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Reviews

Library Lines

March 15, 2024

New Fiction

The Hunter by Tana French – It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the west of Ireland.  One of them is coming home.  Both of them are coming to get rich.  One of them is coming to die.  Cal Hooper took early retirement from the Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace.  He’s found it, more or less: he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places.  But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat.  Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting.  What she wants is revenge.

Pelican Girls by Julia Malye – Paris, 1720.  La Salpetriere hospital is in crisis: too many occupants, not enough beds.  Half-way across the world, France’s colony in the wilds of North America has space to spare and needs families to fill it.  So the director of the hospital rounds up nearly a hundred female “volunteers” of childbearing age – orphans, prisoners, and mental patients – to be shipped to New Orleans.  Among this group are three unlikely friends: a sharp-tongued twelve year old orphan, a mute “madwoman,” and an accused abortionist.  Charlotte, Petronille, and Genevieve, along with the dozens of other women aboard La Baleine, have no knowledge of what lies ahead and no control over their futures.  Strangers brought together by fate, these brave and fierce young women will face extraordinary adversity – pirates, slave drivers, sickness, war – but also the private trauma of heartbreak and unrequited love, children born and lost, cruelty and unexpected pleasure, and friendships forged in fire that will endure through the years.

Murder Road by Simone St. James – July 1995.  April and Eddie have taken a wrong turn.  They’re looking for the small resort town where they plan to spend their honeymoon.  When they spot what appears to be a lone hitchhiker along the deserted road, they stop to help.  But not long after the woman gets into their car, they see the blood seeping from her jacket and a truck barreling down Atticus Line after them.  When the hitchhiker dies at the local hospital, April and Eddie find themselves in the crosshairs of the Coldlake Falls police.  Unexplained murders have been happening along Atticus Line for years, and the cops finally have two witnesses who easily become their only suspects.  As April and Eddie start to dig into the history of the town – and that horrible stretch of road – to clear their names, they soon learn that there is something supernatural at work, something that could not only tear the town and its dark secrets apart but take April and Eddie down with it all.

The New Couple in 5B by Lisa Unger - Rosie and Chad Lowan are barely making ends meet in New York City when they receive life-changing news: Chad’s late uncle has left them his luxury apartment at the historic Windermere in glamorous Murray Hill. With its prewar elegance and impeccably uniformed doorman, the building is the epitome of old New York charm. One would almost never suspect the dark history lurking behind its perfectly maintained facade.
At first, the building and its eclectic tenants couldn’t feel more welcoming. But as the Lowans settle into their new home, Rosie starts to suspect that there’s more to the Windermere than meets the eye. Why is the doorman ever-present? Why are there cameras everywhere? And why have so many gruesome crimes occurred there throughout the years? When one of the neighbors turns up dead, Rosie must get to the truth about the Windermere before she, too, falls under its dangerous spell.

Krista Law