Monday, August 2, 2010

Yeah, don't want to think about that


It's Mailbox Monday! Mailbox Monday gathers together for readers the books that came into the house last week. (feel free to share yours) Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

************************************************

I've gotten some ARCs (advanced reading copies) via http://www.netgalley.com/:


DARK ROAD TO DARJEELING by Deanna Raybourn -- I told you about that one

VALLEY OF DRY BONES by Priscilla Royal -- also told you about that one


but I also have


ROMAN GAMES by Bruce MacBain (October 2010)

Rome: September, 96 AD. When the body of Sextus Verpa, a notorious senatorial informer and libertine, is found stabbed to death in his bedroom, his slaves are suspected. Pliny is ordered by the emperor Domitian to investigate. However, the Ludi Romani, the Roman Games, have just begun and for the next fifteen days the law courts are in recess. If Pliny can't identify the murderer in that time, Verpa's entire slave household will be burned alive in the arena. Pliny, a very respectable young senator and lawyer, teams up with Martial, a starving author of bawdy verses and denizen of the Roman demimonde. Pooling their respective talents, they unravel a plot that involves Jewish and Christian 'atheists,' exotic Egyptian cultists, and a missing horoscope that forecasts the emperor's death. Their investigation leads them into the heart of the palace, where no one is safe from the paranoid emperor. As the deadline approaches, Pliny struggles with the painful dilemma of a good man who is forced to serve a brutal regime—a situation familiar in our own age as well. The novel provides an intimate glimpse into the palaces and tenements, bedrooms and brothels of imperial Rome's most opulent and decadent age.


PREY IN PATMOS by Jeffrey Siger (January 2011)

Saint John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation over 1900 years ago in a cave on Greece's eastern Aegean island of Patmos. When a revered monk from that holy island's thousand year-old monastery is murdered in Patmos' town square during Easter Week, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis of Greece's Twenty-First Century Special Crimes Division is called upon to find the killer before all hell breaks loose…in a manner of speaking.Andreas' impolitic search for answers brings him face-to-face with a scandal haunting the world's oldest surviving monastic community. On the pristine Aegean peninsula of Mount Athos, isolated from the rest of humanity, twenty monasteries sit protecting the secrets of Byzantium amid a way of life virtually unchanged for more than 1500 years. But today this sacred refuge harbors modern international intrigues that threaten to destroy the very heart of the Church…in a matter of days.


And a biography of JUSTICE BRENNAN by Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel

****************************************

I should be getting the Ellen Crosby and Sara Poole in a couple days from amazon.com.


I watched most of the first episode of Rubicon last night. This is a new series on AMC -- right before Mad Men -- and it is GOOD. Conspiracy theory stuff. Sort of A Beautiful Mind (without the schizoprenia) meets the best spy stories with a dash of paranoid X Files/Fringe thrown in. Intelligent and mysterious. Love it!!


Tonight I have Lie to Me and Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations. If I had time, I'd watch the second episode of Rubicon but maybe tomorrow evening for that. Steve has a board meeting tomorrow so that may work.


Busy at work. Having to be on the phones quite a bit because they're busier with the new federal extension. Bah.


Have a lovely Monday evening. Gotta go make dinner.


Much love,

PK the Bookeemonster

No comments: