Late one night, exploring ther father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters addressed ominously to 'My dear and unfortunate successor'. Her discovery plunges her into a world she never dreamed of - a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an evil hiden in the depths of history. Comments on this book: Some stories can be told again in endlessly different ways. Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian combines a search for the historical Dracula with a profound sense that Stoker got some things right--that the late Mediaeval tyrant kills among us yet, undead and dangerous. From Stoker, she also takes a sense that the supernatural seems more real when embedded in documentary evidence. Three generations search for Dracula's resting place, and their stories are nested within each other, so that we know that at least two quests ended badly. Kostova rations her thrills very carefully so that we jump out of our chair at quite slight surprises, especially when we have come to expect buckets of blood and loud bangs. She also has a profound and well-communicated sense of place and period, so that the book is equally at home in 1930s Rumania, Cold War Budapest and 1970s Oxford. Kostova is particularly good on the sights and sounds of remote country places and the taste of real peasant food--this sensuous realism does not always go with her other skill, the creation of imagined documents and folksongs that feel as real and true as what might be actual. This is a quietly good book rather than a spectacular debut, with some uncomfortable twists in its tail; her heroine-narrators are, and perhaps remain, in the most serious of jeopardies. ---Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

在线阅读本书 Book Description THE MEMORIES OF MIDNIGHT START HERE! In Paris...Washington...and a fabulous villa in Greece, an innocent American girl becomes a bewildered, horror-stricken pawn in a game of vengeance and betrayal. She is Catherine Douglas, a woman caught in a web of four lives intertwined by passion as her handsome husband pursues an incredibly beautiful film star...and as Constantin Demeris, a legendary Greek tycoon, tightens the strands that control them all... Book Dimension length: (cm)17.1 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)10.7 温馨提示：两种封面，随机发货。

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code comes the explosive thriller that started it all. An ancient secret brotherhood. A devastating new weapon of destruction. An unthinkable target. When world-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to his first assignment to a Swiss research facility to analyze a mysterious symbol -- seared into the chest of a murdered physicist -- he discovers evidence of the unimaginable: the resurgence of an ancient secret brotherhood known as the Illuminati...the most powerful underground organization ever to walk the earth. The Illuminati has now surfaced to carry out the final phase of its legendary vendetta against its most hated enemy -- the Catholic Church. Langdon's worst fears are confirmed on the eve of the Vatican's holy conclave, when a messenger of the Illuminati announces they have hidden an unstoppable time bomb at the very heart of Vatican City. With the countdown under way, Langdon jets to Rome to join forces with Vittoria Vetra, a beautiful and mysterious Italian scientist, to assist the Vatican in a desperate bid for survival. Embarking on a frantic hunt through sealed crypts, dangerous catacombs, deserted cathedrals, and the most secretive vault on earth, Langdon and Vetra follow a 400-year-old trail of ancient symbols that snakes across Rome toward the long-forgotten Illuminati lair...a clandestine location that contains the only hope for Vatican salvation. Critics have praised the exhilarating blend of relentless adventure, scholarly intrigue, and cutting wit found in Brown's remarkable thrillers featuring Robert Langdon. An explosive international suspense, Angels & Demons marks this hero's first adventure as it careens from enlightening epiphanies to dark truths as the battle between science and religion turns to war. 点击链接进入中文版： 天使与魔鬼

Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they make mistakes? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Renowned social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson take a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right - a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong. Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)" offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception - how it works, the harm it can cause, and how we can overcome it.

This succinct, interdisciplinary introduction to critical thinking successfully dares students to question their own assumptions and to enlarge their thinking through the analysis of the most common problems associated with everyday reasoning. The text offers a unique and effective organization: Part I explains the fundamental concepts; Part II describes the most common barriers to critical thinking; Part III offers strategies for overcoming those barriers.

The Firm is a 1991 legal thriller and the second novel by John Grisham. It was his first widely recognized piece of work, and in 1993, was made into a film starring Tom Cruise. Grisham's first novel, A Time to Kill, was successful but did not bring the author the attention of the general public. Mitchell Y. McDeere is a law student who graduated third in his class at Harvard Law School. Mitch is married to his college sweetheart, Abby. His brother Ray is serving a prison term, and his other brother, Rusty, died in Vietnam. Mitch has offers from law firms in New York and Chicago but eventually decides to join Bendini, Lambert and Locke, a small tax law firm based in Memphis. The firm seduces him by offering him a large salary, a lease on a new BMW 3 series, a low interest mortgage on a house, as well as paying off his student loans. Soon after he joins, his new colleagues help him study and pass his bar exam. At the firm, the first priority is for the associate to pass the bar exam. Two of Mitch's colleagues die in a scuba diving accident in the Cayman Islands the week he starts at the firm. Mitch finds the deaths unsettling, but settles down, works hard towards his dream of becoming a successful employee of the firm. During a memorial service at the firm for the two deceased attorneys, Mitch notices plaques commemorating three other attorneys who died while working at the firm. Suspicious, he hires a private investigator, Eddie Lomax, an ex-cell mate of his brother Ray, to investigate the deaths of the attorneys. Lomax discovers that all five of the deceased attorneys died under questionable circumstances: two in the diving accident, and the other three in a car accident, a hunting accident and a suicide, respectively. Lomax cautions Mitch to be careful. Soon after delivering his report to Mitch, Lomax is murdered. Just as he passes his bar exam, Wayne Tarrance, an FBI agent, confronts Mitch. Mitch gradually learns from the FBI that the firm is actually part of the white collar operations of the Morolto crime family of Chicago. For years, the Moroltos have lured new lawyers from poor backgrounds into the firm with promises of wealth and security. By the time a lawyer is aware of the firm's actual operations, he cannot leave. No lawyer has escaped the firm alive, as the recent deaths of his two colleagues show. Mitch learns that his house, office and car are bugged. He and Abby are also routinely followed, making his meetings with the FBI dangerous. Pressure from both the firm and the FBI, who warns him he will regret not cooperating later on if he chooses to ignore them, force Mitch to make a decision quickly. Desperate to find a way out and stay alive in the process, Mitch makes a deal with the FBI, in which he gets two million dollars and the release of his brother, if he collects enough evidence to indict the firm. Mitch tells Tarrance that he can obtain enough evidence to indict half the firm, but the information obtained through those indictments will prove the existence of an illegal conspiracy—giving the government the ammunition it needs to destroy the firm and the Morolto family. In order to do so, however, Mitch must disclose information about his clients, and thus end his career as a lawyer (though in truth, the attorney-client privilege in most U.S. states, including Tennessee,[1] does not apply to situations where a lawyer knows that a crime is taking place). Working with Lomax's secretary and lover, Tammy, Mitch begins to copy confidential documents and makes plans to deliver them to the FBI as planned. Meanwhile, the firm becomes suspicious of Mitch, and with the assistance of "Alfred", a mole in the FBI, they discover Mitch's plan. Once Mitch learns of this, he runs from both the FBI and Mafia with his brother who escaped from jail, and his wife. He steals approximately ten million dollars from various bank accounts belonging to the firm. Mitch manages to escape to the Caribbean with the help of Barry Abanks, a scuba diving business owner whose son died in the incident where the firm killed two lawyers, and George, a bank robber from Australia, while the FBI gets the evidence they need to bust the firm through a variety of documents Mitch and Abby copy from the firm. At the end, Mitch, Abby and Ray are quietly enjoying their newfound wealth in the Caribbean region.

