Michael k bender (95 risultati)

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Two years after the reservoir gave up its dead, Callan believed he'd left this particular work behind him - the drive out to some other county's failing department, the slow, patient dismantling of a corruption nobody wanted looked at too closely. He'd built a consulting practice out of the wreckage of Marrow Falls: a training module, a reputation, a way of practicing the posture of the thing without ever again standing fully inside it.Then a letter arrives from Sheriff Corinne Task of Aldwich County, a place he's never worked, written by a woman he's never met, asking for help with a situation she "isn't yet able to describe in writing." Three men have died in the past eighteen months - a fall, a single-vehicle crash, a hunting accident that shouldn't have been possible for a man who'd hunted the same hillside since he was nine years old. All three had filed complaints against the county board in the months before they died. Task doesn't believe in coincidence. Neither, anymore, does Callan.With medical examiner Dr. Priya Kade beside him, Callan starts pulling a thread that runs straight through the county clerk's records office, the board chairmen carefully cultivated reputation as the last thing standing between a dying county and total collapse, and a construction corridor that doesn't stop cleanly at any county line. What they find isn't a single corrupt official cutting a single bad deal. It's a method - patient, deniable, built out of small mercies and careful silences extended one at a time until the exceptions are the whole of what a county's machinery has quietly become. And it's already, they come to understand, being taught to the next county down the line.As the case widens - pulling in an FBI agent chasing a civil rights complaint from the other side of the county line, a fifteen-year-old boy who saw more on a dark road than anyone twice his age should have to carry, a records clerk thirty years into a career built on not asking questions who finally decides to start asking them, and a county board chairman who has spent eleven years convincing himself that patience and silence are simply the cost of keeping a dying place alive - Callan has to reckon with the thing he brought to Aldwich already carrying, unexamined, in the trunk of his car: the difference between the man his own father built an entire county's machinery to protect, and the man Callan has spent two years, one case at a time, trying to become instead.What the Ground Keeps is a slow-burn small-town thriller in the tradition of patient, character-driven procedurals - the kind that trust readers with the unglamorous texture of the work itself: a records room, a kitchen-table map, a phone call at eleven at night that isn't quite a threat and is somehow worse for it. It is a novel about institutional corruption as a taught method rather than a single villain's scheme, about the particular loneliness of being the only person in a room willing to ask an inconvenient question, and about a man trying to prove - to a sheriff who took a considerable risk trusting him, to a woman three hours away who has already survived loving someone who does this work, and to a father whose clearest days now arrive without warning and without much time left to spend them - that a demonstration only stays a demonstration if nobody learns from it.A direct sequel to The Quiet County, What the Ground Keeps also stands entirely on its own: a new county, a new sheriff, a new pattern of deaths dressed in a different county's particular local grammar, and the same hard-won conviction, carried forward from book to book, that the actual work of dismantling something like this happens less in dramatic confrontations than in small, unglamorous moments - a policy quietly revised, a question finally asked pro Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

Paperback. Condizione: new. Paperback. Forensic psychologist Mara Williams has spent her career listening to other people's darkest secrets. She never expected to come home to one.Twelve years after leaving Ashford Hollow, Mara returns to the Catskills town she grew up in to help care for her mother, Celia, whose grip on her own memory has started to slip. The town looks exactly as she left it -- the same steeple over the sugar maples, the same lake, the same neighbors who have known her since she was a girl. It takes her a while to notice how carefully it has all been watched.Set over one tightening autumn sliding into a Catskills winter, Ashford Hollow becomes a character in its own right: small enough that everyone assumes they would notice if something were wrong, and exactly the kind of place where something has been wrong for a very long time.Martin Shaw is the kind of neighbor everyone trusts: helpful, quiet, unremarkable, the sort of man who offers to carry your groceries and remembers your coffee order. He has also spent more than a decade cataloguing the town's most private moments on cassette tape, one labeled reel at a time, filed away in an archive he has built with the patience of a man who has never once been in a hurry. A section of that archive is reserved entirely for Mara -- and has been since long before she came back.Told in alternating chapters from Mara's perspective and Martin's own carefully controlled point of view, THE LISTENER puts readers inside both the investigation and the obsession driving it, watching in real time as a quiet, methodical man convinces himself that devotion and violation are the same thing.When a local woman goes missing, Mara's professional instincts pull her into the investigation almost against her will, working alongside a local detective who is more grateful for her expertise than he initially lets on. She spends her working life building psychological profiles of people who hurt others; she knows, better than most, exactly what obsession looks like from the outside, clinically, at a safe distance. What she does not yet know is how long she has already been living inside someone else's.Underneath the thriller runs a quieter story about caregiving and inheritance: what it costs to come home and look after a parent who is slowly losing the details of a life she spent decades building, and what it means for a woman whose entire profession is attentiveness to admit she has spent her adult life avoiding that same closeness with the people who actually love her.As the case tightens and more women in Ashford Hollow disappear, Mara has to hold two versions of her hometown in her head at once: the one she remembers, full of porch lights and familiar faces, and the one that has apparently been listening back the entire time. Her mother's failing memory becomes its own kind of clock, ticking against how much time Mara actually has. An old, unresolved piece of her own past -- a recording she never knew existed until it is far too late to feel safe about it -- resurfaces at the worst possible moment. And somewhere on the outskirts of town, in a building nobody has reason to visit, a very patient man's patience is finally running out.THE LISTENER is a slow-burn psychological thriller about surveillance, obsession, and the razor-thin difference between being heard and being watched. It is a novel about a woman whose entire profession rests on the belief that being truly listened to is a form of care -- and what happens when she discovers that, in the wrong hands, it can just as easily become a form of theft.Atmospheric, character-driven, and unsettling in the way only a story about your own hometown can be, THE LISTENER is for readers of Caroline Kepnes's YOU and Colleen Hoover's VERITY, and f Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…

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PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Condizione: New.

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PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Condizione: New.

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PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Condizione: New.

Condizione: New.

Condizione: New.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

Condizione: New.

Condizione: New.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.

PAP. Condizione: New. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since 2000.