June 6, 2011 / Leslie

Mailbox Monday ~ June 6th

Mailbox Monday was created by The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their home last week.

Mailbox Monday is currently on tour, hosted by a different blog each month. This month’s host is Bluestocking at The Bluestocking Guide.

This was a busy week for me. I received four books for review and one win.

From Simon & Schuster for review:

The Dovekeepers
by Alice Hoffman

In 70 CE, nine hundred Jews held out for months against armies of Romans on a mountain in the Judean desert, Masada. According to the ancient historian Josephus, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic historical event, Hoffman weaves a spellbinding tale of four extraordinary, bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path.

From HarperCollins for review:

Sanctus
by Simon Toyne

The certainties of the modern world are about to be blown apart by a three thousand year-old conspiracy nurtured by blood and lies …A man throws himself to his death from the oldest inhabited place on the face of the earth, a mountainous citadel in the historic Turkish city of Ruin. This is no ordinary suicide but a symbolic act. And thanks to the media, it is witnessed by the entire world.But few understand it.

From Doubleday for review and giveaway:

Prophecy
by S.J. Parris

S. J. Parris returns with the next Giordano Bruno mystery, set inside Queen Elizabeth’s palace and steeped in period atmospherics and the strange workings of the occult.

It is the year of the Great Conjunction, when the two most powerful planets, Jupiter and Saturn, align—an astrological phenomenon that occurs once every thousand years and heralds the death of one age and the dawn of another. The streets of London are abuzz with predictions of horrific events to come, possibly even the death of Queen Elizabeth.

From Doubleday for review:

The Devil All The Time
by Donald Ray Pollack

In The Devil All the Time, Donald Ray Pollock has written a novel that marries the twisted intensity of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers with the religious and Gothic overtones of Flannery O’Connor at her most haunting.

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s.

A win from Kay at My Random Acts of Reading. This is the first book in the Death on Demand series.

Death on Demand
by Carolyn Hart

The prime suspect in the murder of author Elliot Morgan, Annie Laurance Darling, owner of the Death on Demand mystery bookstore, embarks on an investigation in an attempt to clear her name.