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Bestseller Preview October - December |
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The Widow
by John Grisham
Simon Latch is a lawyer in rural Virginia, making just enough to pay his bills while his marriage slowly falls apart. Then into his office walks Eleanor Barnett, an elderly widow in need of a new will. Once he hooks the richest client of his career, Simon works quietly to keep her wealth under the radar. But soon her story begins to crack. When she is hospitalized after a car accident, Simon realizes that nothing is as it seems, and he finds himself on trial for a crime he swears he didn’t commit: murder.
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The Proving Ground
by Michael Connelly
Following his “resurrection walk” and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty.
Representing the victim’s family, Mickey’s case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails. Along the way he joins up with a journalist named Jack McEvoy, who wants to be a fly on the wall during the trial in order to write a book about it.
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Remain
by Nicholas Sparks
When Tate Donovan arrives in Cape Cod to design his friend’s summer home, he is hoping to make a fresh start. But when he takes up residence at a historic bed-and-breakfast on the Cape, he encounters a woman named Wren who will challenge every assumption he has about his world. Tate and Wren find themselves forging a connection, one that neither has ever experienced before. But Tate gradually discovers that below the surface of Wren’s idyllic life, hatred, jealousy, and greed are festering, threatening their relationship. Tate realizes that to free Wren from a desperate fate, he will need to unearth the truth about her past before time runs out
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The Black Wolf (Inspector Gamache #20)
by Louise Penny
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache uncovered and stopped a domestic terrorist attack in Montrâeal, arresting the person behind it. A man they called the Black Wolf. In a turn of events, Gamache has realized that plot was just the beginning. Something more damaging is planned. Did he in fact arrest the Black Wolf, or are they still out there? Still recovering from wounds received in the first attack, Armand is confined to the village of Three Pines, leading a covert investigation from there. He must be careful not to let the Black Wolf know he has recognized his mistake. In a quiet church basement, he and his senior agents Beauvoir and Lacoste, pore over what little evidence they have. From the apparent peace of his village, Gamache finds himself playing a lethal game of cat and mouse with an invisible foe who is gathering forces and preparing to strike.
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The Picasso Heist
by James Patterson
A previously unknown Picasso is discovered in the attic of a French villa.
Filthy-rich Manhattan art people. Organized crime bosses. Power-hungry government officials. A notorious forger. A glamorous twenty-two-year-old art thief. She’s the rival none of the power players see coming.
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Sharp Force (Kay Scarpetta #29)
by Patricia Cornwell
During the early hours of Christmas morning, chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta receives a chilling call. The Phantom Slasher has struck again. The serial killer has terrorized Northern Virginia for months. His pattern is to stalk with a sophisticated technology that enables him to invade his victims' homes and watch their every move. They wake up to a ghost-like hologram before being murdered in their beds. Scarpetta is summoned to Mercy Island, the site of a notorious psychiatric hospital where two people have been brutalized, one of them from Scarpetta’s past. It soon becomes apparent that she could be next…
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Coyote Hills (Clay Edison #6)
by Jonathan Kellerman
Clay Edison has left behind the Alameda County coroner’s office to strike out on his own as a private investigator. He’s perfectly happy working low-stakes embezzlement cases—that is, until PI Regina Klein calls him with a mystery only he can solve. The son of a wealthy couple has washed up dead on the shores of San Francisco Bay with drugs in his system and a head injury. The police are calling it an accident. But the parents are adamant something’s not right—and as Clay digs deeper, he uncovers a horrifying tangle of betrayal and lies.
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Twice
by Mitch Albom
When he is eight years old, Alfie Logan discovers the magical ability to get a second chance at everything. He can undo any moment and live it again. The one catch: he must accept the consequences of his second try—for better or worse. He grows up correcting his mistakes and saving himself from adolescent embarrassments. In time, he falls deeply in love with Gianna, the woman he believes is the one. He seems to find contentment. But as the years pass, Alfie's eye begins to wander. Which is when he learns a lone caveat to his power: once he undoes a love, that person can never fall in love with him again. Knowing if he gives into to temptation, he will risk losing what he has with Gianna, Alfie makes a choice that changes his life forever.
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Five Golden Wings (Meg Langslow #38)
by Donna Andrews
Two of Meg's cousins, members of Mother's vast Hollingsworth clan, are getting married, and both have chosen Caerphilly for their Christmas destination wedding . . on the same day, in the same venues. But while they're cousins they're also lifelong enemies. Mother's efforts to keep the peace are wearing her down, and the battling brides (and their mothers) are making the holiday season miserable for everyone. So Meg steps in to keep the peace. And it was going badly even before she stumbles over the murdered body of the wedding photographer.
