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Alex Awards: As Simple As Snow
If You Like Gregory Galloway Booklist
Page Modified: April 7, 2008
If you like psychologically suspenseful books that are "full of contradiction and ambiguities and mysteries" (Galloway- As Simple As Snow). Titles may also have subjects related to codes and Houdini . . .
- As Simple As Snow
Author: Galloway, Gregory
Publisher: Putnam $ 23.95
ISBN: 0399152318 Date: 2006
A mesmerizing labyrinth of art, magic, and cryptic love sparks the imagination in this arresting first novel about a young man's quest to unravel the puzzle his missing girlfriend may (or may not) have left behind.
Updated 6.1.06
These are adult titles suggested for teens - not all books are suitable for all readers. Please use your judgement when considering these titles.
Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.
- The Tutor
Author: Abrahams, Peter
Publisher: Ballantine $ 25.95 ISBN: 0345439384 Date: 2002
LJ
Master of psychological suspense Peter Abrahams returns with an ingenious tale of an ordinary family that unknowingly invites the agent of their destruction into their own home.
Suggested Reading: Psychological Suspense Stars
Updated 5/5/02 - The Man from Beyond
Author: Brownstein, Gabriel
Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393051528 Date: 2005
Booklist
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrives in New York on a spiritualist crusade, defending the powers of the mysterious medium Margery. His good friend Harry Houdini is a skeptic, and when Doyle claims Margery's powers are superior to Houdini's, the magician goes on the attack.
Suggested Reading: Historical Fiction Stars | Elementary Stars | Magic & Magicians | Spiritualist Stars
Updated 8.15.05 - Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Author: Doctorow, Cory
Publisher: Tor $ 24.95 ISBN: 0765312786 Date: 2005
PW
One of the leading voices of next-generation SF and author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom returns with a miraculous novel of secrets, lies, magic, and Internet connectivity, set on the streets of modern-day Toronto.
Suggested Reading: Internet Stars
Updated 3.10.05 - The Virgin Suicides
Author: Eugenides, Jeffrey
Publisher: FSG $ 20 ISBN: 0374284385 Date: 1993
This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter's spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates "the year of the suicides."
Updated 5.22.06 - 26A
Author: Evans, Diana
Publisher: Morrow $ 23.95 ISBN: 0060820918 Date: 2005
PW
Booklist
A hauntingly beautiful, wickedly funny and devastatingly moving novel of innocence and dreams that announces the arrival of a major new talent to the literary scene. The attic room at 26a Waifer Avenue in the lower-middle-class London neighborhood of Neasden is a sanctuary for identical twins Georgia and Bessi Hunter. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Twins | Adult Books for Teens
Updated 8.15.05 - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Author: Foer, Jonathan Safran
Publisher: Houghton $ 24.95 ISBN: 0618329706 Date: 2005
Kirkus PW LJ
Oskar Schell is an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Suggested Reading: 9/11 Stars | All Stars | Adult Book for Teens
Updated 3.10.05 - The Two Sams: Ghost Stories
Author: Hirshberg, Glen
Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 23 ISBN: 0786712254 Date: 2003
PW
With this unique collection, acclaimed author Glen Hirshberg breathes new life into an age-old literary tradition.
Suggested Reading: Ghostly Stars
Updated 9.22.03 - The Girls
Author: Lansens, Lori
Publisher: Little Brown $ 23.95 ISBN: 0316069035 Date: 2006
Booklist
LJ Kirkus
In Lori Lansens' astonishing second novel, readers come to know and love two of the most remarkable characters in Canadian fiction: Rose and Ruby, 29-year-old conjoined twins.
Suggested Reading: Twins
Updated 2.28.06 - Other Worlds
Author: Michaels, Barbara
Publisher: HarperCollins $ 23 ISBN: 0060192356 Date: 1999
On a foggy evening, in a smoky club, a lofty assemblage of crime specialists settles in to talk about poltergeists and murder. The two grisly cases they discuss are sure to raise the hair on every reader's neck--and raise the standard for what is considered to be a great mystery fiction.
Updated 5.16.06 - The Time Traveler's Wife
Author: Niffenegger, Audrey
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage $ 25 ISBN: 193156146x Date: 2003
PW LJ
Alex Award
The love story of Henry and Claire whose lives are punctuated by Henry's disappearance to different points in time--sometimes even back to visit Claire as a young woman. When Henry meets Claire, he is twenty-eight, and she is twenty. He's a hip, handsome librarian; she is an art student with Botticelli hair. Henry has never met Claire before; Claire has known Henry since she was six...
