 12.21
By Dustin Thomason
A tale inspired by the 2012 apocalypse phenomenon finds a Centers for Disease Control expert and a talented Mayan scholar racing against time in the wake of a confounding medical mystery and the discovery of a priceless artifact from the scholar’s lost ancestral home.
The Absent One
By Jussi Adler-Olsen
Detective Carl Morck investigates the 20-year-old murders of a brother and sister whose confessed killer may actually be innocent, a case with ties to a homeless woman and powerful adversaries.
Bad Little Falls (Mike Bowditch)
By Paul Doiron
Summoned to a rustic cabin during a blizzard, Maine game warden Mike Bowditch embarks on a dangerous investigation involving a notorious drug dealer, a beautiful woman with a dark past and her troubled young son.
The Bartender’s Tale
By Ivan Doig
Running a venerable bar in 1960s Montana while raising his 12-year-old son, single father Tom Harry finds his world upended by the arrival of a woman from his past and her beatnik daughter who claims Tom as her father and disrupts the town with her passionate and pretentious modern views.
 Battleborn
By Claire Vaye Watkins
A debut collection of ten short stories reimagines the mythology of the American West through the experiences of protagonists who endure hardship and violence in the face of such challenges as a foreigner’s erotic changes at a prostitution ranch, a hermit’s attempt to rescue an abused teen and a woman’s role in a friend’s degrading Las Vegas encounter.
Bride of New France
By Suzanne Desrochers
Laure Beasejour is a young, French orphan transported to the new but primitive Canadian colony as part of a program sponsored by King Louis XIV that sent 800 young women abroad to marry settlers.
Buddhaland Brooklyn
By Richard C. Morais
A contemporary fable about a Japanese Buddhist priest who finds himself in an unlikely place traces his youth in a quaint mountainside village, where he is educated by Buddhist monks and undertakes an unexpected midlife mission to leave his refuge home and open a temple in Brooklyn, New York.
Buried on Avenue B (Darlene O’Hara)
By Peter de Jonge
When the cops find the skeleton of a ten-year-old boy buried in a park off Avenue B, NYPD detective Darlene O’Hara must dive headlong into the city’s dark underbelly to find a killer, and in the process she stumbles upon an amoral tribe of criminals who target the weakest members of the population.
 The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns
By Margaret Dilloway
Enduring a strict schedule that balances her teaching job with the hospital regimen required by her advanced kidney disease, 36-year-old Gal Garner devotes her spare hours to cultivating a new rose variation before her world is upended by the arrival of her teenage niece.
Caravan of Thieves
By David Rich
Deep undercover agent Rollie Waters uses his enigmatic con-artist father’s tactics to prove his innocence and discern the truth when his father is implicated in a large-scale heist involving government funds.
Cascade
By Maryanne O’Hara
Struggling to protect her family’s theater from destruction by a proposed reservoir and married to a man desperate for children, would-be artist Desdemona Hart is drawn to newcomer Jacob, who is wrongly implicated by anti-Semitic townspeople in the wake of a local murder, in this story set in Massachusetts in 1935.
City of Women
By David R. Gillham
Hiding her clandestine activities behind the persona of a model Nazi soldier’s wife at the height of World War II, Sigrid Schroeder dreams of her former Jewish lover and risks everything to hide a mother and two young children who she believes might be her lover’s family.
 The Creeper (Philip Brennan)
By Tania Carver
Detective Phil Brennan tracks down a brutal killer who stalks his victims before subjecting them to torture, in a case that becomes even more horrific when Phil discovers unsuspected aspects of the culprit’s twisted psyche.
The Crime of Julian Wells
By Thomas H. Cook
When a famous true-crime writer is found dead on a boat on Montauk pond, his best friend begins a quest to determine if the author committed suicide, and uncovers a darkness amidst a life filled with adventure and achievement.
The Dead Do Not Improve
By Jay Caspian Kang
Targeted by an elaborate and violent scheme after the murder of his elderly next-door neighbor, recent MFA recipient Philip Kim, an expert on the gritty underworld of modern times, finds himself outmaneuvering laconic police officers, militant surfers and aggressive creative writing students in a San Francisco that has turned suddenly menacing.
