Out

Out
Natsuo Kirino
ISBN 1400078377

With volcanic urgency, Kirino's story erupts onto the page with a searing heat, flowing like lava to a remarkable finish. Facing the daily burdens of slavish work conditions, stale marriages, and a society refusing to show them a proper respect, the women on the nightshift at a suburban Tokyo factory are all looking for one thing -- a way out. When pretty young Yayoi takes a beating from her deadbeat husband, her coworkers do little more than help their friend keep pace with the line. But a new kind of sisterhood emerges when Yayoi requires assistance in disposing of her dead husband's body.

Masako Katori emerges as a tenaciously determined leader in the dangerous cover-up, and with the others, provides readers with a disturbing vision of the lengths a human mind will travel in its quest for freedom. For Kirino's women aren't ruthless murderers; they're hardworking housewives with dignity, desperate for respect.

White Heat

White Heat
M.J. McGrath
ISBN 023074818X

Nothing on the tundra rotted ...The whole history of human settlement lay exposed there, under that big northern sky. There was nowhere here for bones to hide. On Craig Island, a vast landscape of ice north of the Arctic Circle, three travellers are hunting duck. Among them is expert Inuit hunter and guide, Edie Kiglatuk; a woman born of this harsh, beautiful terrain. The two men are tourists, experiencing Arctic life in the raw, but when one of the men is shot dead in mysterious circumstances, the local Council of Elders in the tiny settlement of Autisaq is keen to dismiss it as an accident. Then two adventurers arrive in Autisaq hoping to search for the remains of the legendary Victorian explorer Sir James Fairfax. The men hire Edie - whose ancestor Welatok guided Fairfax - along with Edie's stepson Joe, and two parties set off in different directions. Four days later, Joe returns to Autisaq frostbitten, hypothermic and disoriented, to report his man missing. And when things take an even darker turn, Edie finds herself heartbroken, and facing the greatest challenge of her life..