Suggested Reading: Librarian Stars | Time Travel Stars | Adult Books for Teens
Updated 8.14.03 - Lost
Author: Robotham, Michael
Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385508662 Date: 2006
LJ
London detective Vincent Ruiz (Suspect) returns and is accused of faking amnesia when he's found shot in the leg, but with no memory of how. Ruiz turns to psychologist Joe O'Loughlin, and soon a twisted trail of grief, vengeance, and the search for redemption is revealed.
Updated 12.27.05 - Escapade
Author: Satterthwait, Walter
Publisher: St Martins $ 22.95 ISBN: 0312130686 Date: 1995
Kirkus
Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle team up to solve the ultimate locked-room whodunit, in this brilliant comic novel that's also a traditional mystery, by the author of The Hanged Man. "Mr. Satterthwait writes in a bright, satirical style".--New York Times Book Review.
Updated 5.24.06 - Lovely Bones
Author: Sebold, Alice
Publisher: Little Brown $ 21.95 ISBN: 031666343 Date: 2002
Booklist
Library Journal
PW
In the hands of a brilliant new novelist, and through the eyes of her winning new heroine, this tale of family, memory, love, and living is told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief the most hopeful and joyful of stories.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | All Stars Lists | Reading Group Stars
Updated 6.29.02 - Broken Verses
Author: Shamsie, Kamila
Publisher: Harvest $ 14 (paper) ISBN: 0156030535 Date: 2005
Kirkus
Fourteen years ago, famous Pakistani activist Samina Akram disappeared. Two years earlier, her lover, Pakistan's greatest poet, was beaten to death by government thugs. In present-day Karachi, her daughter Aasmaani has just discovered a letter in the couple's private code-a letter that could only have been written recently.
Aasmaani is thirty, single, drifting from job to job. Always left behind whenever Samina followed the Poet into exile, she had assumed that her mother's disappearance was simply another abandonment. Then, while working at Pakistan's first independent TV station, Aasmaani runs into an old friend of Samina's who gives her the first letter, then many more. Where could the letters have come from? And will they lead her to her mother?
Merging the personal with the political, Broken Verses is at once a sharp, thrilling journey through modern-day Pakistan, a carefully coded mystery, and an intimate mother-daughter story that asks how we forgive a mother who leaves - Publisher Marketing
Updated 2.23.05 - Cryptonomicon
Author: Stephenson, Neal
Publisher: Avon $ 29.50 ISBN: 0380973464 Date:1999
PW
LJ
The adult grandchildren of two men once involved in code-breaking espionage in World War II find a sunken Nazi submarine that leads to a massive conspiracy, which can either enhance freedom - or subjugate the world. - Lost Boy, Lost Girl
Author: Straub, Peter
Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400060923 Date: 2003
Booklist PW
From the bestselling author of Black House and Mr. X springs a groundbreaking story of the persistence of evil, told with tantalizing ambiguity and structural audacity.
Updated 9.22.03 -
The Quick
and the Dead
Author: Williams, Joy
Publisher: Knopf $ 25 ISBN: 067944646x Date: 2000
Kirkus
Over summer vacation, three girls explore a world seemingly empty of meaning yet filled with eccentricity and random events. A panorama of contemporary life, seen through the looking-glass of adolescence, The Quick and the Dead is at once mundane and magical, ominous and comic.
Updated 10/6/00 - Broken As Things Are
Author: Witt, Martha
Publisher: Holt $ 23 ISBN: 080507595x Date: 2004
Kirkus
"A sensitive Southern tale of weirdly imaginative children and hapless adults. Ms. Witt has staked out a territory somewhere between Harper Lee and Flannery O'Connor." - E. L. Doctorow. - Publisher Marketing.
Suggested Reading: Debuts | Adult Books for Young Adults
Updated 6.10.04
- Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini
Author: Brandon, RRuth
Publisher: Random $ 25 ISBN: 0679424377 Date: 1994
Booklist
A mesmerizing, intimate look at a man whose obsessions and secret fears made him one of the most memorable, fascinating, and charismatic performers. The author reveals much that is new, including the first full description of Houdini's fabled death.
Updated 5.16.06
Hotlists
Crime Fiction - embedded
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Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec Crime Fiction: Jan-June | July-Dec
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Genre Hotlists: Christian Fiction | African American Fiction
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