Dead Stars
By Bruce Wagner
Pen Faulkner-finalist Wagner traces the experiences of Telma, a very young breast cancer survivor, who crosses paths with actor Michael Douglas during the latter’s efforts to achieve his professional dream against a backdrop of riotous Hollywood culture that skewers the reality-TV phenomenon.
 The Devil in Silver
By Victor LaValle
Landing in a budget-strapped mental institution after being accused of a crime he does not remember, self-proclaimed hero Pepper is assaulted by a monstrous creature that has been attacking patients, but that the hospital staff does not believe exists, a situation that compels Pepper to rally three fellow inmates in a fight for survival.
Discretion
By Allison Leotta
Investigating the falling death of a high-paid escort at the U.S. Capitol building, Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Curtis teams up with brash FBI Special Agent Samantha Randazzo to examine clues implicating a powerful elected official, a case that imperils her career and relationship with chief homicide prosecutor Jack Bailey.
The Dog Stars
By Peter Heller
Surviving a pandemic disease that has killed everyone he knows, a pilot establishes a shelter in an abandoned airport hangar before hearing a random radio transmission that compels him to risk his life to seek out other survivors.
The Double Game
By Dan Fesperman
Decades after his favorite author confesses that he considered spying for the enemy during the Cold War, disillusioned PR man Bill Cage receives an anonymous message that he should have probed deeper into the story, prompting him to follow a trail of literary bread crumbs through Vienna, Prague and Budapest to discover links between the author, a beautiful woman and the CIA.
 An Echo Through the Snow
By Andrea Thalasinos
Rescuing a neglected Siberian husky with whom she forges a deep and loving bond, Rosalie finds herself immersed in rural Wisconsin’s competitive dog sled racing circles, where she learns the sport’s tragic ties to the deaths and losses of Siberia’s husky-loving Chukchi culture.
The Exceptions
By David Cristofano
Jonathan Bovaro, a member of a crime family, finds his loyalty shaken by a beautiful but damaged young woman whose parents joined the Witness Protection Program after observing a legendary violent streak carried out by his family.
A Foreign Country
By Charles Cumming
When a newly appointed first female Chief of MI6 disappears weeks after two possibly-related cases, disgraced former MI6 officer Thomas Kell is offered a chance to redeem his career by conducting a discreet operation that uncovers a shocking conspiracy.
Haven
By Kay Hooper
After a head injury brings on nightmares involving girls being tortured and murdered, Emma Rayburn contracts her estranged sister, Jessie, a psychic investigator, for help.
 The Headmaster’s Wager
By Vincent Lam
Enjoying his position as the headmaster of Saigon’s most respected English school while indulging in a gambling and womanizing lifestyle, Percival Chen acquires a sudden awareness of regional violence when his son lands in trouble with the Vietnamese authorities.
Hostage
By Elie Wiesel
The acclaimed Nobel laureate presents an impassioned new novel about the legacy of the Holocaust and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tracing the experiences of an innocent Jewish writer from Brooklyn who endures a nightmarish abduction by Arab and Italian captors by sharing poignant stories from the time he spent hiding from the Nazis.
A Hundred Flowers
By Gail Tsukiyama
A tale set during the Chinese Cultural Revolution follows the struggles of Kai Ying to safeguard her family when her teacher’s husband is arrested and sent to a reeducation labor camp as a result of his criticism of the Communist Party, a situation that is further complicated a year later by her young son’s injury and other guilty household secrets.
If I Can’t Have You
By Mary B. Morrison
The owner of a multi-million dollar multimedia firm, Madison Tyler, enjoys her no-strings-attached relationship with Granville Washington, but when she tries to break things off, he refuses to let her go and will do whatever it takes to make her see that he is the perfect man for her.
 In the Shadow of the Banyan
By Vaddey Ratner
Her life of royal privilege in Cambodia shattered by the outbreak of civil war on the streets of capital city Phnom Penh, young Raami endures four soul-crushing years of loss, starvation, and brutal forced labor while clinging to memories of the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father.
Judgment Call (Sheriff Joanna Brady)
By J. A. Jance
Cochise County Sheriff Joanna Brady’s personal and professional worlds collide when her daughter, Jenny, stumbles upon the dead body of her high school principal, and the search for justice leads to her own door.
