genre: mystery | Scribbles & Wanderlust | Page 5

Tag: genre: mystery
- Upcoming Books! [25]
  
  Posted at 10:45 am by Laura, on July 8, 2012
  
  I will be away the following two Sundays, so there will be no updates for Upcoming Books (or book reviews and publishing news). I have three books here that will be published Tuesday, and one in particular later this month simply because I adore this author. Yes. I can have some bias here!
  
  ~
  
  Title: The Absolutist
  Author: John Boyne
  Genre: historical fiction
  Publisher: Other Press
  Publishing Date: July 10
  Summary: It is September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver a package of letters to the sister of Will Bancroft, the man he fought alongside during the Great War.
  But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan’s visit. He can no longer keep a secret and has finally found the courage to unburden himself of it. As Tristan recounts the horrific details of what to him became a senseless war, he also speaks of his friendship with Will–from their first meeting on the training grounds at Aldershot to their farewell in the trenches of northern France. The intensity of their bond brought Tristan happiness and self-discovery as well as confusion and unbearable pain.
  
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  Title: Lies, Knives, and Girls in Red Dresses
  Author: Ron Koertge
  Genre: young adult, fairy tales, short stories
  Publisher: Candlewick Press
  Publishing Date: July 10
  Summary: Once upon a time, there was a strung-out match girl who sold CDs to stoners. Twelve impetuous sisters escaped King Daddy’s clutches to jiggle and cavort and wear out their shoes. A fickle Thumbelina searched for a tiny husband, leaving bodies in her wake. And Little Red Riding Hood confessed that she kind of wanted to know what it’s like to be swallowed whole. From bloodied and blinded stepsisters (they were duped) to a chopped-off finger flying into a heroine’s cleavage, this is fairy tale world turned upside down. Ron Koertge knows what really happened to all those wolves and maidens, ogres and orphans, kings and piglets, and he knows about the Ever After. So come closer
  – he wants to whisper in your ear.
  
  ~
  
  Title: Playing With Matches
  Author: Carolyn Wall
  Genre: fiction
  Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  Publishing Date: July 10
  Summary: Growing up in False River, Mississippi, Clea Shine learned early that a small town is no place for big secrets. Having fled years ago in the wake of a tragedy and now settled with a family of her own, she faces a turning point in her marriage and seeks refuge in the one place she vowed never to return.
  Clea’s homecoming is bittersweet. Reunited with Jerusha Lovemore, the kindly neighbor who raised her, Clea gains a sense of love and comfort, but still cannot escape the ghosts of her past: the abandonment by her disreputable mother, her constant search for belonging, the truth behind that fateful night from long ago. Once outspoken and impulsive, Clea now seeks only redemption and peace of mind. And as a hurricane threatens to hit False River, everything she has tried to forget may finally be exposed once and for all.
  
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  Title: Broken Harbor
  Author: Tana French
  Genre: mystery
  Publisher: Penguin Group
  Publishing Date: July 24
  Summary: “Scorcher” Kennedy, the brash cop from Tana French’s bestselling Faithful Place, plays by the book and plays hard. That’s what’s made him the Murder squad’s top detective—and that’s what puts the biggest case of the year into his hands.
  On one of the half-built, half-abandoned “luxury” developments that litter Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children are dead. His wife, Jenny, is in intensive care.
  At first, Scorcher and his rookie partner, Richie, think it’s going to be an easy solve. But too many small things can’t be explained. The half dozen baby monitors, their cameras pointing at holes smashed in the Spains’ walls. The files erased from the Spains’ computer. The story Jenny told her sister about a shadowy intruder who was slipping past all the locks.
  And Broken Harbor holds memories for Scorcher. Seeing the case on the news sends his sister Dina off the rails again, and she’s resurrecting something that Scorcher thought he had tightly under control: what happened to their family one summer at Broken Harbor, back when they were children.
  
