Top Book Club Pick

Raised in a small English town, Louisa doesn't have any plans for the future until she meets a quadriplegic named Will.  Will, a former athlete and playboy, was hit by a motorbike and is now confined to his wheelchair.  Hired by his mother to look after him and raise his spirit, Louisa finds herself drawn to Will.  As the two develop an affection for each other, their prospects for a happy future are darkened by a secret plan Will is hiding.  Jojo Moyes' Me Before You is a heartbreaking books that readers will have a hard time forgetting.

Brilliant Debut Mystery

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.  Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, thelegendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.  You may think you know detectives, but you've never met one quite like Strike. You may think you know about the wealthy and famous, but you've never seen them under an investigation like this.  Introducing Cuckoo's Calling, the first crime novel by J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Inspired by Homer's Odyssey

After Fin's mother passes away, his older half sister, Lady, becomes his legal guardian.  Fin's only memory of Fin & Lady, is a light and crisp comic romance that will especially delight readers with a soft spot for New York City.
Lady is from a trip to Capri where he and his parents went looking for Lady after she jilted her fiance.  Glamorous, careless, and charismatic, Lady is an unlikely guardian for an 11 year old boy but together they set up a home in New York.  Lady, obsessed with her freedom but at the same time consumed with being loved, charges Fin with the task of selecting the perfect husband.  Lady is pursued by three suitors while trying to fight her daily urge to run away from her life.  Cathleen Shine's latest novel,

The Power of Nostalgia and Hope

1985 has not been a good year for Greta Wells.  Still reeling from the death of her twin brother and the shock of her longtime partner walking out on her, Greta feels as if her life is crumbling.  As a last ditch effort to regain control, Greta turns to electroshock therapy.  The treatment is not without side effects and Greta finds herself transported through time, sliding into lives in different decades that could have been her own.  The boundaries between the lives begin to blur as the burdens that each Greta carries can no longer be ignored and the consequences of her actions become difficult to compartmentalize.  With the end of her treatment drawing near, Greta faces a race to set everything right and must prepare herself to choose the one life in which happily ever after might exist.  The Impossible Loves of Greta Wells by Andrew Greer is an enchanting novel that explores the age of question of "what if?" in a fresh new way.

Literary Mystery

One hot summer night in Brooklyn, Val and her best friend June take their raft on the bay but only one of Fadi, a local bodega owner, uses his storefront to publicize the case in the hopes it will become the neighborhood's headquarters for news.  Jonathan, music appreciation teacher and frequent drinker, battles with his personal ties to the tragedy.  In the middle of it all, Val buries a dark secret about that night, revealing it only to the one she trusts the most.  A literary mystery, Ivy Pochoda's Visitation Street, weaves through the gritty neighborhood of Red Hook and ends with a bang you won't want to miss.
them returns home.  After finding Val washed up on shore, badly bruised and semi-conscious, the residents of Red Hook must deal with the aftermath of June's disappearance.  Cree, a friend of the girls who has just faced his own tragedy, finds himself at the center of the police investigation.

Thrilling WWII Adventure

Military novelist P.T. Deutermann, known for action-packed WWII naval fiction (Pacific Glory), has created by far the best entry in his Sea Stories series with Ghosts of Bungo Suido. Commander Gar Hammond, skipper of the U.S. submarine Dragonfish, enjoys a reputation in the Pacific theater circa 1944 as a maverick officer, unorthodox and audacious in his approach to harassing Japanese shipping and irreverent toward myopic armchair admirals. He and his crew are assigned a secret suicide mission: to penetrate the deadly Bungo Suido strait into Japan’s Inland Sea and sink a new aircraft carrier. They also have a passenger aboard: a middle-aged Japanese prisoner with a mysterious task to perform at Hiroshima. Gar’s brilliant, bold attack plan almost succeeds, only to go awry and place him at the enemy’s mercy. Deutermann’s gritty descriptions of the technical and tactical complexities of submarine warfare, the heavy demands of command leadership, and Japan’s inhuman treatment of Allied POWs are historically accurate and superbly presented. Best and most suspenseful, however, is a tense postwar epilogue in which Gar must deliver an account of his conduct under fire. This is marvelous military fiction; fast-paced, exciting, and utterly convincing!

