Title: Stay Close
Author: Harlan Coben
Genre: mystery
Publisher: Dutton
Publishing Date: March 20
Summary: Megan is a suburban soccer mom who once upon a time walked on the wild side. Now she’s got two kids, a perfect husband, a picket fence, and a growing sense of dissatisfaction. Ray used to be a talented documentary photographer, but at age forty he finds himself in a dead- end job posing as a paparazzo pandering to celebrity-obsessed rich kids. Jack is a detective who can’t let go of a cold case-a local husband and father disappeared seventeen years ago, and Jack spends the anniversary every year visiting a house frozen in time, the missing man’s family still waiting, his slippers left by the recliner as if he might show up any moment to step into them.
Three people living lives they never wanted, hiding secrets that even those closest to them would never suspect, will find that the past doesn’t recede. Even as the terrible consequences of long-ago events crash together in the present and threaten to ruin lives, they will come to the startling realization that they may not want to forget the past at all. And as each confronts the dark side of the American Dream- the boredom of a nice suburban life, the excitement of temptation, the desperation and hunger that can lurk behind even the prettiest facades- they will discover the hard truth that the line between one kind of life and another can be as whisper-thin as a heartbeat.

~

Title: The Good Father
Author: Noah Hawley
Genre: fiction
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publishing Date: March 20
Summary: An intense, psychological novel about one doctor’s suspense-filled quest to unlock the mind of a suspected political assassin: his twenty-year old son.
As the Chief of Rheumatology at Columbia Presbyterian, Dr. Paul Allen’s specialty is diagnosing patients with conflicting symptoms, patients other doctors have given up on. He lives a contented life in Westport with his second wife and their twin sons—hard won after a failed marriage earlier in his career that produced a son named Daniel. In the harrowing opening scene of this provocative and affecting novel, Dr. Allen is home with his family when a televised news report announces that the Democratic candidate for president has been shot at a rally, and Daniel is caught on video as the assassin.
Daniel Allen has always been a good kid—a decent student, popular—but, as a child of divorce, used to shuttling back and forth between parents, he is also something of a drifter. Which may be why, at the age of nineteen, he quietly drops out of Vassar and begins an aimless journey across the United States, during which he sheds his former skin and eventually even changes his name to Carter Allen Cash.

~

Title: Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner
Author: John Maxtone-Graham
Genre: nonfiction
Publisher: WW Norton & Company
Publishing Date: March 19
Summary: This is a book unlike any other. Rather than offering simply a detailed retelling of the Titanic sinking on her maiden voyage, John Maxtone-Graham devotes his considerable knowledge and impeccable prose to a discussion of salient, provocative, and rarely investigated components of the story, including dramatic survivors accounts of the events of the fateful night, the role of newly in-vented wireless telecommunication in the disaster, the construction and its ramifications at the famous Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and the dawn rendezvous with the rescue ship Carpathia. Richly written and vividly detailed, this is the book Titanic buffs have been waiting for.

~

And now for some really big news of the week about upcoming 2012/2013 books!

• Cassandra Clare (of The Mortal Instruments and Infernal Devices fantasy series) has announced a new Shadowhunter series set in 2015 LA, The Dark Artifices. This week she was answering fans’ questions on her twitter @cassieclare about the possible TMI movie, the next ID book, and the future TDA.
• Lisa Jewell’s BEFORE I MET HER, connecting 1920s Jazz Age London and 1990s Soho
• Rachel Urquhart’s debut novel, THE VISIONIST, the story of a 15 year-old girl who sets fire to her family farm and finds refuge in an 1840s Shaker settlement
• A Game of Thrones graphic novel (available March 27)

Happy reading!