BookOpinion

Find out the hottest books selling right now at Buy.com with this quick run down of their current bestselling books:

Order any of these books and more from Buy.com. New Buy.com customers can also save on their next purchase with this coupon:

Offer: $5 off $100 or more in ALL Stores (New Customers Only)
Expiration: Sept. 30, 2007
Coupon: Use This Link.

Find out the hottest books selling right now at Buy.com with this quick run down of their current bestselling books:

Order any of these books and more from Buy.com. New Buy.com customers can also save on their next purchase with this coupon:

Offer: $5 off $100 or more in ALL Stores
Expiration: Aug. 31, 2007
Coupon: Use this Link.

Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore released an interview with Sara Paretsky, the author of the popular V.I. Warshawski mystery novels. The six-part interview is about an hour long and covers a wide variety of topics.

The bestselling author recently published a memoir, “Writing in an Age of Silence,” which covers her politics, activism and art.

“There were no expectations of me, and I think I became a writer by accident,” Paretsky says in the video interview below. “I certainly wrote my whole life a lot, both poetry and short stories as a way of exploring my emotions but I never thought, ‘Oh, I am a writer and I’m doing this.’ So, to be a professional writer I thought was a great accident that happened to me.”

She discusses living in Chicago and how the different parts of the city influenced her books. She also hits on her love for the Cubs, her various jobs outside of writing and a range of other areas.

“One of the fun things that I did in a lot of the earlier books was take a neighborhood for each of the books,” Paretsky says. “And one that I love was Burn Marks, which was the sixth book in the series, where I went down to the old industrial quarter along the shipping canal there. You can create characters that you just fall in love with. And I had someone in there — this woman who was just horrible, but I loved her she was just so bad. She sat on her porch with a fire extinguisher. She was a great heavy woman who was always being taunted by the neighborhood boys. It was a little bit of urban warfare between the two of them and she’d sit there with a fire extinguisher, and if they got too close she would spray at them. She was a dreadful person, but I loved her so much. She was just so real and so part of that community.”

Watch the six-part interview in its entirety with the links below:

Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 2
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 3
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 4
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 5
Sarah Paretsky Interview - Part 6

Find out the hottest books selling right now at Buy.com with this quick run down of their current bestselling books (Updated Aug. 14 with newest list): 

Order any of these books and more from Buy.com. New Buy.com customers can also save on their next purchase with this coupon:

Offer: $5 off $100 or more in ALL Stores
Expiration: Aug. 31, 2007
Coupon: Use this Link.

After hours of reading, staying up late, and more reading, Harry Potter fans are hitting the net with reviews of the book. BookOpinion has compiled a range of these reviews. If you don’t want to hear anything about the plot, then don’t listen to these because they are filled with spoilers.

First, however, we start with J.K. Rowling reading the first chapter:

Watch and listen to Part 2 here.

We start of the reviews with this superbly done critique:

Want to talk about the first 10 Chapters only:

In response to another review listed below:

Turn up the volume for this listen (but remember to turn it down for then next one)

More full reviews:

Watch and listen to Part 2 of this review.

Want more:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=4QaDp2d_ws4
http://youtube.com/watch?v=jm9_zllLgyk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Iz8jxhpGi3w
http://youtube.com/watch?v=S3747oRA8cg (1 of 3)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=1sC7b4jXR4A (2 of 3)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=yOMGzkM9ugE (3 of 3)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=e_KT9QNOpto
http://youtube.com/watch?v=wExpDMUxTHY
http://youtube.com/watch?v=s0YUIiapklU

“The Secret Servant” by Daniel Silva is due in bookstores in a few days. Although the book does not come out until July 24, it is currently No. 12 on Amazon’s list of new releases. BookOpinion has compiled reviews, an excerpt from the novel and a recent six-part interview with Silva.

This is Silva’s seventh novel to feature Gabriel Allon, a wayward son of Israeli intelligence.

“Why it’s hot: Allon is Israel’s Jack Bauer,” writes USA Today. “In true Bauer fashion, shootouts, kidnappings and international terror plots follow him wherever he goes.”

Publisher’s Weekly summarizes the plot of The Secret Servant: “When Solomon Rosner, a professor in Amsterdam who’s also a secret Israeli asset, is assassinated for his strident reports and articles detailing the dangers of militant Islam within the Netherlands, Gabriel gets the job to clean out the professor’s files. In Amsterdam, the Israeli agent and his old partner, Eli Lavon, unearth a plot that leads to the kidnapping by Islamic extremists of the daughter of the U.S. ambassador in London. While most intelligence agencies consider Gabriel persona non grata because of his unorthodox methods and the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake, he once again proves invaluable as he and his stalwart team hunt down some of Israel’s—and the world’s—most violent enemies.”

We have also found a recent multi-part interview with the Daniel Silva. It’s lengthy, but in-depth.

Daniel Silva Interview - Part 2
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 3
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 4
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 5
Daniel Silva Interview - Part 6

The following is an excerpt from Silva’s “The Secret Servant.”

1
Amsterdam

It was Professor Solomon Rosner who sounded the first alarm, though his name would never be linked to the affair except in the secure rooms of a drab office building in downtown Tel Aviv. Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli intelligence, would later observe that Rosner was the first asset in the annals of Office history to have proven more useful to them dead than alive. Those who overheard the remark found it uncharacteristically callous but in keeping with the bleak mood that by then had settled over them all.

