This Week's Bestsellers

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.

It's about the disappearance forty hears ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden... and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.

It's about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get ot the bottom of Harriet's disappearance... and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom osf someone twice her age--and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it--who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly un-fathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialistm--and an un-expected connection between themselves.

It's a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.


A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire

Since Wicked was first published in 1995, millions of readers have discovered Gregory Maguire's fantastically encyclopedic Oz, a world filled with characters both familiar and new, darkly conceived and daringly reimagined. In the much anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion--the once tiny cub defended by Elphaba in Wicked.

A Lion Among Men chronicles a battle of wits hastened by the Emerald City's approaching armies. What does the Lion know of the wearabouts of the Witch's boy, Liir? What can Yackled reveal about the auguries of the Clock of the Time Dragon? And what of the Grimmerie, the magic book that vanished as quickly as Elphaba? Is destiny ever arbitrary? can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets--cowardly, wicked, brainless, criminally earnest--to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they're skinned alive?

At once a portrait of a would-be survivor and a panoramic glimpes of a world gone shrill with war fever, Gregory Maguire's new novel is written with the sympathy and power that made his books contemporary classics.