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In this newsletter, you will find books releasing the weeks of August 13th and August 20th that we think will be of interest to Bookreporter.com readers, along with Bonus News, where we call out a contest, feature or review that we want to let you know about so you have it on your radar.
This week, we are calling attention to our review of MAKE ME EVEN AND I'LL NEVER GAMBLE AGAIN and our interview with its author, Jerrold Fine. This debut novel by a hedge fund pioneer is currently our Fiction Author Spotlight title and will be a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick.
We also have two new contests to tell you about on ReadingGroupGuides.com.
In SUNBURN, a stand-alone novel of psychological suspense from Laura Lippman, two people are locked in a passionate yet uncompromising game of cat and mouse. But instead of rules, this game has dark secrets, forbidden desires, inevitable betrayals --- and cold-blooded murder. We are giving three groups the chance to win 12 copies of the book, which is now available in paperback, in our special contest. Enter here by Monday, September 10th at noon ET.
Also, we are celebrating the release of THE DAISY CHILDREN --- Sofia Grant’s new novel about a young woman who peels back the layers of her family’s history and discovers a tragedy in the past that explains so much of the present --- with a special contest that will give three groups an opportunity to win 12 copies of the book, which is now in stores. Enter here by Monday, September 10th at noon ET.
For those of you who are doing online shopping, if you use the store links below, Bookreporter.com gets a small affiliate fee on your purchases. We would appreciate your considering this.
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound
This Week's Bonus News: Our Review of
MAKE ME EVEN AND I'LL NEVER GAMBLE AGAIN,
a Fiction Author Spotlight Title,
and Our Interview with Jerrold Fine
MAKE ME EVEN AND I'LL NEVER GAMBLE AGAIN by Jerrold Fine (Fiction)
Rogers Stout has the gambler’s gifts --- a titanic brain, an uncanny ability to read people, and a risk-taker’s daring. As an apathetic high school student who loves baseball but lacks a 90-mph fastball, he knows that the game does not begin until the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. But his life needs direction. Everything changes the summer he is invited into the boisterous environment of an investment bank’s trading room, and to a gambling hall dive where he immediately wins big at poker, capturing the attention of his co-workers with his card-playing skills.
- Click here to read more about the book.
- Click here to read an excerpt.
- Click here for the discussion guide.
- Click here to see advance readers' comments.
- Click here to read more in our Fiction Author Spotlight.
Read our review of the book and interview with the author.
MAKE ME EVEN AND I'LL NEVER GAMBLE AGAIN
will be a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick.
Don’t miss Carol Fitzgerald's commentary in the August 24th
Bookreporter.com Weekly Update newsletter.
On Sale the Week of August 13th in Hardcover
August 13th
TEXAS RANGER by James Patterson and Andrew Bourelle (Western/Thriller)
Across the ranchlands and cities of his home state, Rory Yates' discipline and law-enforcement skills have carried him far: from local highway patrolman to the honorable rank of Texas Ranger. He arrives in his hometown to find a horrifying crime scene and a scathing accusation: he is named a suspect in the murder of his ex-wife, Anne, a devoted teacher whose only controversial act was ending her marriage to a Ranger. In search of the killer, Yates plunges into the inferno of the most twisted and violent minds he's ever encountered, vowing to never surrender. That code just might bring him out alive.
Little, Brown and Company | 9780316556668
August 14th
BALL LIGHTNING written by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen (Science Fiction/Adventure)
When Chen’s parents are incinerated before his eyes by a blast of ball lightning, he devotes his life to cracking the secret of this mysterious natural phenomenon. His search takes him to stormy mountaintops, an experimental military weapons lab, and an old Soviet science station. The more he learns, the more he comes to realize that ball lightning is just the tip of an entirely new frontier. While Chen’s quest for answers gives purpose to his lonely life, it also pits him against soldiers and scientists with motives of their own: a beautiful army major with an obsession with dangerous weaponry, and a physicist who has no place for ethical considerations in his single-minded pursuit of knowledge.
Tor Books | 9780765394071
THE BREAKERS: A Sharon McCone Mystery by Marcia Muller (Mystery)
On a foggy summer morning, private investigator Sharon McCone receives a call from her former neighbors, the Curleys. Their usually dependable daughter, Chelle, hasn't been answering their calls for weeks. Would Sharon check on her? Sharon arranges to visit the building Chelle had been living in and rehabbing in southwest San Francisco. Lurking behind a divider screen is a ghastly art gallery: portraits and caricatures of mass murderers, long ago and recent. What, an alarmed Sharon wonders, was Chelle doing in this chamber of horrors? And where is she now?
