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March 18, 2025

In this newsletter, you will find books releasing the weeks of March 17th and March 24th that we think will be of interest to Bookreporter.com readers, along with Bonus News, where we call out a contest, feature or review that we want to let you know about so you have it on your radar.

This week, we are calling attention to our current Word of Mouth contest. Let us know by Friday, March 28th at noon ET what books you’ve read, and you’ll have a chance to win BROKEN COUNTRY by Clare Leslie Hall (the Reese's Book Club pick and Barnes & Noble Book Club selection for March, as well as an upcoming Bookreporter.com Bets On title) and THE STORY SHE LEFT BEHIND by Patti Callahan Henry.

March 18, 2025

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we know people will be talking about this spring. Read more about it, and enter our Spring Reading Contest by Wednesday, March 19th at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of DAUGHTER OF MINE by Megan Miranda, a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick that is now available in paperback. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

Sophie Stava, author of Count My Lies

Sloane Caraway is a liar. Harmless lies, mostly, to make her self-proclaimed sad little life a bit more interesting. So when Sloane sees a young girl in tears at a park one afternoon, she can’t help herself. She tells the girl’s (very attractive) dad that she’s a nurse and helps him pull a bee stinger from the girl’s foot. With this lie, and chance encounter, Sloane becomes the nanny for the wealthy and privileged Jay and Violet Lockhart. They’re the perfect New York couple, with a brownstone, a daughter in private school, and summers on Block Island. But maybe Sloane isn’t the only one lying, and all that’s picture-perfect harbors a much more dangerous truth.

Lauren Willig, author of The Girl from Greenwich Street: A Novel of Hamilton, Burr, and America's First Murder Trial

Just before Christmas 1799, Elma Sands slips out of her Quaker cousin’s boarding house --- and doesn’t come home. Her body is eventually found in the Manhattan Well. Handbills circulate around the city accusing a carpenter named Levi Weeks of seducing and murdering Elma. But privately, quietly, Levi’s wealthy brother calls in a special favor. Aaron Burr’s legal practice can’t finance both his expensive tastes and his ambition to win the 1800 New York elections. To defend Levi Weeks is a double win: a hefty fee plus a chance to grab headlines. Alexander Hamilton has his own political aspirations; he isn’t going to let Burr monopolize the public’s attention. If Burr is defending Levi Weeks, then Hamilton will too. As the trial and the election draw near, Burr and Hamilton race against time to save a man’s life --- and destroy each other.

Karen Russell, author of The Antidote

THE ANTIDOTE opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing --- not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. Karen Russell’s novel follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for people's memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Chris Bohjalian, author of The Jackal's Mistress

Virginia, 1864. Libby Steadman’s husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand and his wife. It’s an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield. And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor’s house. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy --- but he’s also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible decision: Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband?

Editorial Content for The Women on Platform Two

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Pamela Kramer

There are three female protagonists in Laura Anthony's THE WOMEN ON PLATFORM TWO, and they couldn't be more different. Read More

Teaser

Dublin, 1969: Maura has just married Dr. Christy Davenport, and they look forward to growing their family. But as her husband’s vicious temper emerges, Maura worries that her home might never be safe for a child. Meanwhile, her close friend Bernie, a mother of three, learns the devastating news that if she conceives again, her health complications could prove fatal. Dublin, 2023: A close call makes Saoirse realize that she may never want to be a mother. Little does she know that only a few decades ago, a group of women made this option possible for her. And she’s about to meet one of them.

Promo

Dublin, 1969: Maura has just married Dr. Christy Davenport, and they look forward to growing their family. But as her husband’s vicious temper emerges, Maura worries that her home might never be safe for a child. Meanwhile, her close friend Bernie, a mother of three, learns the devastating news that if she conceives again, her health complications could prove fatal. Dublin, 2023: A close call makes Saoirse realize that she may never want to be a mother. Little does she know that only a few decades ago, a group of women made this option possible for her. And she’s about to meet one of them.

About the Book

In 1970s Dublin, all forms of contraception are strictly forbidden, but an intrepid group of women will risk everything to change that in this sweeping, timely novel inspired by a remarkable and little-known true story.

Dublin, 1969: Maura has just married Dr. Christy Davenport, and they look forward to growing their family. But as her husband’s vicious temper emerges, Maura worries that her home might never be safe for a child. Meanwhile, her close friend Bernie, a mother of three, learns the devastating news that if she conceives again, her health complications could prove fatal.

Dublin, 2023: A close call makes Saoirse realize that she may never want to be a mother. Little does she know that only a few decades ago, a group of women made this option possible for her. And she’s about to meet one of them.

THE WOMEN ON PLATFORM TWO is a haunting, powerful story of feminine resistance and resilience that reminds us all of where we started --- and how far we still have to go.

Audiobook available; read by Jessica Regan, Shakira Shute and Maeve Smyth

Editorial Content for Don't Tell Me How to Die

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Ray Palen

DON'T TELL ME HOW TO DIE was not what I expected. Having read Marshall Karp before --- his solo novels and the NYPD Red series that he wrote with James Patterson --- I was anticipating a smash-mouth style of writing about elite law enforcement teams.

The book is categorized as a domestic thriller, but it is so much more than that. Karp composes a deeply affecting generational family drama filled with twists and surprises. The narrative is completely engaging and sucks you in from the first chapter, only to hold you there straight through to the exciting finale. Read More

Teaser

I had it all: a fantastic husband, two great kids, an exciting career. And then, at the age of 43, I found out I would be dead before my next birthday. My mother also died at 43. I was 17, and she warned me that women would flock to my suddenly single father like stray cats to an overturned milk truck. They did. And one absolutely evil woman practically destroyed his life, mine and my sister’s. I am not letting that happen to my family. I have three months, and I plan to spend every waking minute searching for the perfect woman to take my place as Alex’s wife, and mother to Kevin and Katie. You’re probably thinking that I’ll never do it. Did I mention that in high school I was voted “Most Likely to Kill Someone to Get What She Wants”?

