Modern Fiction

Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original. In this controversial and exciting listen, Pollan explores caffeine’s power as the most-used drug in the world - and the only one we give to children (in soda pop) as a treat.

A tour-de-force of historical imagination, this is the story of three young men at the dawn of the French Revolution. Georges-Jacques Danton: zealous, energetic, debt-ridden. Maximilien Robespierre: small, diligent, and terrified of violence. And Camille Desmoulins: a genius of rhetoric, charming, handsome, but erratic and untrustworthy. As these key figures of the French Revolution taste the addictive delights of power, they must also come to face the horror that follows.

Paint your toes. Pick up the wrong coffee and bagel order. Drive from Brooklyn to Jersey in traffic so slow you want to tear your hair out. It’s amazing all the useless things I can accomplish while on hold for three hours with customer service. Three hours when I should be getting the Date-in-a-Box website ready to launch at the big business expo in a few days. Except my shiny new website is glitching, and my inner rage-monster is ready to scorch some earth...when he finally picks up. Not the robot voice I expected but a real live human named Kal.

A woman and her husband rent a summer house, but what should be a restful getaway turns into a suffocating psychological battle. This chilling account of postpartum depression and a husband's controlling behaviour in the guise of treatment will leave you breathless.

Chesterton's allegorical masterpiece is a surreal, psychologically thrilling novel that centres on seven anarchists in turn of the century London who call themselves by the names of days of the week. The story begins when poet Gabriel Syme is recruited as a detective to a secret anarchist division of Scotland Yard by a shrouded, nameless person. Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists who are intent on destroying the world and becomes known as 'Thursday', one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council.

It’s officially booty o’clock, I’m alone again in my kitchen choking down a slice of terrible chocolate cake…and I’m pretty sure I just got drunk texted by the man I have a ginormous crush on. I’ve been daydreaming about Eliot Hoffman’s dimples for two months, and even though I’m sure this was a mistake on his end, it doesn’t mean it’s not an opportunity on mine. It’s the middle of the night, and I just wanna talk to him. So I text him back.

Dave Robicheaux has been warned that he's on somebody's hit list, and now the homicide detective is trying to discover just who that is before he ends up dead. Meanwhile he has taken on the murder investigation of a young black girl found dead in the Bayou swamp. Robicheaux uncovers a web of corruption that leads him to a terrifying confrontation with the one horror he fears most of all.

Daniel Pell is a contemporary Charles Manson. A petty criminal with a history of anti-social behaviour, he had a group of women living with him in a quasi cult in central California. Eight years ago, he and another man viciously slaughtered a family for no apparent reason, though the three women in his "family" were absolved of any part in the deaths. Now, present day, Pell has escaped and interrogator and analyst Kathryn Dance must find out where he is and why he's staying near the prison he escaped from.

A woman is found naked, badly beaten and barely alive in the New Mexico mountains. The shocking discovery plunges Albuquerque Detective Alyssa Wyatt into a case that will test her to the limit. It appears that Callie McCormick is the latest plaything of a shadowy psychopath that leaves a long shadow on the streets of New Mexico - an individual linked to a string of deaths but leaving no evidence. But when Alyssa makes a breakthrough that just might reveal the killer, she unknowingly puts herself in the crosshairs of a brutal maniac - one with an old score to settle.

'There is only one book to a man,' Steinbeck wrote of East of Eden, his most ambitious novel. Set in the rich farmland of the Salinas Valley, California, this powerful, often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families - the Trasks and the Hamiltons - whose generations hopelessly re-enact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel. Here Steinbeck created some of his most memorable characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity; the inexplicability of love and the murderous consequences of love's absence.

Tracey Kavanagh was her usual upbeat self - right up until the moment she drowned her son and tied a rope around her neck, killing herself and her unborn child. For Alex Moreton, this case couldn't have come at a worse time. Battling with her partner over whether to have another child, she is superstitious about pushing their luck - they're happy enough as they are...aren't they?

A murder with no weapon or motive. A detective on edge. A community that wants answers. Impurity is the first in a series of six books featuring Leeds based Detective Inspector Stewart Gardener. One fateful night, DI Stewart Gardener intervenes in a street brawl, and his wife is shot dead. Finding his wife’s murderer is never far from his mind, but with no leads and a hazy recollection of events, it seems hopeless. Soon he is presented with a shocking case. A man is found dead in a grubby apartment, and It is not long before another man meets the same fate.

Christmastime in London: a period of joy and togetherness. Not for Metropolitan Police Commander Austin Grant, though. Three dead bodies have turned up on his patch, and the only thing they have in common is a number carved into their foreheads. A professor of ancient mythology, a sculptor of curious idols, frontman of The Blasphemers. It seems the killer is meting out their own justice, Biblically, punishing those who transgress the Ten Commandments. With seven commandments left, Grant sets the Met's best detectives to the case, scouring the capital before the zealot can strike again.

Newly widowed Phyllida returns from India to visit her absent-minded father, Professor Woodbridge, only to find the house locked up and deserted. Phyllida learns that he left town four months ago having dismissed the staff, telling them he was leaving for a prolonged holiday. After some further investigation, it appears that her father has vanished. As Phyllida investigates the disappearance of her missing father, she is faced with secrets and revelations she could never have been prepared for.

Brendan Foley has worked to balance the responsibilities of a demanding job and a troublesome family. He’s managed to keep these two worlds separate, until the discovery of a mass grave sends them into a headlong collision. When one of the dead turns out to be a familiar face, he’s taken off the case. Iona Madison keeps everything under control. She works hard as a detective sergeant and trains harder as a boxer. But when her superior, DI Foley, is removed from the case, her certainties are tested like never before.

Nine months ago, Zeus' murder catapulted the Greek gods back into public life. Now, the whole pantheon revels in new temples, casinos, and media empires - except Apollo. An overachiever with a bursting portfolio of godly duties, the amount of email alone he receives from rapacious mortals turns each day into a living hell. Yet there may be hope, if only he can return Zeus to life! With the aid of Thalia, the muse of comedy and science fiction, Apollo will risk his very godhood to help TV producer Tracy Wallace and a gamer geek named Leif, who hold the key to Zeus' resurrection.

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge kills the wrong person. The young woman in the car behind is spared. But only for a while... A few weeks later, George Marshalson lives every father's worst nightmare: he discovers the murdered body of his eighteen-year-old daughter on the side of the road. Wexford steps into the case but soon a second teenage girl is murdered - a victim unquestionably linked to the first - and another family is shattered...

In this third novel in Gabriel Cohen’s Edgar Award-nominated Jack Leightner crime series, the Brooklyn homicide detective investigates the serial killing of prostitutes in Crown Heights and the murder of a friend who ran afoul of Russian gangsters in Brighton Beach.

Ex-Berlin cop and private detective Bernie Gunther has seen his share of bad guys. But when the worst guys of all are the ones running the show, it's much harder to stay out of their reach. Hired by a wealthy industrialist to investigate the murder of his daughter and her husband in an apparent botched robbery, Bernie soon finds himself drawn into the complex - not to mention lethal - internal politics and corruption of the Nazi party.

When Mattie Winston catches her husband, Dr. David Winston, receiving some very special loving care from RN Karen Owenby, she quits her job and moves out. Mattie's best friend, Izzy, offers her a place to stay and suggests she'd be a natural as deputy coroner. Now, instead of taking patients' pulses, Mattie's weighing their hearts and livers. But Mattie's first homicide call turns out to be for none other than Nurse Karen, and even though she saw her ex in a heated argument with the newly deceased the night before, she refuses to believe David could be a killer.