Grand Central Publishing | 9781455538935
CHERRY by Nico Walker (Fiction)
Cleveland, 2003. A young man is just a college freshman when he meets Emily. They share a passion for Edward Albee and Ecstasy, and fall hard and fast in love. But soon Emily has to move home to Elba, New York, and he flunks out of school and joins the Army. Desperate to keep their relationship alive, they marry before he ships out to Iraq. But as an Army medic, he is unprepared for the grisly reality that awaits him. He and Emily try to make their long-distance marriage work, but when he returns from Iraq, his PTSD is profound. The opioid crisis is beginning to swallow up the Midwest. Soon he is hooked on heroin, and so is Emily. With their money drying up, he turns to the one thing he thinks he could be really good at --- robbing banks.
Knopf | 9780525520139
FEARED by Lisa Scottoline (Legal Thriller)
When three men announce that they are suing the Rosato & DiNunzio law firm for reverse sex discrimination --- claiming that they were not hired because they were men --- Mary DiNunzio and Bennie Rosato are outraged. To make matters worse, their one male employee, John Foxman, intends to resign, claiming that there is some truth to this case. The plaintiffs’ lawyer is Nick Machiavelli, who already has lost to Mary once and is now back with a vengeance --- determined not only to win, but to destroy the firm. It soon becomes clear that Machiavelli will do anything in his power to achieve his end…even after the case turns deadly.
St. Martin's Press | 9781250099594
FLIGHTS written by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft (Fiction/Short Stories)
A 17th-century Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. FLIGHTS explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going?
Riverhead Books | 9780525534198
HIS FAVORITES by Kate Walbert (Fiction)
They were on a lark, three teenage girls speeding across the greens at night on a “borrowed” golf cart, drunk. The cart crashes, and one of the girls lands violently in the rough, killed instantly. The driver, Jo, flees the hometown that has turned against her and enrolls at a prestigious boarding school. Her past weighs on her. She is responsible for the death of her best friend. She has tipped her parents’ rocky marriage into demise. She is ready to begin again, far away from the accident.
Scribner | 9781476799391
LAST LOOKS by Howard Michael Gould (Thriller)
Former detective Charlie Waldo now lives in solitude deep in the woods. He has left behind his career and his girlfriend, Lorena, to pay self-imposed penance for an awful misstep on an old murder case. But the old ghosts are about to come roaring back. Alastair Pinch is a onetime Royal Shakespeare Company thespian who now slums it as the "wise" Southern judge on a tacky network show. He's absurdly rich, often belligerent and typically drunk --- a damning combination when Alastair's wife is found dead on their living room floor and he can't remember what happened. Waldo's old flame Lorena, hiding peril of her own, draws him toward the case, and Alastair's greedy network convinces Waldo to take it on.
Dutton | 9781524742492
THE LINE THAT HELD US by David Joy (Fiction)
When Darl Moody went hunting after a monster buck he's chased for years, he never expected he'd accidentally shoot a man digging ginseng. Worse yet, he's killed a Brewer, a family notorious for vengeance and violence. With nowhere to turn, Darl calls on the help of the only man he knows will answer: his best friend, Calvin Hooper. But when Dwayne Brewer comes looking for his missing brother and stumbles onto a blood trail leading straight back to Darl and Calvin, a nightmare of revenge rips apart their world.
G.P. Putnam's Sons | 9780399574221
MAKE ME EVEN AND I'LL NEVER GAMBLE AGAIN by Jerrold Fine (Fiction)
Rogers Stout has the gambler’s gifts --- a titanic brain, an uncanny ability to read people, and a risk-taker’s daring. As an apathetic high school student who loves baseball but lacks a 90-mph fastball, he knows that the game does not begin until the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand. But his life needs direction. Everything changes the summer he is invited into the boisterous environment of an investment bank’s trading room, and to a gambling hall dive where he immediately wins big at poker, capturing the attention of his co-workers with his card-playing skills.
RosettaBooks | 9781948122054
NIGHT SOIL by Dale Peck (Fiction)
The art world falls in love with Dixie Stammers when it is discovered that not only are her pots mechanically perfect spheres, they are also identical, despite the fact that they are made entirely by hand. Her teenage son, Judas, is pathologically shy, and retreats into a world of anonymous sexual encounters at a roadside rest area. What he really longs for, though, is a relationship with one of the boys at the private school he attends. The Academy was founded by Judas’ ancestral grandfather, a 19th-century coal magnate. Driven by his mother’s secretive nature, Judas begins digging into his family’s history, and the Academy’s, until he unearths a series of secrets that cause him to question everything he thought he knew about his world.
Soho Press | 9781616957803
OUR HOMESICK SONGS by Emma Hooper (Fiction)
The Connor family is one of the few that is still left in their idyllic fishing village, Big Running. After the fish mysteriously disappeared, most families had no choice but to relocate and find work elsewhere. Aidan and Martha Connor now spend alternate months of the year working at an energy site up north to support their children, Cora and Finn. But soon the family fears they’ll have to leave Big Running for good. And as the months go on, plagued by romantic temptations new and old, the emotional distance between the once blissful Aidan and Martha only widens. Between his accordion lessons and reading up on Big Running’s local flora and fauna, 11-year-old Finn Connor develops an obsession with solving the mystery of the missing fish.