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged books, genre: fantasy, genre: fiction, genre: history, genre: mystery, genre: young adult, upcoming books
- Upcoming Books! [23]
  
  Posted at 12:00 pm by Laura, on June 24, 2012
  
  Title: Between the Lines
  Author: Jodi Picoult, Samantha van Leer
  Genre: young adult
  Publisher: Simon Pulse
  Publishing Date: June 26
  Summary: What happens when happily ever after…isn’t?
  Delilah is a bit of a loner who prefers spending her time in the school library with her head in a book—one book in particular. Between the Lines may be a fairy tale, but it feels real. Prince Oliver is brave, adventurous, and loving. He really speaks to Delilah.
  And then one day Oliver actually speaks to her. Turns out, Oliver is more than a one-dimensional storybook prince. He’s a restless teen who feels trapped by his literary existence and hates that his entire life is predetermined. He’s sure there’s more for him out there in the real world, and Delilah might just be his key to freedom.
  Delilah and Oliver work together to attempt to get Oliver out of his book, a challenging task that forces them to examine their perceptions of fate, the world, and their places in it. And as their attraction to each other grows along the way, a romance blossoms that is anything but a fairy tale.
  
  This looks like it’s going to be a neat book. The idea was all Picoult’s daughter’s, van Leer. They wrote this across several years together during her winter and summer breaks. Pretty cool!
  
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  Title: One Breath Away
  Author: Heather Gudenkauf
  Genre: suspense, mystery
  Publisher: Mira
  Publishing Date: June 26
  Summary: In the midst of a sudden spring snowstorm, an unknown man armed with a gun walks into an elementary school classroom. Outside the school, the town of Broken Branch watches and waits.
  Officer Meg Barrett holds the responsibility for the town’s children in her hands. Will Thwaite, reluctantly entrusted with the care of his two grandchildren by the daughter who left home years earlier, stands by helplessly and wonders if he has failed his child again. Trapped in her classroom, Evelyn Oliver watches for an opportunity to rescue the children in her care. And thirteen-year-old Augie Baker, already struggling with the aftermath of a terrible accident that has has brought her to Broken Branch, will risk her own safety to protect her little brother.
  As tension mounts with each passing minute, the hidden fears and grudges of the small town are revealed as the people of Broken Branch race to uncover the identity of the stranger who holds their children hostage.
  
  ~
  
  Title: The Receptionist
  Author: Janet Groth
  Genre: memoir, nonfiction
  Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
  Publishing Date: June 26
  Summary: Thanks to a successful interview with the painfully shy E.B. White, a beautiful, 19-year-old, blue-eyed blonde from the cornfields of Iowa lands a job as a receptionist at “The New Yorker” magazine. There she stays two decades, becoming general all-around factotum–watching and registering the comings and goings, marriages and divorces, scandalous affairs, failures, triumphs, and tragedies of the eccentric inhabitants of the 18th floor. Though she dreamed of becoming a writer, she never advanced at the magazine. This memoir of a particular time and place is as much about why that was so as it is about Groth’s fascinating relationships with John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, Muriel Spark, as well as E.J. Kahn, Calvin Trillin, Renata Adler, Peter DeVries, Charles Addams, and many other “New Yorker” contributors and bohemian denizens of Greenwich Village in its heyday. Eventually, Groth would have to leave “The New Yorker” in order to find herself.
  
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged genre: adult fiction, genre: fiction, genre: mystery, genre: nonfiction, genre: romance, genre: young adult, upcoming books
- Upcoming Books! [20]
  
  Posted at 4:53 pm by Laura, on June 3, 2012
  
  Title: Little Night
  Author: Luanne Rice
  Genre: fiction, drama, family
  Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
  Publishing Date: June 5
  Summary: Clare Burke’s life took a devastating turn when she tried to protect her sister, Anne, from an abusive and controlling husband and ended up serving prison time for assault. The verdict largely hinged on Anne’s defense of her spouse—all lies—and the sisters have been estranged ever since. Nearly twenty years later, Clare is living a quiet life in Manhattan as an urban birder and nature blogger, when her niece, Grit, turns up on her doorstep.
  The two long for a relationship with each other, but they’ll have to dig deep into their family’s difficult past in order to build one. Together they face the wounds inflicted by Anne and find in their new connection a place of healing. When Clare begins to suspect her sister might be in New York, she and her niece hold out hope for a long-awaited reunion with her.
  
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  Title: Monument 14
  Author: Emmy Laybourne
  Genre: young adult, dystopian, post-apocalyptic
  Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
  Publishing Date: June 5
  Summary: Your mother hollers that you’re going to miss the bus. She can see it coming down the street. You don’t stop and hug her and tell her you love her. You don’t thank her for being a good, kind, patient mother. Of course not—you launch yourself down the stairs and make a run for the corner.
  Only, if it’s the last time you’ll ever see your mother, you sort of start to wish you’d stopped and did those things. Maybe even missed the bus.
  But the bus was barreling down our street, so I ran.
  Fourteen kids. One superstore. A million things that go wrong.
  In Emmy Laybourne’s action-packed debut novel, six high school kids (some popular, some not), two eighth graders (one a tech genius), and six little kids trapped together in a chain superstore build a refuge for themselves inside. While outside, a series of escalating disasters, beginning with a monster hailstorm and ending with a chemical weapons spill, seems to be tearing the world—as they know it—apart.
  
