Summer is right around the corner! With that comes (hopefully) more time to enjoy the nice weather by curling up with a book! Following is the first part of my most-anticipated books of June! Click on the title or cover to preorder! So.many.books!
Finders Keepers by Stephen King (June 2):
Wake up, genius.” So begins King’s instantly riveting story about a vengeful reader. The genius is John Rothstein, an iconic author who created a famous character, Jimmy Gold, but who hasn’t published a book for decades. Morris Bellamy is livid, not just because Rothstein has stopped providing books, but because the nonconformist Jimmy Gold has sold out for a career in advertising. Morris kills Rothstein and empties his safe of cash, yes, but the real treasure is a trove of notebooks containing at least one more Gold novel.
Morris hides the money and the notebooks, and then he is locked away for another crime. Decades later, a boy named Pete Saubers finds the treasure, and now it is Pete and his family that Bill Hodges, Holly Gibney, and Jerome Robinson must rescue from the ever-more deranged and vengeful Morris when he’s released from prison after thirty-five years.
Not since Misery has King played with the notion of a reader whose obsession with a writer gets dangerous.Finders Keepers is spectacular, heart-pounding suspense, but it is also King writing about how literature shapes a life—for good, for bad, forever.
The Fold by Peter Clines (June 2):
The folks in Marco Leland’s small New England town would say he’s just your average, everyday guy. And that’s just how Marco likes it. Sure, the life he’s chosen may not be much of a challenge to someone with his gifts, but Marco is content with his quiet and peaceful existence.
That is, until an old government friend presents him with an irresistible mystery—one that Marco seems uniquely qualified to solve: it seems that a team of DARPA scientists has invented a device that could make teleportation a reality. But something is very wrong with the project. The personalities of the scientists who work on it are changing. People are dying. And reality itself seems to be…warping.
Marco soon learns that the machine is not at all what it appears to be—and that its creators may have opened a doorway to something horrible that lurks just outside our world’s borders.
Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy (June 2):
On a dark Kentucky night in 1952 exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran crosses into forbidden territory. Everyone knows Hollerans don’t go near Baines, not since Joseph Carl was buried two decades before, but, armed with a silver-handled flashlight, Annie runs through her family’s lavender fields toward the well on the Baines’ place. At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future. Not finding what she had hoped for, she turns from the well and when the body she sees there in the moonlight is discovered come morning, Annie will have much to explain and a past to account for.
It was 1936, and there were seven Baine boys. That year, Annie’s aunt, Juna Crowley, with her black eyes and her long blond hair, came of age. Before Juna, Joseph Carl had been the best of all the Baine brothers. But then he looked into Juna’s eyes and they made him do things that cost innocent people their lives. Sheriff Irlene Fulkerson saw justice served—or did she?
As the lavender harvest approaches and she comes of age as Aunt Juna did in her own time, Annie’s dread mounts. Juna will come home now, to finish what she started. If Annie is to save herself, her family, and this small Kentucky town, she must prepare for Juna’s return, and the revelation of what really happened all those years ago.
The Governor’s Wife by Michael Harvey (June 2):
In the latest installment in Michael Harvey’s beloved Michael Kelly series, Chicago’s favorite Ovid-reading, gun-toting private investigator takes on Illinois’s first family in a blistering thriller that charts the border where ambition ends and evil begins.
It’s been two years since disgraced Illinois governor Ray Perry disappeared from a federal courthouse in Chicago moments after being sentenced to thirty-seven years in prison on corruption charges. P.I. Michael Kelly is sitting in his office when he gets an anonymous e-mail offering to pay him nearly a quarter of a million dollars if he will find Perry, no questions asked. Kelly’s investigation begins with the woman Ray Perry left behind—his wife, Marie. Ostracized by her former friends and hounded by the feds, Marie tells Kelly she has no idea where her husband is. Like everyone else, Kelly doesn’t believe her. As he hunts for her husband, Kelly begins to unwind Marie Perry’s past. What he finds is a woman who turns out to be even more intriguing than her husband, with her own deeply complicated reasons for standing by him. Everyone in Chicago has secrets, including the governor’s wife. Some of them she shared with her husband. Some of them she kept to herself. And some of them could get Michael Kelly killed.
