Robin Sharma

The Last Testament
by Sam Bourne

April 2003: an Iraqi boy loots an ancient clay tablet from a long-forgotten vault in the Baghdad Museum of Antiquities.

Years later, at a rally for the signing of a historic deal between Israel and the Palestinians, a suspected assassin pushes through the crowd toward the Israeli prime minister. Bodyguards shoot the man dead. But in his hand there is no gun-only a blood-stained note.

A series of seemingly random revenge killings follows and tensions boil over. Washington calls in star peace-negotiator Maggie Costello. With her relationship in trouble and old sins to atone for, Maggie finds herself in an impossible situation, especially when she discovers the murders are not random. Someone is killing archaeologists and historians-those who know the buried secrets of the ancient past.

Menaced on all sides by violent extremists, Costello is plunged into a mystery rooted in the last unsolved riddle of the Bible. The truth could end hostilities-or spark the war to end all wars.

Motor Mouth
by Janet Evanovich

It's the last race of the season, and the wheels are smoking and the temperature is rising at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Alexandra Barnaby is NASCAR driver Sam Hooker's raceday spotter, his eye-in-the-sky, telling Hooker when to pass and when to get off the gas. From her vantage point high above the grandstand she's also seeing things going on in the infield that will change her life. Things that will lead to a stolen racecar hauler, a kidnapped Saint Bernard, a bizarre murder, some restless nights under the covers with Hooker, and a reunion with super cigar roller Rosa Florez and the queen of wholesale fruit Felicia Ibarra.

The Unknown Errors of Our Lives
by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

In tales set in India and the United States, Divakaruni illuminates the transformations of personal landscapes, real and imagined, brought about by the choices men and women make at every stage of their lives.

"The Love of a Good Man" tells of an Indian woman happily settled in the United States who must confront the past when her long-estranged father begs to meet his only grandson. In "Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter," which was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1999 and short-listed for a 1999 O. Henry Award, a widow, inadvertently eavesdropping, discovers that her cherished, old-fashioned ways are an embarrassment to her daughter-in-law. A young American woman joins a pilgrimage of women in Kashmir and, in the land of her ancestors, comes to view herself and her family in a new light in "The Lives of Strangers," Two women, uprooted from their native land by violence and deception, find unexpected comfort and hope in each other in "The Blooming Season for Cacti." And in the title story, a young woman turns to her painting and the wisdom of her grandmother for the strength to accept ther fiance's past when it arrives on her doorstep.

Whether Divakaruni is writing about the adjustments of immigrants to a foreign land or the accommodations families make to the disruptive differences between generations, she poignantly portrays the eternal struggle to find a balance between the pull of home and the alluring promise of change.