November 17, 2023

Held by Anne Michaels – 1917.  On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs.  Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.  1920.  John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not whole.  Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavors to keep on living.  But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.  So begins a narrative that spans four generations, connections and consequences igniting and reigniting as the century unfolds.

The Strangers we Know by Pip Drysdale – When Charlie sees a man who is the spitting image of her husband, Oliver, on a dating app, her heart stops.  Her first, desperate instinct is to tell herself she must be mistaken – after all, she only caught a glimpse from a distance as her friends laughingly swiped through the men on offer.  But no matter how much she tries to push her fears aside, she can’t let it go.  Because she took that photo.  On their honeymoon.  When other signs of betrayal begin to surface, Charlie does the only thing she can think of to defend herself – she signs up for the app to catch Oliver in the act.  But Charlie soon discovers that infidelity is the least of her problems.  Nothing is as it seems, and nobody is who she thinks they are.

A Very Inconvenient Scandal by Jacquelyn Mitchard – Stunned by her recently widowed father’s reckless behavior, a young woman must learn to navigate a new world – where the people she should trust the most have become strangers she cannot trust at all.  Frankie Attleboro returns home to Cape Cod with thrilling news.  She’s met the love of her life, and they’re getting married with a baby on the way.  That’s the moment her father makes his own jaw-dropping announcement: at sixty, he’s getting married as well, to Frankie’s best friend, Ariel, who is also pregnant, and due soon.  As Frankie and Ariel struggle to adjust to their new relationship, Ariel’s estranged mother, Carlotta, returns after a decade-long absence.  She claims to be a changed woman-but is she really?  And where has she been all these years?  Frankie is suspicious, and as Carlotta’s unpredictable behavior intensifies, Frankie must untangle the threads of the past to protect Ariel’s future – and her own.

Betrayal by Phillip Margolin – Robin Lockwood is now a prominent defense attorney in Portland, Oregon, but back in her college days, she was a ranked and rising MMA fighter.  Her career came to a quick end when she was knocked out and concussed in the first round by Mandy Kerrigan, a much more talented fighter.  Now their situations couldn’t be more different.  Mandy Kerrigan is on her last legs professionally, her career nearly over, and under arrest for the quadruple murder of all four members of the Finch family.  Kerrigan’s only possible friend in this hopeless situation is Robin Lockwood, the attorney she beat in the octagon so many years ago.  For Robin, it’s no simple case – Margaret Finch was a lawyer working for vicious Russian mobsters and was in the crosshairs of both the mobsters and the widower of a woman killed by a client.  Her husband, Nathan Finch, was deeply in debt to a bookie who threatened his life.  Their son, Ryan Finch, was the one who sold Kerrigan illegal performance-enhancing drugs and was beaten severely by Kerrigan when she failed her drug test.  To complicate matters further, the DA that Robin is facing is the man she’s just started dating, the first person she’s begun seeing seriously after her fiancé was killed.  In a case where the stakes are high and the truth is evasive, where each new fact twists the case in a new direction, there is seemingly no way to win or direction to turn to that will leave Robin Lockwood unscathed.