Upcoming Hot Releases
September 2021
The Stranger in the Lifeboat
by Mitch Albom

Fiction. In Mitch Albom’s new novel of hope and faith, a group of shipwrecked passengers pull a strange man from the sea. He claims to be “the Lord.” And he says he can only save them if they all believe in him. By the author of The Five People You Meet in Heaven and The First Phone Call from Heaven. (November) 
Over My Dead Body
by Jeffrey Archer

Thriller. In London, the Metropolitan Police set up a new Unsolved Murders Unit--a cold case squad--to catch the criminals nobody else can. In Geneva, millionaire art collector Miles Faulkner--convicted of forgery and theft--was pronounced dead two months ago. So why is his unscrupulous lawyer still representing a dead client? On a luxury liner en route to New York, the battle for power within a wealthy dynasty is about to turn to murder. And at the heart of all three investigations are Detective Chief Inspector William Warwick, rising star of the department, and ex-undercover agent Ross Hogan, brought in from the cold. (October) 
Mercy
by David Baldacci

Thriller. The latest in the Atlee Pine series. As the long search for twin sister Mercy reaches its conclusion, FBI agent Atlee Pine, when the truth is finally revealed, will face the greatest danger yet, one that could cost her everything. (November) 
A Man of Honor
by Barbara Taylor Bradford

Family Saga. The prequel to A Woman of Substance. Thirteen-year-old Blackie O’Neill faces an uncertain future in rural County Kerry. Orphaned and alone, he has just buried his sister, Bronagh, and must leave his home to set sail for England, in search of a better life with his mother’s brother in Leeds. There, he learns his trade as a navvy, amid the grand buildings and engineering triumphs of one of England’s most prosperous cities, and starts to dream of greater things. Then, high on the Yorkshire moors, in the mists of a winter morning he meets a kitchen maid called Emma Harte. (November)
Better Off Dead
by Lee Child

Thriller. Walking in the desert, Reacher comes upon a curious scene. A Jeep has crashed into the only tree for miles around. A woman is slumped over the wheel. Dead? No, nothing is what it seems. The woman is Michaela Fenton, an army veteran turned FBI agent trying to find her twin brother, who might be mixed up with some dangerous people. Reacher is good at finding people who don't want to be found, so he offers to help, despite feeling that Fenton is keeping secrets of her own. (October)
State of Terror
by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Thriller. After a tumultuous period in American politics, a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone's surprise the president chooses Ellen Adams, his political enemy, as secretary of state. As the new president addresses Congress for the first time, with Secretary Adams in attendance, Anahita Dahir, a young foreign service officer (FSO) on the Pakistan desk at the State Department, receives a baffling text from an anonymous source. Too late, she realizes the message was a hastily coded warning. What begins as a series of apparent terrorist attacks is revealed to be the beginning of an international chess game involving the volatile and Byzantine politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. (October)
The Dark Hours
by Michael Connelly

Mystery/Crime Fiction. There's chaos in Hollywood at the end of the New Year's Eve countdown. LAPD detective Renée Ballard is called to a scene where a hardworking auto shop owner has been fatally hit by a bullet in the middle of a crowded street party. Ballard quickly determines that the deadly bullet could not have fallen from the sky and that it is linked to another unsolved murder--a case at one time worked by Detective Harry Bosch. Ballard and Bosch must join forces to find justice for the victim in a city scarred by fear and social unrest. (November)
Autopsy: A Scarpetta Novel
by Patricia Daniels Cornwell

Medical Thriller. Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has returned to Virginia as the chief medical examiner. She and her husband Benton Wesley, now a forensic psychologist with the U.S. Secret Service, have relocated to Old Town Alexandria where she's headquartered five miles from the Pentagon in a post-pandemic world that's been torn by civil and political unrest. Just weeks on the job, she's called to a scene by railroad tracks where a woman's body has been shockingly displayed. At the same time, a catastrophe occurs in a top secret private laboratory in outer space, and at least two scientists aboard are found dead. Appointed to the highly classified Doomsday Commission that specializes in sensitive national security cases, Scarpetta is summoned to the White House Situation Room. (November)
The Devil's Sea
by Dirk Cussler

Adventure. The most recent entry in the Dirk Pitt series. In 1959 Tibet, a Buddhist artifact of immense importance was seemingly lost to history in the turmoil of the Communist takeover. But when National Underwater and Marine Agency Director Dirk Pitt discovers a forgotten plane crash in the Philippine Sea over 60 years later, new clues emerge to its hidden existence. But Pitt and his compatriot Al Giordino have larger worries when they are ordered to recover a failed hypersonic missile from Luzon Strait. (November)
The Midnight Lock
by Jeffery Deaver