Simon & Schuster | 9781501124488
A RIVER OF STARS by Vanessa Hua (Fiction)
Holed up with other mothers-to-be in a secret maternity home in Los Angeles, Scarlett Chen is far from her native China, where she worked in a factory and fell in love with the owner, Boss Yeung. Now she’s carrying his baby. Already married with three daughters, Boss Yeung is overjoyed because the doctors have confirmed that he will finally have the son he has always wanted. To ensure that his child has every advantage, Boss Yeung has shipped Scarlett off to give birth on American soil. Then a new sonogram of Scarlett’s baby reveals the unexpected. Panicked, she escapes by hijacking a van --- only to discover that she has a stowaway: her housemate Daisy, who intends to track down the father of her child.
Ballantine Books | 9780399178788
SCARFACE AND THE UNTOUCHABLE: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (True Crime)
A Mystery Writers of America “Grand Master” --- author of the gangster classic ROAD TO PERDITION, long-time "Dick Tracy" writer and multiple Shamus Award winner --- teams up with an acclaimed rising young historian in this riveting, myth-shattering dual portrait of Al Capone, America’s most notorious gangster, and Eliot Ness, the legendary Prohibition agent whose extraordinary investigative work crippled his organization.
William Morrow | 9780062441942
THE SEA QUEEN by Linnea Hartsuyker (Historical Fantasy)
Six years after THE HALF-DROWNED KING, Ragnvald Eysteinsson is now king of Sogn, but fighting battles for King Harald keeps him away from home. Ragnvald’s sister, Svanhild, has found the freedom and adventure she craves at the side of the rebel explorer Solvi Hunthiofsson, though not without a cost. As a growing rebellion unites King Harald’s enemies, Ragnvald suspects that some Norse nobles are not loyal to Harald’s dream of a unified Norway. He sets a plan in motion to defeat all of his enemies and bring his sister back to his side. Svanhild finds herself with no easy decisions, and no choices that will leave her truly free. Their actions will hold irrevocable repercussions for the fates of those they love and for Norway itself.
Harper | 9780062563736
THE SHAKESPEARE REQUIREMENT by Julie Schumacher (Fiction/Satire)
Now is the fall of his discontent, as Jason Fitger, newly appointed chair of the English Department of Payne University, takes arms against a sea of troubles, personal and institutional. His ex-wife is sleeping with the dean who must approve whatever modest initiatives he undertakes. The fearsome department secretary Fran clearly runs the show (when not taking in rescue parrots and dogs) and holds plenty of secrets she's not sharing. The lavishly funded Econ Department keeps siphoning off English's meager resources and has taken aim at its remaining office space. And Fitger's attempt to get a mossbacked and antediluvian Shakespeare scholar to retire backfires spectacularly when the press concludes that the Bard is being kicked to the curricular curb.
Doubleday | 9780385542340
SWEET LITTLE LIES by Caz Frear (Mystery)
Cat Kinsella, a Detective Constable with the Metropolitan Police Force, is called to the scene of a murder, where young housewife Alice Lapaine has been found strangled. Cat and her team immediately suspect Alice’s husband, until she receives a mysterious phone call that links the victim to Maryanne Doyle, a teenage girl who went missing in Ireland 18 years earlier. The call raises uneasy memories for Cat --- her family met Maryanne while on holiday, right before she vanished. Though she was only a child, Cat knew that her father wasn’t telling the truth when he denied knowing anything about Maryanne or her disappearance. Did he do something to the teenage girl all those years ago? Could he have harmed Alice now?
Harper | 9780062823199
WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Delia Owens (Historical Fiction)
For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life --- until the unthinkable happens.
G.P. Putnam's Sons | 9780735219090
On Sale the Week of August 13th in Paperback
August 14th
BIBLIOMYSTERIES: Stories of Crime in the World of Books and Bookstores edited by Otto Penzler (Mystery/Short Stories)
If you open your dictionary, you will discover that there is no such word as “bibliomystery.” However, most mystery readers know that the word refers to a mystery story that involves the world of books: a bookshop, a rare volume, a library, a collector or a bookseller. The stories in this unique collection were commissioned by the Mysterious Bookshop and were written by some of the mystery genre’s most distinguished authors --- tough guys like Ken Bruen, Reed Farrel Coleman, Loren D. Estleman, and Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins; bestsellers like Nelson DeMille, Anne Perry and Jeffery Deaver; and Edgar winners such as C. J. Box, Thomas H. Cook and Laura Lippman.
Pegasus Books | 9781681777832
THE BLINDS by Adam Sternbergh (Thriller)
Imagine a place populated by criminals --- people plucked from their lives, with their memories altered, who’ve been granted new identities and a second chance. Welcome to The Blinds, a dusty town in rural Texas populated by misfits who don’t know if they’ve perpetrated a crime or just witnessed one. What’s clear to them is that if they leave, they will end up dead. For eight years, Sheriff Calvin Cooper has kept an uneasy peace --- but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town’s residents revolt. Cooper has his own secrets to protect, so when his new deputy starts digging, he needs to keep one step ahead of her --- and the mysterious outsiders who threaten to tear the whole place down.