The backdrop for Rosner’s demise was not Israel, where violent death occurs all too frequently, but the normally tranquil quarter of Amsterdam known as the Old Side. The date was the first Friday in December, and the weather was more suited to early spring than the last days of autumn. It was a day to engage in what the Dutch so fondly refer to as gezelligheid, the pursuit of small pleasures: an aimless stroll through the flower stalls of the Bloemenmarkt, a lager or two in a good bar in the Rembrandtplein, or, for those so inclined, a bit of fine cannabis in the brown coffeehouses of the Haarlemmerstraat. Leave the fretting and the fighting to the hated Americans, stately old Amsterdam murmured that golden late-autumn afternoon. Today we give thanks for having been born blameless and Dutch.

Solomon Rosner did not share the sentiments of his countrymen, but then he seldom did. Though he earned a living as a professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam, it was Rosner’s Center for European Security Studies that occupied the lion’s share of his time. His legion of detractors saw evidence of deception in the name, for Rosner served not only as the center’s director but was its only scholar in residence. Despite those obvious shortcomings, the center had managed to produce a steady stream of authoritative reports and articles detailing the threat posed to the Netherlands by the rise of militant Islam within its borders. Rosner’s last book, The Islamic Conquest of the West, had argued that Holland was now under a sustained and systematic assault by jihadist Islam. The goal of this assault, he maintained, was to colonize the Netherlands and turn it into a majority Muslim state, where, in the not-too-distant future, Islamic law, or sharia, would reign supreme. The terrorists and the colonizers were two sides of the same coin, he warned, and unless the government took immediate and drastic action, everything the freethinking Dutch held dear would soon be swept away.

The Dutch literary press had been predictably appalled. Hysteria, said one reviewer. Racist claptrap, said another. More than one took pains to note that the views expressed in the book were all the more odious given the fact that Rosner’s grandparents had been rounded up with a hundred thousand other Dutch Jews and sent off to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. All agreed that what the situation required was not hateful rhetoric like Rosner’s but tolerance and dialogue. Rosner stood steadfast in the face of the withering criticism, adopting what one commentator described as the posture of a man with his finger wedged firmly in the dike. Tolerance and dialogue by all means, Rosner responded, but not capitulation. “We Dutch need to put down our Heinekens and hash pipes and wake up,” he snapped during an interview on Dutch television. “Otherwise, we’re going to lose our country.”

The book and surrounding controversy had made Rosner the most vilified and, in some quarters, celebrated man in the country. It had also placed him squarely in the sights of Holland’s homegrown Islamic extremists. Jihadist websites, which Rosner monitored more closely than even the Dutch police, burned with sacred rage over the book, and more than one forecast his imminent execution. An imam in the neighborhood known as the Oud West instructed his flock that “Rosner the Jew must be dealt with harshly” and pleaded for a martyr to step forward and do the job. The feckless Dutch interior minister responded by proposing that Rosner go into hiding, an idea Rosner vigorously refused. He then supplied the minister with a list of ten radicals he regarded as potential assassins. The minister accepted the list without question, for he knew that Rosner’s sources inside Holland’s extremist fringe were in most cases far better than those of the Dutch security services.
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Dean Koontz’s latest novel, “The Good Guy,” has hit bookstores and is currently listed as No. 42 on Amazon’s bestseller list.

The author also held a contest for fans to come up with a trailer for the book. BookOpinion has listed the winner and a runner up below as well as the first chapter of the book.

The tension mounts in The Good Guy when Koontz sticks an everyman into extraordinary circumstances. Sitting at a bar, Tim Carrier is mistaken for a hitman, given an envelope with $10,000 cash and told who to kill. The real hitman arrives and Carrier tries to pay him off not to the job. Carrier than gets sucked into more trouble when he tries to save the intended victim.

Publishers Weekly writes, “Bestseller Koontz (The Husband) delivers a thriller so compelling many readers will race through the book in one sitting.”

“For most of its length, this is white-knuckle suspense as gripping as any Koontz has ever written,” writes Booklist, “and the principals all have intriguing backstories that are eventually, with the frustrating exception of the killer’s, fully disclosed. Yet the climax and the denouement seem half-baked and perfunctory. This is, however, as politically passionate and common-guy witty as his other, better recent books.”

Here is the winner of The Good Guy trailer contest:

Here is a runner up:

Koontz released the first chapter of The Good Guy:

Sometimes a mayfly skates across a pond, leaving a brief wake as thin as spider silk, and by staying low avoids those birds and bats that feed in flight.
At six feet three, weighing two hundred ten pounds, with big hands and bigger feet, Timothy Carrier could not maintain a profile as low as that of a skating mayfly, but he tried.
Shod in heavy work boots, with a John Wayne walk that came naturally to him and that he could not change, he nevertheless entered the Lamplighter Tavern and proceeded to the farther end of the room without drawing attention to himself. None of the three men near the door, at the short length of the L-shaped bar, glanced at him. Neither did the couples in two of the booths.
When he sat on the end stool, in shadows beyond the last of the downlights that polished the molasses-colored mahogany bar, he sighed with contentment. From the perspective of the front door, he was the smallest man in the room.
If the forward end of the Lamplighter was the driver’s deck of the locomotive, this was the caboose. Those who chose to sit here on a slow Monday evening would most likely be quiet company.
Liam Rooney–who was the owner and, tonight, the only barkeep– drew a draft beer from the tap and put it in front of Tim.
“Some night you’ll walk in here with a date,” Rooney said, “and the shock will kill me.”
“Why would I bring a date to this dump?”
“What else do you know but this dump?”
“I’ve also got a favorite doughnut shop.”
“Yeah. After the two of you scarf down a dozen glazed, you could take her to a big expensive restaurant in Newport Beach, sit on the curb, and watch the valets park all the fancy cars.”
Tim sipped his beer, and Rooney wiped the bar though it was clean, and Tim said, “You got lucky, finding Michelle. They don’t make them like her anymore.”
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