The Way of All Fish
Publishers Weekly ★ 11/18/2013 This addictive, whimsical follow-up to 2003’s Foul Matter from MWA Grand Master Grimes dives into the cesspool that is the New York publishing world. L. Bass Hess, a despicable literary agent, likes to sue his former clients, claiming, after they fire him, that they owed him a commission. Some authors have […]
The Invention of Wings
Kirkus Reviews ★ 2013-10-05 Kidd (The Mermaid Chair, 2005, etc.) hits her stride and avoids sentimental revisionism with this historical novel about the relationship between a slave and the daughter of slave owners in antebellum Charleston. Sarah Grimké was an actual early abolitionist and feminist whose upbringing in a slaveholding Southern family made her voice […]
In the Blood
Publishers Weekly ★ 10/28/2013 Bestseller Unger returns to the Hollows, the secluded upstate New York town that served as the setting for Fragile and Darkness, My Old Friend, for this gripping novel of psychological suspense. Ace student Lana Granger, with a new name and appearance, sequesters herself at small Sacred Heart College, where no one […]
The Supreme Macaroni Company
Library Journal As with last year's The Shoemaker's Wife, the author's hottest seller to date, Trigiani picks up the cobbler's toolkit to craft a story about love and work that ranges from New York to Italy and beyond. As Valentine Roncalli seeks to maintain the 100-year-old family business—the Greenwich Village-based Angelini Shoe Company—she complicates her […]
Never Laugh As a Hearse Goes By
Library Journal ★ 11/01/2013 A small conference for a group of vicars at the notable Gladstone's Library in Wales goes decidedly grim when the bishop's administrative assistant dies of a food-allergic reaction. Turns out someone planned it that way. DCI Gareth Davies happens to be on the scene, and, conveniently, Penny Brannigan is there, too. […]
The First Phone Call From Heaven
★ 09/09/2013 Albom (The Five People You Meet in Heaven) has a nose for “thin placesâ€: places where the boundary between secular and sacred is porous, and ultimate meaning is easier to encounter. In his new novel, Coldwater, Mich., is this thin place, a town where people who have lost loved ones begin receiving phone […]
An Old Betrayal
“The upper-class amateur sleuth, an endangered species even in historical mysteries, is very much alive in Charles Finch’s charming Victorian whodunits.†—The New York Times Book Review
Dark Witch
Kirkus Reviews ★ 2013-10-21 Seven hundred fifty years after an evil sorcerer attacks the Dark Witch Sorcha and leaves her children orphans, he comes back, and her descendants must depend on magic, friendship and love to repel him. Iona Sheehan has sold most of what she owns and left everything she knows behind in America, […]
The All-girl Filling Station's Last Reunion
“Flagg spins another charming tale of the peaks and valleys of everyday life … If all the self-help books that promote ways to “find yourself†were stacked in an enormous pile … none would approach the sweet wisdom with which Flagg infuses The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion. And neither could they match the author’s […]
Takedown Twenty
New Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum knows better than to mess with family. But when powerful mobster Salvatore “Uncle Sunny†Sunucchi goes on the lam in Trenton, it’s up to Stephanie to find him. Uncle Sunny is charged with murder for running over a guy (twice), and nobody wants to turn him in—not his poker […]