Wednesday, January 4, 2023

New This Week:

 Thursday Edition

The Golden Couple

by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen

St. Martin's Griffin

Trade Paperback


Wealthy Washington suburbanites Marissa and Matthew Bishop seem to have it all—until Marissa is unfaithful. Beneath their veneer of perfection is a relationship riven by work and a lack of intimacy. She wants to repair things for the sake of their eight-year-old son and because she loves her husband. Enter Avery Chambers.


Avery is a therapist who lost her professional license. Still, it doesn’t stop her from counseling those in crisis, though they have to adhere to her unorthodox methods. And the Bishops are desperate.
When they glide through Avery’s door and Marissa reveals her infidelity, all three are set on a collision course. Because the biggest secrets in the room are still hidden, and it’s no longer simply a marriage that’s in danger.


Armored
by Mark Greaney
Berkley
Trade Paperback


Joshua Duffy is a Close Protection Agent—a professional bodyguard—and he’s one of the world’s elite operatives. That is, he 
was until his last mission in Lebanon. Against all odds, Josh got his primary out alive, but the cost was high. Josh lost his lower left leg. 
 
There’s not much call for an elite bodyguard with such an injury. So, Josh has to support his family working as a mall cop in New Jersey. For a man like Josh, this is purgatory on earth, but miracles can occur even in Paramus. 
 
A lucky run-in with an old comrade promises to get Josh back in the field for one last job. The UN is sending a peace mission into the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico, an area so dangerous it’s known as Espinazo del Diablo—the Devil’s Spine. Only a fool would think they could broker peace between the homicidal drug cartels in the region, and only a madman would sign on to keep those fools alive.


Abandon
by Blake Crouch
Ballantine Books
Trade Paperback


On Christmas Day in 1893, every man, woman, and child in a remote mining town disappeared, belongings forsaken, meals left to freeze in vacant cabins, and not a single bone found.

 
Now, journalist Abigail Foster and her historian father have set out to explore the long-abandoned town and learn what happened. With them are two backcountry guides—along with a psychic and a paranormal photographer who are there to investigate rumors that the town is haunted.
 
But Abigail and her companions are about to learn that the town’s ghosts are the least of their worries. Twenty miles from civilization, with a blizzard bearing down, they realize they are not alone. 
 
The ordeal that follows will test this small team past the breaking point as they battle the elements and human foes alike—and discover that the town’s secrets still have the power to kill. 

Part journey into old-West history, part nail-biting survival thriller, Abandon is a bloody, darkly surprising tale as only Blake Crouch could deliver.


When You Are Mine
by Michael Robotham
Scribner Books
Trade Paperback


Philomena McCarthy is an ambitious police officer with the elite Metropolitan Police in London, responding to a domestic violence call. Tempe Brown is a bloodied young woman and the mistress of a decorated and intimidating London detective, Darren Goodall. Philomena and Tempe strike up a tentative friendship, determined to protect each other from Goodall, but something isn’t quite right about the stories Tempe tells and the secrets she keeps. Yet the young officer is drawn into Tempe’s world, unsure of what is real or invented. After a bungled break-in and an unsolved murder, Philomena finds herself trapped—with her career, her impending wedding, and her very survival in doubt.


Robotham’s brilliant ability to render complex characters, both good and bad, keeps readers unsure of whom to trust, “maintain[ing] an air of excruciating suspense” (The Washington Post)—until the very last page.


Very Cold People
by Sarah Manguso
Hogarth
Trade Paperback


For Ruthie, the frozen town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. 


Once home to the country’s oldest and most illustrious families—the Cabots, the Lowells: the “first, best people”—by the tail end of the twentieth century, it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets.
 
Forged in this frigid landscape Ruthie has been dogged by feelings of inadequacy her whole life. Hers is no picturesque New England childhood but one of swap meets and factory seconds and powdered milk. Shame blankets her like the thick snow that regularly buries nearly everything in Waitsfield.
 
As she grows older, Ruthie slowly learns how the town’s prim facade conceals a deeper, darker history, and how silence often masks a legacy of harm—from the violence that runs down the family line to the horrors endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. For Ruthie, Waitsfield is a place to be survived, and a girl like her would be lucky to get out alive.

In her eagerly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has written, with characteristic precision, a masterwork on growing up in—and out of—the suffocating constraints of a very old, and very cold, small town. At once an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class as well as a vital confrontation with an all-American whiteness where the ice of emotional restraint meets the embers of smoldering rage, Very Cold People is a haunted jewel of a novel from one of our most virtuosic literary writers. 








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