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Editorial Content for A Small Affair

Reviewer (text)

Barbara Lipkien Gershenbaum

Twenty-seven-year-old Vera MacDonald is a driven woman who is the director of sales for a fashion company in Manhattan. She is single and meets a man named Tom Newburn, who is 10 years her senior, on an exclusive dating app. He, too, is very successful and runs a logistics tech start-up. He claims to be separated, sharing visitation of his daughter with his pregnant, soon-to-be ex-wife, Odilie. Read More

Teaser

Vera is ruthlessly ambitious, beautiful and knows how to get exactly what she wants. When she meets a wealthy older man on an exclusive dating app, she thinks nothing of the wife he tells her he’s separated from. But days later, when the man and his wife are found dead in their home, Vera is immediately blamed for their deaths and branded as good as a murderer. A year later, she emerges from a cocoon of self-pity and tries to reenter the world, but the specter of scandal still clings to her. Then she’s invited to a memorial for the wife of her former lover. As she learns more about the family, and about the couple and their friends, she begins to suspect there was more to the story than an affair gone wrong.

Promo

Vera is ruthlessly ambitious, beautiful and knows how to get exactly what she wants. When she meets a wealthy older man on an exclusive dating app, she thinks nothing of the wife he tells her he’s separated from. But days later, when the man and his wife are found dead in their home, Vera is immediately blamed for their deaths and branded as good as a murderer. A year later, she emerges from a cocoon of self-pity and tries to reenter the world, but the specter of scandal still clings to her. Then she’s invited to a memorial for the wife of her former lover. As she learns more about the family, and about the couple and their friends, she begins to suspect there was more to the story than an affair gone wrong.

About the Book

A young woman’s life is torn apart when her wealthy ex-lover is found dead --- along with his wife.

Vera is ruthlessly ambitious, beautiful and knows how to get exactly what she wants --- no matter who stands in the way. When she meets a wealthy older man on an exclusive dating app, she thinks nothing of the wife he tells her he’s separated from. But days later, when the man and his wife are found dead in their home, Vera is immediately blamed for their deaths and branded as good as a murderer.

A year later, she emerges from a cocoon of self-pity and tries to reenter the world, but the specter of scandal still clings to her. Then she’s invited to a memorial for the wife of her former lover. As she learns more about the family, and about the couple and their friends, she begins to suspect there was more to the story than an affair gone wrong. In a quest for redemption, Vera uncovers layers of lies and closely kept secrets held by an inner circle of filthy rich tech millionaires who will go to any lengths to protect their reputations.

Audiobook available, read by Teri Schnaubelt

Editorial Content for JUDAS 62

Book

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Ray Palen

Charles Cumming is quickly becoming the new face of the modern spy thriller. JUDAS 62, a stellar follow-up to BOX 88, is all the evidence you need in support of that statement.

The creepy and prophetic prologue is set in 1979 and takes place in Sverdlovsk, Russia. We are brought into a dire situation involving Alexei Nikolaye and the role he played in a tragic shift at the Soviet army’s biological weapons research facility. The release of the deadly compound of weaponized anthrax is in violation of a 1972 accord and is being called “the biological Chernobyl.” Read More

Teaser

1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia, a spy in the guise of a language teacher. Embedded in the town of Voronezh, Kite’s mission is to extract a chemical weapons scientist before the man’s groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands and shuttle him across the border to freedom in Ukraine. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong, and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. 2020: Thirty years after that dangerous mission, Kite discovers that its outcome put his name on the notorious “JUDAS” list --- a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination. Kite’s fight for survival takes him to Dubai, where he enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian secret state.

Promo

1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia, a spy in the guise of a language teacher. Embedded in the town of Voronezh, Kite’s mission is to extract a chemical weapons scientist before the man’s groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands and shuttle him across the border to freedom in Ukraine. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong, and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail. 2020: Thirty years after that dangerous mission, Kite discovers that its outcome put his name on the notorious “JUDAS” list --- a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination. Kite’s fight for survival takes him to Dubai, where he enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian secret state.

About the Book

Thirty years after a deadly attempt to extract a Russian scientist to safety in Ukraine, master spy Lachlan Kite eludes an assassin in the streets of Dubai.

