September 2, 2022

New Fiction

Point Last Seen by Christina Dodd – When you’ve already died, there should be nothing left to fear… When Adam Ramsdell pulls Elle’s half-frozen body from the surf on a lonely California beach, she has no memory of how she ended up there, what her full name is and how she got those terrible bruises on her throat.  Elle finds refuge in Adam’s home on the edge of Gothic, a remote village located between the steep mountains and the raging Pacific Ocean.  As flashes of her memory return, Elle faces a terrible truth – buried in her mind lurks a secret so dark it could get her killed.  Everyone in Gothic seems to hide a dark past.  Even Adam knows more than he will admit.  Until Elle can unravel the truth, she can’t be sure who to trust, when to run and who else might be hurt when the killer stalking her nightmares arrives to finish what he started…

Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra – Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past.  Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of Mass, Maria immigrates to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father’s arrest.  Fifteen years later, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart.  Her mother won’t speak to her.  Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators.  Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can’t escape the studio’s narrow typecasting.  And the studio itself, Maria’s only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy.   As the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European emigres: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled.  While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalists, and jockeying ambitions.  But when the arrival of a stranger from her father’s past threatens Maria’s carefully constructed façade, she must finally confront her father’s fate – and her own.

The Last Housewife by Ashley Winstead – While in college in New York, Shay Evans and her best friends met a captivating man who seduced them with a web of lies about the way the world works, bringing them under his thrall.  By senior year, Shay and her friend Laurel were the only ones who managed to escape.  Now, eight years later, Shay’s built a new life in a tony Texas suburb.  But when she hears the horrifying news of Laurel’s death – delivered, of all ways, by her favorite true-crime podcast crusader – she begins to suspect that the past she thought she buried is still very much alive, and the predators more dangerous than ever.  Recruiting the help of the podcast host, Shay goes back to the place she vowed never to return to in search of answers.  As she follows the threads of her friend’s life, she’s pulled into a dark, seductive world, where wealth and privilege shield brutal philosophies that feel all too familiar.  When Shay’s obsession with uncovering the truth becomes so consuming that she can no longer separate her desire for justice from darker desires newly awakened, she must confront the depths of her own complicity and conditioning.  But in a world built for men to rule it – both inside the cult and outside of it – is justice even possible, and if so, how far will Shay go to get it?

Fox Creek by William Kent Krueger – The ancient Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux has had a vision of his death.  As he walks the Northwoods in solitude, he tries to prepare himself peacefully for the end of his long life.  But peace is destined to elude him as hunters enter the woods seeking a woman named Dolores Morriseau, a stranger who had come to Henry for shelter and the gift of his wisdom.  Meloux guides this stranger and his great niece, Cork O’Connor’s wife, to safety deep inside the Boundary Waters, his home for more than a century.  On the last journey he may ever take into his beloved land, Meloux must do his best to outwit the deadly mercenaries who follow.  Meanwhile, in Aurora, Cork works feverishly to identify the hunters and the reason for their relentless pursuit, but he has little to go on.  In desperation, Cork begins tracking the killers, but own skills in the wild are severely tested by a late season snowstorm.  He knows only too well that with each passing hour time is running out.  His fiercest enemy in this deadly game of cat and mouse may be his own deep self-doubt about his ability to save those he loves.