The Nose Knows

In her new memoir, Coming To My Senses, Alyssa Harad reveals how an improbable obsession with perfume altered the course of her life. At the age of 36, she's earned her Ph.D in English and is set in her ways until she discovers a blog about perfume that introduces her into the enchanting world of scent.  Taken with the concept of perfume, she soon begins collecting samples, honing her sense of smell, and embracing life in new ways.  As her passion for fragrance grows, so does her passion for life and a new sense of femininity.  Filled with trivia about the history, production, and culture of perfume, this charming memoir makes for a great summer read.

Coming Soon: The Final Book in Atwood's Maddaddam Trilogy


Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, newly fortified against man and giant pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasi-human species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. Their reluctant prophet, Snowman-the-Jimmy, is recovering from a debilitating fever, so it’s left to Toby to preach the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator. She must also deal with cultural misunderstandings, terrible coffee, and her jealousy over her lover, Zeb. Zeb has been searching for Adam One, founder of the God’s Gardeners, the pacifist green religion from which Zeb broke years ago to lead the MaddAddamites in active resistance against the destructive CorpSeCorps. But now, under threat of a Painballer attack, the MaddAddamites must fight back with the aid of their newfound allies, some of whom have four trotters. At the center of MaddAddam is the story of Zeb’s dark and twisted past, which contains a lost brother, a hidden murder, a bear, and a bizarre act of revenge.  Although the book is due out next month, you can reserve a copy now here!

Intense New Thriller

 
Number 1 New York Times –bestselling author Catherine Coulter is back with Bomb Shell, an electrifying new entry in the FBI series featuring Savich and Sherlock.  
FBI Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith, last seen in Backfire, has been recruited by Dillon Savich to join his unit in Washington, D.C. Savich sees something special in Hammersmith, an instinct for tracking criminals.  While on his way to D.C., Hammersmith plans to visit his sister, Delsey, a student at Stanislaus School of Music in Maestro, Virginia. Before he arrives, he gets a phone call that Delsey was found naked, unconscious, and covered with blood after a wild party. The blood isn't hers—so who does it belong to?   Meanwhile, back in D.C., Savich and Sherlock have their hands full when the grandson of former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank is found murdered, every bone in his body broken, and frozen at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.   Was Savich right—is Griffin gifted with a unique ability to "see" how criminals think? And will he figure out who was behind the attempt on Delsey's life—before it's too late?

A Study of the Roots of Our Fascination with Crime

Murder in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, with killings transformed into novels, broadsides, ballads, opera, and melodrama—even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts. Detective fiction and the new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other—the founders of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens's Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell.  In this well researched book, Judith Flanders retells the gruesome stories of many different types of murder, both famous and obscure: from Greenacre, who transported his dismembered fiancĂ©e around town by omnibus, to Burke and Hare’s bodysnatching business in Edinburgh; from the crimes (and myths) of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, to the tragedy of the murdered Marr family in London’s East End.  Through these stories of murder—from the brutal to the pathetic—Flanders builds a rich and multi-faceted portrait of Victorian society.  With an irresistible cast of swindlers, forgers, and poisoners, the mad, the bad and the utterly dangerous, The Invention of Murder is both a mesmerizing tale of crime and punishment, and history at its most readable!

