Death Of A Pilgrim

1905. A young man called James Delaney is dying in a New York hospital. The doctors and the nuns cannot save him. When his life is spared his tycoon father takes it as a miracle and organizes a family pilgrimage to the resting place of the boy's name saint, Saint James the Greater in Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the greatest pilgrimage site of the Middle Ages. The first modern-day pilgrim is killed in Le Puy en Velay in Southern France and Powerscourt is summoned to investigate. The pilgrims' progress across the holy sites is punctuated by further bizarre deaths. After his own life is put in terrible danger Powerscourt finally solves the murders on the day of the Bull Run at Pamplona in Southern Spain where young men race down the cobbled streets pursued by the bulls. The careless are gored to death, but it is up to Powerscourt to beware of the horns and other hidden dangers to finally resolve the Deaths of the Pilgrims.

In a seedy hotel near Ground Zero, a woman lies face down in a pool of acid, features melted of her face, teeth missing, fingerprints gone. The room has been sprayed down with DNA-eradicating antiseptic spray. Pilgrim, the code name for a legendary, world-class segret agent, quickly realizes that all of the murderer's techniques were pulled directly from his own book, a cult classic of forensic science written under a pen name.

Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.” An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.” More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

Peace Pilgrim was born Mildred Lisette Norman to Ernest and Josephine Norman in 1908 on a poultry farm in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey. Her father was a carpenter, and her mother was a tailor. Mildred Lisette Norman adopted the name "Peace Pilgrim" in 1953 in Pasadena, California, and walked across the United States for 28 years. 'Peace Pilgrim: her life and work in her own words' was compiled by some of her friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1982. Composed mainly in her own words except for the reproduced newspaper articles and the introduction. There are comments by people she met while on her 28 year pilgrimage for peace.

Two years previously Richard's quick thinking and brave action had prevented a bomb blast which would have killed schoolchildren and politicians. A second blast seriously injured him and caused the death of his wife. Unable, physically and emotionally to continue his police career he retreated to a cottage in rural Galicia and opened up a small gallery to sell his watercolour paintings, putting his past life firmly behind him. One morning, he finds an English pilgrim murdered in front of his gallery. Once her identity becomes known he is forced to face his past and the truth he has been running from. To solve the murder Richard teams up with Miguel, a Spanish detective and is thrust into the complex world of international policing. They find themselves in a race to safeguard democracy from those who will go to any lengths to obtain power.