FaceOff by Dennis Lehane, James Rollins, Ian Rankin, Michael Connelly, R. L. Stine, Heather Graham, Jeffery Deaver, Peter James, Steve Martini, Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child, Joseph Finder, Lee Child, Raymond Khoury, Linwood Barclay, Steve Berry, John Sandford, M. J. Rose, Lisa Gardner, F. Paul Wilson, T. Jefferson Parker, John Lescroart, Linda Fairstein Page B

with blue, unblinking eyes, painted red lips, and dressed in a white lab coat with the polished brown shoes, was Dr. Augustine.

M. J. ROSE
VS.  LISA GARDNER
    O ld world versus young gun. Pragmatic versus the occult. Actual versus the surely impossible. That’s the premise M. J. Rose and Lisa Gardner started with. The end result?
    A cunningly clever tale.
    M. J. Rose doesn’t believe she invented Malachai Samuels any more than he may have invented her. But certainly Samuels changed her writing career when he first showed up in The Reincarnationist (2007).Samuels became the impetus for M.J. to take her first foray into metaphysical and historical fiction, and she hasn’t turned back from that course since. Samuels is, without question, unique. He’s an enigmatic Jungian therapist, entrenched in research into past life regressions—a journey he’s never actually been able to take himself.
    Which is partly why that’s become his obsession.
    The other reason is that, like M.J., his ancestors, going back to the nineteenth century, have been invested in questioning the mystical lines between past and present. Bringing law enforcement face-to-face with Malachai Samuels, a man who’s managed to evade them at every turn for years, intrigued M.J. Especially when the cop in question would be one of her favorites.
    Detective D.D. Warren.
    Here’s an interesting fact. Lisa Gardner’s D.D. Warren actually exists in real life. Gardner named her hardened Boston detective after her neighbor, a beautiful blonde best known for her baking and gardening skills. In the beginning, Lisa intended for D.D. to only appear in one chapter of Gardner’s sniper novel Alone . But D.D.’s brash Boston attitude and relentless determination quickly captured readers’ imaginations. Before she knew it, Lisa ended up writing half a dozen novels featuring her neighbor’s namesake. The decision to use D.D. for this story was an easy one. Who better to take on the charming, enigmatic Dr. Malachai Samuels, a man suspected of multiple murders but proved guilty of none, than a young, street-smart homicide cop?
    Add in the spice of Boston’s Chinatown and the legend of a rare artifact and you have the perfect recipe for a thriller.
    Or maybe something else entirely?
    Something unexpected.

The Laughing Buddha
    New York City—1884
    TWILIGHT SETTLED OVER THE CITY , shrouding it in a grayish haze. He hated this time of day, the hour lost between darkness and light, when everything became indistinct. Standing in the shadows he watched the mansion from across the street. Linden trees partially hid the Queen Anne–style villa but he could see light glowing through the glass sunburst below the curved-top window. The lugubrious strains of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata wafted from the open balcony door, appropriate accompaniment to the gloomy dusk.
    Even in this murkiness, the elaborate building with its gables, scrolled wrought iron railing, and dozens of gargoyles tucked under the eaves was an impressive sight; a symbol of wealth.
    But not his wealth.
    Unconsciously, he clenched his jaw, felt the tightness, then forced those muscles to relax.
    The front door—with its bas-relief coat of arms of a giant bird rising from a pyre—opened and a finely dressed woman stepped out. She didn’t have any idea what she might be coming home to later that evening, but he did and thought about how, if the worst happened, she’d accept his sympathy, come to rely on it, and never guess he’d been the one to orchestrate her grief.
    “Percy? Esme? Hurry now, we can’t be late for your cousin’s birthday party,” she called.
    The children ran past her; the ten-year-old boy and his eight-year-old sister scampering down the steps and preceding their mother into the waiting carriage.
    Once the sound of the children’s laughter and the hoofs clomping on cobblestones was far in the distance, the man crept across the street and silently let himself into the house. Quietly