Ecco | 9780062661357
GOING DEEP: John Philip Holland and the Invention of the Attack Submarine by Lawrence Goldstone (History)
Like Henry Ford and the Wright brothers, John Philip Holland was completely self-taught, a brilliant man raised in humble circumstances, earning his living as a schoolteacher and choirmaster. But all the while he was obsessed with creating a machine that could successfully cruise beneath the waves. His struggle to unlock the mystery behind controlled undersea navigation would take three decades. But his indestructible belief in himself and his ideas led him to finally succeed where so many others had failed. GOING DEEP is a vivid chronicle of the fierce battles not only under the water, but also in the back rooms of Wall Street and the committee rooms of Congress.
Pegasus Books | 9781681777818
THE HIDDEN LIGHT OF NORTHERN FIRES by Daren Wang (Historical Fiction)
Mary Willis has always been an outcast, an abolitionist in a town of bounty hunters and anti-Union farmers. After college, she dreams of exploring the country, but is obligated to take over the household duties and management of her family’s farm. Helping runaways is the only thing that makes her life in Town Line bearable. When escaped slave Joe Bell collapses in her father’s barn, Mary is determined to help him cross to freedom in nearby Canada. But the wounded fugitive is haunted by his vengeful owner, and his sister, who is still trapped as a slave in the South. Rebels and soldiers from both sides bring intrigue and violence of the brutal war to the town and the farm, threatening to destroy all that Mary loves.
Picador | 9781250166029
THE HIDDEN LIVES OF TUDOR WOMEN: A Social History by Elizabeth Norton (History)
The Tudor period conjures up images of queens and noblewomen in elaborate court dress; of palace intrigue and dramatic politics. But if you were a woman, it was also a time when death during childbirth was rife; when marriage was usually a legal contract, and the education you could hope to receive was minimal at best. Yet the Tudor century was also dominated by powerful and dynamic women in a way that no era had been before. Historian Elizabeth Norton explores the life cycle of the Tudor woman through the diverging examples of women such as Elizabeth Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister; Mary Howard, widowed but influential at court; and Elizabeth Boleyn, mother of a controversial queen.
Pegasus Books | 9781681778044
THE HOT ONE: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex, and Murder by Carolyn Murnick (Memoir)
As girls growing up in rural New Jersey in the late 1980s, Ashley and Carolyn had everything in common. Only when the girls attended different high schools did they begin to grow apart. After high school, Carolyn entered college in New York City and Ashley ended up in Los Angeles, where she quit school to work as a stripper and an escort. The last time Ashley visited New York, Carolyn was shocked by how the two friends had grown apart. One year later, Ashley was stabbed to death in her Hollywood home. The man who may have murdered Ashley --- an alleged serial killer --- now faces trial in Los Angeles. Carolyn Murnick traveled across the country to cover the case and learn more about her magnetic and tragic friend.
Simon & Schuster | 9781451625820
LONE WOLF IN JERUSALEM by Ehud Diskin (Historical Thriller)
Paperback Original
During World War II, after losing his family to Hitler's ''final solution,'' young David Gabinsky leads a courageous group of Jewish resistance fighters against the Nazis. When Germany is defeated, he journeys to Jerusalem, to find a new battle brewing. British occupation forces are entrenched in Israel, blocking Holocaust survivors from immigrating to their Jewish homeland. Determined to help his people find freedom, David uses his guerilla skills to single-handedly wreak havoc on the British. As he begins his dangerous quest, David meets and falls in love with the beautiful Shoshana, a young Holocaust survivor whose spirit may have gotten damaged beyond repair.
Greenleaf Book Group | 9781626345164
THE MOUNTAIN: Stories by Paul Yoon (Fiction/Short Stories)
Six thematically linked stories take place across several continents and time periods, populated with characters who are connected by their traumatic pasts, newly vagrant lives, and quests for solace in their futures. Though they exist in their own distinct worlds, they are united by the struggle to reconcile their traumatic pasts in the wake of violence. A morphine-addicted nurse wanders through the decimated French countryside in search of purpose; a dissatisfied wife sporadically takes a train across Spain with a much younger man in the wake of a building explosion; a lost young woman emigrates from Korea to Shanghai, where she aimlessly works in a camera sweat shop, trying fruitlessly to outrun the ghosts of her past.
Simon & Schuster | 9781501154096
OLYMPUS BOUND by Jordanna Max Brodsky (Urban Fantasy/Thriller)
Summer in New York: a golden hour on the city streets, but a dark time for Selene. She's lost her home and the man she loves. A cult hungry for ancient power has kidnapped her father and targeted her friends. To save them, Selene must face the past she's been running from --- a past that stretches back millennia, to when the faithful called her Huntress. Moon Goddess. Artemis. With the pantheon at her side, Selene must journey back to the seat of her immortal power: from the streets of Rome and the temples of Athens --- to the heights of Mount Olympus itself.