在《血字的研究》中，福尔摩斯一出场就令人震惊不已。某日，一座无人居住的空房子里发现一具没有外伤的尸体，死者是美国人。现场的墙壁上用鲜血赫然写着的“RACHE”、一枚滚落的戒指、两种不同的脚印、几处墙上的指痕，组成了《血字的研究》这个有关爱与复仇的惨案。如果说《血字的研究》使福尔摩斯声名远播的话，那么《四签名》则奠定了他的大侦探地位。随后推出的福尔摩斯系列《福尔摩斯历险记》、《福尔摩斯回忆录》、《福尔摩斯归来记》等，无一不彰显了福尔摩斯惊人的智慧和敏锐的判断力。

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory. HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming. With its taut, crafted writing, Sharp Objects is addictive, haunting, and unforgettable.

When a loathsome tourist is murdered in full view of her fellow sightseers, Poirot doesn't question who did it, but rather, who wouldn't have?

Killing Floor is the first book in the internationally popular Jack Reacher series. It presents Reacher for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode: a righter of wrongs, the perfect action hero. Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks fourteen miles down a country road into Margrave, Georgia. An arbitrary decision he's about to regret. Reacher is the only stranger in town on the day they have had their first homicide in thirty years.The cops arrest Reacher and the police chief turns eyewitness to place him at the scene. As nasty secrets leak out, and the body count mounts, one thing is for sure. They picked the wrong guy to take the fall.

In a mega-stakes, high-suspense race against time, three of the most unlikely and winning heroes Stephen King has ever created try to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands. In the frigid pre-dawn hours, in a distressed Midwestern city, hundreds of desperate unemployed folks are lined up for a spot at a job fair. Without warning, a lone driver plows through the crowd in a stolen Mercedes, running over the innocent, backing up, and charging again. Eight people are killed; fifteen are wounded. The killer escapes. In another part of town, months later, a retired cop named Bill Hodges is still haunted by the unsolved crime. When he gets a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the “perk” and threatens an even more diabolical attack, Hodges wakes up from his depressed and vacant retirement, hell-bent on preventing another tragedy. Brady Hartsfield lives with his alcoholic mother in the house where he was born. He loved the feel of death under the wheels of the Mercedes, and he wants that rush again. Only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again. And they have no time to lose, because Brady’s next mission, if it succeeds, will kill or maim thousands. Mr. Mercedes is a war between good and evil, from the master of suspense whose insight into the mind of this obsessed, insane killer is chilling and unforgettable. #该内容有淘宝网乐读书屋提供# http://l-books.taobao.com

《第三个女郎》讲述了三个年轻女郎在伦敦城内合租一套公寓。第一个是冷静而能干的私人秘书；第二个在艺术圈里混事。第三个女郎在早餐时出现了，当赫尔克里•波洛享用着奶油蛋卷和巧克力时，她冲进来告诉他，自己是个杀人凶手——转而又消失不见了。 波洛后来一步步探悉围绕这神秘的第三个女郎的种种传闻——她的家庭内幕，以及她的失踪，等等。然而，在伟大的侦探宣布这第三个女郎是否有罪，抑或是否精神错乱之前，他需要提供强有力的证据。 A perplexed girl thinks she might have killed someone...Three single girls shared the same London flat. The first worked as a secretary; the second was an artist; the third who came to Poirot for help, disappeared convinced she was a murderer. Now there were rumours of revolvers, flick-knives and blood stains. But, without hard evidence, it would take all Poirot's tenacity to establish whether the third girl was guilty innocent or insane!

Agatha Christie's audacious mystery thriller, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers. For an instant the two trains ran together, side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth witnessed a murder. Helplessly, she stared out of her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman's throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away. But who, apart from Miss Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there were no suspects, no other witnesses...and no corpse.

"Precisely what one expects: the most delicious bamboozling possible, bright talk, a bristle of suspicion... a neat succession of clues." -- New York Herald Tribune "The most delicious bamboozling possible." -"New York Herald Tribune" "The most delicious bamboozling possible." -New York Herald Tribune