March 21, 2025

New Fiction

Count my Lies by Sophie Stava – Sloane Caraway is a liar.  Harmless lies, mostly, to make her self-proclaimed sad little life a bit more interesting.  So when Sloane sees a young girl in tears at a park one afternoon, she can’t help herself – she tells the girl’s (very attractive) dad she’s a nurse and helps him pull a bee stinger from the child’s foot.  With this lie, and chance encounter, Sloane becomes the nanny for the wealthy and privileged household of Jay and Violet Lockhart.  The perfect New York couple with a brownstone, a daughter in private school, and summers on Block Island.  But maybe Sloane isn’t the only one lying, and all that’s picture-perfect harbors a much more dangerous truth. 

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy – Dominic Sand and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica.  Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants.  Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.  Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need.  Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.  But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater.  And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets.  As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust one another enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late – and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall – Beth and her gentle, kind husband, Frank, are happily married, though their relationship relies on the past staying buried.  But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives.  The dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager – the man who broke her heart years ago.  Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son, Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died a few years earlier in a tragic accident.  As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and latent jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences.  Beth is forced to choose between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

All the Other Mothers Hate Me by Sarah Harman – Florence Grimes is a thirty-one-year old party girl who always takes the easy way out.  Single, broke, and unfulfilled after the humiliating end to her girl band career, she has only one reason to get out of bed each day: her ten-year-old son, Dylan.  But then Alfie Risby, her son’s bully and the heir to a vast frozen-food empire mysteriously vanishes during a class trip, and Dylan becomes the prime suspect.  Florence, for once, is faced with a task she can’t quit: She’s got to find Alfie and clear her son’s name, or risk losing Dylan forever.  The only problem?  Florence has no useful skills, let alone investigative ones, and all the other school moms hate her.  Oh, and Florence has a reason to suspect Dylan might not be as innocent as she’d like to believe.