Promo

I had it all: a fantastic husband, two great kids, an exciting career. And then, at the age of 43, I found out I would be dead before my next birthday. My mother also died at 43. I was 17, and she warned me that women would flock to my suddenly single father like stray cats to an overturned milk truck. They did. And one absolutely evil woman practically destroyed his life, mine and my sister’s. I am not letting that happen to my family. I have three months, and I plan to spend every waking minute searching for the perfect woman to take my place as Alex’s wife, and mother to Kevin and Katie. You’re probably thinking that I’ll never do it. Did I mention that in high school I was voted “Most Likely to Kill Someone to Get What She Wants”?

About the Book

I have one thing to do before I die.
And time is running out.

I had it all: a fantastic husband, two great kids, an exciting career. And then, at the age of 43, I found out I would be dead before my next birthday.

My mother also died at 43. I was 17, and she warned me that women would flock to my suddenly single father like stray cats to an overturned milk truck. They did. And one absolutely evil woman practically destroyed his life, mine and my sister’s.

I am not letting that happen to my family.

I have three months, and I plan to spend every waking minute searching for the perfect woman to take my place as Alex’s wife, and mother to Kevin and Katie.

You’re probably thinking that I’ll never do it. Did I mention that in high school I was voted “Most Likely to Kill Someone to Get What She Wants”?

From thriller writer Marshall Karp (cocreator with James Patterson of the #1 New York Times bestselling NYPD Red series), and rich with Karp’s deft array of three-dimensional characters and his signature biting humor, DON'T TELL ME HOW TO DIE has so many twists and turns, you’d swear he wrote it with a corkscrew.

Audiobook available, read by January LaVoy

Editorial Content for We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Jane T. Krebs

In WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES, Alissa Wilkinson has used one of the most quoted lines from Joan Didion’s writings as part of the title. She explains that the years Didion spent in California, notably Los Angeles, were the years that the American Dream was being decided by the movies. She believes that Hollywood is still making those decisions. Read More

Teaser

Joan Didion opened THE WHITE ALBUM (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood. In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking.

Promo

Joan Didion opened THE WHITE ALBUM (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood. In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking.

About the Book

Joan Didion opened THE WHITE ALBUM (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood.

In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.

WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES eloquently traces Didion’s journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system. She spent much of her adult life deeply embroiled in the glitz and glamor of the Los Angeles elite, where she acutely observed --- and denounced --- how the nation’s fears and dreams were sensationalized on screen. Meanwhile, she paid the bills writing movie scripts like A Star Is Born, while her books propelled her to celestial heights of fame.

Peering through a scrim of celluloid, Wilkinson incisively dissects the cinematic motifs and machinations that informed Didion’s writing --- and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood’s addictive grasp on the American imagination. More than a portrait of a writer, WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES shines a new light on a legacy whose impact will be felt for generations.

Editorial Content for Rose of Jericho

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Ray Palen

Readers unfamiliar with Alex Grecian are in for a treat. From his London police procedurals featuring Jack the Ripper to his gothic horror/fantasy novels, Grecian is a master wordsmith always capable of transporting you to another time and place. Read More

Teaser

Something wicked is going on in the village of Ascension. A mother wasting away from cancer is suddenly up and about. A boy trampled by a milk cart walks away from the accident. A hanged man can still speak, broken neck and all. The dead are not dying. When Rabbit and Sadie Grace accompany their friend, Rose, to Ascension to help take care of her ailing cousin, they immediately notice that their new house, Bethany Hall, is occupied by dozens of ghosts. And something is waiting for them in the attic. The villagers of Ascension are unwelcoming and wary of their weird visitors. As the three women attempt to find out what’s happening in the town, they must be careful not to be found out. But a much larger --- and more dangerous --- force is galloping straight for them.

Promo

Something wicked is going on in the village of Ascension. A mother wasting away from cancer is suddenly up and about. A boy trampled by a milk cart walks away from the accident. A hanged man can still speak, broken neck and all. The dead are not dying. When Rabbit and Sadie Grace accompany their friend, Rose, to Ascension to help take care of her ailing cousin, they immediately notice that their new house, Bethany Hall, is occupied by dozens of ghosts. And something is waiting for them in the attic. The villagers of Ascension are unwelcoming and wary of their weird visitors. As the three women attempt to find out what’s happening in the town, they must be careful not to be found out. But a much larger --- and more dangerous --- force is galloping straight for them.

About the Book

From the New York Times bestselling author of RED RABBIT comes a supernatural horror where ghosts and ghouls are the least of a witch’s problems in 19th-century New England.

Something wicked is going on in the village of Ascension. A mother wasting away from cancer is suddenly up and about. A boy trampled by a milk cart walks away from the accident. A hanged man can still speak, broken neck and all.

The dead are not dying.

When Rabbit and Sadie Grace accompany their friend, Rose, to Ascension to help take care of her ailing cousin, they immediately notice that their new house, Bethany Hall, is occupied by dozens of ghosts. And something is waiting for them in the attic.

The villagers of Ascension are unwelcoming and wary of their weird visitors. As the three women attempt to find out what’s happening in the town, they must be careful not to be found out. But a much larger --- and more dangerous --- force is galloping straight for them.

Audiobook available, read by John Pirhalla