April 7, 2023
New Fiction
A Death at the Party by Amy Stuart – Nadine Walsh’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbours all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite – everything’s going according to plan. But Nadine-devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter-finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this? Rewind to that morning, when Nadine is in her kitchen, making last-minute preparations before she welcomes more than a hundred guests to her home to celebrate her mother’s birthday. But her husband is of little help to her, her two grown children are consumed with their own concerns and her mother- only her mother knows that today isn’t just a birthday party. It marks another anniversary as well. Still, Nadine will focus just on tonight. Everyone deserves a celebration after the year they’ve had. A chance for fun. A chance to forget. But it’s hard to forget when Nadine’s head is swirling with secrets, haunting memories, and concerns about what might happened when her guests unite.
The Woman with the Cure by Lynn Cullen – In 1940s and ‘50s America, polio is as dreaded as the atomic bomb. No one’s life is untouched by this disease, which kills or paralyzes its victims, particularly children. Outbreaks of the virus across the country regularly put American cities into lockdown. Some of the world’s best minds are engaged in the race to find a vaccine. The man who succeeds will be god. But Dorothy Horstmann is not focused on beating her colleagues to the vaccine. She just wants the world to have a cure. Applying the same determination that lifted her from a humble background as the daughter of immigrants to becoming a doctor-often the only woman in the room-she hunts down the monster where it lurks: in the blood. This discovery of hers, and an error by a competitor, catapults her closest colleague to a lead in the race. When his chance to win comes on a worldwide scale, she is asked to sink or validate his vaccine-and to decide what is forgivable, and how much should be sacrificed, in pursuit of the cure.
The Dead of Winter by Stuart Macbride – All Detective Constable Edward Reekie had to do was pick up a dying prisoner from HMP Grampian and deliver him somewhere to live out his last few months in peace. From the outside, Glenfarach looks like a quaint, sleepy, snow-dusted village, nestled deep in the heart of Cairngorms National Park, but things aren’t what they seem. The place is thick with security cameras and there’s a strict nine o’clock curfew, because Glenfarach is the final sanctuary for people who’ve served their sentences but can’t be safely released into the general population. Edward’s new boss, DI Victoria Montgomery-Porter, insists they head back to Aberdeen before the approaching blizzards shut everything down, but when an ex-cop-turned-gangster is discovered tortured to death in his bungalow, someone needs to take charge.
The Porcelain Moon by Janie Chang – France 1918. In the final days of the First World War, a young Chinese woman, Pauline Deng, runs away from her uncle’s home in Paris to evade a marriage that will send her back to Shanghai. To prevent the union, she needs the help of her cousin Theo, who has been working as a translator for the Chinese Labour Corps in the town of Noyelles-sur-Mer. In Noyelles-sur-Mer, Camille Roussel is planning her escape from an abusive marriage. When Camille offers Pauline a place to stay while she is in Noyelles, the two women become friends. But it’s not long before Pauline uncovers a perilous love affair that Camille has been hiding and the truth about Theo. As their situation escalates into deadly danger, the two women are forced to make a terrible decision that will bind them together for the rest of their lives.