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Sugar and Spite (Agatha Raisin #36)
by M. C. Beaton
When a series of deaths within the small Cotswolds birdwatching community begins to unravel her village, Agatha and her team at are certain there has been foul play involved. They must dig up decades' worth of tempestuous relationships and simmering secrets among the birdwatching enthusiasts of the village in order to prevent any further deaths. Agatha will have to break out her binoculars and embrace her bitter side to solve the murders and wrangle the sickly-sweet temptations in her own life. Will she be able to gather all the breadcrumbs and put together the clues before she becomes a sitting duck herself?
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Return of the Spider (Alex Cross #33)
by James Patterson
Detective Alex Cross; the “human superhero” versus Gary Soneji; the "most deliciously wicked character since Hannibal Lecter”.
But that wasn’t their first meeting. Police discover that Soneji kept a murder book, “Profiles in Homicidal Genius,” detailing his transformation from substitute teacher to hardened serial killer—including clues that imply missteps that Alex Cross may have made a rookie homicide detective. Now, Alex must retrace the steps of that long-ago investigation and face…the Return of the Spider.
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The Seven Rings (Lost Bride #3)
by Nora Roberts
Sonya MacTavish lives in a manor that has been cursed for generations. Within its walls, she has witnessed the deaths of seven brides and the thefts of seven wedding rings. Refusing to let her spirit be broken, Sonya searches each room for clues to her ancestors' hidden story. But the enemy in the black dress continues to hover, to come at her in frightening forms. They may be illusions-but illusions can be powerful enough to wound and kill.This dark-hearted witch wants to be mistress of Poole Manor, at any cost. And Sonya will need to fight a battle across two realms to finally take possession of the house on the clifftop-and of her own future..
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Nash Falls
by David Baldacci
Walter Nash is a sensitive, intelligent and kindhearted man. He has a wife and a daughter and a very high-level position at Sybaritic Investments. Following his father's funeral, Nash is approached by the FBI in the middle of the night. They have an important request: become their inside man to expose an enterprise that is laundering large sums of money through Sybaritic. At the top of this illegal operation is Victoria Steers. Nash accepts the FBI's demands and try to bring Steers and her partners to justice. But when Steers discovers that Nash is working with the FBI, she turns the tables on him. That forces Nash to take the ultimate step both to survive and to take his revenge.
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The King's Ransom
by Janet Evanovich
Gabriela Rose, recovery agent extraordinaire, can find just about anything. Too bad she can’t seem to lose her gorgeous-but-infuriating ex-husband Rafer Jones. And now he needs her help. His cousin, Harley, is in trouble. As the president of a bank, he invested in insuring some of the world’s most priceless artifacts. Recently, these insured pieces started going missing and worse, there’s no paper trail of Harley being directed to make these risky investments. Unless the artwork can be recovered soon, it looks like Harley is going to be heading to jail.Gabriela knows what she must do: travel around the world with Rafer to find the missing works of art, keep Harley out of jail, and save both his skin and his bank.
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Exit Strategy (Reacher #30)
by Lee Child
Reacher makes his way towards the entrance of a coffee shop. A young, stressed-looking guy in a suit brushes against him. Instinctively Reacher checks the pocket holding his cash and passport. There's no problem. Nothing is missing. But later in the day he finds something new has appeared in another pocket. A cryptic note. Reacher figures the guy in the suit must have planted it during their brief contact. Impressed by the guy's technique and intrigued by the message, he decides to find out more...
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The Color of Hope
by Danielle Steel
Following the unexpected death of her beloved husband, art gallery owner Samantha Thompson finds herself adrift in their Malibu beach house. Her three adult children are concerned for her and encourage her to take a trip to Paris. Once abroad, an impulsive day trip from Paris to Biarritz leads Samantha to discover the charming medieval village of Arcangues.The château is the ancestral home of Xavier de Bonport. He needs rental income as much as Samantha needs a refuge. With Xavier living in a smaller house on the property, Samantha begins to transform the château into a temporary home. As a newfound family begins to fill the château, Samantha and Xavier wonder if their friendship is becoming something more.
