Mailbox Monday (Nov 14, 2011)

 Mailbox Monday will be hosted in November at the Mailbox Monday blog.  In My Mailbox is hosted Sundays at The Story Siren. Please visit these posts and take a look at what packages everybody else got this week! 

Wayward Saints

by Suzzy Roche

Mary Saint, the rule-breaking former lead singer of the almost-famous band Sliced Ham, has given up on music after the death of her band member and lover Garbagio seven years earlier.  With the help of her best friend, Thaddeus, Mary is trying to make mochaccinos in San Francisco.  Meanwhile, back in her hometown of Swallow, New York, her mother Jean Saint, struggles with her own ghosts.

When Mary is invited to give a concert at her old high school, Jean is thrilled, though she's worried about what Father Benedict and her neighbors will think of songs such as "Sewer Flower" and "You're a Pig."  But she soon realizes there are going to be bigger problems when her arch-nemesis, Adele from the Silver Tray Bakery, gets involved.

Wayward Siants is a touching, emotionally complex, and hilarious look at how the past always bumps up against the present.  Punctuated by winks at the music business and loving flourishes about family, faith, and the unpredictability of talent, the novel touches on the very deep pain of loss, and the possibilities of the miraculous.



If You Hear Her

by Shiloh Walker

The scream Lena Riddle hears in the woods behind her house is enough to curdle her blood -- she has no doubt that a woman is in real danger.   Unfortunately, with no physical evidence, the local law officers in small-town Ash, Kentucky, dismiss her claim.  But Lena knows what she heard -- and it leaves her filled with fear and frustration.

Ezra King is on leave from the state police, but he can't escape the guilty memories that haunt his dreams.  When he sees Lena, he is immediately drawn to her.  He aches to touch her -- to be touched by her -- but is he too burdened by his tragic past to get close?  When Ezra hears her story of an unknown woman's screams, his instincts tell him that Lena's life is also at risk -- and his desire to protect her is as fierce as his need to possess her.



Full Dark, No Stars

by Stephen King

"I believe there is another man inside every man, a stranger . . ." writes Wilfred Leland James in the early pages of the riveting confession that makes up "1922," the first in this pitch-black quartet of mesmerizing tales from Stephen King. For James, that stranger is awakened when his wife, Arlette, proposes selling off the family homestead and moving to Omaha, setting in motion a gruesome train of murder and madness.

In "Big Driver," a cozy-mystery writer named Tess encounters the stranger along a back road in Massachusetts when she takes a shortcut home after a book-club engagement. Violated and left for dead, Tess plots a revenge that will bring her face-to-face with another stranger: the one inside herself.

"Fair Extension," the shortest of these tales, is perhaps the nastiest and certainly the funniest. Making a deal with the devil not only saves Dave Streeter from a fatal cancer but provides rich recompense for a lifetime of resentment.

When her husband of more than twenty years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.

Like Different Seasons and Four Past Midnight, which generated such enduring films as The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, Full Dark, No Stars proves Stephen King a master of the long story form.



Where all the Dead Lie

by J.T. Ellison

The shot to the head didn't kill Nashville homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson.  But it will crack her psyche and take her to the very edge.

In her showdown with the murderous Pretender, a bullet taken at close range severed the connection between Taylor's thoughts and speech.  Effectively mute, there's no telling if her voice will ever come back.  Trapped in silence, she is surrounded by ghosts -- of the past, of friendships and trusts lost. . . of a lost faith in herself and her motives that night.

When Memphis Highsmythe offers Taylor his home in the Scottish Highlands to recuperate, her fiance can't refuse her excitement, no matter his distrust of the man.  At first, Memphis's drafty and singularly romantic castle seems the perfect place for healing.  But shortly the house itself surrounds her like a menacing presence.  As Taylor's sense of isolation and vulnerability grows, so too, does her grip on reality.

PSTD. PILLS. GHOSTS. GRUDGES.

Someone or something is coming after Taylor.  But is she being haunted by the dead. . . or hunted by the living?

What books came home to you this week?