Today's (2/8/2010) New Book Releases on Mystery & Thrillers

It is January 1961 and Margaret Spencer and Nat Southby are relaxing on a ski holiday when their vacation takes a bone-chilling turn. While cross-country skiing the couple comes across the frozen body of Maurice Dubois, a man who went missing from a fishing resort the month before. When Maurices wife is also found murdered, the two Vancouver detectives are hired by the victims children to investigate. An energetic hunt begins, as Maggie and Nat find themselves involved in clandestine visits to a clothing factory on East Hastings Street, encounters at horse-breeding stables in Langley, a car chase to Lulu Island and eventually a pilgrimage to the fishing resort at St. Clares Cove in Pender Harbour.

In Death As a Last Resort, the fourth book in the popular Margaret Spencer Mystery series, our favourite Vancouver female sleuth Maggie Spencer and her partner Nat Southby continue their escapades as they track down the unlawful and dangerous.

On June 9, 1865, while traveling by train to London with his secret mistress, 53-year-old Charles Dickens--at the height of his powers and popularity, the most famous and successful novelist in the world and perhaps in the history of the world--hurtled into a disaster that changed his life forever. Did Dickens begin living a dark double life after the accident? Were his nightly forays into the worst slums of London and his deepening obsession with corpses, crypts, murder, opium dens, the use of lime pits to dissolve bodies, and a hidden subterranean London mere research . . . or something more terrifying?
Just as he did in The Terror, Dan Simmons draws impeccably from history to create a gloriously engaging and terrifying narrative. Based on the historical details of Charles Dickens's life and narrated by Wilkie Collins (Dickens's friend, frequent collaborator, and Salieri-style secret rival), DROOD explores the still-unsolved mysteries of the famous author's last years and may provide the key to Dickens's final, unfinished work: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Chilling, haunting, and utterly original, DROOD is Dan Simmons at his powerful best.