Felix Witter is the reigning Mr. Universe. He is in training for the current international body-building competition—just another dedicated weight lifter with extraordinary muscular development. He is murdered during his last workout on the day preceding the annual competition, and it just so happens that the murder takes place in the gym where Max Roper does his exercising. Lucky for the innocent gym attendant who is accused of dropping a quarter-ton of iron on the Superbody, because Roper is on hand to clear up the murder and prove who really did it. Roper has to sift through the co-ed part of the gym, including a few of the exercising ladies and their reasons for wanting Witter deader than alive. Also in line for lively suspicion are jealous competitors, last year’s losers and this year’s aspirants. Felix Witter, the victim, has a broken marriage behind him, a disgruntled business agent, an irascible trainer, a jealous girlfriend, a jealous boyfriend, and a tie-in with a nutrition product and a company unable to meet his demands for more money before he goes over to a rival health-kick group. What with karate experts, weight lifters, body builders and college athletes using the gym for work-outs, obviously Roper has a lot of strong men to deal with this time, and he is forced to fight for his own life before he can come up with the killer.

*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR *** A 52 year-old photographer and a 41 year-old anatomy professor are jurors sequestered during a sensational three-week trial: a toddler murdered by one of his twin sisters. At the court appointed cut-rate motel off the interstate, they fall into an intense, furtive affair, but it is only during deliberations that the lovers learn they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens. After the trial, the photographer returns to her much older husband amidst an ongoing media frenzy over the case. But the judge has received an anonymous letter about the affair, and she is preparing to release the jurors names. From that point on, the photographer’s “one last dalliance before she is too old” takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences, as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.

"Complex and challenging... push[es] the boundaries of writing about trauma." —The New York Times “A True Crime Masterpiece” – Vogue Entertainment Weekly "Must" List and Best Books of the Year So Far Real Simple's Best New Books Guardian Best Book of the Year Lambda Literary Award Winner Chautauqua Prize Winner "The Fact of a Body is one of the best books I've read this year. It's just astounding." — Paula Hawkins, author of Into the Water and The Girl on the Train "This book is a marvel. The Fact of a Body is equal parts gripping and haunting and will leave you questioning whether any one story can hold the full truth." — Celeste Ng, author of the New York Times bestselling Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere Before Alex Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working to help defend men accused of murder, they think their position is clear. The child of two lawyers, they are staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley’s face flashes on the screen as they review old tapes—the moment they hear him speak of his crimes -- they are overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by their reaction, they dig deeper and deeper into the case. Despite their vastly different circumstances, something in his story is unsettlingly, uncannily familiar. Crime, even the darkest and most unsayable acts, can happen to any one of us. As Alex pores over the facts of the murder, they find themself thrust into the complicated narrative of Ricky’s childhood. And by examining the details of Ricky’s case, they are forced to face their own story, to unearth long-buried family secrets, and reckon with a past that colors their view of Ricky's crime. But another surprise awaits: They weren’t the only one who saw their life in Ricky’s. An intellectual and emotional thriller that is also a different kind of murder mystery, THE FACT OF A BODY is a book not only about how the story of one crime was constructed -- but about how we grapple with our own personal histories. Along the way it tackles questions about the nature of forgiveness, and if a single narrative can ever really contain something as definitive as the truth. This groundbreaking, heart-stopping work, ten years in the making, shows how the law is more personal than we would like to believe -- and the truth more complicated, and powerful, than we could ever imagine.

A serial killer with all the time in the world...From a stunning new voice in crime fiction. Stephen Killigan has been cold since the day he arrived in Cambridge. Seven hundred years of history staining the stones of the university have given him a chill he can't shake. Then he stumbles across the body of a missing beauty queen - a body which disappears before the police arrive... Unwittingly, Killigan has entered the sinister world of Jackamore Grass on a trail that reaches back to seventeenth-century Cambridge. It's a world of cadavers, philosophers and scholars of deadly beauty, a world where a person's corpse can be found before they even go missing, of a city and a person that hold far too many secrets written in blood.

Robert Graham is mugged when he's mistaken for a stalker instead of a law-abiding detective chief inspector. His loyal but over-enthusiastic dog inflicts an embarrassing wound on Graham's atacker. a peeping tom outsmarts the police force. and a fast-talking barmaid disappears just like her one-time husband, the paroled rapist. But it's someone quite different who dies. Shirley (alias Davinia) West had hoped to make her fortune as a beauty queen. Instead she makes the headlines when she's brutally murdered right under the noses of the police, who were supposedly trying to thwart the stalker, the peeping tom and the missing rapist at the time...