Orbit | 9780316306232
THE SECRET OF THE IRISH CASTLE by Santa Montefiore (Historical Fiction)
Paperback Original
1939: Peace has flourished since the Great War ended, but much has changed for the Deverill family as now a new generation is waiting in the wings to make their mark. When Martha Wallace leaves her home in America to search for her birth mother in Dublin, she never imagines that she will completely lose her heart to the impossibly charming JP Deverill. But more surprises are in store for her after she discovers that her mother comes from the same place as JP, sealing her fate. As long-held secrets come to light, the Deverills will have to heal old wounds and come to terms with the past if they hope to ensure their legacy for the future.
William Morrow Paperbacks | 9780062456908
SIP by Brian Allen Carr (Post-Apocalyptic/Science Fiction)
It started with a single child and quickly spread: you could get high by drinking your own shadow. At night, artificial lights were destroyed so that addicts could sip shadow in the pure glow of the moon. Gangs of shadow addicts chased down children on playgrounds and rounded up old ladies from retirement homes. Cities were destroyed and governments fell. One hundred fifty years later, Mira, her shadow-addicted friend Murk, and an ex-domer named Bale search for a possible mythological cure to the shadow sickness --- but they must do so before the return of Halley’s Comet, which is only days away.
Soho Press | 9781616959517
THE STOLEN MARRIAGE by Diane Chamberlain (Historical Fiction)
Pregnant, alone and riddled with guilt, 23-year-old Tess DeMello abruptly gives up her budding career as a nurse and ends her engagement to the love of her life. She turns to the baby’s father for help and agrees to marry him, moving to the small, rural town of Hickory, North Carolina. Tess’ new husband, Henry Kraft, is a secretive man who shows her no affection, and she quickly realizes she’s trapped in a strange and loveless marriage with no way out. When a sudden polio epidemic strikes Hickory, the townspeople band together to build a polio hospital. As Tess works to save the lives of her patients, can she untangle the truth behind her husband’s mysterious behavior and find the love --- and the life --- she was meant to have?
St. Martin’s Griffin | 9781250087287
THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE: A Nicole Foster Thriller by Gregg Olsen (Mystery/Thriller)
Paperback Original
In the middle of the hottest August in a century, a toddler is found dead inside a parked car. Her father says he forgot her. It’s an unthinkable crime. And for homicide detective Nicole Foster, it’s made all the more unbearable by her own suffocating secrets --- those shared by an old rival who has reappeared from the shadows and is pushing Nicole to the edge once again. Now, wherever the truth lies, solving this case and avenging an unforgivable death is the most important move in Nicole’s career. But to see it through to the end, how far is she willing to go? And what is she prepared to risk this time?
Thomas & Mercer | 9781503901353
On Sale the Week of August 20th in Hardcover
August 21st
THE AIR YOU BREATHE by Frances de Pontes Peebles (Historical Fiction)
Nine-year-old orphaned Dores is working in the kitchen of a sugar plantation in 1930s Brazil when in walks a girl who changes everything. Graça, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy sugar baron, is clever, well fed, pretty and thrillingly ill-behaved. Born to wildly different worlds, Dores and Graça quickly bond over music. One has a voice like a songbird; the other feels melodies in her soul and composes lyrics to match. Music will become their shared passion, the source of their partnership and their rivalry, and the only way out of the life to which each was born. But only one of the two is destined to be a star. Their intimate, volatile bond will determine each of their fortunes --- and haunt their memories.
Riverhead Books | 9780735210998
ARTHUR ASHE: A Life by Raymond Arsenault (Biography)
Raymond Arsenault chronicles tennis superstar Arthur Ashe’s rise to stardom on the court. But much of the book explores his off-court career as a human rights activist, philanthropist, broadcaster, writer, businessman and celebrity. In the 1970s and ’80s, Ashe gained renown as an advocate for sportsmanship, education, racial equality and the elimination of apartheid in South Africa. But from 1979 on, he was forced to deal with a serious heart condition that led to multiple surgeries and blood transfusions, one of which left him HIV-positive. Five years after being diagnosed with AIDS, Ashe passed away at the age of 49, leaving an inspiring legacy of dignity, integrity and active citizenship.
Simon & Schuster | 9781439189047
BONE ON BONE by Julia Keller (Mystery)
After a three-year prison sentence, Bell Elkins is back in Acker's Gap. And she finds herself in the white-hot center of a complicated and deadly case --- even as she comes to terms with one last, devastating secret of her own. A prominent local family has fallen victim to the same sickness that infects the whole region: drug addiction. With mother against father, child against parent, and tensions that lead inexorably to tragedy, they are trapped in a grim, hopeless struggle with nowhere to turn. Teamed up with former Deputy Jake Oakes, who battles his own demons as he adjusts to life as a paraplegic, and aided by the new prosecutor, Rhonda Lovejoy, Bell tackles a case as poignant as it is perilous, as heartbreaking as it is challenging.
