6 results for "Children"

The hunt

Kellerman, Faye
"Peter and his partner, Detective Tyler McAdams, are thrown into an unsolved case and propelled into action when a body is found in Upstate New York, in the very woods where a man previously went missing ... But that's not the only crisis that Peter has to deal with. Teresa McLaughlin, the biological mother of Peter and Rina's foster son, Gabe, has fled to Los Angeles with her two other children in tow, hoping to avoid a court injunction amid a messy divorce. But L.A. is no escape from her problems--she is found by ruthless men and beaten mercilessly. When Terry wakes, barely conscious, she discovers that both of her children are gone and frantically calls Gabe for help. Unable to assist his mother immediately, Gabe enlists the help of Peter and Rina and contacts his biological father, the notorious Christopher Donatti, a former hit man from a known crime family who's now a multi-millionaire in Nevada. By bringing Donatti into the fray, Gabe, Peter, and Rina know they have made a deal with the devil--but with Terry on the verge of death, they have no choice. As these unlikely allies rally to find the kidnappers of Terry's children before things end tragically, they race headlong toward an explosive confrontation from which no one will emerge unscathed..."--Dust jacket flap.
William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 2022 483 pages

Perfect murder, perfect town

Schiller, Lawrence
In Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, Lawrence Schiller thoroughly recreates every aspect of the complex case of the death of JonBenét Ramsey. A brilliant portrait of an inscrutable family thrust under the spotlight of public suspicion and an affluent, tranquil city torn apart by a crime it couldn't handle, Perfect Murder, Perfect Town uncovers the mysteries that have bewildered the nation. Why were the Ramseys, the targets of the investigation, able to control the direction of the police inquiry? Can the key to the murder be found in the pen and writing pad used for the ransom note? Was it possible for an intruder to have killed JonBenét?
HarperCollins 2000 768 pages

The quiet boy

Winters, Ben H.
"In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room. In 2019, Shenk - still in practice but a shell of his former self - is hired to defend Wesley Keener's father when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk's adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness. Two thrilling trials braid together, medical malpractice and murder, jostling us back and forth in time. The Quiet Boy is a book full of mysteries, not only about the death of a brilliant scientist, not only about the outcome of the medical malpractice suit, but about the relationship between children and their parents, between the past and the present, between truth and lies. At the center of it all is Wesley Keener, endlessly walking, staring empty-eyed, in whose quiet, hollow body may lie the fate of humankind."--Publisher.
Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company 2021-05 438 pages

Ghost hunters

Blum, Deborah
In Victorian Britain, a group of eminent scientists got together to found a society expressly to prove the existence of ghosts. The age of Darwin represented the greatest scientific advances known to man. The tension between science and religion was exposed by Darwin's On the Origin of the Species in 1859, which challenged the basic tenets of belief. Yet many of those in the forefront of the scientific revolution could not give up the idea of a higher reality. Life after death was the unknown frontier. Victorian society was full of mediums claiming they could communicate with the spirits of the dead. Baffling psychic phenomena occurred every day at seances- mysterious rappings were heard, furniture moved, ghostly forms appeared, the mediums spoke in the altered voices of the dead with information only their nearest could possibly know. Pyschometry involving locks of hair and watches and children's toys; telepathy; ouija boards; apparitions; astral projection- all were commonplace. In 1882 the Society of Psychical Research was founded in London to investigate all these phenomena- it was a group led by some of the greatest scientists of the age but its membership also included Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf's father, John Ruskin, the Reverend Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). Six months later William James, Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and the brother of Henry James visited London and went on to set up American branch. Their experiments went on for years. Many mediums, like the notorious Madame Blavatsky, were exposed as charlatans yet there were some mediums who continued to communicate directly with another world, who despite every rigorous scientific test seemed to prove that souls survived death. This is the story of this group of forward thinkers- many of whom were driven to the spirit world by personal tragedy, some whose feeling of loss lead to their own suicides. It is the story of the greatest ghost hunt of any age.
Arrow 2007 370 pages

The unloved

Levy, Deborah
When a group of hedonistic West European tourists gather to celebrate Christmas in a remote French chateau, an English woman is murdered. Tatiana, 'the unloved child', declares she knows who did it. The subsequent inquiry into the death proves to be more of an investigation into the nature of love, insatiable rage and sadistic desire, framed within an unfolding narrative of colonial violence which will change the tourists' version of history for ever. The Unloved is a pivotal novel in Levy's career, first published in 1994 and reissued now for a new generation of readers.
Bloomsbury 2015 199 pages