September 22, 2023
New Fiction
Reykjavik by Ragnar Jonasson – Iceland, 1956. Fourteen-year-old Lara decides to spend the summer working for a couple on the small island of Videy, just off the coast of Reykjavik. In early August, the girl disappears without a trace. Time passes, and the mystery becomes Iceland’s most infamous unsolved case. What happened to the young girl? Is she still alive? Did she leave the island, or did something happen to her there? Thirty years later, as the city of Reykjavik celebrates its two-hundredth anniversary, journalist Valur Robertsson begins his own investigation into Lara’s case. But as he draws closer to discovering the secret, and with the eyes of Reykjavik upon him, it soon becomes clear that Lara’s disappearance is a mystery that someone will stop at nothing to keep unsolved.
Pure Evil by Lynda La Plante – It was supposed to be a simple case: a young man arrested for armed assault. But it was just the beginning. As Rodney Middleton awaits trial, Detective Jack Warr is warned by his mentor, DCI Ridley, that they have only scratched the surface of the man’s crimes. As Warr digs into Middleton’s past, Ridley calls pleading for help, now accused of a murder he insists he didn’t commit. To catch a monster and exonerate his friend, Warr must weed out the lies. But what awaits him if he uncovers the truth?
The Wings of Poppy Pendleton by Melanie Dobson – 1907. On the eve of her fifth birthday, Poppy Pendleton is tucked safely in her bed, listening to her parents entertain New York’s elite in their Thousand Islands castle. The next morning, she is gone, and her father is found dead in his smoking room. Desperate to find her daughter – or at least find out what happened to her – Amelia Pendleton struggles to move on with her devastated life. 1992. Though Chloe Ridell lives in the shadows of Poppy’s castle, now in ruins, she has little interest in the mystery that still captivates tourists and locals alike. She is focused on preserving the island she inherited from her grandparents and reviving their vintage candy shop. Until the day a girl named Emma shows up on Chloe’s doorstep, with few possessions, save a tattered scrapbook that connects her to the Pendleton family. When a reporter arrives at Chloe’s store, asking questions about her grandfather, Chloe decides to help him dig into a past she’d thought best left behind. The haunting truth about Poppy, they soon, discover, could save Emma’s life, so Chloe and Logan must work together to investigate exactly what happened long ago on Koster Isle.
The Fraud by Zadie Smith - It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems. Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. The “Tichborne Trial”—wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title—captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task.