Three acclaimed novels
de Jodi Picoult
Second glance: A developer has targeted an ancient Indian burial ground for a mall, and now strange happenings have the inhabitants of Comtosook, Vermont, talking of supernatural forces at work. Ross Wakeman is a ghost hunter who's never seen a ghost - all he's searching for is something to end the pain of losing his fiancee Aimee in a car accident eight years ago. Now Ross lives only for a way to connect with Aimee from beyond. Searching the site for signs of the paranormal, Ross meets the mysterious Lia, who sparks him into life for the first time in years. But the discoveries that await Ross are beyond anything he could dream of in this world - or the next. The tenth circle: When Daniel Stone was a child, he was the only white boy in a native Eskimo village where his mother taught, and he was teased mercilessly because he was different. He fought back, the baddest of the bad kids: stealing, drinking, robbing and cheating his way out of the Alaskan bush where he honed his artistic talent, fell in love with a girl and got her pregnant. To become part of a family, he reinvented himself jettisoning all that anger to become a docile, devoted husband and father. Fifteen years later, when we meet Daniel again, he is a comic book artist. His wife teaches Dante's Inferno at a local college; his daughter, Trixie, is the light of his life and a girl who only knows her father as the even-tempered, mild-mannered man he has been her whole life. Until, that is, she is date raped and Daniel finds himself struggling, again, with a powerlessness and a rage that may not just swallow him whole, but destroy his family and his future. Nineteen minutes: Set in a small town in the wake of a horrific school shooting, Nineteen Minutes features the return of two beloved Picoult characters Jordan McAfee, the lawyer from The Pact and Salem Falls, who once again finds himself representing a boy who desperately needs someone on his side; and Patrick Ducharme, the intrepid detective introduced in Perfect Match, whose best witness is the daughter of the superior court judge assigned to the case. As the story unfolds, layer after layer is peeled back to reveal some hard-hitting questions about the nature of justice, the balance of power and what it means to be different.