The Governor’s Wife is a hard-eyed look at the intersection of the political and the personal, at the perils of trusting even those closest to us, and the collateral damage of our highest aspirations. Stylish, knock-out suspense from a modern master.
Saint Mazie by Jami Attenberg (June 2):
Meet Mazie Phillips: big-hearted and bawdy, she’s the truth-telling proprietress of The Venice, the famed New York City movie theater. It’s the Jazz Age, with romance and booze aplenty–even when Prohibition kicks in–and Mazie never turns down a night on the town. But her high spirits mask a childhood rooted in poverty, and her diary, always close at hand, holds her dearest secrets.
When the Great Depression hits, Mazie’s life is on the brink of transformation. Addicts and bums roam the Bowery; homelessness is rampant. If Mazie won’t help them, then who? When she opens the doors of The Venice to those in need, this ticket taking, fun-time girl becomes the beating heart of the Lower East Side, and in defining one neighborhood helps define the city.
Then, more than ninety years after Mazie began her diary, it’s discovered by a documentarian in search of a good story. Who was Mazie Phillips, really? A chorus of voices from the past and present fill in some of the mysterious blanks of her adventurous life.
Inspired by the life of a woman who was profiled in Joseph Mitchell’s classic Up in the Old Hotel, SAINT MAZIE is infused with Jami Attenberg’s signature wit, bravery, and heart. Mazie’s rise to “sainthood”–and her irrepressible spirit–is unforgettable.
In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume (June 2):
In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling. Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, she paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place—Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable,” Elizabeth Taylor haircuts, young (and not-so-young) love, explosive friendships, A-bomb hysteria, rumors of Communist threat. And a young journalist who makes his name reporting tragedy. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.
In the Unlikely Event is vintage Judy Blume, with all the hallmarks of Judy Blume’s unparalleled storytelling, and full of memorable characters who cope with loss, remember the good times and, finally, wonder at the joy that keeps them going.
A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay (June 2):
The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when fourteen-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia.
To her parents’ despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie’s descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession. He also contacts a production company that is eager to document the Barretts’ plight. With John, Marjorie’s father, out of work for more than a year and the medical bills looming, the family agrees to be filmed, and soon find themselves the unwitting stars of The Possession, a hit reality TV show. When events in the Barrett household explode in tragedy, the show and the shocking incidents it captures become the stuff of urban legend.
Fifteen years later, a bestselling writer interviews Marjorie’s younger sister, Merry. As she recalls those long ago events that took place when she was just eight years old, long-buried secrets and painful memories that clash with what was broadcast on television begin to surface—and a mind-bending tale of psychological horror is unleashed, raising vexing questions about memory and reality, science and religion, and the very nature of evil.
Eight Hundred Grapes by Laura Dave (June 2):
There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide…
Growing up on her family’s Sonoma vineyard, Georgia Ford learned some important secrets. The secret number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine: eight hundred. The secret ingredient in her mother’s lasagna: chocolate. The secret behind ending a fight: hold hands.
But just a week before her wedding, thirty-year-old Georgia discovers her beloved fiancé has been keeping a secret so explosive, it will change their lives forever.
Georgia does what she’s always done: she returns to the family vineyard, expecting the comfort of her long-married parents, and her brothers, and everything familiar. But it turns out her fiancé is not the only one who’s been keeping secrets…
The Fixer by Joseph Finder (June 9):
When Rick Hoffman loses his job and apartment, his only option is to move back into—and renovate—the home of his miserable youth, now empty and in decay since his father’ stroke. But when he starts to pull it apart, he makes an electrifying discovery that will put his life in peril—and change everything he thought he knew about his father.
