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Reviews

Reviews

by John Connolly - Fiction, Supernatural Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

In Amsterdam, four bodies, violently butchered, are discovered in a canal house, the remains of friends and confidantes of the assassin known only as Louis. The men responsible for the murders are Serbian war criminals. They believe they can escape retribution by retreating to their homeland. They are wrong. For Louis has come to Europe to hunt them down: five killers to be found and punished before they can vanish into thin air. There is just one problem. The sixth.

by Paul Auster - Biography, Nonfiction

With BURNING BOY, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age 28. Auster’s probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next.

by Scott Carson - Fiction, Horror, Supernatural Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

Recently laid-off from his newspaper and desperate for work, war correspondent Nick Bishop takes a humbling job: writing a profile of a new mindfulness app called Clarity. It’s easy money, and a chance to return to his hometown for his first visit in years. The app itself seems like a retread of old ideas, but then there are the “Sleep Songs.” A woman’s hauntingly beautiful voice sings a ballad that is anything but soothing --- it’s disturbing, more of a warning than a relaxation --- but it works. Deep, refreshing sleep follows. So do nightmares. Vivid and chilling, they feature a dead woman who calls Nick by name and whispers guidance. Or are they threats? And soon her voice follows him long after the song is done.

by Anthony Horowitz - Fiction, Mystery

Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England. Upon arrival, they meet the festival’s other guests --- an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children’s author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic and a war historian --- along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line. When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?

by Lee Child and Andrew Child - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Reacher is heading west, walking under the merciless desert sun --- until he comes upon a curious scene. A Jeep has crashed into the only tree for miles around. A woman is slumped over the wheel. Dead? No, nothing is what it seems. The woman is Michaela Fenton, an army veteran turned FBI agent trying to find her twin brother, who might be mixed up with some dangerous people. Most of them would rather die than betray their terrifying leader, who has burrowed his influence deep into the nearby border town. The mysterious Dendoncker rules from the shadows, out of sight and under the radar, keeping his dealings in the dark. Bringing him down will be the riskiest job of Reacher's life.

by Tamron Hall - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network. She is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star-power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of Black women --- many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized and all of them quickly forgotten. All until Masey James, a 15-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot. Putting the rest of her work and her (fraying) personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that Black children rarely receive.

by Matthew Sturgis - Biography, Nonfiction

Drawing on material that has come to light in the past 30 years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us his own experience as he experienced it. Here, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; his years at Oxford and arrival in London; his 10-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, who unwittingly welcomed young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers; his development as a playwright; and, in later years, his irresistible pull toward another --- double --- life, and the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years of hard labor.

by Jess Lourey - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

In the summer of ’84, 14-year-old Frankie Jubilee is shuttled off to Litani, Minnesota, to live with her estranged mother, a county prosecutor she barely knows. From the start, Frankie senses something uneasy going on in the small town. The locals whisper about The Game, and her mother warns her to stay out of the woods and away from adults. When a bullying gang of girls invites Frankie to The Game, she accepts, determined to find out what’s really going on in Litani. She’s not the only one becoming paranoid. Hysteria burns through the community. Dark secrets emerge. And Frankie fears that, even in the bright light of day, she might be living among monsters.

by Romy Hausmann - Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

It's been years since Nadja Kulka was convicted of a cruel crime. After being released from prison, she's wanted nothing more than to live a normal life: nice flat, steady job, even a few friends. But when one of those friends, Laura von Hoven --- free-spirited beauty and wife of Nadja's boss --- kills her lover and begs Nadja for her help, Nadja can't seem to refuse. The two women make for a remote house in the woods, the perfect place to bury a body. But their plan quickly falls apart, and Nadja finds herself outplayed, a pawn in a bizarre game in which she is both the perfect victim and the perfect murderer.

by Matthew Pearl - History, Nonfiction

On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, 13-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro. A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party has taken the girls as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers who have decimated native lands and resources. Hanging Maw, the raiders’ leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky's most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good. But ultimately the raiding party is ambushed by Daniel Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict.