Waiting on Wednesday: 77 Shadow Street

This week's pre-publication can't wait to read selection is:

77 Shadow Street

by Dean Koontz
Publication Date: Dec 27, 2011

I am the One, the all and the only. I live in the Pendleton as surely as I live everywhere. I am the Pendleton's history and its destiny. The building is my place of conception, my monument, my killing ground. . . .

The Pendleton stands on the summit of Shadow Hill at the highest point of an old heartland city, a Gilded Age palace built in the late 1800s as a tycoon’s dream home. Almost from the beginning, its grandeur has been scarred by episodes of madness, suicide, mass murder, and whispers of things far worse. But since its rechristening in the 1970s as a luxury apartment building, the Pendleton has been at peace. For its fortunate residents—among them a successful songwriter and her young son, a disgraced ex-senator, a widowed attorney, and a driven money manager—the Pendleton’s magnificent quarters are a sanctuary, its dark past all but forgotten.

But now inexplicable shadows caper across walls, security cameras relay impossible images, phantom voices mutter in strange tongues, not-quite-human figures lurk in the basement, elevators plunge into unknown depths. With each passing hour, a terrifying certainty grows: Whatever drove the Pendleton’s past occupants to their unspeakable fates is at work again. Soon, all those within its boundaries will be engulfed by a dark tide from which few have escaped.

Dean Koontz transcends all expectations as he takes readers on a gripping journey to a place where nightmare visions become real—and where a group of singular individuals hold the key to humanity’s destiny. Welcome to 77 Shadow Street.

Waiting on Wednesday is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.

What are you waiting for?

Waiting on Wednesday: Frankenstein: Lost Souls

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Frankenstein: lost souls

by Dean Koontz

Publication Date: June 15, 2010

#1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz brings his fertile imagination and unparalleled storytelling abilities to one of the most timeless—and terrifying—creations in all of fiction: the legend of Frankenstein.

In Lost Souls, Koontz puts a singular twist on this classic tale of ambition and science gone wrong, and forges a new legend uniquely suited to our times—a story of revenge, redemption, and the razor thin line that separates humanity from inhumanity as we consider a new invitation to apocalypse.

The work of creation has begun again. Only now things will be different. Victor Leben, once Frankenstein, has not only seen the future—he’s ready to populate it. Using stem cells, “organic” silicon circuitry, and nanotechnology, he will engender a race of superhumans—the perfect melding of flesh and machine. With a powerful, enigmatic backer eager to see his dream come to fruition and a secret location where the enemies of progress can’t find him, Victor is certain that this time nothing and no one can stop him.

It is up to five people to prove him wrong. In their hands rests nothing less than the survival of humanity itself. They are drawn together in different ways, by omens sinister and wondrous, to the same shattering conclusion: Two years after they saw him die, the man they knew as Victor Helios lives on. Detectives Carson O’Connor and Michael Maddison, Victor’s engineered wife, Erika 5 and her companion Jocko, and the original Victor’s first creation, the tormented Deucalion, have all arrived at a small Montana town where their old alliance will be renewed, as well astested, by forces from within and without, and where the dangers they face will eclipse any they have yet encountered. Yet in the midst of their peril, love will blossom, and joy, and they will discover sources of strength and perseverance they have not imagined.

They will need all these resources, and more. For a monumental battle is about to commence that will require all their ingenuity and courage, as it defines what we are to be . . . and if we are to be at all. (synopsis from Barnes and Noble)

Waiting on Wednesdays is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine.

What are you waiting for?

Frankenstein: lost souls

Publisher/Publication Date: Random House, June 15, 2010

ISBN: 9780553808018

368 pages


 

 

Tome Travelers - Garage Sale Day!

If you have been following me for any length of time, then you know that I love to go to garage sales - mainly for the books! I was able to pick up 5 books today.

Title: Bad Cat: Not-so-pretty kitties and cats gone bad
Author: Jim Edgar

It's the dark side that most cat owners never see. The side that wouldn't be caught dead purring. Here, captured in all their infamy, are hundreds of trouble-makers, delinquents, and dementos.