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  Title: Dead Scared
  Author: SJ Bolton
  Genre: mystery, thriller
  Publisher: St Martin’s Press
  Publishing Date: June 5
  Summary: When a rash of suicides tears through Cambridge University, DI Mark Joesbury recruits DC Lacey Flint to go undercover as a student to investigate. Although each student’s death appears to be a suicide, the psychological histories, social networks, and online activities of the students involved share remarkable similarities, and the London police are not convinced that the victims acted alone. They believe that someone might be preying on lonely and insecure students and either encouraging them to take their own lives or actually luring them to their deaths. As long as Lacey can play the role of a vulnerable young woman, she may be able to stop these deaths, but is it just a role for her? With her fragile past, is she drawing out the killers, or is she herself being drawn into a deadly game where she’s a perfect victim?
  
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  Happy reading! What are you reading this week? I’ve started Insurgent by Veronica Roth, and I think I’ll either start The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox or The House of Velvet and Glass by Katherine Howe after.
  
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged books, genre: adult fiction, genre: dystopian, genre: fiction, genre: mystery, genre: young adult, upcoming books
- Book Review: “Faithful Place” by Tana French
  
  Posted at 4:23 pm by Laura, on June 3, 2012
  
  Faithful Place by Tana French
  
  Back in 1985, Frank Mackey was nineteen, growing up poor in Dublin’s inner city, and living crammed into a small flat with his family on Faithful Place. But he had his sights set on a lot more. He and Rosie Daly were all ready to run away to London together, get married, get good jobs, break away from factory work and poverty and their old lives.
  
  But on the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show. Frank took it for granted that she’d dumped him-probably because of his alcoholic father, nutcase mother, and generally dysfunctional family. He never went home again.
  
  Neither did Rosie. Everyone thought she had gone to England on her own and was over there living a shiny new life. Then, twenty-two years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, and Frank is going home whether he likes it or not.
  
  Getting sucked in is a lot easier than getting out again. Frank finds himself straight back in the dark tangle of relationships he left behind. The cops working the case want him out of the way, in case loyalty to his family and community makes him a liability. Faithful Place wants him out because he’s a detective now, and the Place has never liked cops. Frank just wants to find out what happened to Rosie Daly-and he’s willing to do whatever it takes, to himself or anyone else, to get the job done.
  
  This third installment of the Dublin Murder series was better than the first book (In the Woods) and not as fantastic as the second book (The Likeness). It is a mixture of the two, with personal dilemmas like the first and loads of intrigue and mystery like the second. Faithful Place is first and foremost a love story, discovering the past and revealing mysterious incidents through vengeance. Frank Mackey is quite the charmer, and stops at nothing to discover what happened to his old girlfriend (and later, his brother).
  
  Rather than taking place in offices and solving the mystery through crime lab results and scientific data, Frank discovers everything “old school.” He’s always at the scene of the crime, back home, or visiting old friends’ places and having multiple conversations with others. At first the conversations seemed to drag – I wondered what the point was for all the dialogue – but once it seemed to be too much, Frank (and the reader) could immediately make connections to other conversations and incidents from the past. Tana French was very clever in her subtle hints and twists in the plot.
  
  What was incredibly fascinating was the internal switch in my mental accent. The voice reading in my head was no longer a midwestern American, but an Irish voice that I’m sure was a terrible mimicry of a true Dublin accent. The slang, phrasing, and deliberate misspellings in the dialogue begged to be read with the accent in mind! It certainly became entertaining, and easier to read once I got the hang of it.
  
  Filled with intrigue, old-fashioned word-of-mouth mystery-solving, folklore, and Irish homeliness, I would recommend this book to anyone who deeply enjoyed The Likeness (which Frank makes repeated appearances in) or wants a good heartbreaking love story that ended in murder. The relationships between the characters are entertaining, the conversations and class divides interesting, and the atmosphere intoxicating.
  