Enchanting Debut Novel

The Empress Anna Ioannovna has issued her latest eccentric order: construct a palace out of ice. Inside its walls her slaves build a wedding chamber, a canopy bed on a dais, heavy drapes cascading to the floor—all made of ice. Sealed inside are a disgraced nobleman and a deformed female jester. On the empress’s command—for her entertainment—these two are to be married, the relationship consummated inside this frozen prison. In the morning, guards enter to find them half-dead. Nine months later, two boys are born.  Surrounded by servants and animals, Prince Alexander Velitzyn and his twin brother, Andrei, have an idyllic childhood on the family’s large country estate. But as they approach manhood, stark differences coalesce. Andrei is daring and ambitious; Alexander is tentative and adrift. One frigid winter night on the road between St. Petersburg and Moscow, as he flees his army post, Alexander comes to a horrifying revelation: his body is immune to cold.  J. M. Sidorova’s boldly original and genrebending novel, The Age of Ice, takes readers from the grisly fields of the Napoleonic Wars to the blazing heat of Afghanistan, from the outer reaches of Siberia to the cacophonous streets of nineteenth-century Paris.

Next in the Highly Anticipated Dave Robicheaux Series

In Light of the World, sadist and serial killer Asa Surrette narrowly escaped the death penalty for the string of heinous murders he committed while capital punishment was outlawed in Kansas. But following a series of damning articles written by Dave Robicheaux’s daughter Alafair about possible other crimes committed by Surette, the killer escapes from a prison transport van and heads to Montana—where an unsuspecting Dave happens to have gone to take in the sweet summer air, accompanied by Alafair, his wife Molly, faithful partner Clete, and Clete’s newfound daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, whom listeners met in James Burke’s most recent bestseller Creole Belle.

New Danielle Steel

New York. London. Milan. Paris. Fashion Week in all four cities.. At the center of the storm and avalanche of work is American Timmie O’Neill, whose renowned line, Timmie O, is the embodiment of casual chic. Over two decades Timmie has built an international empire that has brought her enormous satisfaction and success. In a world where humility and compassion are all too rare, her humor, kindness, integrity, and creativity are inspirational. Yet as blessed as she feels by her success, Timmie harbors the private wounds of a devastating childhood and past tragedy. Despite her well-ordered and highly controlled world, it turns out that Timmie O’Neill is not immune to magic when it strikes. And it strikes in Paris during Paris Fashion Week, when an intriguing Frenchman comes into her life when she gets sick. At first, Timmie and Jean-Charles Vernier are only patient and physician. They become confidants and friends, corresponding at a safe distance between Paris and Los Angeles once she goes home. There is every reason why they must remain apart. But neither can deny their growing friendship and the electricity that sparks whenever they meet. First Sight is as complex and compelling as modern life itself. 

Movie Alert

Universal has set a Christmas Day 2014 release for World War II drama Unbroken, which marks Angelina Jolie's second directorial effort.  Universal picked up the rights to the book in January 2011, initially for Francis Lawrence to direct. Jolie boarded the project in December.The coveted release positions the film -- an adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s acclaimed 2010 book about World War II hero Lou Zamperini -- for an awards run. Ethan and Joel Coen are writing the script from previous drafts by William Nicholson and Richard LaGravenese.

The Dark Legacy of Shannara #3

Terry Brooks' fans rejoice: Witch Wraith, the third novel in the Shannara series, has been released.  For centuries the Four Lands enjoyed freedom from its demon-haunted past, protected by magic-enhanced borders from the dark dimension known as the Forbidding and the profound evil imprisoned there. But now the unthinkable is happening: The ancient wards securing the barrier between order and mayhem have begun to erode—and generations of bloodthirsty, monstrous creatures, fueled by a rage thousands of years in the making, are poised to spill forth, seeking revenge for what was done to them.
Young Elf Arling Elessedil possesses the enchanted means to close the breach and once more seal the denizens of the Forbidding in their prison. But when she falls into the hands of the powerful Federation’s diabolical Prime Minister, her efforts may be doomed. Only her determined sister, Aphen, who bears the Elfstones and commands their magic, has any hope of saving Arling from the hideous fate her captor has in store.  Meanwhile, Railing Ohmsford—desperate to save his imprisoned brother—seeks to discover if his famed but ill-fated ancestor Grianne is still alive and willing to help him save the world . . . no matter the odds or the consequences

Renaissance Borgias & Machiavellian Magnetism.

