Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake --- a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led --- her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters: Matilde, Pastora and Camila. But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own. Spanning the three days prior to the wake, FAMILY LORE traces the lives of each of the Marte women, weaving together past and present, Santo Domingo and New York City.
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and they are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
Officer Ren Hopper is an enforcement ranger with the National Park Service, tasked with duties both mundane and thrilling: breaking up fights at campgrounds, saving clueless tourists from moose attacks, and attempting to broker an uneasy peace between the wealthy vacationers who tromp through the park with cameras, and the residents of hardscrabble Cooke City who want to carve out a meaningful living. When Ren, hiking through the backcountry on his day off, encounters a tall man with a dog and a gun chasing a small black bear up a hill, his hackles are raised. But what begins as an investigation into the background of a local poacher soon opens into something far murkier: a shattered windshield, a series of red ribbons tied to traps, the discovery of a frightening conspiracy, and a story of heroism gone awry.
Southern California, 1960s. Carol Donnelly is a legendary female surfer struggling to compete in a male-dominated sport --- and her daughters, Mindy and Ginger, bear the weight of her unconventional lifestyle. The Donnelly sisters grow up enduring their mother’s absence, both physically and emotionally. To escape questions about Carol’s whereabouts --- and to chase her elusive affection --- they cut school to spend their days in the surf. From her first time on a board, Mindy is a natural, but Ginger, two years younger, feels out of place in the water. As they grow up and their lives diverge, Mindy and Ginger’s relationship ebbs and flows. But through it all, their sense of duty to each other survives, as they are forever connected by the emotional damage they carry from their unorthodox childhood.
Cassie Greenberg loves being an artist, but it’s a tough way to make a living. On the brink of eviction, she’s desperate when she finds a too-good-to-be-true apartment in a beautiful Chicago neighborhood. Cassie knows there has to be a catch --- only someone with a secret to hide would rent out a room for that price. Of course, her new roommate Frederick J. Fitzwilliam is far from normal. He sleeps all day, is out at night on business, and talks like he walked out of a regency romance novel. He also leaves Cassie heart-melting notes around the apartment, cares about her art, and asks about her day. But when Cassie finds bags of blood in the fridge that definitely weren’t there earlier, Frederick has to come clean. Cassie’s sexy new roommate is a vampire. And he has a proposition for her.
The CIA is rocked to its core when a KGB defector divulges that there is a KGB mole inside the Agency. They learn that the mole’s handler is a KGB agent known as Boris. CIA analyst Bill Hefflin recognizes that name --- Boris is the code name of Hefflin’s longtime KGB asset. If the defector is correct, Hefflin realizes that Boris must be a triple agent, and his supposed mole has been passing false intel to Hefflin and the CIA. What’s more, this makes Hefflin the prime suspect as the KGB mole inside the Agency. Hefflin is given a chance to prove his innocence by returning to his city of birth, Bucharest, Romania, to find Boris and track down the identity of the mole. But Hefflin has a secret that no one else knows --- Boris has been dead for over a year.
The future Queen Elizabeth was not yet three when her mother, Anne Boleyn, was beheaded on May 19, 1536, on Henry’s order, incensed that she had not given him a son and tired of her contentious nature. Elizabeth had been raised away from court, rarely even seeing Anne. After her death, Henry tried in every way to erase Anne’s presence and memory. At that moment in history, few could have predicted that mother and daughter would each leave enduring, and interlocked, legacies. Yet as Tracy Borman reveals in this first-ever joint portrait, both women broke the mold for British queens and for women in general at the time.
Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, LEARNED BY HEART is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy. Eliza and Anne meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both 14.
On the isle of Ithaca, Queen Penelope maintains a delicate balance of power. Many years ago, her husband, Odysseus, sailed to war with Troy and never came home. In his absence, Penelope uses all her cunning to keep the peace --- a peace that is shattered by the return of Orestes, king of Mycenae, and his sister, Elektra. Orestes’ hands are stained with his mother’s blood. Not so long ago, the son of Agamemnon took Queen Clytemnestra’s life on Ithaca’s sands. Now, racked with guilt, he is slowly losing his mind. Penelope knows that destruction will follow in his wake as surely as the Furies circle him. His uncle, Menelaus, the battle-hungry king of Sparta, longs for Orestes’ throne --- and if he can seize it, no one will be safe from his violent whims.
In 2008, nine mountaineers failed to return from a winter backpacking trip in the New Mexico mountains. At their final campsite, searchers found a bizarre scene: something had appeared at the door of their tent so terrifying that it impelled them to slash their way out and flee barefoot to certain death in a blizzard. Despite a diligent search, only six bodies were found, two violently crushed and inexplicably missing their eyes. The case, given the code name “Dead Mountain” by the FBI, was never solved. Now, two more bodies from the lost expedition are unexpectedly discovered in a cave, one a grisly suicide. Young FBI Agent Corrie Swanson teams up with archaeologist Nora Kelly to investigate what really happened on that fateful trip 15 years ago --- and to find the ninth victim.
We have listed 12 of Carol’s Bookreporter.com Bets On picks that are now or soon to be in paperback. Which of these books have you read or do you plan to read? Please check all that apply.
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Coming Soon
Curious about what books will be released in the months ahead so you can pre-order or reserve them? Then click on the months below.
August's Books on Screen roundup includes the films The Thursday Murder Club, My Oxford Year and Night Always Comes on Netflix, the Providence Falls trilogy on Hallmark, The Map That Leads to You on Prime Video, and She Rides Shotgun in theaters; the conclusion of "And Just Like That..." on HBO Max and "The Institute" on MGM+; the series premieres of "Outlander: Blood of My Blood" on STARZ and "The Terminal List: Dark Wolf" on Prime Video; the season premieres of "The Marlow Murder Club" on PBS "Masterpiece" and "My Life with the Walter Boys" on Netflix; and the DVD/Blu-ray releases of The King of Kings and How to Train Your Dragon.