  Rating: ★★★★★
  Goodreads: 3.89 of 5
  
  Posted in books, Reviews 2012 | 0 Comments | Tagged book review, books, genre: adult fiction, genre: fiction, genre: mystery, goodreads, review
- Upcoming Books! [19]
  
  Posted at 12:00 pm by Laura, on May 27, 2012
  Title: Changeling
  Author: Philippa Gregory
  Genre: young adult, historical fiction, fantasy
  Publisher: Simon Pulse
  Publishing Date: May 29
  Summary: Italy, 1453. Seventeen-year-old Luca Vero is brilliant, gorgeous—and accused of heresy. Cast out of his religious order for using the new science to question old superstitious beliefs, Luca is recruited into a secret sect: The Order of the Dragon, commissioned by Pope Nicholas V to investigate evil and danger in its many forms, and strange occurrences across Europe, in this year—the end of days.
  Isolde is a seventeen-year-old girl shut up in a nunnery so she can’t inherit any of her father’s estate. As the nuns walk in their sleep and see strange visions, Isolde is accused of witchcraft—and Luca is sent to investigate her, but finds himself plotting her escape.
  Despite their vows, despite themselves, love grows between Luca and Isolde as they travel across Europe with their faithful companions, Freize and Ishraq. The four young people encounter werewolves, alchemists, witches, and death-dancers as they head toward a real-life historical figure who holds the boundaries of Christendom and the secrets of the Order of the Dragon.
  
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  Title: The Yard
  Author: Alex Grecian
  Genre: mystery, historical fiction
  Publisher: Putnam Books
  Publishing Date: May 29
  Summary: Victorian London is a cesspool of crime, and Scotland Yard has only twelve detectives—known as “The Murder Squad”—to investigate countless murders every month. Created after the Metropolitan Police’s spectacular failure to capture Jack the Ripper, The Murder Squad suffers rampant public contempt. They have failed their citizens. But no one can anticipate the brutal murder of one of their own . . . one of the twelve . . .When Walter Day, the squad’s newest hire, is assigned the case of the murdered detective, he finds a strange ally in the Yard’s first forensic pathologist, Dr. Bernard Kingsley. Together they track the killer, who clearly is not finished with The Murder Squad . . . but why?
  
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  Title: The Watchers
  Author: Jon Steele
  Genre: mystery, thriller
  Publisher: Blue Rider Press
  Publishing Date: May 29
  Summary: Meet Marc Rochat, a man-child who has devoted his life to being the bell ringer at the Gothic Lausanne Cathedral, one of the greatest architectural structures in the world. Eerie things have been going on in and around his church, including tremblings in the underground crypt and a variety of gruesomely murdered bodies showing up in nearby streets. Across the square from the cathedral lives Katherine Taylor, a beautiful young American woman who is making phenomenal money as one of the highest-priced call girls in Switzerland; she’s a bit too introspective for her own good and, unfortunately, much too observant of her clients’ peccadilloes. Rochat’s and Taylor’s lives collide with Jay Harper, a British private eye who has been sent to investigate the killings and other strange doings; alas, he has no memory of who hired him or precisely why he was chosen for the job. And now all the clues are pointing skyward, where fallen angels are said to haunt Lausanne.
  
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  Some books to look forward to publication later in 2012 and early 2013 include
  - Stephanie Thornton’s THE SECRET HISTORY, in which a theater tart-turned-Constantinople’s premier courtesan must decide what’s more important: pleasing the emperor who claims to love her or keeping the son he can never know about.
  - Mary Miley’s THE IMPERSONATOR, featuring a young vaudeville actress who takes on the role of a lifetime when she impersonates a missing heiress.
  - Benjamin Percy’s THE DEAD LANDS, a post-apocalyptic reinvention of Lewis and Clark’s epic journey across the West.
  Happy reading!
  
  Major thanks to several publishing houses, Goodreads, and Publishers Lunch for providing weekly updates!
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged books, genre: adult fiction, genre: fantasy, genre: fiction, genre: history, genre: mystery, genre: young adult, upcoming books
- Upcoming Books! [17]
  
  Posted at 8:51 pm by Laura, on May 13, 2012
  
  Title: A Confusion of Princes
  Author: Garth Nix
  Genre: young adult, sci-fi, fantasy
  Publisher: HarperCollins Children’s Books
  Publishing Date: May 15
  Summary: You’d think being a privileged Prince in a vast intergalactic Empire would be about as good as it gets. But it isn’t as great as it sounds. For one thing, Princes are always in danger. Their greatest threat? Other Princes. Khemri discovers that the moment he is proclaimed a Prince.
  He also discovers mysteries within the hidden workings of the Empire. Dispatched on a secret mission, Khemri comes across the ruins of a space battle. In the midst of it all he meets a young woman named Raine, who will challenge his view of the Empire, of Princes, and of himself.
  