Is there a family in history more dazzling, dangerous and notorious than the Borgias?  A powerhouse of the Italian Renaissance, their very name epitomizes the ruthless politics and sexual corruption of the Papacy.  The father, Pope Alexander VI, a consummate politician and a man with a voracious appetite both as Cardinal and Pope.  The younger Juan, womanizer and thug, and their lovely sister, Lucretia, whose very name has become a byword for poison, incest and intrigue.  But how much of the history about this remarkable family is actually true, and how much distorted, filtered through the age old mechanisms of political spin, propaganda and gossip?  What if the truth, the real history, is even more challenging?   Blood & Beauty: The Borgias by Sarah Dunant is an epic novel which sets out to capture the scope, the detail, the depth, the colour and the complexity of this utterly fascinating family.

If you like Kristin Hannah....

In the tradition of Kristin Hannah, from bestselling author Meg Waite Clayton comes The Wednesday Daughters, an enthralling new novel of mothers, daughters, and the secrets and dreams passed down through generations.  It is evening when Hope arrives at the cottage in England’s pastoral Lake District where her mother, Ally, spent the last years of her life. Ally—one of a close-knit group of women who called themselves the Wednesday Sisters—had used the cottage as a retreat while she worked on her unpublished biography of Beatrix Potter, yet Hope knows little about her mother’s time there. Traveling with Hope are friends Anna and Julie, first introduced as little girls in The Wednesday Sisters, now grown women grappling with issues of a different era. They’ve come to help Hope sort through her mother’s personal effects, yet what they find is a tangled family history—one steeped in Lake District lore.  Hope finds a stack of Ally’s notebooks tucked away in a  drawer, all written in code. As she, Julie, and Anna try to decipher Ally’s writings, they are forced to confront their own personal struggles. And as the real reason for Ally’s stay in England comes to light, Hope, Julie, and Anna  reach a new understanding about the enduring bonds of family, the unwavering strength of love, and the inescapable pull of the past.

A Literary Break Up Letter

Nate Piven is a rising star in Brooklyn’s literary scene. After several lean and striving years, he has his pick of both magazine assignments and women: Juliet, the hotshot business reporter; Elisa, his gorgeous ex-girlfriend, now friend; and Hannah, “almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice,” who is lively fun and holds her own in conversation with his friends.  In this 21st-century literary world, wit and conversation are not at all dead. Is romance? Novelist Adelle Waldman plunges into the psyche of a modern man—who thinks of himself as beyond superficial judgment, yet constantly struggles with his own status anxiety, who is drawn to women, yet has a habit of letting them down. With tough-minded intelligence and wry good humor The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is an absorbing tale of one young man’s search for happiness—and an inside look at how he really thinks about women and love

Wise Novel in Verse

Ian Rankin's Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish leaps cities and decades as Rakoff sings
the song of an America whose freedoms can be intoxicating, or brutal.  The characters' lives are linked toeach other by acts of generosity or cruelty. A daughter of Irish slaughterhouse workers in early-twentieth-century Chicago faces a desperate choice; a hobo offers an unexpected refuge on the rails during the Great Depression; a vivacious aunt provides her clever nephew a path out of the crushed dream of postwar Southern California; an office girl endures the casually vicious sexism of 1950s Manhattan; the young man from Southern California revels in the electrifying sexual and artistic openness of 1960s San Francisco, then later tends to dying friends and lovers as the AIDS pandemic devastates the community he cherishes; a love triangle reveals the empty materialism of the Reagan years; a marriage crumbles under the distinction between self-actualization and humanity; as the new century opens, a man who has lost his way finds a measure of peace in a photograph he discovers in an old box-an image of pure and simple joy that unites the themes of this brilliantly conceived work.