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Evil Bones (Temperance Brennan #24)
by Kathy Reichs
Small creatures—a rat, a rabbit, a squirrel—have been turning up throughout Charlotte, North Carolina, mutilated and displayed in a bizarre manner. One day, as Tempe is relaxing at home she’s diverted by a disturbing call. The perp is upping the ante. This find could be human. Tempe visits the scene and discovers that the victim is a dog. Tempe agrees to help apprehend the person responsible, and she acquires an ally in semi-retired homicide detective Erskine “Skinny” Slidell. And then it happens. A woman is found disfigured and posed in a manner that mimics the animal killings. Next, people Tempe cares about begin to go missing until it becomes clear she is being taunted. A game that has her and Slidell racing against the clock.
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Queen Esther
by John Irving
Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board a ship to Portland, Maine; her mother is murdered by anti-Semites in Portland. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; in fact, he won’t find any family who’ll adopt her. When Esther is fourteen, soon to be a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic New England family with a history of providing foster care for orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they despise anti-Semitism. Esther’s gratitude for the Winslows is unending; even as she retraces her roots back to Vienna, she never stops loving and protecting the Winslows.
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Otherwise Engaged
by Susan Mallery
When Shannon gets engaged, her mom, Cindy, is the first person she wants to tell, and the last. Cindy’s engaged, too, and has already hinted at a double wedding. She’ll keep her engagement a secret until Cindy’s I-dos are done. Victoria has never been proper enough for her mother, Ava. She lives on her own terms. Ava loves but doesn’t understand her stuntwoman daughter. When a movie-set mishap brings Victoria home, Ava longs to finally connect. Chance brings the four women together at a wedding venue, where a shocking secret comes tumbling out. Twenty-four years ago, teenager Cindy chose wealthy Ava to adopt her baby—then changed her mind. As Shannon and Victoria deal with the fallout from the decisions their mothers made, they wrestle with whether who they are is different than who they might have become.
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False Witness
by Phillip Margolin
Defense Attorney Karen Wyatt exposed corruption in the police force and the District Attorney's office while getting her client exonerated in court. But in doing so, she put a target on her back and she was set-up on fake drug charge, imprisoned and disbarred until the conspiracy unraveled and her innocence was proven. Now reinstated to the bar, Wyatt is still interested in finding out who ordered her to be set-up. In the meantime, Wyatt is a practicing defense attorney, whose current client is either guilty of a heinous murder, or is a too-trusting patsy for an acquaintance set-up for a crime he didn't commit. .
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Robert B. Parker's Showdown (Spenser #52)
by Mike Lupica
Vic Hale isn’t anyone’s idea of a father figure. He is one of the biggest – and loudest -- podcasters in the nation and got there by spewing overheated rhetoric that’s reviled by some but loved by even more.
Spenser is there on behalf of Daniel Lopez, a young man who believes Hale may be his father. It’s a potentially explosive revelation for a man in the podcaster’s position. That could explain the bodies that start popping up. There are a lot of questions remaining, and Spenser’s going to have to find the answers before someone shuts Hale or Daniel up for good.
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Spasm (Jack & Laurie #15)
by Robin Cook
When Laurie Montgomery temporarily steps down from her position as Chief Medical Examiner to get a break from office politics, she and Jack decide to embark on a weekend getaway. And the timing couldn't be better when they receive a call from Jack's old peer, Robert Neilson MD,about two strange deaths and their potential association with the upswing in Alzheimer's cases in Essex Falls.It's apparent that most of the residents are earnest in their undying wish to return America back to the 1950s. Two of the dead are known white extremists. Prior to their deaths, they were complaining of muscle spasms, nausea, and off-the-charts anxiety. As Jack and Laurie get to work, they are led to believe that a dangerous bioweapon might be at play.
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Stuart Woods' Blown Away (Teddy Fay #8)
by Brett Battles
Teddy Fay whisks away to join Peter and Hattie Barrington in Palm Springs. But his hope for a relaxing vacation vanishes when he attends a prominent actor’s annual birthday party, where he witnesses a heated squabble between two women, only for one of them to turn up dead the next day. Teddy takes it upon himself to investigate who might be lurking in the shadows and uncovers a web of intrigue involving a sinister plan to take over a cutting-edge energy company. If he doesn’t act fast, valuable secrets risk falling into the wrong hands, but more importantly innocent lives could be in jeopardy next.
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W. E. B.Griffin Direct Action (Presidential Agent #10)
by Jack Stewart
Charley Castillo, the original Presidential Agent is in Virginia Beach to visit his son when two gunmen appear. Charley is able to thwart a deadly mass shooting, but he is hit and badly injured. Meanwhile Pick McCoy is at the Naval Academy catching up with some old friends. When the news of the attack reaches him, he senses that this is no random event. While Charley clings to life, Pick searches for the men responsible and in the process uncovers a deadly plot that threatens to strike deep at the heart of American democracy.
