Reading Room

This week's Reading Room features books about cops and robbers, vampires and sperm donors. The usual 25% discount at Kinokuniya applies with the coupon (only in StarTwo).

Intrigue and conspiracy

Compiled by DAPHNE LEE

The Sanctuary
Author: Raymond Khoury
Publisher: Dutton Books, 448 pages

IN BAGHDAD, an army unit discovers a state-of-the-art laboratory where dozens of men, women and children have died as a result of cruel experiments. 

The scientist who runs the lab and is believed to be researching a bio-weapon, escapes, leaving behind a single clue: the symbol of a snake devouring it’s own tail. 

As the truth behind this sign is slowly revealed, so is a centuries-old conspiracy that is about to change the world forever. 

Play Dirty
Author: Sandra Brown
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 416 pages

MILLIONAIRE Foster Speakman is a paraplegic who badly wants to have a child with his wife. He offers Griff Burkett, an ex-Cowboys quarterback, half-a-million dollars to be a sperm donor. 

He also insists that the deed be done “the way God intended”. Griff, fresh out of the slammer where he was thrown for cheating, jumps at the chance to make a quick and easy buck but soon finds himself framed for murder.

Devil May Cry: A Dark Hunter Novel
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon
Publisher: St Martin’s Press, 320 pages

THE Dark Hunter series is about gods, from different cultures, at war with each other. This is the 12th book and features Sin, an ancient Sumerian god, who is trying to save the world from total annihilation. 

Sin’s arch enemy is the Greek goddess Artemis who sends her daughter Katra to kill him. However, Katra, impressed by Sin’s noble intentions towards the planet, decides to help him. She also falls madly in love with him, but will he feel the same once he finds out who her mother is?

The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet
Author: Carole Matthews
Publisher: Headline Review, 320 pages

THERE’S trouble in paradise for members of The Chocolate Lovers Club (also the title of the book that comes before this). 

Lucy Lombard has caught her gorgeous lover in bed with another woman; Autumn’s parents have yet to meet her new boyfriend and she’ll be damned if they ever do; Nadia’s husband is addicted to gambling; and Chantal wants to end her marriage, but isn’t sure just how far she’d go to do it. 

Luckily, the girls are always there for each other. And, thankfully, there’s always plenty of chocolate too.

Troy: Fall of Kings
Author: David and Stella Gemmell
Publisher: Bantam Press, 449 pages

DAVID Gemmell’s final novel was unfinished when he died and it was his wife, Stella, who completed this tale set in the battlefields outside the ancient city of Troy. 

As the Mykene king Agamemnon’s forces gather at the city gates, the Trojan king waits, his hopes pinned on his son Hektor and the mighty warrior Helikaon who thirsts to avenge the death of his wife at Mykene hands.

The Tin Roof Blowdown: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
Author: James Lee Burke
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 384 pages

THE latest in James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series see the ex-alcoholic cop being called in to help out in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. 

While investigating the shooting of two looters in a wealthy neighbourhood, he learns that they were part of a group of small-time criminals who had sacked the home of a member of one of the country’s most dangerous gangs. 

Robicheaux must find the surviving looters before the mobsters do.