Kill You Twice (Archie Sheridan/Gretchen Lowell)
By Chelsea Cain
Struggling to move past his traumatic encounters with serial killer Gretchen Lowell, Archie Sheridan investigates a murder involving a brutally tortured victim before he is contacted by Lowell, who claims to have inside information about the case.
The Kingmaker’s Daughter (The Cousins’ War)
By Philippa Gregory
The best-selling author of The Other Boleyn Girl presents a tale inspired by the daughters of “kingmaker” Richard, 15th-century Earl of Warwick, who uses his daughters as political pawns before their strategic marriages place them on opposing sides in a royal war that will cost them everyone they love.
 Last to Die (Rizzoli & Isles)
By Tess Gerritsen
Visiting 16-year-old “Rat” Perkins at the isolated Evenson boarding school, Maura Isles is astonished to learn that all of his classmates are survivors of violence and are being instructed in scientific detective skills, a discovery that coincides with Jane Rizzoli’s investigation into the murder of a boy’s foster family.
The Light Between the Oceans
By M. L. Stedman
Moving his young bride to an isolated lighthouse home on Australia’s Janus Rock where the couple suffers miscarriages and a stillbirth, Tom allows his wife to claim an infant who has washed up on the shore, only to witness a rift in their marriage that is further complicated by a search by the baby’s desperate mother.
The Lincoln Letter
By William Martin
Peter Fallon and Evangeline Carrington head to Washington, D.C., to compete against dangerous adversaries in a hunt for the 16th President’s Civil War diary, a record that contains information that could change history and influence key elections.
Line of Fire (Alan Gregory)
By Stephen White
Alan Gregory hopes for a quieter life involving his clinical psychiatry practice, only to be thrown into upheaval by a challenging patient, Diane’s imminent emotional collapse, and the possible exposure of his involvement in a woman’s suicide.
 Lionel Asbo: State of England
By Martin Amis
A satire of modern society and celebrity culture by the author of The Second Plane finds the seemingly simple pursuits of young Desmond Pepperdine hampered by his uncle Lionel’s near-criminal habits, which become more prominent when Lionel wins the lottery.
The Lost Prince
By Selden Edwards
Forced to resume her place in late 19th-century Boston society after the tragic loss of a great love, Eleanor Burden, who believes she has advance knowledge of every major event that is to occur in her lifetime, struggles to balance the expectations of her family with her resolve to prevent historical disasters.
The Map of Lost Memories
By Kim Fay
Teaming up in 1925 Shanghai to find a priceless set of scrolls believed to contain the lost history of the Khmer Empire, Irene Blum and temple-robber Simone Merlin commit a shockingly violent act before discovering unexpected commonalities in their respective pasts.
 Off the Grid (A Monkeewrench Novel)
By P. J. Tracy
When a series of grisly murders occur shortly after a Monkeewrench Software partner thwarts an assassination attempt on a retired FBI agent, Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth team up to link the crimes, leading them to uncover an operation that places Monkeewrench in a battle for their lives on a remote Minnesota reservation.
The Painted Bridge
By Wendy Wallace
Committed by her husband to a shabby, mid-19th-century London asylum for mentally ill women, Anna Palmer endeavors to prove her sanity to unheeding male doctors and finds allies in a theoretical-science therapist, an equally sane fellow patient, and the asylum proprietor’s bookish daughter.
The Pigeon Pie Mystery
By Julia Stuart
Moving to the reputedly haunted Hampton Court Palace of Queen Victoria when her father’s untimely death renders her penniless, Indian princess Alexandria is befriended by three eccentric widows before her faithful lady’s maid, Pooki, is wrongly accused of murder.
Port Vila Blues (Wyatt)
By Garry Disher
Combining maverick strategies and old-style methods in his work as a thief, Wyatt eludes authorities while cracking alarm systems and managing lucrative heists until a diamond-studded Tiffany brooch and an infatuation with the wrong girl pits him against dangerous adversaries.
 Requiem
By Frances Itani
After spending his youth in an internment camp during World War II, Bin Okuma travels across Canada to find his biological father despite his leaving a devastating legacy.
