Search results for ""author mark mussari""

All his life, Viggo Larssen has been haunted by the same troubling dream, which he calls the Omen—a vision of a woman beckoning to him from the surface of a churning sea. Now, as he broods over his shipwrecked existence in a remote lighthouse off the outermost coast of Denmark, he is about to be borne backward by the current to a past he thought he had escaped forever. On the Danish mainland, the widowed mother of the nation's prime minister mysteriously vanishes from her prestigious nursing home. As the police search for clues, evidence mounts that her disappearance is tied to an unsolved crime from Viggo's childhood. Told through the eyes of multiple characters from Viggo's old neighborhood, Erik Valeur's dark, serpentine mystery is a profound meditation on the persistence of memory, the power of dreams, and the secrets we hide from one another—and ourselves.

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From the award-winning author of We, the Drowned comes a brutal, unflinching, and bestselling epic novel of a platoon of soldiers descending into the insanity of the war in Afghanistan. Dispatched to fight the Taliban as part of the NATO forces, the soldiers of the Third Platoon arrive in a desert hell intent on testing their courage and endurance. Among them are the charismatic platoon leader Schrøder, a former games designer fascinated by the imaginative potential of war; Colonel Steffensen, whose negotiating tactics will have deadly consequences; Sidekick, the LifeLogger whose online “war memorial” will blur into horror; and the hardened but vulnerable Hannah, who must bury her womanhood—or sacrifice her soul. Confronted by a betrayal that no military training could prepare them for, the soldiers must embark on a desperate mission to track down an enemy whose methods are as murderous as they are unfathomable. As the hunters become the hunted, the mission turns into a depraved, hallucinatory voyage into an Afghanistan they never knew existed. With the Third Platoon’s most fundamental notions of good and evil called into question, survival becomes their only mission. An explicitly brutal portrait of battle told with the propulsion of a harrowing psychological thriller, The First Stone is a stunning and epic depiction of comradeship, humanity, and the bestial realities of a conflict without end.

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An empowering memoir of resilience and redemption, and the rage that helped a girl escape the darkness of a harrowing childhood. Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimization by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit. Coming of age with a myriad of fears and emotional disorders, Lisbeth had three things that would become driving forces in her life: she was extraordinarily bright, extremely willful, and exceptionally angry. From hell to liberation, this is Lisbeth’s emotional and galvanizing memoir told in two voices: that of a young girl who was unwanted, challenged, and defiant, and that of a woman who channeled her rage into a positive force as a passionate advocate for children’s rights. Whatever darkness defines the past, it can be used to change the future. Lisbeth’s heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting journey is proof.

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Murder in the Dark sports a winning combination of engaging crime narrative and cool, unsentimental appraisal of Scandinavian society (as seen through the eyes of its shabby, unconventional anti-hero). There are elements of the book which now seem quite as relevant as when they were written, and like all the most accomplished writing in the Nordic Noir field, there is an acute and well-observed sense of place throughout the novel. The descriptions of Copenhagen channel the poetic sensibility which is the author's own: 'Copenhagen is at its most beautiful when seen out of a taxi at midnight, right at that magical moment when one day dies and another is born, and the printing presses are buzzing with the morning newspapers.'

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