Minotaur Books | 9781250190925
THE BOY ON THE BEACH: My Family's Escape from Syria and Our Hope for a New Home by Tima Kurdi (Memoir)
THE BOY ON THE BEACH is an intimate and poignant memoir about the family of Alan Kurdi --- the young Syrian boy who became the global emblem for the desperate plight of millions of Syrian refugees --- and of the many extraordinary journeys the Kurdis have taken, spanning countries and continents. Alan’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015, and overnight, the political became personal, as the world awoke to the reality of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima Kurdi first saw the shocking photo of her nephew in her home in Vancouver, Canada. But Tima did not need a photo to understand the truth --- she and her family had already been living it.
Simon & Schuster | 9781982108519
DEAD MAN RUNNING: An Alex McKnight Novel by Steve Hamilton (Thriller)
On the Mediterranean Sea, a vacationer logs on to the security-camera feed from his home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Rewinding through the feed, he sees an intruder. When he shifts to the bedroom camera, he sees the dead body. Martin T. Livermore is the key suspect in the abduction and murder of at least five women, but he's never been this sloppy before. When the FBI finally catches him in Scottsdale, he declares he'll only talk to one person: Alex McKnight. Livermore means nothing to McKnight, but it soon becomes clear that McKnight means something to Livermore...and that Livermore's capture was only the beginning of an elaborate, twisted plot with McKnight at the center.
G.P. Putnam's Sons | 9780399574443
DESOLATION MOUNTAIN by William Kent Krueger (Mystery/Thriller)
A private plane has crashed on Desolation Mountain in a remote part of the Iron Lake Reservation, which kills a United States senator and most of her family. Cork O’Connor is joined by his son, Stephen, and a few Ojibwe men to sift through the smoldering wreckage when the FBI arrives and quickly assumes control of the situation. As he initiates his own probe, Cork stumbles upon a familiar face in Bo Thorson, a private security consultant whose unnamed clients have hired him to quietly look into the cause of the crash. The men agree to join forces in their investigation, but soon Cork begins to wonder if Thorson’s loyalties lie elsewhere.
Atria Books | 9781501147463
THE DEVOTED by Blair Hurley (Fiction)
Nicole Hennessy’s life revolves around her Zen practice at the Boston Zendo, seeking solace in the tenets of Buddhism to the chagrin of her Irish Catholic family. After a decade of grueling spiritual practice under her Master’s tutelage, living on a shoestring budget as a shop clerk, Nicole has become dangerously entangled with her mentor. As Nicole confronts her past --- a drug-fueled year spent fleeing her family’s loaded silences and guilt-laden "Our Fathers" --- and reinvents herself in New York City, her Master’s intoxicating voice pursues her, an electrifying whisper on the other end of the phone. Somehow, he knows everything.
W. W. Norton & Company | 9780393651591
FOGLAND POINT by Doug Burgess (Mystery)
When sudden tragedy brings David Hazard back to Little Compton to care for his grandmother during her struggle with dementia, he discovers that her fragile memories may hold the key to a bizarre mystery half a century old --- and perhaps to the sudden and brutal murder right next door. Once Chief of Police Billy Dyer names her as a witness, Grandma Maggie's recollections become vital. But can they be trusted, especially in a town where everyone has a secret, including David himself? The investigation stalls. Then eccentric millionaire Marcus Rhinegold's yacht disappears into the fog, bodies begin to wash ashore, and Maggie's stories come vividly to life, setting off a chain of events both horrifying and hauntingly familiar.
Poisoned Pen Press | 9781464210228
HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SAVE YOURSELF by JM Holmes (Fiction/Short Stories)
Bound together by shared experience but pulled apart by their changing fortunes, four young friends coming of age in the postindustrial enclave of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, struggle to liberate themselves from the legacies left to them as black men in America. JM Holmes’ debut follows a decade in the lives of Dub, Rolls, Rye and Gio as they each grapple with the complexity of their family histories, the newfound power of sex and drugs, and the ferocity of their desires.
Little, Brown and Company | 9780316514880
MEG, JO, BETH, AMY: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters by Anne Boyd Rioux (Literary Criticism)
Soon after its publication, LITTLE WOMEN became an enormous bestseller and one of America’s favorite novels. Its popularity quickly spread throughout the world, and the book has become an international classic. When Anne Boyd Rioux read the novel in her 20s, she had a powerful reaction to the story. Through teaching the book, she has seen the same effect on many others. In MEG, JO, BETH, AMY, Rioux recounts how Louisa May Alcott came to write LITTLE WOMEN, drawing inspiration for it from her own life. Rioux also examines why this tale of family and community ties, set while the Civil War tore America apart, has resonated through later wars, the Depression, and times of changing opportunities for women.