Return to Willow Lake (The Lakeshore Chronicles)
By Susan Wiggs
When her mother, who is unexpectedly pregnant, receives a devastating diagnosis, Sonnet Romano must decide what really matters in life and, putting her career on hold, stays in Avalon and takes a job that forces her to work alongside her biggest mistake – award-winning filmmaker Zach Alger.
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
By Jonathan Evison
After losing virtually everything meaningful in his life, Benjamin trains to be a caregiver, but his first client, a fiercely independent teen with muscular dystrophy, gives him more than he bargained for and soon the two embark on a road trip to visit the boy’s ailing father.
The Second Empress: A Novel of Napoleon’s Court
By Michelle Moran
The author of the best-selling Nefertiti draws on primary sources to recreate the wildly promiscuous court of Napoleon Bonaparte through the experiences of his step-daughter Hortense, his infamous sister Pauline, and his freedom-seeking Austrian wife Marie-Louise.
 Sentinel (Spycatcher)
By Matthew Dunn
When CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, receives a cryptic message from an agent operating deep undercover in Russia stating “he has betrayed us and wants to go to war,” special agent Will Cochrane must infiltrate the secret submarine base in eastern Russia’s Avacha Bay to stop the threat.
The Shadow of the Rock
By Thomas Mogford
Entreated for help by an old school friend who has been wrongly accused of murder, lawyer Spike Sanguinetti travels to Tangier to prevent his friend’s extradition, an effort that is compromised by a renewable energy company’s financing deal and a Bedouin girl’s claims that the company is responsible for her father’s disappearance.
Shake Off
By Mischa Hiller
Posing as a grad student, skilled intelligence operative Michel Khoury begins a relationship with a pretty English girl from his apartment building until the secrets he is keeping send the couple running for their lives through London, Berlin and Scotland.
Silver
By Andrew Motion
A former UK poet laureate’s swashbuckling continuation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is set 20 years later and finds Natty, the daughter of Long John Silver, teaming up with Hawkins’ son, Jim, on a dangerous voyage to the legendary island in search of their father’s hidden treasure.
 Some Kind of Peace
By Camilla Grebe and Asa Traff
In the wake of a client’s murder, widowed Stockholm psychotherapist Siri Bergman realizes she is being targeted by a killer who prompts her investigation at the side of Markus, a young policeman.
Sorry Please Thank You
By Charles Yu
A collection of stories features such protagonists as a retail employee who is confronted by a zombie, a computer warrior who leads his fighter band across a virtual landscape and a company that outsources grief.
The Spymasters (Men at War)
By W.E.B. Griffin
Tapped by FDR to assist the Allies’ threatened efforts to secure France and build an atomic bomb, OSS spy chief Wild Bill Donovan and top agent Dick Canidy coordinate a sabotage mission targeting Germany’s aerial torpedo munitions while countering a double-agent who is leaking Manhattan Project secrets to the Soviets.
The St. Zita Society
By Ruth Rendell
The psychologically charged affairs between residents and servants on a posh London street escalate to violence involving a handsome valet who is sleeping with a lord’s wife and daughter, an au pair who accepts fees for aiding her mistress’s affair and a disturbed gardener who believes he is receiving instructions from a god on his cell phone.
Summer Lies: Stories
By Bernhard Schlink
An anthology of seven provocative tales by the best-selling author of The Reader explores the impact of truthfulness and lies on human emotions.
The Survivor
By Gregg Hurwitz
Anticipating suicide only to foil a bank robbery and receive a blackmail note from one of the robbers, Nate, a traumatized former soldier with ALS, is kidnapped by a Russian mobster who threatens Nate’s family to force him to complete the robbery he interrupted.
Suzy’s Case
By Andy Siegel
Tackling a seemingly unwinnable case involving a young African-American girl who was brutally victimized by medical malpractice in a Brooklyn hospital, personal injury attorney Tug Wyler employs street smarts, legal brinksmanship and charm to expose a sobering cover-up.
Syndrome E
By Franck Thilliez
Beleaguered detective Lucie Hennebelle teams up with brooding inspector Frank Sharko to investigate bizarre misfortunes and deaths surrounding an extremely rare and violent film from the 1950s that exploited cutting edge neuroscience discoveries.