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  Title: The Chemistry of Tears
  Author: Peter Carey
  Genre: historical fiction
  Publisher: Knopf Doubleday
  Publishing Date: May 15
  Summary: London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying eyes in the museum’s Annexe. Usually controlled and rational, but now mad with grief, Catherine reluctantly unpacks an extraordinary, eerie automaton that she has been charged with bringing back to life.
  As she begins to piece together the clockwork puzzle, she also uncovers a series of notebooks written by the mechanical creature’s original owner: a nineteenth-century Englishman, Henry Brandling, who traveled to Germany to commission it as a magical amusement for his consumptive son. But it is Catherine, nearly two hundred years later, who will find comfort and wonder in Henry’s story. And it is the automaton, in its beautiful, uncanny imitation of life, that will link two strangers confronted with the mysteries of creation, the miracle and catastrophe of human invention, and the body’s astonishing chemistry of love and feeling.
  
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  Title: As the Crow Flies
  Author: Craig Johnson
  Genre: mystery
  Publisher: Viking Adult
  Publishing Date: May 15
  Summary: Embarking on his eighth adventure, Wyoming Sheriff Walt Longmire has a more important matter on his mind than cowboys and criminals. His daughter, Cady, is getting married to the brother of his undersheriff, Victoria Moretti. Walt and old friend Henry Standing Bear are the de facto wedding planners and fear Cady’s wrath when the wedding locale arrangements go up in smoke two weeks before the big event.
  The pair set out to find a new site for the nuptials on the Cheyenne Reservation, but their scouting expedition ends in horror as they witness a young Crow woman plummeting from Painted Warrior’s majestic cliffs. It’s not Walt’s turf, but the newly appointed tribal police chief and Iraqi war veteran, the beautiful Lolo Long, shanghais him into helping with the investigation. Walt is stretched thin as he mentors Lolo, attempts to catch the bad guys, and performs the role of father of the bride.
  
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  Happy reading!
  
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged genre: adult fiction, genre: fantasy, genre: fiction, genre: history, genre: mystery, genre: sci-fi, genre: young adult, upcoming books
- Upcoming Books! [15]
  
  Posted at 3:28 pm by Laura, on April 29, 2012
  
  Title: Insurgent
  Author: Veronica Roth
  Genre: young adult, dystopian
  Publisher: HarperTeen
  Publishing Date: May 1
  Summary: One choice can transform you—or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves—and herself—while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.
  Tris’s initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable—and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.
  See my review of the first book in this trilogy, Divergent!
  
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  Title: The Proposal
  Author: Mary Balogh
  Genre: historical fiction, romance
  Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
  Publishing Date: May 1
  Summary: Gwendoline, Lady Muir, has seen her share of tragedy, especially since a freak accident took her husband much too soon. Content in a quiet life with friends and family, the young widow has no desire to marry again. But when Hugo, Lord Trentham, scoops her up in his arms after a fall, she feels a sensation that both shocks and emboldens her.
  Hugo never intends to kiss Lady Muir, and frankly, he judges her to be a spoiled, frivolous—if beautiful—aristocrat. He is a gentleman in name only: a soldier whose bravery earned him a title; a merchant’s son who inherited his wealth. He is happiest when working the land, but duty and title now demand that he finds a wife. He doesn’t wish to court Lady Muir, nor have any role in the society games her kind thrives upon. Yet Hugo has never craved a woman more; Gwen’s guileless manner, infectious laugh, and lovely face have ruined him for any other woman. He wants her, but will she have him?
  
