"Nothing makes me happier than finding that little-known or first-time author who really deserves to make it, and selling a boatload of their books -well, that and putting just the right books into each customer's hands.." jill
Our man Peter Ash is back, but now he's a wanted man from his last book's adventure in Iceland, so he needs to hang low.
Hard to do when a grinning assassin named Edgar appears to be in single-minded pursuit of Jane, Peter's girlfriend.
The Breaker is replete with technology theft, covert government action, rebel geniuses and several nasty bad guys.
We have so many Nick Petrie fans at Saturn. If you love your thrillers - books by folks like Lee Child, David Baldacci or Vince Flynn, do yourself a favor and start with Petrie's first, The Drifter.
Peter Ash fans - he's baaaaaack!
Sarah Langan's novel skewers the dark hearts of neighbors in an affluent pocket of Long Island.
The Wildes have recently moved to Maple Street, and everyone looks askance at them. Do they really belong?
The Rat Pack of neighborhood kids, who'd accepted Julia Wilde and just tolerated her odd brother Larry, see the adults begin to turn on each other and mimic their behavior.
And then a sink hole appears in the neighboring park - swallowing a dog and symbolizing the dark undercurrent of the whole novel.
There is some abuse. There is some craziness. There are attacks. There is murder. And there is the mob mentality that thrums beneath the surface of this book.
It's one of those novels in which you know a train-wreck is coming, but you're not sure from which direction and who will survive.
Langan is great with the atmosphere and fellow authors have rushed to praise her work.
Good Neighbors will be one of those novels that sticks with readers for a good, long time.
Rebecca has worked her way up in the FBI to the Russian desk in DC and her husband, Brian, finally landed a job at the NSA. So they were comfortable - just barely - living in DC with their two teenaged children. But their fortunes changed when Brian sold an app he'd written for millions of dollars. Now they could afford a decent house and that trip to Europe they'd always planned.
And all was great until their daughter, Kira, doesn't come back to their rental one night in Barcelona. And their son, Tony, reveals that she'd met a guy in Paris who'd said he'd meet her in Barcelona that evening.
This book is an espionage thriller, but also a story of testing one's limits, and of marriage and all that entails.
I give this one an enthusiastic two thumbs up for firing - and hitting - on all those cylinders.
Abigail was celebrating her upcoming wedding with her bridesmaids at a California winery when she was approached by a charming man with whom she ended up spending the night.
Fast forward a few weeks and she's sure she sees the man - whose real name she doesn't even know - near her home in NYC. When he sends her an email, Abigail realizes he knows just who she is, though, and then he shows up at her wedding. And honeymoon. Think you know where this is going? Think again - it's Peter Swanson - author of my permanent staff pick The Kind Worth Killing. Implausible? Maybe. Unpredictable? Probably. Creepy as all get out? Absolutely.
I had to more than quadruple my order after I read this one because I knew just how many of you are gonna be talking about Every Vow You Break.
Sometimes the setting in a novel is just so vivid that I can feel myself there. Sometimes characters are so well drawn that I feel as if they could be real people I just haven't met. And, rarely, a debut novelist gives me both of those, tied up in a story I loved reading and then...then it becomes a permanent staff pick.
Ada and Matilda's entwined lives on the Trace - the Natchez Trace back in the 1920s - is an unlikely tale in that Ada is the daughter of an awful, racist, dirt-poor man living on the edge of a swamp. Matilda's father is a Black sharecropper hoping to work his way into a better situation for his family. When life throws the girls together and binds them with secrets only one of them really understands, both of their lives are changed irrevocably, for better and for worse. (That's all you get - you just have to read it.)
I loved that the prologue set the stage for the action to come. And I equally loved that the ending of this novel didn't come back around and wrap everything up with a nice, neat bow. I was impressed with Mustian's writing and enthralled with her story. This novel should be on your to be read pile!
If you follow literary awards, you know the name Don DeLillo. He's won the PEN/Faulkner, the PEN Saul Bellow, the Jerusalem Prize, the William Dean Howells Medal, and the Library of Congress Prize for American fiction and is a National Book Award winner - WOW!
So when someone with those chops publishes a new book, folks take notice.
The Silence is a diminutive novel - almost a novella - that takes place in 2022. Something unspecified has disrupted all digital connections and five people, gathered to watch the super Bowl and eat together represent the rest of us as they have disjointed yet oddly profound conversations about what to make of a bewildering new world.
Here's my favorite passage, spoken by Diane in the book:
"We were headed in this direction. No more wonder, no more curiosity. Totally impaired orientation. Too much of everything from too narrow a source code."
It's writing like that that makes Don DeLillo celebrated for his prescience, imagination, and command of the language.
Literature lovers - it's small, but it packs a wallop.
I was a Lisa Unger fan from the get-go, when she wrote more of a crime-fiction type mystery. In Confessions on the 7:45, Unger shows us her versatility by writing a really good psychological thriller.
Selena pretty much has it all - two great kids, a husband who keeps it exciting, a nice house, a good job, friends, family - until she discovers that her husband is keeping things exciting for their nanny, Geneva, too, while Selena's at work. And when Selena meets a compelling woman on the 7:45 train, she finds herself returning the stranger's confession with her own knowledge of Graham's affair with their nanny.
And a few days later, the nanny disappears, and Selena starts getting texts to meet up with Martha - from the train.
Nicely twisty with lots of fairly complex characters, Confessions on the 7:45 is well worth the read - whether you are a long time Lisa Unger fan, or this will be your very first one.
This is the first Jack Reacher novel that also has Andrew Child's name on it. We all know Andrew as Lee's brother who writes his own mysteries under the name Andrew Grant - and of course many of you met him here when he and his wife, historical mystery author Tasha Alexander, came for an event.
Lee Child is retiring from the Jack Reacher stories and Andrew will be taking over, so I was of course anxious to read The Sentinel to see how that transition would go, and I'm relieved to report that Jack is the same drifting do-gooder he has always been, and once again he saves the day.
In The Sentinel, Reacher is hitching a ride in Tennessee and stops in a town and almost immediately sees an attempted kidnapping - attempted, of course, because Reacher intervenes, leaving the would-be abductors broken in his wake and the intended victim under his wing.
This one gets complicated as spies, the Russians, the FBI, and big tech are all involved in this furious race to recover some data thought destroyed forever.
If you are a Reacher fan, good news - it looks like you'll be able to continue reading his adventures for many years to come!
Bill Clegg has written a novel about a disparate group of people connected in ways that don't completely reveal themselves until the very end:
A rich woman who has never had to think about anyone but herself.
A new father who has missed the last chance to connect with his own father.
An unhappy housewife.
A taxi driver in Hawai'i.
And other minor characters whose rolls in the background made them pivotal.
Bill Clegg is known for his 'elegant voice,' and if you enjoy character-driven novels, you should check out The End of the Day.
"They found the bodies on' a Tuesday." So begins one of my favorite thrillers of the season.
When Matt Pine returned to his dorm room to discover an FBI agent whose job it was to tell him that his parents and two younger siblings had been found dead in a resort town in Mexico, Matt's life was upended for the second time. The first was when his older brother was convicted of murdering a girlfriend and sentenced to prison. So much of his family's energy since that moment had been spent trying to overturn Danny's conviction. And now they were gone and only Matt and Danny remain.
Think you know where this is going? Think again.