A Meditation on Villainy

Chuck Klosterman has walked into the darkness. As a boy, he related to the cultural figures who represented goodness—but as an adult, he found himself unconsciously aligning with their enemies. This was not because he necessarily liked what they were doing; it was because they were doing it on purpose (and they were doing it better). They wanted to be evil. And what, exactly, was that supposed to mean? When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying (and why are we so obsessed with saying it)? How does the culture of deliberate malevolence operate?   In I Wear the Black Hat, Klosterman questions the modern understanding of villainy.   Blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers observations on the complexity of the antihero and is a rare example of serious criticism that’s instantly accessible and really, really funny. 

Cute New Cozy

No mission is impawsible for pet sitter Dixie Hemingway (no relation to you-know-who). On an early morning walk, she spots an exotic bird rarely seen north of the equator, much less in the sleepy beach-side town of Siesta Key, Florida. At first, Dixie thinks the bird has been blown off course by a terrible storm, but as she digs deeper into where the bird came from, Dixie becomes increasingly suspicious of its origins. When one client is found dead and a new friend and her baby disappear without warning, Dixie is pulled into a whirlwind of greed, deception, and danger. The eighth in this popular cozy series, John Clement and Blaize Clement's The Cat Sitter's Cradle, will keep both newcomers and loyal Dixie fans perched on the edge of their seats.

New Music Memoir

Mo' Meta Blues is a punch-drunk memoir in which Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson tells his own story while tackling some of the lates, the greats, the fakes, the philosophers, the heavyweights, and the true originals of the music world. He digs deep into the album cuts of his life and unearths some pivotal moments in black art, hip hop, and pop culture.  Questlove  is many things: virtuoso drummer, producer, arranger, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon bandleader, DJ, composer, and tireless Tweeter. He is one of our most ubiquitous cultural tastemakers, and in this, his first book, he reveals his own formative experiences--from growing up in 1970s West Philly as the son of a 1950s doo-wop singer, to finding his own way through the music world and ultimately co-founding and rising up with the Roots, a.k.a.,the last hip hop band on Earth. But this isn't just a memoir. It's a dialogue about the nature of memory and the idea of a post-modern black man saddled with some post-modern blues making it a one of a kind read.

For Fans Of The Paris Wife

For fans of The Paris Wife, Loving Frank, The Other Boleyn Girl and Shanghai Girls comes Freud's Mistress by Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufmann.  Minna  is an overeducated woman with limited options. Fired again for speaking her mind, she finds herself out on the street. In 1895 Vienna, even though the city is aswirl with avant-garde artists and writers and revolutionary are still very few options for women. Out of desperation, Minna turns to her older sister, Martha, for help. But Martha has her own problems—six young children, a host of physical ailments, a household run with military precision, and an absent, overworked, disinterested husband who happens to be Sigmund Freud. Freud is a struggling professor, all but shunned by his peers and under attack for his theories, most of which center around sexual impulses, urges, and perversions. While Martha is shocked and repulsed by her husband’s "pornographic" work, Minna is fascinated.  Minna is everything Martha is not—intellectually curious, an avid reader, stunning. But while she and Freud embark on what is at first simply an intellectual courtship, something deeper is brewing beneath the surface, something Minna cannot escape

New Steampunk Mystery

A serial killer is loose on the streets of London, murdering apparently random members of the gentry with violent abandon. The corpses are each found with their chest cavities cracked open and their hearts removed. Charles Bainbridge, Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard, suspects an occult significance to the crimes and brings Newbury and Veronica in to investigate.  If you're new to steampunk, try George Mann's The Executioner's Heart to start!

Spellbinding Novel of Love, Despair, and Revenge

1943: Tucked away in the hills of Florence, the Rosatis, an Italian family of noble lineage, believe that the walls of their villa will keep them safe from the war raging across Europe. Eighteen-year-old Cristina spends her days swimming, playing with her young niece and nephew, and wandering aimlessly. But when two soldiers, a German and an Italian, arrive at the villa asking to see an ancient Etruscan burial site, the Rosatis’ bucolic tranquility is shattered. A young German lieutenant begins to court Cristina, the Nazis descend upon the estate demanding hospitality, and what was once their sanctuary becomes their prison.