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  Title: Death Comes Silently
  Author: Carolyn Hart
  Genre: mystery
  Publisher: Berkley Hardcover
  Publishing Date: May 2
  Summary: Winter has arrived in Broward’s Rock, South Carolina, and business has slowed for Annie Darling, owner of mystery bookstore Death on Demand. So when the island’s resident writer publishes the latest in her popular mystery series, Annie jumps at the chance to host a book signing, even though it conflicts with her shift at the local charity shop, Better Tomorrow.
  Luckily, fellow volunteer Gretchen Burkholt agrees to sub for her. The signing goes well, but Gretchen interrupts the event multiple times, leaving voice mails about scandalous news she’s dying to share. Even though Gretchen tends to be excitable, Annie heads over to Better Tomorrow, where she finds Gretchen dead on the floor, an axe by her side.
  Annie enlists the help of her husband, Max, to piece together a puzzle involving an overturned kayak, a stolen motorboat, a troubled love affair, and a reckless teenager. And she must tread carefully in her investigation, because a killer is on the loose, and that killer works well in the foggy days of winter…
  
  ~
  
  Happy reading!
  
  Posted in books, Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged books, genre: adult fiction, genre: dystopian, genre: fiction, genre: history, genre: mystery, genre: romance, genre: young adult, upcoming books
- Upcoming Books! [13]
  
  Posted at 7:19 pm by Laura, on April 15, 2012
  
  Title: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened
  Author: Jenny Lawson / The Bloggess
  Genre: nonfiction
  Publisher: Amy Einhorn Putnam
  Publishing Date: April 17
  Summary: For fans of Tina Fey and David Sedaris-Internet star Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, makes her literary debut.
  When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father (a professional taxidermist who created dead-animal hand puppets) and a childhood of wearing winter shoes made out of used bread sacks. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.
  Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter are the perfect comedic foils to her absurdities, and help her to uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments-the ones we want to pretend never happened-are the very same moments that make us the people we are today.
  
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  Title: White Horse
  Author: Alex Adams
  Genre: fiction, post-apocalyptic
  Publisher: Atria / Emily Bestler Books
  Publishing Date: April17
  Summary: Thirty-year-old Zoe leads an ordinary life until the end of the world arrives. She is cleaning cages and floors at Pope Pharmaceuticals when the President of the United States announces that human beings are no longer a viable species. When Zoe realizes that everyone she loves is disappearing, she starts running. Scared and alone in a shockingly changed world, she embarks on a remarkable journey of survival and redemption. Along the way, Zoe comes to see that humans are not defined by their genetic code, but rather by their actions and choices. White Horse offers hope for a broken world, where love can lead to the most unexpected places.
  
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  Title: The Innocent
  Author: David Baldacci
  Genre: mystery
  Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
  Publishing Date: April 17
  Summary: It begins with a hit gone wrong. Robie is dispatched to eliminate a target unusually close to home in Washington, D.C. But something about this mission doesn’t seem right to Robie, and he does the unthinkable. He refuses to kill. Now, Robie becomes a target himself and must escape from his own people.
  Fleeing the scene, Robie crosses paths with a wayward teenage girl, a fourteen-year-old runaway from a foster home. But she isn’t an ordinary runaway-her parents were murdered, and her own life is in danger. Against all of his professional habits, Robie rescues her and finds he can’t walk away. He needs to help her.
  Even worse, the more Robie learns about the girl, the more he’s convinced she is at the center of a vast cover-up, one that may explain her parents’ deaths and stretch to unimaginable levels of power.
  Now, Robie may have to step out of the shadows in order to save this girl’s life . . . and perhaps his own.
  
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  Remember to vote for me in the Independent Book Blogger Awards!
  
  Anyone getting ready to pick up their World Book Night books? I’m looking forward to the event!
  
  Happy reading!
  
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged awards, books, genre: fiction, genre: mystery, genre: nonfiction, goodreads, upcoming books, world book night
- Upcoming Books! [11]
  
  Posted at 8:18 pm by Laura, on April 2, 2012
  
  Apologies for the lateness. Many papers sneaked up on me this weekend! (PS I definitely thought “snuck” was a word. This is terrible.)
  
