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Reviews

Reviews

by Tracy Sierra - Domestic Thriller, Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Home alone with her young children during a blizzard, a mother tucks her son back into bed in the middle of the night. Suddenly she hears footsteps coming up the stairs and sees the figure of a man appear down the hallway. Terrified, she quietly wakes her children and hustles them into the oldest part of the house, a tiny, secret room concealed behind a wall. There they hide as the man searches for them, trying to tempt the children out with promises and scare the mother into surrender. In the suffocating darkness, the mother struggles to remain calm and to plan. Should she search for a weapon or attempt escape? But then she catches another glimpse of him. And at once she knows her situation is even more dire than she’d feared, because she knows exactly who he is --- and what he wants.

by Leo Vardiashvili - Fiction

Saba is just a child when he flees the fighting in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia with his older brother, Sandro, and father, Irakli, for asylum in England. Two decades later, all three men are struggling to make peace with the past. When Irakli decides to return to Georgia, pulled back by memories of a lost wife and a decaying but still beautiful homeland, Saba and Sandro wait eagerly for news. But within weeks of his arrival, Irakli disappears, and the final message they receive from him causes a mystery to unfold before them: “I left a trail I can’t erase. Do not follow it.” In a journey that will lead him to the very heart of a conflict that has marred generations and fractured his own family, Saba must retrace his father’s footsteps to discover what remains of their homeland and its people.

by Andrés N. Ordorica - Fiction

When Daniel de La Luna arrives as a scholarship student at an elite East Coast university, he bears the weight of his family’s hopes and dreams, and the burden of sharing his late uncle’s name. Daniel flounders at first --- but then Sam, his roommate, changes everything. As their relationship evolves from brotherly banter to something more intimate, Daniel soon finds himself in love with a man who helps him see himself in a new light. But just as their relationship takes flight, Daniel is pulled away, first by Sam’s hesitation and then by a brutal turn of events that changes Daniel’s life forever. As he grapples with profound loss, Daniel finds himself in his family’s ancestral homeland in México for the summer, finding joy in this setting even as he struggles to come to terms with what’s happened and faces a host of new questions.

by Kiley Reid - Fiction, Women's Fiction

It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie's starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardized by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue. A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption and reckless abandon, COME AND GET IT is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion and bad behavior.

by Kate Alice Marshall - Fiction, Mystery, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Fourteen years ago, the Palmer sisters --- Emma, Juliette and Daphne --- left their home in Arden Hills and never returned. But when Emma discovers she’s pregnant and her husband loses his job, she has no option but to return to the house that she and her estranged sisters still own...and where their parents were murdered. Emma has never told anyone what she saw the night her parents died, even when she became the prime suspect. But her presence in the house threatens to uncover secrets that have stayed hidden for years, and the sisters are drawn together once again. As they face their memories of the past, rivalries restart, connections are forged, and, for the first time, Emma starts to ask questions about what really happened that night.

by Elizabeth Gonzalez James - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism, Western

In 1895, Antonio Sonoro is the latest in a long line of ruthless men. A drought has ravaged the town of Dorado, Mexico, where he lives with his wife and children. So when he hears about a train laden with gold and other treasures, he sets off for Houston to rob it. But when the heist goes awry and his younger brother, Hugo, is killed by the Texas Rangers, Antonio finds himself launched into a quest for revenge. In 1964, Jaime Sonoro is Mexico’s most renowned actor and singer. But his comfortable life is disrupted when he discovers a book that purports to tell the entire history of his family beginning with Cain and Abel. Jaime realizes that he may be the one who has to pay for his ancestors’ crimes unless he can discover the true story of his grandfather Antonio, the legendary bandido El Tragabalas, The Bullet Swallower.

by Marie-Helene Bertino - Fiction

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different; she also possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. But at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

by İnci Atrek - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Ada adores spending every summer in a Turkish seaside town with her mother and grandmother at the family villa. The glittering waters, endless olive groves and her spirited friends make it easy to leave her idle life in California behind. But no matter how much Ada feels that she belongs to the country where her mother grew up, deep down, her connection to the culture feels as fleeting as the seasons. When Levent, a mysterious man from her mother’s past, shows up in their town, Ada can’t help but imagine a different future for her mother --- one that promises a return to home, to love, to happiness. But while playing matchmaker, Ada has to come to terms with her own intensifying attraction to Levent. Does the future she’s fighting for belong to her mother --- or to her alone?

by Adam Plantinga - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Kurt Argento is an ex-Detroit street cop who can’t let injustice go. If he sees a young girl being dragged into an alley, he's going to rescue her and cause some damage. When he does just that in a small corrupt Missouri town, he’s brutally beaten and thrown into a maximum-security prison. Julie Wakefield, a grad student who happens to be the governor's daughter, is about to take a tour of the prison. But when a malfunction in the security system releases a horde of prisoners, a fierce struggle for survival ensues. Argento must help a small band of staff and civilians, including Julie and her two state trooper handlers, make their way from the bottom floor to the roof to safety. All that stands in their way are six floors of the most dangerous convicts in Missouri.

by Shahnaz Habib - Cultural Studies, Essays, History, Nonfiction, Travel

The color of one’s skin and passport have long dictated the conditions of travel. For Shahnaz Habib, travel and travel writing have always been complicated pleasures. Habib threads the history of travel with her personal story as a child on family vacations in India, an adult curious about the world, and an immigrant for whom roundtrips are an annual fact of life. Tracing the power dynamics that underlie tourism, AIRPLANE MODE parses who gets to travel and who gets to write about the experience. Threaded through the book are analyses of obvious and not-so-obvious travel artifacts: passports, carousels, bougainvilleas, guidebooks, trains, the idea of wanderlust itself. Together, they tell a subversive history of travel as a Euro-American mode of consumerism. But as any traveler knows, travel is more than that.