1955: Serafina, an investigator with the Florence police department, has her own demons. A beautiful woman, Serafina carefully hides her scars along with her haunting memories of the war. But when she is assigned to a gruesome new case—a serial killer targeting the Rosatis, murdering the remnants of the family one-by-one in cold blood—Serafina finds herself digging into a past that involves both the victims and her own tragic history.

Set against an exquisitely rendered Italian countryside, Chris Bohjalian's The Light in the Ruins unveils a breathtaking story of moral paradox, human frailty, and the mysterious ways of the heart

A Crack In Time

It is Christmas afternoon and Peter gets an unexpected phone call from his parents, asking him to come. It pulls him away from his wife and children and into a bewildering mystery.  He arrives at his parents house and discovers that they have a visitor.  His sister, Tara.  But twenty years ago Tara took a walk into the woods and never came back and as the years have gone by with no word from her the family have, unspoken, assumed that she was dead. Now she's back, tired, dirty, dishevelled, but happy and full of stories about twenty years spent travelling the world, an epic odyssey taken on a whim.  But her stories don't quite hang together and once she has cleaned herself up and got some sleep it becomes apparent that the intervening years have been very kind to Tara. She really does look no different from the young woman who walked out the door twenty years ago. Peter's parents are just delighted to have their little girl back, but Peter and his best friend Richie, Tara's one time boyfriend, are not so sure. Tara seems happy enough but there is something about her.  Some would say it's as if she's off with the fairies. And as the months go by Peter begins to suspect that the woods around their homes are not finished with Tara and his family  .Graham Joyce's Some Kind Of Fairy Tale  is a magical book that explores the concept of family even as it questions the nature of reality.

Chasing A Ghost

Karin Slaughter’s latest thriller, Unseenpits detectives, lovers, and enemies against one another in an unforgettable standoff between righteous courage and deepest evil.  Will Trent is a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent whose latest case has him posing as Bill Black, a scary ex-con who rides a motorcycle around Macon, Georgia, and trails an air of violence wherever he goes. The cover has worked and he has caught the eye of a wiry little drug dealer who thinks he might be a useful ally. But undercover and cut off from the support of the woman he loves, Sara Linton, Will finds his demons catching up with him.  Although she has no idea where Will has gone, or why, Sara herself has come to Macon because of a cop shooting: Her stepson, Jared, has been gunned down in his own home. Sara holds Lena, Jared’s wife, responsible: Lena, a detective, has been a magnet for trouble all her life, and Jared’s shooting is not the first time someone Sara loved got caught in the crossfire. Furious, Sara finds herself involved in the same case that Will is working without even knowing it, and soon danger is swirling around both of them.  Slaughter’s latest is both an electrifying thriller and a piercing study of human nature: what happens when good people face the unseen evils in their lives.

Romantic New Love Story

Year after year, Luanne Rice’s fans eagerly await her next book. Their enthusiasm is soon to be rewarded with The Lemon Orchard, Rice’s romantic new love story between two people from seemingly different worlds.  In the five years since Julia last visited her aunt and uncle’s home in Malibu, her life has been turned upside down by her daughter’s death. She expects to find nothing more than peace and solitude as she house-sits with only her dog, Bonnie, for company. But she finds herself drawn to the handsome man who oversees the lemon orchard. Roberto expertly tends the trees, using the money to support his extended Mexican family. What connection could these two people share? The answer comes as Roberto reveals the heartbreaking story of his own loss—a pain Julia knows all too well, but for one striking difference: Roberto’s daughter was lost but never found. And despite the odds he cannot bear to give up hope.  Set in the sea and citrus-scented air of the breathtaking Santa Monica Mountains, The Lemon Orchard is an affirming story about the redemptive power of compassion and the kind of love that seems to find us when we need it most.