Whew! What a month for books! Below please find the last of my most anticipated books for May! Don’t forget to check out Parts I & II!
Hangman by Stephan Talty (May 13): New York Times bestselling author Stephan Talty follows the critically-acclaimed Black Irish with the next installment in an explosive crime series sure to please fans of Jo Nesbo, Karin Slaughter, and Tana French.
When a predatory serial killer known as the Hangman escapes incarceration, throwing his hometown of Buffalo into a fearful panic, homicide detective Absalom “Abbie” Kearney is tasked with finding him before he claims another victim. Abbie, still reeling from her encounter with a twisted killer whose dark past entwined closely with her own, tracks the murderer to within miles of the city limits, where a teen girl suddenly goes missing. The Buffalo P.D. is on high alert, but the Hangman continues to evade capture even as more girls disappear, and Abbie suspects someone may be helping him. Unsure who to trust in a city of shadows and secrets, Abbie turns to the Network, a shady consortium of Buffalo old boys and ex-cops, when a cease and desist order from the police chief seems to confirm her theories. As she draws closer to the truth, the Hangman ratchets up the stakes, kidnapping a girl from a prestigious local school with the clear message that Abbie has only hours left to save her.
Bittersweet by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore (May 13): Ordinary and unassuming, Mabel wins a scholarship at a prestigious East Coast college and is assigned the beautiful, blue-blooded Genevra Winslow as her roommate. Ev soon invites Mabel to spend the summer at her cottage, Bittersweet, on the lakeside Vermont estate where her family has held court for more than a century.
Usually an outsider, Mabel is thrilled to be surrounded by WASPs, yachts, and wealth she’d only imagined-but when everything isn’t exactly as she pictured it, she can’t put her finger on what’s wrong. At first, she is overjoyed to spend her days basking in the Winslows’ pristine privilege; she swims in the lake, flirts with handsome men, and plays house with the roommate she worships. But ever so gradually she discovers that this glittering façade masks ambiguous morals and dark truths, both about personal indiscretions and the sources of the family fortune. Mabel must choose: expose the lies surrounding her and face expulsion from paradise, or immerse herself in their darkness and fulfill her dreams by becoming one of Them.
Motherless Child by Glen Hirshberg (May 13): In his powerful novel, Motherless Child, Bram Stoker Award–nominee Glen Hirshberg, author of the International Horror Guild Award–winning American Morons, exposes the fallacy of the Twilight-style romantic vampire while capturing the heart of every reader.
It’s the thrill of a lifetime when Sophie and Natalie, single mothers living in a trailer park in North Carolina, meet their idol, the mysterious musician known only as “the Whistler.” Morning finds them covered with dried blood, their clothing shredded and their memories hazy. Things soon become horrifyingly clear: the Whistler is a vampire and Natalie and Sophie are his latest victims. The young women leave their babies with Natalie’s mother and hit the road, determined not to give in to their unnatural desires.
Hunger and desire make a powerful couple. So do the Whistler and his Mother, who are searching for Sophie and Natalie with the help of Twitter and the musician’s many fans. The violent, emotionally moving showdown between two who should be victims and two who should be monsters will leave readers gasping in fear and delight.
Originally published in a sold-out, limited edition, Motherless Child is an extraordinary Southern horror novel that Tor Books is proud to bring to a wider audience.
Bone Dust White by Karin Salvalaggio (May 13): When a young woman witnesses the murder of her mother who had abandoned her as a child, Detective Macy Greeley must return to solve the murder and stop a killer in this incredible debut
Someone is knocking at the door to Grace Adams’ house, and he won’t stop. Grace thinks she knows who it is, but when she goes to her second floor window for a look she sees a woman she doesn’t recognize. The woman isn’t alone for long before a man emerges from the dark of the surrounding woods, stabs her, and leaves her for dead. Trying to help, Grace goes to the woman and is shocked to find that it’s her mother Leanne—a woman who abandoned her 11 years before. There’s nothing she can do, and Leanne is already past the point where she can tell Grace what happened all those years ago or why she came back now.
While Grace was only a child when Leanne left her, Detective Macy Greeley has been waiting for Leanne ever since she disappeared from Collier, MT. She’s looking to close a case that has been haunting the town for far too long, but Collier is a hard-bitten place where the people are fierce when it comes to keeping their feuds between themselves and keeping secrets hidden in the past.