They're bad cats, with bad intentions, bad habits, and bad attitude. So the next time your sweet little ball of fur misses the litterbox, ask yourself -- was it really an accident?




Title: No Second Chance
Author: Harlan Coben

When the first bullet hit my chest, I thought of my daughter. . .

Shot twice by an unseen assailant, Dr. Marc Seidman lies in a hospital bed. His wife has been killed. His six-month-old daughter has vanished. But when the ransom note arrives, it gives Mark one chance to bring her home alive. Then something goes wrong, and Marc spirals into a world of shock and surprise, of hope and yearning, where nothing is as it seems. . .




Title: Third Degree
Author: Greg Iles

Sometimes the gravest dangers -- and the darkest souls -- live right beside us. . .

In the span of twenty-four hours, everything Laurel Shields believes about her life and her marriage to a prominent doctor will be shattered -- if she survives a terrifying ordeal. The day begins with the jarring discovery that, soon after ending an affair, Laurel is pregnant. But when she returns home to find her husband ashen, unkempt, and on the brink of violence, a nightmare quickly unfolds. In the heart of an idyllic Mississippi town, behind the walls of her perfect house, Laurel finds herself locked in a volatile standoff with a husband she barely recognizes. Confronted with evidence of her betrayal, she must tread a deadly path between truth and deception while a ring of armed police prepares a dangerous rescue. But Laurel's greatest fear -- and her only hope -- lies with her former lover, a brave man whom fate has granted the power to save both Laurel and her children -- if she can protect his identity long enough.


Title: Right as Rain
Author: George P. Pelecanos

Derek Strange is black and successful. Terry Quinn is white and barely holding on. Now Strange has been hired to investigate a police shooting in which Quinn played a major role. For Strange, a savvy and careful man, the investigation goes against his style and instinct. For Terry Quinn, Strange's questions are a chance to absolve his conscience and shake out a little truth. But in a city that lives in the shadow of a nation's dream, neither man can foresee the dirty little war that will break out around them . . . or how deadly being right can be.




Title: By the Light of the Moon
Author: Dean Koontz

Dylan O'Conner is a gifted young artist just trying to do the right thing in life. He's on his way to an arts festival in Santa Fe when he stops to get a room for himself and his twenty-year-old autistic brother, Shep. But in a nightmarish instant, Dylan is attacked by a mysterious "doctor," injected with a strange substance, and told that he is now a carrier of something that will either kill him. . .or transform his life in the most remarkable way. Then he is told that he must flee -- before the doctor's enemies hunt him down for the secret circulating through his body.

No one can help him, the doctor says, not even the police.

Stunned, disbelieving, Dylan is turned loose to run for his life. . . and straight into an adventure that will turn the next twenty-four hours into an odyssey of terror, mystery -- and wondrous discovery.

It is a journey that begins when Dylan and Shep's path intersects with that of Jillian Jackson. Before that evening Jilly was a beautiful comedian whose biggest worry was whether she would ever find a decent man. Now she too is a carrier. And even as Dylan tries to convince her that they'll be safer sticking together, cold-eyed men in a threatening pack of black Suburbans approach, only seconds before Jilly's classic Coupe DeVille explodes into thin air.

Now the three are on the run together, but with no idea whom they're running from -- or why. Meanwhile Shep has begun exhibiting increasingly disturbing behaviour. And whatever it is that's coursing through their bodies seems to have plunged them into one waking nightmare after another. Seized by sinister premonitions, they find themselves inexplicably drawn to crime scenes -- just minutes before the crimes take place.

What this unfathomable power is, how they can use it to stop the evil erupting all around them, and why they have been chosen are only parts of a puzzle that reaches back into the tragic past and the dark secrets they all share: secrets of madness, pain, and untimely death. Perhaps the answer lies in the eerie, enigmatic messages that Shep, with precious time running out, begins to repeat, about a man who does his work "by the light of the moon."

(all book descriptions were taken from back covers or book jackets)