of power and how biblioclasm is used as a means to gain attention, force beliefs, or hegemonize societies. This book presents a sobering assessment of how easily priceless cultural resources can be destroyed.
Emily Rodda / The Key to Rondo (Junior fiction)
The old music box has been carefully handed down through Leo's family. Painted scenes of villages, mysterious forests, a castle on a hill, and a queen in a long blue gown decorate its sides, and an astounding secret is hidden beneath its gleaming black lid. But the box comes with rules - "Turn the key three times only; Never turn the key while the music is playing; Never pick up the box while the music is playing; Never close the lid until the music has stopped."
Now it is Leo's music box, and although he respects the rules, his least favourite cousin Mimi Langlander does not. When she comes to stay, and discovers that Leo has inherited the box, the first thing she tries is to wind it four times so that the music tune will play all the way through. Leo is appalled, fearing the Mimi has broken the music box forever, but then he sees some small blue butterflies hovering in the air above the box. When he looks again, they have disappeared and then Leo realises where he has seen them before - painted on the music box.
If this is what happens when the key is turned more than three times, what else will happen? Leo winds the box again and his ordered life is changed forever, when he and Mimi are pulled into the magical world inside the music box.
An enchanting novel of magic and mystery from Emily Rodda, acclaimed author of the Deltora Quest and Rowan novels.