  ~
  
  Title: Triggers
  Author: Robert J. Sawyer
  Genre: sci-fi, thriller
  Publisher: Penguin
  Publishing Date: April 3
  Summary: On the eve of a secret military operation, an assassin’s bullet strikes President Seth Jerrison. He is rushed to the hospital, where surgeons struggle to save his life. At the same hospital, researcher Dr. Ranjip Singh is experimenting with a device that can erase traumatic memories.
  Then a terrorist bomb detonates. In the operating room, the president suffers cardiac arrest. He has a near-death experience-but the memories that flash through Jerrison’s mind are not “his” memories. It quickly becomes clear that the electromagnetic pulse generated by the bomb amplified and scrambled Dr. Singh’s equipment, allowing a random group of people to access one another’s minds.
  And now one of those people has access to the president’s memories- including classified information regarding the upcoming military mission, which, if revealed, could cost countless lives. But the task of determining who has switched memories with whom is a daunting one- particularly when some of the people involved have reason to lie…
  
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  Title: Dorchester Terrace
  Author: Anne Perry
  Genre: historical mystery
  Publisher: Random House
  Publishing Date: April 3
  Summary: Thomas Pitt, once a lowly policeman, is now the powerful head of Britain’s Special Branch, and some people fear that he may have been promoted beyond his abilities. He, too, feels painful moments of self-doubt, especially as rumors reach him of a plot to blow up connections on the Dover-London rail line—on which Austrian duke Alois Habsburg is soon to travel to visit his royal English kin.
  Why would anyone destroy an entire train to kill one obscure Austrian royal, or are the rumors designed to distract Pitt from an even more devastating plot? He must resolve this riddle at once, before the damage is done.
  Meanwhile, in a London sickroom, an old Italian woman—at the end of a romantic career as a revolutionary spy—is terrified that as she sinks into dementia, she may divulge secrets that can kill. And a beautiful young Croatian woman, married to a British power broker, hoards her own mysteries. Apparently all roads lead to the Continent, and Pitt suspects that between them these two fascinating women could tell him things he desperately needs to know. But as the hours tick by, it seems that the only woman Pitt can count on is his clever wife, Charlotte.
  
  ~
  
  Title: Death Comes Silently
  Author: Carolyn Hart
  Genre: mystery
  Publisher: Berkeley Hardcover
  Publishing Date: April 3
  Summary: Winter has arrived in Broward’s Rock, South Carolina, and business has slowed for Annie Darling, owner of mystery bookstore Death on Demand. So when the island’s resident writer publishes the latest in her popular mystery series, Annie jumps at the chance to host a book signing, even though it conflicts with her shift at the local charity shop, Better Tomorrow.
  Luckily, fellow volunteer Gretchen Burkholt agrees to sub for her. The signing goes well, but Gretchen interrupts the event multiple times, leaving voice mails about scandalous news she’s dying to share. Even though Gretchen tends to be excitable, Annie heads over to Better Tomorrow, where she finds Gretchen dead on the floor, an axe by her side.
  Annie enlists the help of her husband, Max, to piece together a puzzle involving an overturned kayak, a stolen motorboat, a troubled love affair, and a reckless teenager. And she must tread carefully in her investigation, because a killer is on the loose, and that killer works well in the foggy days of winter.
  
  ~
  
  Title: Grave Mercy
  Author: Robin LaFevers
  Genre: young adult, fantasy
  Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  Publishing Date: April 3
  Summary: Seventeen-year-old Ismae escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the sanctuary of the convent of St. Mortain, where the sisters still serve the gods of old. Here she learns that the god of Death Himself has blessed her with dangerous gifts—and a violent destiny. If she chooses to stay at the convent, she will be trained as an assassin and serve as a handmaiden to Death. To claim her new life, she must destroy the lives of others.
  Ismae’s most important assignment takes her straight into the high court of Brittany—where she finds herself woefully under prepared—not only for the deadly games of intrigue and treason, but for the impossible choices she must make. For how can she deliver Death’s vengeance upon a target who, against her will, has stolen her heart?
  
  ~
  
  Happy reading!
  
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged genre: fantasy, genre: fiction, genre: history, genre: mystery, genre: young adult, upcoming books
- Upcoming Books! [9]
  
  Posted at 3:35 pm by Laura, on March 18, 2012
  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!
  Posted in Upcoming Books | 0 Comments | Tagged genre: adult fiction, genre: fiction, genre: history, genre: mystery, genre: nonfiction, history, upcoming books
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- Hello, I’m Laura!
  
  I'm a bookish bookworm and book hoarder. By day I'm a literary agent, and by night I'm forever rearranging my bookshelves. I could talk your ear off about Gothic literature, and in my past life people thought I'd become a professional musician. I have a fluffy black cat named Rossetti, I love to travel, tea is my drink of choice, British TV is the best, and I'm always down for chips-and-queso nights. Welcome to Scribbles & Wanderlust! Grab your favorite hot beverage and let's chat books!
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