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Sharpe's Storm (Sharpe #24)
by Bernard Cornwell
War against Napoleon rages across Europe. As Britain prepares to invade France for the first time, the formidable Richard Sharpe and his men brace themselves for a cold, hard winter.
Before them, across flooded rivers and fortified bridges, lies the fiercest French army they have ever encountered. There is only one way forward for Wellington's army, and it will be bloody. . . .
Major Sharpe may be in for his toughest winter yet.
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Silent Bones(Karen Pirie #8)
by Val McDermid
When torrential winter rain causes a landslide on a motorway, it reveals a skeleton, concealed when the road was built eleven years prior. Sam Nimmo, an investigative journalist who'd been poking his nose into the murky politics of the Scottish independence referendum, had become the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his girlfriend when he vanished. Now he's reappeared, buried under the motorway. It's the perfect cold case for DCI Karen Pirie, chief of Police Scotland's Historic Cases Unit. But when an allegation of murder surfaces over the supposedly accidental death of a hotel manager, it unearths a series of interlinked puzzles that will test Karen and her team unlike ever before.
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Everybody Wants to Rule the World
by Ace Atkins
Peter Bennett is convinced his mom’s new boyfriend is a Russian agent. Peter thinks Gary only wants to get close to his mom because she works at Scientific Atlanta, a lab with big government contracts. But who is going to believe him? After a woman who works at the lab is killed, Peter recruits an unlikely pair of allies—a has-been pulp writer and muckraker named Dennis Hotchner and his drag performer buddy, Jackie Demure. Sylvia Weaver, anFBI agent, investigates Scientific Atlanta in the wake of the employee’s murder and discovers a nest of Russian spies in the Southern “city too busy to hate.As Ronald Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev prepare for a historic nuclear summit in Geneva, what happens in Atlanta might change the course of the Cold War, the twentieth century, and Peter Bennett’s freshman year of high school.
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White Wolf
by Eric Lustbader
Evan Ryder races against time in a landscape where secrets can no longer hide behind digital walls. Ilona Shokova, the elusive, deadly assassin White Wolf, holds the key to mastering this unhackable method. Two powerful, deadly women, one quest. Will either one of them survive? In this pulse-pounding thriller, the future isn't just written in code - it's locked behind it.
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The Cyprian
by Mercedes Lackey
Elena Whitstone and her seven brothers, abandoned by her mother, find themselves with a new stepmother. At first she seems more neglectful than evil, until just after Christmas she proves herself to be worse than evil; she is an actual magician, a Master of Water, who attempts to murder Elena's seven brothers when they are skating. When they survive that attempt by transforming into swans, she drives them away.
Furious, and possessing "only" what was gifted to her during her marriage, the stepmother retreats to Bath, to take up residence in the luxurious townhouse that was bought for her, and resume her former profession as a "Cyprian," a very exclusive courtesan, with Elena posing as a page-boy and her servant. Alone, Elena must not only find a way to save herself, but to reverse the spell that has transformed her brothers.
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Terror on the Train
by Jeanne M. Dams
Dorothy Martin and her husband, retired chief constable Alan Nesbitt, are leaving England behind to attend a wedding on Vancouver Island, Canada. Opting for the scenic route, the pair board the Empire Builder sleeper train from Chicago to Seattle. But the journey takes a terrifying turn when Dorothy witnesses a person falling from the train. The body of a man is quickly found on the route, and Dorothy feels compelled to investigate. Could his fate be linked to a confrontation on the train? As Dorothy and Alan unravel the secrets surrounding the dead man, they uncover disturbingly dark truths . . .
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Closing Time (Michael Gannon #5)
by Michael Ledwidge
It's springtime in Key West, and Michael Gannon is busy supporting his son’s dreams of making it in minor league baseball. But a late-night encounter with a seemingly harmless Australian at a dive bar turns deadly when Gannon unwittingly becomes the prime suspect in a convenience store shoot-out. Seeking the mysterious Australian to clear his name, Gannon uncovers a deadly conspiracy involving a global banker on the run from a shadow paramilitary force that will go to any lengths to stop him. From the Florida Keys to Wall Street, Gannon’s quest for answers takes him deep into the middle of a deadly game of power where one wrong move could be his last.
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