| V. | Thomas Pynchon | Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede
jacket, sneaker and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through
Norfolk, Virginia. | Buy | |
| V.V.'s Eyes | Henry Sydnor Harrison | V. Vivian, M.D., by the paint upon his window, dwelt in the
Dabney House; Mr. Heth--pronounced Heath if you value his
wife's good opinion--dwelt in the House of his cognomen.
Between the two lay a scant mile of city streets. But then this
happened to be the particular mile which traversed, while of
course it could not span, the Great Gulf fixed. | Buy | |
| Valdez Is Coming | Elmore Leonard | Picture the ground rising on the east side of the pasture with scrub trees thick on the slope and pines higher up. | Buy | |
| Valentine Vox | Henry Cockton | In one of the most ancient and populous boroughs in the county of
Suffolk, there resided a genius named Valentine Vox, who, in
order to make a fortune with rapidity, tried everything, but
failed to succeed in anything, because he could stick long to
nothing. | Buy | |
| Valhalla Rising | Clive Eric Cussler | They moved through the morning mist like ghosts, silent and eerie
in phantom ships. Tall, serpentine prows arched gracefully on
bow and stern, crowned with intricately carved dragons, teeth
bared menacingly in a growl as if their eyes were piercing the
vapor in search of victims. Meant to incite fear into the crew's
enemies, the dragons were also believed to be protection against
the evil spirits that lived in the sea. | Buy | |
| Valley of the Dolls | Jacqueline Susann | The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. New York
was steaming--an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an
unseasonable hot spell. But she didn't mind the heat or the
littered midway called Times Square. She thought New York was
the most exciting city in the world. | Buy | |
| Vandover and the Brute | Frank Norris | It was always a matter of wonder to Vandover that he was able to
recall so little of his past life. | Buy | |
| Vanished | Fletcher Knebel | He was restless, curiously remote. | Buy | |
| Vanished | Danielle Steel | Charles Delauney limped only slightly as he walked up the steps
of Saint Patrick's Cathedral, as a bitter wind reached its icy
fingers deep into his collar. It was two weeks before Christmas,
and he had forgotten how cold it was in New York in December. It
was years since he'd been back to New York . . . years since he'd
seen his father. | Buy | |
| Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray | While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour | Buy | |
| Vein of Iron | Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow | Children were chasing an idiot boy up the village street to the
churchyard. | Buy | |
| Venus Envy | Rita Mae Brown | Dying's not so bad. At least I won't have to answer the telephone. | Buy | |
| Verdict in Blood | Gail Bowen | When the phone on my bedside table shrilled in the early hours of Labour Day morning, I had the receiver pressed to my ear before the second ring. | Buy | |
| Victorine | Frances Parkinson Keyes | "Well, thanks a million, Captain Bob. No one but you could have
ferreted this out for me." | Buy | |
| Victory | Joseph Conrad | There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very
close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the
reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black
diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is
a much less portable form of property. | Buy | |
| Villette | Charlotte Brontė | My godfather lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient
town of Bretton. | Buy | |
| Vineland | Thomas Pynchon | Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. | Buy | |
| Violets Are Blue | James B. Patterson | Nothing ever starts where we think it does. So of course this
doesn't begin with the vicious and cowardly murder of an FBI
agent and good friend named Betsey Cavalierre. I only thought
that it did. My mistake, and a really big and painful one. | Buy | |
| Virgin Soil | Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev | At one o'clock on a spring day of 1868, in Petersburg, a man of
twenty-seven, carelessly and shabbily dressed, was mounting the
back stairs of a five-storied house in Officers' Street.
Tramping heavily with his over-shoes trodden down at heel, and
slowly rolling his bulky, ungainly person as he moved, this man
at last reached the very top of the stairs. He stopped before a
half-open door, hanging off its hinges, and without ringing the
bell, merely giving a noisy sigh, he swung into a small, dark
ante-room. | Buy | |
| Virginia of Virginia | Amelie Rives (later Princess Amelie Chanler Troubetzkoy) | "It's a girl," said Roden, laying a wager with himself. "No; it's
a boy. Hanged if it isn't a girl!" He took his short brier-wood
pipe from his mouth, knocked out its contents against the side of
the wagon, and pocketed it. | Buy | |
| Voices of Hope | David Feintuch | In the soft summer evening, Senator Richard Boland paced the den of out Washington compound. | Buy | |
| Void Moon | Michael Connelly | All around them the cacophony of greed carried on in its most glorious and extreme excess. | Buy | |