W. W. Norton & Company | 9780393254730
OHIO by Stephen Markley (Fiction)
On one fateful summer night in 2013, four former classmates converge on the rust belt town where they grew up, each of them with a mission, all of them haunted by regrets, secrets and lost loves. There’s Bill Ashcraft, an alcoholic, drug-abusing activist, whose fruitless ambitions have taken him from Cambodia to Zuccotti Park to New Orleans, and now back to “The Cane” with a mysterious package strapped to the underside of his truck; Stacey Moore, a doctoral candidate reluctantly confronting the mother of her former lover; Dan Eaton, a shy veteran of three tours in Iraq, home for a dinner date with the high school sweetheart he’s tried to forget; and the beautiful, fragile Tina Ross, whose rendezvous with the captain of the football team triggers the novel’s shocking climax.
Simon & Schuster | 9781501174476
THE OTHER WOMAN by Sandie Jones (Psychological Thriller)
Adam adores Emily. Emily thinks Adam’s perfect, the man she thought she’d never meet. Lurking in the shadows is a rival, a woman who shares a deep bond with the man she loves. Emily chose Adam, but she didn’t choose his mother Pammie. There’s nothing a mother wouldn’t do for her son, and now Emily is about to find out just how far Pammie will go to get what she wants: Emily gone forever.
Minotaur Books | 9781250191984
PIECES OF HER by Karin Slaughter (Thriller)
Andrea knows everything about her mother, Laura. She knows she’s spent her whole life in the small beachside town of Belle Isle; she knows she’s never wanted anything more than to live a quiet life as a pillar of the community; she knows she’s never kept a secret in her life. But all that changes when a trip to the mall explodes into violence, and Andrea suddenly sees a completely different side to Laura. Because it turns out that before Laura was Laura, she was someone completely different. For nearly 30 years she’s been hiding from her previous identity, lying low in the hope that no one would ever find her. But now she’s been exposed, and nothing will ever be the same again.
William Morrow | 9780062430274
RUSH by Lisa Patton (Fiction)
Cali Watkins possesses all the qualities sororities are looking for in a potential new member. But her resume lacks a vital ingredient: Pedigree. Without family money, Cali's chances of sorority membership are already thin, but she has an even bigger problem. If anyone discovers the dark family secrets she's hiding, she’ll be dropped from Rush in an instant. When Lilith Whitmore, the well-heeled House Corp President of Alpha Delta Beta, appoints recent empty-nester Wilda to the Rush Advisory Board, Wilda can hardly believe her luck. What’s more, Lilith suggests that their daughters, both incoming freshman, room together. What Wilda doesn’t know is that it's all part of Lilith’s plan to ensure her own daughter receives an Alpha Delt bid --- no matter what.
St. Martin's Press | 9781250020666
SMALL ANIMALS: Parenthood in the Age of Fear by Kim Brooks (Memoir/Sociology)
One morning, Kim Brooks made a split-second decision to leave her four-year-old son in the car while she ran into a store. What happened would consume the next several years of her life and spur her to investigate the broader role America’s culture of fear plays in parenthood. In SMALL ANIMALS, Brooks asks: Of all the emotions inherent in parenting, is there any more universal or profound than fear? Why have our notions of what it means to be a good parent changed so radically? In what ways do these changes impact the lives of parents, children and the structure of society at large? And what, in the end, does the rise of fearful parenting tell us about ourselves?
Flatiron Books | 9781250089557
SUMMER by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Memoir)
The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's intensely personal series about the four seasons, SUMMER once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects, he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.
Penguin Press | 9780399563393
SWIFT VENGEANCE by T. Jefferson Parker (Thriller)
Returning hero and private investigator Roland Ford is on the trail of a mysterious killer who is beheading CIA drone operators and leaving puzzling clues at each crime scene. His troubled friend, Lindsay Rakes, is afraid for her own life and the life of her son after a fellow flight crew member is killed in brutal fashion. Even more terrifying is the odd note the killer left behind: "Welcome to Caliphornia. This is not the last." Ford strikes an uneasy alliance with San Diego-based FBI agent Joan Taucher, who is haunted by what she sees as the Bureau's failure to catch the 9/11 terrorists. As the killer strikes again, Ford and Taucher dash into the fray, each desperate for their own reasons.
G.P. Putnam's Sons | 9780735212695
TRAGEDY PLUS TIME: A Tragi-comic Memoir by Adam Cayton-Holland (Memoir)
Adam Cayton-Holland went from a painfully sensitive kid growing up in Denver, Colorado, to a writer and performer with a burgeoning career in comedy. His father, a civil rights lawyer, and his mother, an investigative journalist, taught Adam and his two sisters to feel the pain of the world deeply and to combat it through any means necessary. Adam chose to meet life’s tough breaks and cruel realities with stand-up comedy; his older sister chose law; their youngest sister, Lydia, struggled with mental illness and ultimately took her own life. This devastating tragedy strikes the Cayton-Holland household at the same moment Adam’s career is finally getting off the ground.
