frantic
Natural Elements
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Mason, Richard, PUBLISHER: Knopf Publishing Group, In his much celebrated debut novel, "The Drowning People," Richard Mason ("An Oxonian literary sensation" --"The" "New York" "Times Book Review") wrote with wisdom and mastery well beyond his twenty-one years--about love, betrayal, and revenge, and about the particular ritualized world of the English upper class. Now in his dazzling new novel Mason writes about mothers and daughters; aging and death; memory and longing; history and narrative; and about the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life. The setting is London. The time is the present. Mother and daughter are choosing an assisted-living facility and have come to The Albany, a late-nineteenth-century Victorian mansion, the flagship property of the TranquilAge(TM) chain of nursing homes. The mother, Joan--eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist denied the pleasures of performance by arthritic hands--has recently been experiencing a rich inner world that she hides from her daughter, a world gained access through the (seemingly magic) pedals of her piano: a portal to adventure. She dreads the prospect of leaving her apartment, but her daughter has decided that she can no longer live on her own. The daughter, Eloise--forty-eight, a hedge fund manager, two decades in commodities--long ago rejected the possibilities of motherhood and has lived enviably free of responsibility. At her pressure-cooker job, Eloise has bought up $130 million (a quarter of the hedge fund's money) of osmium reserves--a transition metal--based on a casual remark by her former lover, a French metallurgist, a genius of sorts, with whom she lived and whom she almost married in Paris in the s. He's been working for years on the development of the compound, which will be tougher than diamonds for industrial use and is only months away from trials. If successful, it could more than double the value of the fund Eloise manages. While mother and daughter are on the trip-of-a-lifetime to the South African capital of the old Orange Free State, the city of Joan's girlhood, Eloise gets a frantic phone call. The price of osmium is in free fall; the fund is off-loading... Fighting panic with a coherent strategy, Eloise puts in motion a bold gamble that risks all--her future, the fund, her mother's well-being. As the stories of mother and daughter intersect, each in a race against time--Joan struggling to live in the present (she cannot believe her days will end in an institution); her daughter racing at breakneck speed toward the precipice of disaster--the novel rushes to its stunning conclusion.
Where Are You Now?
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Clark, Mary Higgins, PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster, From America's Queen of Suspense comes a gripping tale of a young woman trying to unravel the mystery of a family tragedy -- a quest with terrifying repercussions. It has been ten years since twenty-one-year-old Charles MacKenzie Jr. ("Mack") went missing. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already accepted at Duke University Law School, he walked out of his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side without a word to his college roommates and has never been seen again. However, he does make one ritual phone call to his mother every year: on Mother's Day. Each time, he assures her he is fine, refuses to answer her frantic questions, then hangs up. Even the death of his father, a corporate lawyer, in the tragedy of 9/11 does not bring him home or break the pattern of his calls. Mack's sister, Carolyn, is now twenty-six, a law school graduate, and has just finished her clerkship for a civil court judge in Manhattan. She has endured two family tragedies, yet she realizes that she will never be able to have closure and get on with her life until she finds her brother. She resolves to discover what happened to Mack and why he has found it necessary to hide from them. So this year when Mack makes his annual Mother's Day call, Carolyn interrupts to announce her intention to track him down, no matter what it takes. The next morning after Mass, her uncle, Monsignor Devon MacKenzie, receives a scrawled message left in the collection basket: "Uncle Devon, tell Carolyn she must not look for me." Mack's cryptic warning does nothing to deter his sister from taking up the search, despite the angry reaction of her mother, Olivia, and the polite disapproval of Elliott Wallace, Carolyn's honorary uncle, who is clearly in love with Olivia. Carolyn's pursuit of the truth about Mack's disappearance swiftly plunges her into a world of unexpected danger and unanswered questions. What is the secret that Gus and Lil Kramer, the superintendents of the building in which Mack was living, have to hide? What do Mack's old roommates, the charismatic club owner Nick DeMarco and the cold and wealthy real estate tycoon Bruce Galbraith, know about Mack's disappearance? Is Nick connected to the disappearance of Leesey Andrews, who had last been seen in his trendy club? Can the police possibly believe that Mack is not only alive, but a serial killer, a shadowy predator of young women? Was Mack also guilty of the brutal murder of his drama teacher and the theft of his taped sessions with her? Carolyn's passionate search for the truth about her brother -- and for her brother himself -- leads her into a deadly confrontation with someone close to her whose secret he cannot allow her to reveal.