July 8, 2022
New Fiction
The House Across the Lake by Riley Sager – Casey Fletcher, a recently widowed actress trying to escape a streak of bad press, has retreated to the peace and quiet of her family’s lake house in Vermont. Armed with a pair of binoculars and several bottles of bourbon, she passes the time watching Tom and Katherine Royce, the glamorous couple living in the house across the lake. They make for good viewing – a tech innovator, Tom is powerful; and a former model, Katherine is gorgeous. One day on the lake, Casey saves Katherine from drowning, and the two strike up a budding friendship. But the more they get to know each other – and the longer Casey watches- the more it becomes clear that Katherine and Tom’s marriage isn’t as perfect as it appears. When Katherine suddenly vanishes, Casey immediately suspects Tom of foul play. What she doesn’t realize is that there’s more to the story than meets the eye- and that shocking secrets can lurk beneath the most placid of surfaces.
An Island Wedding by Jenny Colgan – On the tiny island of Mure – halfway between Scotland and Norway – Flora Mackenzie and her fiancé, Joel, are planning the smallest of “sweetheart weddings,” a high-summer celebration surrounded only by those very dearest to them. In the meantime, beautiful Olivia Mathieson – who left Mure ten years ago for bigger and brighter things – has returned for the summer with her wealthy fiancé. Olivia is determined to show everyone on the island how far she’s come by throwing the biggest, most-extravagant, most-Instragrammable wedding possible. And she wants to do it at Flora’s hotel, the same weekend as Flora’s carefully planned microwedding. As the summer solstice approaches, can Flora handle everyone else’s Happily Every Afters – and still get her own.
The Winter Rose by Melanie Dobson – Grace Tonquin is an American Quaker who works tirelessly in Vichy France to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis. After crossing the treacherous Pyrenees, Grace returns home to Oregon with a brother and sister who lost their parents during the war. Though Grace and her husband love Elias and Marguerite as their own, echoes of Grace’s past and trauma from the Holocaust tear the fragile new family apart. More than fifty years after they disappear, Addie Hoult arrives at Tonquin Lake, hoping to find the Tonquin family. For Addie, the mystery of what happened to them is a matter of life and death for her beloved mentor Charlie, who is battling a genetic disease. Though Charlie refuses to discuss his ties to the elusive Tonquins, piecing together their story is the only way to save his life – and potentially mend the wounds from his broken past.
Hatchet Island by Paul Doiron – A call for help from a former colleague leads Maine game warden investigator Mike Bowditch and his girlfriend, Stacey Stevens, on a sea kayaking trip to a research station far off the coast. Stacey spent summers interning on the island, a sanctuary for endangered seabirds, and they are shocked by the atmosphere of tension they encounter when they come ashore. The biologists are being threatened and stalked by a mysterious boatman they suspect is trespassing on the refuge late at night. And now the sanctuary’s enigmatic founder, whose mind has been slowly unraveling, has gone missing. Camped on an islet for the night, Make and Stacey waken to the sound of a gunshot. When they return to the refuge at dawn, their darkest fears are confirmed: two of the three researchers have been brutally murdered and the third has disappeared, along with the island skiff. Mike’s quest to find the missing man leads to a nearby island owned by a world-renowned photographer and his equally brilliant wife. The inhabitants of this private kingdom quickly close ranks, and Mike increasingly comes to believe that someone in the village knows more about the killings than they dare admit. With no one to trust from shore, Mike Bowditch must stop a ruthless murdered determined to make sure a terrifying secret never sees the light of day.