Touchstone | 9781501170164
VOX by Christina Dalcher (Dystopian Thriller)
On the day the government decrees that women are no longer allowed more than 100 words per day, Dr. Jean McClellan is in denial. This can't happen here. Not in America. Not to her. Soon women are not permitted to hold jobs. Girls are not taught to read or write. Females no longer have a voice. Before, the average person spoke 16,000 words each day, but now women have only 100 to make themselves heard. For herself, her daughter and every woman silenced, Jean will reclaim her voice.
Berkley | 9780440000785
On Sale the Week of August 20th in Paperback
August 21st
ARARAT by Christopher Golden (Supernatural Thriller)
When an earthquake reveals a secret cave hidden inside Mount Ararat in Turkey, a daring, newly engaged couple are determined to be the first ones inside. The cave is actually an ancient, buried ship that many quickly come to believe is really Noah’s Ark. When a team of scholars, archaeologists and filmmakers make it inside the ark, they discover an elaborate coffin in its recesses. Inside the coffin they find an ugly, misshapen cadaver --- not the holy man they expected, but a hideous creature with horns. Shock and fear turn to horror when a massive blizzard blows in, trapping them thousands of meters up the side of a remote mountain. All they can do is pray for safety. But something wicked is listening to their prayers --- and it wants to answer.
St. Martin’s Griffin | 9781250181343
BEST DAY EVER by Kaira Rouda (Psychological Thriller)
Paul Strom has the perfect life: a glittering career as an advertising executive, a beautiful wife, two healthy boys and a big house in a wealthy suburb. And he’s the perfect husband: breadwinner, protector, provider. That’s why he’s planned a romantic weekend for his wife, Mia, at their lake house, just the two of them. And he's promised today will be the best day ever. But as Paul and Mia drive out of the city and toward the countryside, a spike of tension begins to wedge itself between them and doubts start to arise. How much do they trust each other? And how perfect is their marriage, or any marriage, really?
Graydon House | 9781525811982
A DISTANT VIEW OF EVERYTHING: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel by Alexander McCall Smith (Mystery)
A new baby brings an abundance of joy to Isabel Dalhousie and her husband, Jamie, but Charlie is none too keen on his newborn brother. Isabel must find a way to impress upon her older son the patience and understanding that have served as guiding principles in her own life. These are the very qualities that bring Bea Shandon, an old acquaintance of Isabel’s, to seek her help in a tricky situation. Bea introduced a wealthy female friend to a cosmetic surgeon at her most recent dinner party. Then new information comes to light about the surgeon that causes Bea to doubt his motives and the auspiciousness of the match. Isabel agrees to find out more, but as her enquiries take an unexpected turn, she starts to wonder whom exactly she should be investigating.
Anchor | 9780804169929
IN THE MIDNIGHT ROOM by Laura McBride (Fiction)
Fun-loving and rebellious, 21-year-old June Stein abandons the safe world of her New Jersey childhood for edgy 1950s Las Vegas. For the next 60 years, June will dare to live boldly. She will upend conventions, risk her heart and her life, rear a child, lose a child, love more than one man, and stand up for more than one woman. June’s story will intertwine with those of three unlikely strangers: a one-time mail-order bride from the Philippines, a high school music teacher, and a young mother from Mexico working as a hotel maid. Knit together around June’s explosive secret, they forge a future that none of them foresee.
Touchstone | 9781501157790
LIGHTS ON, RATS OUT: A Memoir by Cree LeFavour (Memoir)
As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame. The thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. Kohl --- whose relationship with Cree is at once sustaining and paralyzing --- comes to be the only bright spot in her days. LIGHTS ON, RATS OUT brings us closely into these years, recounting a fiercely bright and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.
Grove Press | 9780802128058
THE LOCALS by Jonathan Dee (Fiction)
Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife and their young daughter? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter. Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11, he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round “secure location” from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people’s money. The collision of these two men’s very different worlds --- rural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthy --- is the engine of Jonathan Dee’s powerful novel.
Random House Trade Paperbacks | 9780812983395
LOVEMURDER by Saul Black (Thriller)
When she’s called to the murder scene, the last thing San Francisco Homicide detective Valerie Hart is expecting is for Katherine Glass to walk back into her life. Six years earlier, revulsion and fascination had gripped the nation in equal measure, as Katherine had been convicted on six counts of Murder One. But the freshly mutilated corpse in the ground-floor apartment bears all the hallmarks of Katherine’s victims. And then there’s the note, with its chilling implications, addressed to Valerie. To stop the slaughter, Valerie must ask Katherine to help her decipher the killer’s twisted message. But that means re-entering the pitch-black labyrinth that is Katherine’s mind, and this time Valerie isn’t so sure which one of them will survive.
St. Martin’s Griffin | 9781250185167
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