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Latest Reviews

Hardcover: September 10, 2024

A string of overdoses in Colorado Springs has Detectives Joe Kenda and Lee Wilson on the lookout for a bad batch of heroin that has been cut with a drug they've never seen before. Meanwhile, at Springs General Hospital, Dr. Blair Moreland --- the notoriously unpleasant head anesthesiologist --- has found a way to feed his deepening addiction to the very same powerful new drug: Fentanyl. But when Dr. Moreland starts supplying the dangerous painkiller to dealer Lula Lopez --- planning to manufacture the drug himself --- he angers a Mexican crime syndicate and sets into motion a cycle of death and violence that threatens to engulf the entire city. Detectives Kenda and Wilson must track down the source of this killer heroin before anyone else can overdose --- and stop Moreland before he can escape the long arm of the law.

Hardcover: October 8, 2024

Tucked away down a Kyoto backstreet lies the extraordinary Kamogawa Diner, run by Chef Nagare and his daughter, Koishi. The father-daughter duo have reinvented themselves as “food detectives,” offering a service that goes beyond cooking mouth-watering meals. Through their culinary sleuthing, they revive lost recipes and rekindle forgotten memories. From the Olympic swimmer who misses his estranged father’s bento lunchbox to the one-hit-wonder pop star who remembers the tempura she ate to celebrate her only successful record, each customer leaves the diner forever changed --- though not always in the ways they expect. The Kamogawa Diner doesn’t just serve meals. It’s a door to the past through the miracle of delicious food.

Echoes of Us by Joy Jordan-Lake - Historical Fiction
Paperback: October 8, 2024

In the midst of World War II, a Tennessee farm boy, a Jewish Cambridge student and a German POW forge a connection that endures --- against all odds. But now everything that Will Dobbins, Dov Silverberg and Hans Hessler fought for is at risk as their descendants clash for control of the corporation they founded together. In an attempt to remake its tattered corporate image, the firm hires event planner Hadley Jacks and her sister, Kitzie, to organize a reunion for the families on St. Simons Island, Georgia, the place that changed all three men’s lives forever. As Hadley and her sister delve into the friends’ past, they uncover the life of the courageous young woman who links them all together...and the old wounds that could tear everything apart.

Paperback: October 8, 2024

On the cusp of 30, Ghanaian Londoner Whitney Appiah was born with a special gift. The massage therapist can physically sense where her clients’ trauma lies and heal them. But Whitney has no idea that she, too, is suffering. Tragic events from her youth have left a terrible, unseen mark. When a dangerous encounter with the man she’s dating triggers a wave of fragmented recollections, Whitney embarks on a journey to reclaim her memories and the truth that is buried deep in her early years growing up in Kumasi, Ghana, during the 1990s. Spanning three decades, told through the viewpoints of Whitney, sisters Gloria and Aretha, and their house help Maame Serwaa, THE REST OF YOU explores what happens when we try to move forward through the lacuna of our past.

Hardcover: October 1, 2024

London, 1949. Amidst the smog of the capital stumbles Dennis Knuckleyard, a hapless 18-year-old employed by a secondhand bookshop. One day, on an errand to acquire books for sale, Dennis discovers a novel that simply does not exist. It is a fictitious book, a figment from another novel. Yet it is physically there in his hands. How? Dennis has stumbled on a book from the Great When, a magical version of London beyond time and space, where reality blurs with fiction and concepts such as Crime and Poetry are incarnated as wondrous, terrible beings. But this other, magical London must remain a secret. If Dennis cannot find a way to return this book to where it belongs, he risks repercussions, such as his body being turned inside out (or worse). Soon he finds himself at the center of an explosive series of events that may alter and endanger both Londons forever.

Hardcover: August 13, 2024

For over 40 years, Jane Rosenberg has been at the heart of the news cycle, covering almost every major trial that has passed through the New York justice system as a courtroom sketch artist, including the most recent Donald Trump hush money trial. In DRAWN TESTIMONY, Rosenberg brings us into the dramatic high-stakes world of her craft, where art, psychology and courtroom drama collide. Over the course of her legendary career, Jane has had a front-row seat to some of the most iconic and notorious moments in our nation’s recent history. Readers will learn how she has honed her unique powers of perception and what her portraits reveal, not only about her subjects, but about the human condition in general.

Hardcover: October 1, 2024

Freshly graduated from a rigorous training program in all things spy craft, former typist Evelyne Redfern is eager for her first assignment as a field agent helping Britain win the war. However, when she learns her first task is performing a simple security test at Blackthorn Park, a requisitioned manor house in the sleepy Sussex countryside, she can’t help her initial disappointment. Making matters worse, her handler is to be David Poole, a fellow agent who manages to be both strait-laced and dashing in annoyingly equal measure. However, Evelyne soon realizes that Blackthorn Park is more than meets the eye, and an upcoming visit from Winston Churchill means that security at the secret weapons research and development facility is of the utmost importance. When Evelyne discovers Blackthorn Park’s chief engineer dead in his office, her simple assignment becomes more complicated.

The Last Dream by - Fiction & Nonfiction/Short Stories
Hardcover: September 24, 2024

With this debut collection, two-time Academy Award-winning writer and director Pedro Almodóvar delivers a tantalizing glimpse into his world, formed by 12 stories carefully selected from his personal writings dating from the late ‘60s to the present. Almodóvar writes: “I’ve been asked to write my autobiography more than once, and I’ve always refused…. I’ve never kept a diary, and whenever I’ve tried, I’ve never made it to page two; in a sense, then, this book represents something of a paradox. It might be best described as a fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little enigmatic.” Each entry reflects Almodóvar's most intimate obsessions, as well as his evolution as an artist.

Paperback: October 1, 2024

Psychologist Arles Shepherd treats troubled children, struggling with each case to recover from her own traumatic past. Having just set up a new kind of treatment center in the remote Adirondack wilderness, Arles longs to heal one patient in particular: a 10-year-old boy who has never spoken a word --- or so his mother, Louise, believes. Hundreds of miles away, Cass Monroe is living a parent’s worst nightmare. His 12-year-old daughter has vanished on her way home from school. With no clues, no witnesses and no trail, the police are at a dead end. Fighting a heart that was already ailing, and struggling to keep both his marriage and himself alive, Cass turns to a pair of true-crime podcasters for help. Arles, Louise and Cass will soon find their lives entangled in ways none of them could have anticipated.

Queen Macbeth by Val McDermid - Historical Thriller
Hardcover: September 24, 2024

A thousand years ago in an ancient Scottish landscape, a woman is on the run with her three companions --- a healer, a weaver and a seer. The men hunting her will kill her --- because she is the only one who stands between them and their violent ambition. She is no lady: she is the first queen of Scotland, married to a king called Macbeth. As the net closes in, what unfurls is a tale of passion, forced marriage, bloody massacre and the harsh realities of medieval Scotland. At the heart of it is one strong, charismatic woman, who survived loss and jeopardy to outwit the endless plotting of a string of ruthless and power-hungry men. Her struggle won her a country. But now it could cost her life.