April 4, 2025

New Fiction

I Would Die For You by Sandie Jones – California, 2011:  Nicole Forbes lives a quiet life in the small seaside town of Coronado with her husband and daughter.  She is not expecting a writer to knock on her door asking for her personal insight into the downfall of the biggest British band of the 1980s – unspooling the threads of a life she left behind years ago.  The same day, her daughter goes missing and the school claims her aunt picked her up… but she doesn’t have an aunt.  Convinced of a link between the two incidents, Nicole is forced to confront long-abandoned memories from her past to protect everything she now holds dear.  London, 1986: Sixteen-year-old Cassie is obsessed with Secret Oktober, the hottest band of the moment.  Harboring an intense crush on the lead singer, Ben Edwards, she will do anything she can to capture his attention among the throngs of groupies at the band’s scandalous backstage parties.  But when Ben discovers her older sister, Nicole, singing at a local bar one night, he can’t help but feel drawn to her, setting in motion a collision course that could tear their family apart.

Lethal Prey by John Sandford – Doris Grandfelt, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death…but nobody knew exactly where the crime took place.  Her body was found the next night, dumped among a dense thicket of trees along the edge of an urban park, eight miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota.  Despite her twin sister Lara Grandfelt’s persistent calls to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the killer was never found.  Twenty years later, Lara has been diagnosed with breast cancer.  Confronted with the possibility of her own death, she’s determined to find Doris’s killer once and for all.  Finally taking matters into her own hands, she dumps the entire investigation file on every true crime site in the world and offers a $5 million reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest.  Dozens of true crime bloggers show up looking for both new evidence and “clicks,” and Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in to review anything that might be a new lead.  When one of the bloggers locates the murder weapon, Lucas and Virgil begin to uncover vital details about the killer’s identity.  But what they don’t know is that the killer lurks in plain sight and with the true crime bloggers blasting every clue online, the killer can keep one step ahead.  As the nation maneuvers the detectives closer to the truth, Lucas and Virgil will find that digging up Doris’s harrowing past might just get them buried instead.

Fight or Flight by Fern Michaels – From the comfort of her beautiful mountain top retreat, Katherine Winston creates her bestselling young adult series, Girls with Unusual Powers.  No one in the nearby small town has any idea of her true identity.  To them, she’s just the reclusive woman on the mountain, and Katherine is grateful to be left alone.  It wasn’t always this way.  Though her parents were as neglectful as they were wealthy, Katherine built up a busy, full life.  Then tragedy struck and she retreated, panic-stricken at the idea of engaging with anyone again.  Aside from her two faithful dogs who provide companionship and security, Katherine mostly interacts with people anonymously online through reader fan pages.  Now one of those fans appears to be in danger and Katherine desperately wants to help.  But that means moving beyond her isolated world for the first time in years.  More and more, Katherine can’t shake the feeling that some of her fears may be justified.  Someone is watching her, she’s sure of it, and they’re getting closer all the time.  And only by leaving her self-imposed exile can she hope to find the answers she needs, the courage to trust again, and an unexpected new beginning.

The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry – In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, disappears off the coast of South Caroline.  Bronwyn, a literary prodigy, had stunned the world by writing a fantasy novel that became a national sensation when she was just twelve.  Her mysterious departure leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to the landmark work, written in an enigmatic and invented language.  As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beautiful mother.  By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie.  When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language, Clara is skeptical.  Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s vanishing, she crossed the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters – the Great Smog.  With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, mother daughter escape the city with Charlie and find refuge in the Jamesons’ family retreat nestled in the Lake District.  It is there that Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.