 The Thing About Thugs
By Tabish Khair
A former member of a violent cult who agrees to be a subject in a scientist’s phrenological research is implicated in a string of grisly murders.
This Is How It Ends
By Kathleen Macmahon
While visiting Ireland in search of his family’s roots, Bruno falls for Addie, an unemployed architect who is recovering from a nasty break-up and taking care of her ill father, but the pair’s new romance is tested by an unexpected tragedy.
Three Strong Women
By Marie NDiaye
The intertwined stories of three women who discover the power of saying no include a French-born lawyer who must save a victim from her tyrannical father, a Dakar teacher whose happiness is thwarted by a depressed boyfriend and a penniless widow who travels to France to escape homelessness.
Tiger’s Claw
By Dale Brown
After he and his team refurbish America’s aging weapon systems, Patrick McLanahan heads to Guam to oversee strategy, which causes the Chinese to take the offensive, launching a preemptive strike on a small American fleet that ignites a battle for the Pacific, one that McLanahan is determined to win no matter what the cost.
 To Love and Cherish (Bridal Veil Island)
By Tracie Peterson & Judith Miller
When the love of her life, Evan, goes missing after a hurricane strikes Bridal Veil Island in 1898, Melinda Colson returns to search for him, but as she settles into a new job and a new life, how long will she be able to hold out hope?
Triburbia
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
Thrown together by circumstance, a group of fathers – a sound engineer, a sculptor, a film producer, a writer and a gangster – meet each morning at a local coffee shop where they share their secrets, passions and hopes, and confront terrible truths about ambition, wealth and sex.
Valley of Ashes
By Cornelia Read
Madeline Dare, a recently transplanted New Yorker and stay-at-home mom, takes on a freelance position for a Boulder, Colorado, newspaper and must protect her family when her investigative coverage of a local serial arsonist gets a bit too hot.
Vanished in the Dunes
By Allan Retzky
Spending his days alone at his Hamptons beach house after losing his job with an international trading firm that made him a scapegoat for shady business dealings, Amos Posner is targeted by a beautiful psychiatric resident whose twisted wiles quickly threaten his life.
What in God’s Name
By Simon Rich
A comedy writer who has worked for the New Yorker, Saturday Night Live and Pixar describes the efforts of two underpaid angels, Craig and Eliza, who try to stop God, the CEO of Heaven, Inc., from retiring and destroying Earth.
 What the Nanny Saw
By Fiona Neill
When her privileged employers become the focus of a financial scandal at the height of the economic crash, a trusted nanny finds her loyalties tested by a reporter who taps her as an insider with unique perspectives into what various family members have hidden from each other.
When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories
By Molly Ringwald
This debut collection of interlinked stories from the iconic “Brat Pack” actress explores the numerous betrayals, big and small, that one grapples with across a lifetime.
Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
By Maria Semple
When her notorious, hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled and agoraphobic mother goes missing, teenage Bee begins a trip that takes her to the ends of the earth to find her.
Whispers in the Wind (Wild West Wind)
By Laurie Snelling
With a secretive widow, a love-struck cowboy and a suspicious rancher standing in her way, Cassie Lockwood struggles to fulfill her father’s dream of starting a horse ranch among the Black Hills of South Dakota.
 You Are the Love of My Life
By Susan Richards Shreve
Hoping for a fresh start, Lucy Painter moves back to a small Washington, D.C., neighborhood as the Watergate scandal hits and wrestles with her own secrets, including the identity of the father of her children and the scandal surrounding her own father’s death.
You Don’t Want to Know
By Lisa Jackson
After spending the past two years in and out of Seattle mental institutions, unable to remember the details of her 2-year-old son Noah’s disappearance, Ava returns to the family estate and, secretly visiting a hypnotist to restore her memories, discovers that her son may still be alive.
The Zenith
By Duong Thu Huong
A reimagining of the final months of Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh recounts his physical and emotional imprisonment in an isolated mountaintop compound where his story is entwined with those of his wife’s brother-in-law, an elder in a small village town, and a close political ally. |
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