The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios-YANN MARTEL

“The desire to find out what happens next keeps the reader turning the pages. Grisham is an absolute master of the chase story.”—The Washington Post

Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother were sharing a forbidden cigarette when a chance encounter with a suicidal lawyer left Mark knowing a bloody and explosive secret: the whereabouts of the most sought-after dead body in America.

Now Mark is caught between a legal system gone mad and a mob killer desperate to cover up his crime. And his only ally is a woman named Reggie Love, who has been a lawyer for all of four years.

Prosecutors are willing to break all the rules to make Mark talk. The mob will stop at nothing to keep him quiet. And Reggie will do anything to protect her client—even take a last, desperate gamble that could win Mark his freedom . . . or cost them both their lives.

Den Laurey, the leader of one of the country’s most violent biker gangs, should have been behind bars. But thanks to a daring escape on the L.A. freeway, several US marshals are dead and Laurey is riding free. Tim Rackley, back on the service’s warrant squad, is in hot pursuit of the outlaw and his ruthless gang–with a media whirlwind and the entire Los Angeles law enforcement community dogging him. Tim’s search leads him into a dark world of deception, of criminals and undercover cops, and drugs and mutilation. With the stakes rising, Tim must unravel a horrifying secret and confront a deadly terror that reaches from the back alleys of Mexico to the poppy fields of Afghanistan–and threatens to explode on the dark streets of L.A.

Bruno Salvador, known to friends and enemies alike as Salvo, is the ever-innocent, twenty-nine-year-old orphaned love-child of a Catholic Irish missionary and a Congolese headman’s daughter. Educated first at mission school in the East Congolese province of Kivu, and later at a discreet sanctuary for the secret sons of Rome, Salvo is inspired by his mentor Brother Michael to train as a professional interpreter in the minority African languages of which, almost from birth, he has been an obsessive collector.

Soon a rising star in his profession, he is courted by City corporations, hospitals, law courts, the Immigration services and – inevitably – the mushrooming overworld of British Intelligence. He is also courted – and won – by the all-white, Surrey-born Penelope, star reporter on one of our great national newspapers, whom with typical impulsiveness he promptly marries. Yet even as the story opens, a contrary and irresistible love is dawning in him.

Despatched to a no-name island in the North Sea to attend a top-secret meeting between Western financiers and East Congolese warlords, Salvo is obliged to interpret matters never intended for his re-awoken African conscience.