September 8, 2023

New Fiction

Good Bad Girl by Alice Feeney – Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is killed at a nursing home.  The two crimes are somehow linked.  Edith was tricked into the home by her estranged daughter, Clio, but she’s planning her escape.  Her only friend is Patience, an employee at the home who is lying about almost everything.  When a stranger pushes Clio back into Edith’s life, all of the women are confronted with mysteries they may not want to solve.  But if they can put all the pieces together, they might find out what happened to the missing baby, the mother who lost her, and the connections that bind them all.

The Royal Windsor Secret by Christine Wells – Cleo Davenport has heard the whispers.  Told she was an orphan, she knows the rumor that her father is none other than the Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne.  And at her childhood home at Cairo’s Shepheard’s Hotel, where royals, rulers, and the wealthy live, they call her “the princess.”  But her life is upended when her very proper aunt whisks her away to London to make her debut.  Cleo loathes being confined to a ballroom, and she longs for independence as a jewelry designer for Cartier, far away from the rules of society.  But she cannot move forward until she finds out about her past.  After the chaos of Edward VIII’s abdication, Cleo travels to France, where her search takes a shocking turn into the world of the Parisian demimonde, and a high class courtesan whose scandalous affair with the young Prince of Wales threatened to bring down the British monarchy long before anyone had heard of Wallis Simpson.

The Breakaway by Jennifer Weiner – Thirty -three-year-old Abby Stern has made it to a happy place.  True, she still has gig jobs instead of a career, and the apartment where she’s lived since college still looks like she’s just moved in.  But she’s got good friends, her bike, and her bicycling club in Philadelphia.  She’s at peace with her plus-size body – at least, most of the time – and she’s on track to marry Mark Medoff, her childhood summer sweetheart, a man she met at the weight-loss camp that her perpetually dieting mother forced her to attend.  Fifteen years after her final summer at Camp Golden Hills, when Abby reconnects with a half-his-size Mark, it feels like the happy ending she’s always wanted.  Yet Abby can’t escape the feeling that something isn’t right…or the memories of one thrilling night she spent with a man named Sebastian two years previously.  When Abby gets a last-minute invitation to lead a cycling trip from NYC to Niagara Falls, she’s happy to have time away from Mark, a chance to reflect and make up her mind. But things get complicated fast.  First, Abby spots a familiar face in the group – Sebastian, the one-night stand she thought she’d never see again.  Sebastian is a serial dater who lives a hundred miles away.  In spite of their undeniable chemistry, Abby is determined to keep her distance.  Then there’s a surprise last-minute addition to the trip: her mother, Eileen, the woman Abby blames for a lifetime of body shaming and insecurities she’s still trying to undo.  Over two weeks and more than seven hundred miles, strangers become friends, hidden truths come to light, a teenage girl with a secret unites the riders in unexpected ways…and Abby is forced to reconsider everything she believes about herself, her mother, and the nature of love.

The Witching Tide by Margaret Meyer – East Anglia, 1645.  Martha Hallybread, a midwife, healer, and servant, has lived peacefully for more than four decades in her beloved seaside village of Cleftwater.  Having lost her voice as a child, Martha has not spoken a word in years.  One autumn morning, a sinister newcomer appears in town.  The witchfinder, Silas Makepeace, has been blazing a trail of destruction along the coast and now has Cleftwater in his sights.  His arrival strikes fear into the heart of the community.  Within a day, local women are being captured and detained, and Martha finds herself a silent witness to the hunt.  Powerless to protest, Martha is enlisted to search the accused women for “Devil’s marks.”  She is caught between suspicion and betrayal, between shielding herself or condemning the women of the village.  In desperation, she revives a wax witching doll that belonged to her mother, in the hope that it will bring protection.  But the doll’s true powers are unknowable, Martha harbors a terrible secret, and the gallows are looming…