After a lifetime working with BOX 88, the transatlantic counterintelligence agency so covert that not even the CIA knows of its existence, master spy Lachlan Kite has made plenty of enemies. And now, as the director of the outfit's operations in the UK, one of those past enemies has him in their sights.

1993: Student Lachlan Kite is sent to post-Soviet Russia, a spy in the guise of a language teacher. Embedded in the town of Voronezh, Kite’s mission is to extract a chemical weapons scientist before the man’s groundbreaking research falls into the wrong hands and shuttle him across the border to freedom in Ukraine. But Kite’s mission soon goes wrong, and he is left stranded in a hostile city with a former KGB officer on his trail.

2020: Thirty years after that dangerous mission, Kite discovers that its outcome put his name on the notorious “JUDAS” list --- a record of enemies of Russia who have been targeted for assassination. Kite’s fight for survival takes him to Dubai, a city crawling with international intelligence officers, where he enters into a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the Russian secret state.

The newest installment in the saga of “a spy for the 21st century” (Daily Mail) combines two pulse-pounding narratives that show why Cumming is among the top tier of espionage authors examining the reality of spycraft in the post-Cold War era.

Audiobook available, read by Elliot Fitzpatrick

Peter Blauner, author of Picture in the Sand

When Alex Hassan gets accepted to an Ivy League university, his middle-class Egyptian-American family is filled with pride and excitement. But that joy turns to shock when they discover that he has run off to the Middle East to join a holy war instead. When he refuses to communicate with everyone else, his loving grandfather Ali emails him one last plea. If Alex will stay in touch, he will share with Alex --- and only Alex --- a manuscript containing the secret story of his own life that he has kept hidden from his family, until now. It's the tale of his romantic and heartbreaking past rooted in Hollywood and the post-revolutionary Egypt of the 1950s --- which he is now forced to unearth to save his grandson, who is about to make the same tragic mistakes he made so long ago.

January 6, 2023 - January 20, 2023

Here are reading recommendations with your comments and a rating of 1 to 5 stars for the contest period of January 6 - January 20.

Which of the following genres best describes the book that you most recently read or listened to? (If you have read or listened to more than one book, pick one to reply about.) Please check all that apply.

January 6, 2023, 786 voters

Most Requested Guides of 2022

We took a look at all of the guides that you accessed in 2022, and from there we pulled together a list of the top 30 titles, which you can see below. We love finding out which books resonated the most with you and your group!

January 3, 2023

In this newsletter, you will find books releasing the weeks of January 2nd and January 9th 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 Favorite Monthly Lists & Picks feature for January, which includes Indie Next, LibraryReads, the Barnes & Noble Book Club, Reese's Book Club, the "Read with Jenna" Today Show Book Club, the "Good Morning America" Book Club, and more.

Week of January 30, 2023

Paperback releases for the week of January 30th include THE OMEGA FACTOR, a fascinating stand-alone thriller from Steve Berry that revolves around the Ghent Altarpiece, the most violated work of art in the world, and the secrets it holds; Alafair Burke's FIND ME, a twisty mystery about the disappearance of a young woman that leaves her best friend reeling and an NYPD homicide detective digging into her own past; ENOUGH ALREADY, an intimate memoir from beloved actress and Food Network personality Valerie Bertinelli, who reflects on life at 60 and beyond; and the paperback original HEART BONES by Colleen Hoover, a moving, passionate and unforgettable novel that follows two young adults from completely different backgrounds embarking on a tentative romance, unaware of what the future holds.

Week of January 23, 2023

Paperback releases for the week of January 23rd include THE BIG DARK SKY by Dean Koontz, an exhilarating, twist-filled thriller in which a group of strangers bound by terrifying synchronicity becomes humankind’s hope for survival; VIOLETA, a sweeping novel from Isabel Allende, who tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, a woman whose life spans 100 years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the 20th century; LORRAINE HANSBERRY by Charles J. Shields, a moving account of the life of the woman behind "A Raisin in the Sun," the most widely anthologized, read and performed play of the American stage; and Julie Otsuka's THE SWIMMERS, a searing, intimate story about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool.