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Reviews

Reviews

by Caitlin Starling - Fiction, Horror, Supernatural Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

The city of San Siroco is sinking. The basement of Dr. Tamsin Rivers, the arrogant, selfish head of the research team assigned to find the source of the subsidence, is sinking faster. As Tamsin grows obsessed with the distorting dimensions of the room at the bottom of the stairs, she finds a door that didn’t exist before --- and one night, it opens to reveal an exact physical copy of her. This doppelgänger appears fully, terribly human, passing every test Tamsin can devise. But the longer the double exists, the more Tamsin begins to forget pieces of her life, lose track of time and grow terrified of the outside world. With her employer growing increasingly suspicious, Tamsin must try to hold herself together long enough to figure out what her double wants from her, and just where the mysterious door leads.

by C Pam Zhang - Dystopian, Fiction

A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles. There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch and her own body. In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.

by Kim Cross - Nonfiction, True Crime

On October 1, 1993, 12-year-old Polly Klaas was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a sleepover with two friends, while her mother slept soundly in the room next door. This rarest of all kidnappings --- a stranger abduction from the home --- triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. New York Times bestselling author Kim Cross has written the first comprehensive account of what happened on that fateful night in October, as well as how the case forever transformed the Bureau’s approach to solving crimes. With unprecedented access to case files, crime scene photos, a videotaped murder confession and inside sources, IN LIGHT OF ALL DARKNESS follows the investigators who pieced together the evidence that led to the arrest and conviction of the kidnapper.

by Kim Coleman Foote - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

In 1916, during the early days of the Great Migration, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the South for the “Promised Land” of Vauxhall, New Jersey. But the North possesses its own challenges and bigotries that will shape the fates of the women and their families over the next 70 years. Within 10 years of arriving in Vauxhall, both Celia and Lucy’s husbands are dead, and they turn to one another for support. Encouraged by their mothers’ friendship, their children’s lives become enmeshed as well. As the children grow into adolescence, two are caught in an impulsive act of impropriety, and Celia and Lucy find themselves at irreconcilable odds over who’s to blame. The ensuing fallout has dire consequences that reverberate through the next two generations of their families.

by Carissa Orlando - Fiction, Horror, Supernatural Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

When Margaret and her husband, Hal, bought the large Victorian house on Hawthorn Street, they couldn’t believe they finally had a home of their own. Then they discovered the hauntings. Every September, the walls drip blood. The ghosts of former inhabitants appear, and all of them are terrified of something that lurks in the basement. Most people would flee. Margaret is not most people. But after four years Hal can’t take it anymore, and he leaves abruptly. Now, he’s not returning calls, and their daughter Katherine --- who knows nothing about the hauntings --- arrives, intent on looking for her missing father. September has just begun, and with every attempt Margaret and Katherine make at finding Hal, the hauntings grow more harrowing, because there are some secrets the house needs to keep.

by Myriam Gurba - Essays, Nonfiction, Sociology

A creep can be a singular figure, a villain who makes things go bump in the night. Yet creep is also what the fog does --- it lurks into place to do its dirty work, muffling screams, obscuring the truth, and providing cover for those prowling within it. CREEP is Myriam Gurba’s informal sociology of creeps, a deep dive into the dark recesses of the toxic traditions that plague the United States and create the abusers who haunt our books, schools and homes. Gurba studies the ways in which oppression is collectively enacted, sustaining ecosystems that unfairly distribute suffering and premature death to our most vulnerable. She also examines how we as individuals, communities and institutions can challenge creeps and rid ourselves of the fog that seeks to blind us.

by Hilary Leichter - Fiction

Annie, Edward and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn’t there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of their tiny home, and the shape of the world. TERRACE STORY follows the characters who suffer these repercussions and reverberations. How far can the mind travel when it’s looking for something that is gone? Where do we put our loneliness, longing and desire? What do we do with the emotions that seem to stretch beyond the body, beyond the boundaries of life and death?

by Catriona Ward - Fiction, Horror, Suspense, Thriller

In a cottage overlooking the windswept Maine coast, Wilder Harlow has begun the last book he will ever write. It is the story about the sun-drenched summer days of his youth in Whistler Bay, and the blood-stained path of the killer who stalked his small vacation town. About the terrible secret he and his companions, Nat and Harper, discovered entombed in the coves off the bay. And how the pact they swore that day echoed down the decades, forever shaping their lives. But the more Wilder writes, the less he trusts himself and his memory. He starts to see things that can’t be real. Who, or what, is haunting him? No longer able to trust his own eyes, Wilder begins to fear that this will not only be his last book, but the last thing he ever does.

by Edan Lepucki - Fiction, Women's Fiction

Ursa can travel through memory and revisit her past. After she flees her hometown for the counterculture glory of 1950s California, the intoxicating potential of her unique ability eventually draws a group of women into her orbit and into a ramshackle Victorian mansion. Soon this cultish community of sisterhood takes an ominous turn, prompting Ursa’s son, Ray, and his pregnant lover, Cherry, to flee their home and reinvent themselves far from her insidious influence. But a series of mysterious events forces Cherry to abandon their baby, leaving Ray to raise Opal alone. Now a teenager and still heartbroken over the abandonment of the mother she never knew, Opal must journey into her own past to reveal the generations of secrets that gave rise to the shimmering source of her family's painful legacy.

by Jillian Lauren - Nonfiction, True Crime

Jillian Lauren had no idea what she was getting into when she wrote her first letter to prolific serial killer Samuel Little. All she knew was her research had led her to believe he was good for far more murders than the three for which he had been convicted. While the two exchanged dozens of letters and embarked on hundreds of hours of interviews, Lauren gained the trust of a monster. After maintaining his innocence for decades, Little confessed to the murders of 93 women. How could one man evade justice, manipulating the system for over four decades? More than a deep dive into Little's actions, Lauren's riveting and emotional accounts reveal the women who were lost to cold files, giving his victims a chance to have their stories heard for the first time.