Karin Salvalaggio’s outstanding crime fiction debut Bone Dust White is an absolutely stunning work that signals the entrance of a major new talent.
Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro (May 13):
One late-summer weekend, a group of thirty-something Brooklyn parents and their children gather at a shabby beach house called “Eden,” but their trip is a far cry from paradise
The parents include:
—Nicole: the beach house is her parents’. She’s made sure to be there for the weekend, terrified by internet rumors that something big and bad is going to happen in New York City that week.
—Susanna and Allie: the enviable two-mommy couple with twins, they’ve tied the knot the day they drove out to Long Island; it’s easy to reduce them to a modern urban cliché but nobody sees the reality of their struggles.
—Rip: the sole dad in the playgroup, desperate to have a second child, but his take-no-prisoners wife Grace isn’t on board; after all, they had to use a sperm donor for Hank, so why does Rip even care?
—Tiffany: beyond comfortable with her (amazing) body, she wasn’t born into the upper middle class world all the others were; she propelled herself from a chaotic childhood to land a nice life; will what she brings to this weekend blow it all up?
—Leigh: has hired the magic nanny everyone wants, and has rubbed that in the other parents’ faces by bringing Tenzin along. Tenzin, however, whose own children live thousands of miles away in India, sees the parents from a different perspective.
As the weekend unfolds and conflicts intensify, painful truths surface. Friendships crack. Two days together in Eden will change the group forever. A warm, smart and unpretentious literary novel, CUTTING TEETH is involving and thought-provoking, for readers of Tom Perrotta and Meg Wolitzer.
Black Lake by Johanna Lane (May 20): A debut novel about a family losing grip of its legacy: a majestic house on the cliffs of Ireland.
The Campbells have lived happily at Dulough–an idyllic, rambling estate isolated on the Irish seaside–for generations. But upkeep has drained the family coffers, and so John Campbell must be bold: to keep Dulough, he will open its doors to the public as a museum. He and his wife, daughter, and son will move from the luxury of the big house to a dank, small caretaker’s cottage. The upheaval strains the already tenuous threads that bind the family and, when a tragic accident befalls them, long-simmering resentments and unanswered yearnings surface.
As each character is given a turn to speak, their voices tell a complicated, fascinating story about what happens when the upstairs becomes the downstairs, and what legacy is left when family secrets are revealed.
The Three by Sarah Lotz (May 20):Four simultaneous plane crashes. Three child survivors. A religious fanatic who insists the three are harbingers of the apocalypse. What if he’s right?
The world is stunned when four commuter planes crash within hours of each other on different continents. Facing global panic, officials are under pressure to find the causes. With terrorist attacks and environmental factors ruled out, there doesn’t appear to be a correlation between the crashes, except that in three of the four air disasters a child survivor is found in the wreckage.
Dubbed ‘The Three’ by the international press, the children all exhibit disturbing behavioural problems, presumably caused by the horror they lived through and the unrelenting press attention. This attention becomes more than just intrusive when a rapture cult led by a charismatic evangelical minister insists that the survivors are three of the four harbingers of the apocalypse. The Three are forced to go into hiding, but as the children’s behaviour becomes increasingly disturbing, even their guardians begin to question their miraculous survival…
Resistant by Michael Palmer (May 20): From the New York Times bestselling author another heart stopping thriller at the crossroads of politics and medicine and featuring Dr. Lou Welcome. When Lou has to fill in last minute for his boss at the Physical Wellness Office, giving a speech at a national conference in Atlanta, he takes an exclusive tour of the Center for Disease Control. He can’t help but wonder about the development of weapons of mass destruction at a bacterial level as he watches scientists talk about antibacterial resistance and biological weapon agents before disappearing into mysterious restricted labs. Little does Lou know that a scientist working a top secret case will be kidnapped, and he will become enmeshed in a case that could have fatal consequences across the country.
My Real Children by Jo Walton (May 20): It’s 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. “Confused today,” read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know—what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don’t seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev.
Her childhood, her years at Oxford during the Second World War—those were solid things. But after that, did she marry Mark or not? Did her friends all call her Trish, or Pat? Had she been a housewife who escaped a terrible marriage after her children were grown, or a successful travel writer with homes in Britain and Italy? And the moon outside her window: does it host a benign research station, or a command post bristling with nuclear missiles?
Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history; each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan’s lives…and of how every life means the entire world.
Whew! I think that covers them all! So, tell me! What books are you most looking forward to in May? Which ones did I miss?
