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Charles Todd, author of A Cruel Deception: A Bess Crawford Mystery

Sister Bess Crawford, who has been working with the severely wounded in England in the wake of the Great War, is asked to carry out a personal mission in Paris for a Matron at the London headquarters of The Queen Alexandra’s. When she locates Lawrence Minton, she finds a bitter and disturbed officer who is well on his way toward an addiction to opiates. He tells her that he doesn’t care if he lives or dies, as long as he can find oblivion. But what has changed him? What is it that haunts him? He can’t confide in Bess, because the truth is so deeply buried in his mind that he can only relive it in nightmares. The officers who had shared a house with him in Paris profess to know nothing. Still, Bess is reluctant to trust them even when they offer her their help.

Week of October 5, 2020

Paperback releases for the week of October 5th include WALK THE WIRE, the sixth entry in David Baldacci's Memory Man series, which finds Amos Decker --- the FBI consultant with a perfect memory --- trying to solve a gruesome murder in a booming North Dakota oil town; GRAND UNION, Zadie Smith's debut short story collection, which is about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us; IMAGINARY FRIEND, Stephen Chbosky's first novel since 1999's THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, an epic work of literary horror about a young boy who is haunted by a voice in his head; A SINGLE THREAD by Tracy Chevalier, the story of a woman coming into her own at the dawn of the Second World War; and Susan Ronald's CONDÉ NAST: The Man and His Empire, the first biography in over 30 years of Condé Nast, the pioneering publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair and main rival to media magnate William Randolph Hearst.