THOUGHTS ON THIS 'n THAT

The library is under lock and key. But its secrets can't be contained. 1896. After he brought her home from Jamaica as a baby, Florence's father had her hair hot-combed to make her look like the other girls. But as a young woman, Florence is not so easy to tame—and when she brings scandal to his door, the bookbinder throws her onto the streets of Manchester. Intercepting her father's latest commission, Florence talks her way into the forbidding Rose Hall to restore its rare books. Lord Francis Belfield's library is old and full of secrets—but none so intriguing as the whispers about his late wife…  Evocative, arresting and tightly plotted,  The Library Thief  is at once a propulsive Gothic mystery and a striking exploration of race, gender and self-discovery in Victorian England.  HERE'S AN EXCERPT The story starts with a scandal that I thought would end my life. Fortunately, my scandal didn’t kill anyone. In fact, it pales in comparison with what I went on...

In this stunning debut by South Carolina attorney @CarolineCleveland, a lawyer with a past, and  his indomitable detective and lover, find themselves entangled in secrets, lies, and murder in a small Southern town. #WHENCICADASCRY (UnionSquare&Co.) is a suspenseful thriller that will give you a front row seat into the judicial system. A high-profile murder case— A white woman has been bludgeoned to death with an altar cross in a rural church on Cicada Road in Walterboro, South Carolina. Sam Jenkins, a Black man, is found covered in blood, kneeling over the body. In a state already roiling with racial tension, this is not only a murder case, but a powder keg. A haunting cold case— Two young women are murdered on quiet Edisto Beach, an hour southeast of Walterboro, and the killer disappears without a trace. Thirty-four years later the mystery remains unsolved. Could there be a connection to Stander's case? A killer who's watching— Stander takes on Jenkins's defense, but h...

  Award-winning author @AliSmith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish provocative novel, #COMPANIONPIECE (VintageBooks) that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague. A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.   A day spent locked in a room by border officials without any explanation as to why. A riddle that seemingly has no answer:  curlew or curfew, you choose.  A phone call from a college friend who hasn't been in touch in years.  And all of it is somehow inextricably linked to the life of a young blacksmith hounded from her trade and branded a vagrant nearly 500 years ago. Companion Piece  is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to  Ali Smith's gorgeous canon. Ali Smith CBE FRSL (born August 1962 in Inverness) is a Scottish writer. She was born to working-class parents, raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. S...

  A stunning new novel, The Limits (Penguin/RandomHouse) by author Nell Freudenberger set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year. From Mo’orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia’s imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen’s luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents’ disparate lives—her father’s consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother’s relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock—for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation...

  For a disgraced reporter, unraveling a conspiracy of murder could mean redemption in the powerful new suspense novel, LOST TO DUNE ROAD (Thomas&Mercer) by bestselling author, Kara Thomas. Reporter Lee Ellerin’s investigation into a young woman’s unsolved murder gained national attention—only for her to lose everything due to a tragic mistake. After being publicly ridiculed for causing a suspect’s death, Lee is forced to leave her career behind. Five years later, pregnant college student Amanda Hartley lies in a coma. The police say she attempted suicide, but the details don’t add up. Where is the father? Who was paying for Amanda’s Manhattan penthouse? Why did Amanda have a note with Lee’s name in her backpack? There’s also one alarming coincidence: Amanda was last seen on Dune Road in the Hamptons—where the murder victim in Lee’s previous investigation disappeared. As she’s pulled back into the still-unsolved case that destroyed her career, Lee sees the chance to amend the m...

  In Nick Medina's new novel, INDIAN BURIAL GROUND (Berkley) on this Indian Reservation nothing is what it seems. Summer 1986.  An elderly woman silently drowns herself. A corpse sits up in its coffin and speaks. A vampire stalks a reservation, hunting for its next victim. During the course of one eerie summer, sixteen-year-old Louie will discover that not all is what it seems on the Takoda reservation. After a series of unexplainable deaths leaves the reservation reeling, Louie becomes convinced that a profound evil has infiltrated his home—but is it the Takoda vampire that has haunted Louie since his childhood, or something much more sinister?   In the present day, Noemi Broussard’s life swiftly comes crumbling down after the news of her boyfriend Roddy’s apparent suicide and the return of her Uncle Louie, who she has not seen in over a decade. Noemi knows that the facts surrounding Roddy’s death don’t add up, and she isn’t the only one convinced that something menacing...