The Third Wife by Lisa Jewell (June 9):
In the early hours of a summer morning, a young woman steps into the path of an oncoming bus. A tragic accident? Or suicide?
At the center of this puzzle is Adrian Wolfe, a successful architect and grief-stricken widower, who, a year after his third wife’s death, begins to investigate the cause. As Adrian looks back on their brief but seemingly happy marriage, disturbing secrets begin to surface. The divorces from his two previous wives had been amicable, or so it seemed; his children, all five of them, were resilient as ever, or so he thought. But something, or someone, must have pushed Maya over the edge…
With psychological nuance that gets into the heart of its characters, The Third Wife is a gripping story about a man seeking the truth behind his seemingly perfect marriage and the broken pieces left behind.
The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows (June 9):
Evoking the same small town charm with the same great eye for character, the coauthor of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society finds her own voice in this new novel about a young debutante working for the Federal Writer’s Project whose arrival in Macedonia, West Virginia changes the course of history for a prominent family who has been sitting on a secret for decades.
Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware refuses to marry the gentleman her father has chosen for her and is forced to get a job working for the FWP to write the first official account of Maecdonian History. Her notions of real life—the social whirl of Newport and New York—are totally upended and she despairs in rooming with the overly eccentric Romeyn family in such a small backwater town. The Romeyn family is a fixture in the town, their identity tied to its knotty history. Layla enters their lives and lights a match to the family veneer and a truth comes to light that will change each of their lives forever in deeply personal and powerful ways. As Layla embarks on this grand adventure to establish historical moments in print, her first friend, the town librarian Ms. Betts wisely cautions: “There is a problem with history. All of us see a story according to our own lights. None of us is capable of objectivity.”
Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and told through the incredible voices of three narrators you quickly come to love—Layla Beck, Jottie Romeyn, and her niece, twelve year old Willa—this is an intimate family novel of love and family, of history and truth, and of struggle and hope, filled with the kind of characters once you discover, you’ll never forget.
No Place to Die by Clare Donoghue (June 9):
Following the acclaimed Never Look Back, in Clare Donoghue’s next gripping mystery, London detective Jane Bennett receives a frantic phone call from a friend when her husband disappears
Jane Bennett, senior Detective Sergeant for the murder squad at her London police precinct, is having a terrible day. Her boss, Detective Inspector Mike Lockyer, has just returned to work after two weeks on “leave,” though Jane knows it was really more like a suspension. He’s still shaken by the loss of a victim in their last murder case, and Jane is still stung that Lockyer didn’t trust her enough to confide in her about the case before it was too late.
But neither of them has the luxury of time to dwell on past grievances. Jane has just received a phone call from a good friend saying that her husband Mark Leech, a retired policeman, has disappeared. When Jane finds dramatic blood splatters in the laundry room, she knows Mark is seriously injured at best, and they don’t have any time to waste. And then the body of a young girl is discovered in a tomb under a London greenway, and police resources are stretched even thinner…until it starts to look like the two cases might be related.
Safekeeping by Jessamyn Hope (June 9):
A dazzling debut novel about love, loss, and the courage it takes to start over.
It’s 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at a kibbutz in Israel with a medieval sapphire brooch. To redress a past crime, he must give the priceless heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. But first, he has to track this mystery woman down—a task that proves more complicated than expected.
On the kibbutz Adam joins other lost souls: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet émigrée; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand; Claudette, the French Canadian Catholic with OCD; Ofir, the Israeli teenager wounded in a bus bombing; and Ziva, the old Socialist Zionist firebrand who founded the kibbutz. Driven together by love, hostility, hope, and fear, their fates become forever entangled as they each get one last shot at redemption.
In the middle of that fateful summer glows the magnificent brooch with its perilous history spanning three continents and seven centuries. With insight and beauty, Safekeeping tackles that most human of questions: How can we expect to find meaning and happiness when we know that nothing lasts?
Whew! Quite a list, right? And that’s just half of it! Stay tuned…more to come!
4. Comic Logic
