The past may haunt, but it doesn’t define in this nostalgic, found-family noir. The sequel to Antonini’s Bullets for Silverware, CANDYLAND maintains that same gritty atmosphere and suspense you seek from classic noir fiction. Michael, a newly appointed Harvard Scholar, is still recovering from the traumas of his past life. As a pharmacist in West […]
The most revealing scene in Promise Me Never by Liv Constantine contains no threat, no locked door and no dead woman. A famous novelist sits alone in his office, opens the bestseller rankings, and works down them one title at a time. He reads each synopsis. He takes notes. And he is looking, in his […]
Synopsis: Someone—or something—is trying to bury itself inside Soraya’s skin. It started her sophomore year of college, after she slipped in the shower and hit her head. Since then, nothing has felt real. The lights flicker all at once. She hears tapping at her window, and someone outside keeps calling her name. Desperate to understand […]
On her first afternoon in the suite, a young wife notices a jar on the cocktail tray. It is rat poison, and somebody has stood an ornate silver spoon in it, the way a hotel might present sugar. Her husband looks at it, laughs, and calls it a practical joke by a man with a […]
An elite SWAT team finds more than they bargain for in the depths of a Louisiana bayou. When Special Agent Jennifer Nash’s partner is killed brutally in a surveillance operation gone wrong, she’s shattered. Not only has she lost a friend and almost her own life along with his, but her superiors need the situation […]
Mystery and mentalism return in this intriguing and cozy sequel. “Pat Messina was missing. Again.” Not much time has passed since Nicole used her mind-reading abilities to help the police find the kidnapped Pat Messina and apprehend the criminal mastermind behind it, Lila. With Lila behind bars, everyone is shocked when Pat goes missing yet […]
On an early night in the canyon, a river guide sits by the fire and tells the guests about a white trumpet-shaped bloom that opens after dark. It grows in the wash. It is beautiful. Processed correctly, it will take a person’s capacity to refuse and leave everything else intact, so that the victim is […]
A nuanced meditation on grief, displacement, and the enduring aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster Mitch Wieland’s The Ghosts of Okuma offers one of this year’s most striking portraits of familial grief and the physical and psychological labor required to reimagine life after the most profound loss. What begins as a father and son’s investigation […]
Real life tragedy is combined with a classic plot in this poignant probe into the human condition. More so than most, India is characterized by the contrast of extremes. In Dreams of Orphans, author Vinay Kolhatkar juxtaposes the dark realities of child trafficking with the glamor of Bollywood to provide the setting for an extravagant, […]
Somewhere past midnight in Immortal Rose by Alexandra Bracken, in the kitchen of a fashionable London townhouse, a man widely believed to be a heartless rake gets down on one knee on the tile and begins to sing. The audience is a small spaniel with pink bows on her ears who refuses, on principle, to […]