SEDUCING AN ANGEL by Mary Balogh 



Saga: 

Stephen Huxtable is willing to risk his heart and his reputation to enter a scandalous liaison with an infamous beauty intent on seduction. But, when passion turns the tables on both, who can say who has seduced whom He must be wealthy, well-born and want her more than he wants any other womanthose are the conditions that must be met by the man Cassandra Belmont chooses as her lover. Marriage is out of the question for her, a destitute widow who stands accused of murdering her husband and must now barter her beauty to survive. With seduction in mind, she sets her sights on Stephen, the irresistible Earl of Merton and Londons most eligible bachelor. And his first glimpse of the mysterious, alluring Lady Paget aka Cassandra convinces him that he has found the ideal woman to bed. There is only one caveat. This relationship , fuelled by mutual pleasure, must be on his terms. As the two warily circle each other in a sensual dance of attack and retreat, a single night of passion alters all rules. Cassandra is in danger of losing the one thing she vowed never to give. And Stephen wont rest until she surrenders allnot as his mistressbut as his lover, his wife. 

(Delacorte, equivalent of $18.95) 



DAEMON by Daniel Suarez 



Techno-Thriller : 

A high-tech , adrenaline-laced thriller for the information age, collapsing the boundaries between reality and cyberspace. Just right for fans of Michael Crichton and William Gibson! Matthew Sobol, programming genius, founder of CyberStorm Entertainment and one of the richest and most powerful of Silicon Valleys elite, is dead. But his final creation lives on to execute his last will. At the moment of Matthews death, computer programs around the world burst into life, creating an entity known as the Daemon, which infiltrates the hyper-connected society to gather secrets and steal identities. Soon it has the power to change lives as well as take them... Serve the Daemon and get rewarded or defy it and get eliminated. Recruiting its acolytes from the dispossessed and disaffected, Daemon secures a stranglehold on the worlds most precious commodity: Information. And once you control information, how tough is it to remake the world 

(Quercus, Rs 499) 



THE KINDLY ONES by Jonathan Littell 



Historical fiction: 

A Faustian tale with a terrifying twist, this is the fictional memoir of Dr Max Aue, a former SS intelligence officer, who has reinvented himself as a family man and owner of a lace factory in post-War France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature and classical music. But hes also a cold-blooded assassin and a consummate bureaucrat, who speaks out now not to self-justify but to set the record straight. He looks back at his life with cooleyed precisionfrom a disrupted childhood and a turning point in his student days to his role as observer and then participant in Nazi atrocities on the Eastern Front. Hes there at the siege of Stalingrad, at the death camps and finally caught up in the rout of the Nazis and the nightmarish fall of Berlin. Although Max is a totally imagined character, his world is peopled by real historical figures such as Eichmann, Himmler, Gring and Hitler himself. 

(Chatto & Windus, Rs 550) 



THE KEEPER by Natasha Mostert 



Thriller: 

After the gothic Season Of The Witch, Natasha churns out The Keeper, set in the present but using secrets of the past to create a psychological thriller... Mia has an ancient secret. Her mother was a keeper, as was her grandmother. Both women were warriors, healers and protectors. When a mysterious man enters her life, Mia puts this legacy to test. Adrian is a brilliant scientistand a killer. With the aid of an ancient Chinese text, he masters the art of capturing his opponents chithe life force that flows through the body. Mia is drawn to his dark genius. But when he targets the man with whom shes falling in love, she must choose between them. Its a fight to the death in which love is both the greatest weaknessand the greatest prize. 

(Bantam, Rs 595)