In the heart of Columbia the US DEA and Columbian drug barons have for years been engaged in a war with no rules... Rico Chavez is the most terrifying of killers: ruthless, cunning, charismatic. A man who always gets what he wants. And what he wants now is Elena Kyler. He wants her alive long enough to see him destroy every reason she has for living.
In life, at least before the espionage charges, it was Mata Hari's body that made her mesmerizing; in this alluring novel, it is her hypnotic voice. As softly poetic as it is insistent, it entices the reader from the first lines to give Mata Hari what she always craved: not the secrets that are the currency of a spy, but the rapt attention that is oxygen to a performer.
Two years ago, Ellie Grant would have fallen apart at any reminder of her ex-husband, Tucker. Always In My Heart - inside artBut now she doesn't bat an eye when "their song" comes on the radio. She's unfazed by the thought of Tucker's perky new girlfriend. Ellie Grant is over him. And things are better for Tucker as well. The single life agrees with him. And certainly they've both done a good job of being civil to each other, for the kids' sake.
The notion of America as the divinely anointed homeland of freedom, bravery, democracy and economic opportunity, with everything to teach the world and nothing to learn from it, is so entrenched that this perceptive portrait of America the Ordinary seems downright radical. Hodgson (Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand) situates America as an outpost of Europe, always a part (and not always the most advanced part) of an evolving progressive, liberal, capitalist civilization spanning the Atlantic. American history, he contends, has its share of class conflict, bloody and sometimes losing struggles against hierarchy, and institutional dysfunction.
Added by: zryciuch_83 | Karma: 392.36 | Black Hole | 2 February 2011
2
How to Ride a Dragon's Storm
More of Hiccup's story in his How to Train Your Dragon memoirs ... Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was an awesome sword-fighter, a dragon-whisperer and the greatest Viking Hero who ever lived. But it wasn't always like that. Hiccup's memoirs look back to when Hiccup was just an ordinary boy, and finding it very hard to be a Hero.
