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Reviews

Reviews

by Lev AC Rosen - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery

San Francisco, 1952. Detective Evander “Andy” Mills has started a new life for himself as a private detective, but his business hasn’t exactly taken off. It turns out that word spreads fast when you have a bad reputation, and no one in the queer community trusts him enough to ask an ex-cop for help. When James, an old flame from the war who had mysteriously disappeared, arrives in his offices above the Ruby, Andy wants to kick him out. But the job seems to be a simple case of blackmail, and Andy’s debts are piling up. He agrees to investigate, despite everything it stirs up. The case will take him back to the shadowy, closeted world of the Navy, and then out into the gay bars of the city, where the past rises up to meet him, like the swell of the ocean under a warship.

by Stephanie Land - Memoir, Nonfiction, Social Sciences

When Stephanie Land set out to write her memoir, MAID, she never could have imagined what was to come. Handpicked by President Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2019, it was called “an eye-opening journey into the lives of the working poor.” Later it was adapted into the hit Netflix series “Maid.” MAID was a story about a housecleaner, but it also was a story about a woman with a dream. In CLASS, Land takes us with her as she finishes college and pursues her writing career. Facing barriers at every turn --- including a byzantine loan system, not having enough money for food, navigating the judgments of professors and fellow students who didn’t understand the demands of attending college while under the poverty line --- Land finds a way to survive once again.

by Tananarive Due - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Horror

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.

by Adrienne Young - Fiction, Magical Realism, Mystery, Romance

The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm --- and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow’s disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors. It’s been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. But she is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own. After her grandmother’s death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother’s decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she’s been searching for?

by Robert Dugoni - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Tracy Crosswhite is reopening the investigation into Seattle’s Route 99 serial killer. After 13 victims, he stopped hunting and the trail went cold, stirring public outrage. Now, nearly three decades after his first kill, Tracy is expected to finally bring closure to the victims’ families and redeem the Seattle PD’s reputation. Even if it means working with her nemesis, Captain Johnny Nolasco. Lead detective of the original task force, Nolasco dares Tracy to do what he failed to: close the case. Forming an uneasy alliance, Tracy and Nolasco revisit old leads and pursue new evidence only to unearth high-level corruption and cover-ups as dangerous as the elusive killer himself. At the risk of being exposed, such deadly and powerful forces will go to extremes to stay in the shadows.

by Bryan Washington - Fiction

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits are wild, tender and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ is not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said --- and left unsaid --- to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?

by Nancy Jooyoun Kim - Domestic Thriller, Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children, Anastasia and Ronald, than ever before. But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of a stranger in the backyard, carrying a letter to Sunny. 1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her aloof and often-absent husband. Her loneliness and isolation are broken only by a fateful encounter at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans the decades and echoes into the family’s lives in the present as they uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought they knew about their mother but also their very lives at risk.

by Melissa Broder - Fiction, Magical Realism

A woman arrives alone at a Best Western seeking respite from an emptiness that plagues her. She has fled to the California high desert to escape a cloud of sorrow --- for both her father in the ICU and a husband whose illness is worsening. What the motel provides, however, is not peace but a path, thanks to a receptionist who recommends a nearby hike. Out on the sun-scorched trail, the woman encounters a towering cactus whose size and shape mean it should not exist in California. Yet the cactus is there, with a gash through its side that beckons like a familiar door. So she enters it. What awaits her inside this mystical succulent sets her on a journey at once desolate and rich, hilarious and poignant.

by Alix E. Harrow - Fantasy, Fiction, Gothic

Opal is determined to find a better life for her younger brother, Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two things: bad luck and E. Starling, the reclusive 19th-century author of The Underland, who disappeared over a hundred years ago. Everyone agrees that it’s best to ignore the uncanny mansion and its misanthropic heir, Arthur. Almost everyone, anyway. Opal has been obsessed with The Underland since she was a child. When she gets the chance to step inside Starling House, she can't resist. But sinister forces are digging deeper into the buried secrets of Starling House, and Arthur’s own nightmares have become far too real. As Eden itself seems to be drowning in its own ghosts, Opal realizes that she finally might have found a reason to stick around.

by Jean Kwok - Domestic Thriller, Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

Jasmine Yang arrives in New York City from her rural Chinese village without money or family support, fleeing a controlling husband, on a desperate search for the daughter who was taken from her at birth --- another female casualty of China’s controversial One Child Policy. But with her husband on her trail, the clock is ticking, and she’s forced to make increasingly risky decisions if she ever hopes to be reunited with her daughter. Meanwhile, publishing executive Rebecca Whitney seems to have it all: a prestigious family name, a high-powered career, a handsome husband, and an adopted Chinese daughter she adores. But when an industry scandal threatens to jeopardize not only Rebecca’s job but also her marriage, this perfect world begins to crumble and her role in her own family is called into question.