Thriller. The latest in the Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs series. A woman awakes in the morning to find that someone has picked her apartment’s supposedly impregnable door lock and rearranged personal items, even sitting beside her while she slept. The intrusion, the police learn, is a message to the entire city of carnage to come. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate and soon learn that the sociopathic intruder, who calls himself "the Locksmith,” can break through any lock or security system ever devised. With more victims on the horizon, Rhyme, Sachs and their stable of associates must follow the evidence to the man’s lair and discover his true mission. (November)
The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich

Fiction. National Book Award winning author Louise Erdrich explores how the burdens of history, and especially identity, appropriation, exploitation, and violence done to human beings in the name of justice, manifest in ordinary lives today. After serving part of an outrageously long sentence, an Ojibwe woman named Tookie, who "learned to read with murderous attention" while in prison, naturally gravitates toward working at a bookstore. There she joins a dedicated community of artists and book lovers and begins to build a new life for herself. When Flora, the store's most persistent customer, suddenly dies, her ghost refuses to leave. Flora returns on All Soul's Day to haunt the bookstore and in particular, Tookie. Why? The mystery of this revenant's appearance leads Asema, a fellow Ojibwe bookseller, and Tookie to a shocking personal discovery with historical reverberations. (November)
Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight
by Janet Evanovich

Fiction. When Stephanie Plum is woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of footsteps in her apartment, she wishes she didn't keep her gun in the cookie jar in her kitchen. And when she finds out the intruder is fellow apprehension agent Diesel, six feet of hard muscle and bad attitude who she hasn't seen in more than two years, she still thinks the gun might come in handy. Turns out Diesel and Stephanie are on the trail of the same fugitive: Oswald Wednesday, an international computer hacker as brilliant as he is ruthless. (November) 
Never
by Ken Follett

Political Thriller. Navigating terrorist attacks, illegal arms trading and smear campaigns, Pauline Green, the country’s first women president, is caught in a complex web of alliances with the most powerful counties that are being orchestrated by the enemy, and only those the most elite skills can stop the inevitable. (November)
Crossroads
by Jonathan Franzen

Literary Fiction. The first novel in A Key to All Mythologies trilogy, which tells the story of a Midwestern family across three generations, mirroring the preoccupations and dilemmas of the United States from the Vietnam War to the 2020s. It's December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless--unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, Clem's sister, Becky, long the social queen of her high-school class, has sharply veered into the counterculture, while their brilliant younger brother Perry, who's been selling drugs to seventh graders, has resolved to be a better person. Each of the Hildebrandts seeks a freedom that each of the others threatens to complicate. (October)
Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone: A Novel
by Diana Gabaldon

Historical Fiction/Time Travel. The newest novel in the epic Outlander series. Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser's Ridge. Having the family together is a dream the Frasers had thought impossible. Yet even in the North Carolina backcountry, the effects of war are being felt. Tensions in the Colonies are great and local feelings run hot enough to boil Hell's teakettle. Jamie knows loyalties among his tenants are split and it won't be long until the war is on his doorstep. (November)
The Burning
by Jonathan Kellerman

Thriller. As a deputy coroner, caring for the dead, Clay Edison speaks for those who cannot speak for themselves. While working a murder scene, Clay is horrified to discover a link to his brother, Luke. Luke is fresh out of prison and struggling to stay on the straight and narrow. And now he's gone AWOL. The race is on for Clay to find him before anyone else can. Confronted with Luke's legacy of violence, Clay is forced to reckon with his own suspicions, resentments, and loyalties. (September)
The Party Crasher
by Sophie Kinsella

Fiction. It's been over two years since Effie's beloved parents got divorced. Since then, she's become estranged from her father and embarked on a feud with his hot (and much younger) girlfriend, Krista. And now, more earth-shattering news: Greenoaks, the rambling Victorian country house Effie called home her whole life, has been sold. When Krista decides to throw a grand "house cooling" party, Effie is originally left off the guest list--and then receives a last-minute "anti-invitation" (maybe it's because she called Krista a gold-digger, but Krista totally deserved it, and it was mostly a joke anyway). Effie declines, but then remembers a beloved childhood treasure is still hidden in the house. Her only chance to retrieve it is to break into Greenoaks while everyone is busy celebrating. (October)
Silverview
by John Le Carré

Fiction. The last complete work from John le Carré. Julian Lawndsley has renounced his high-flying job in the City for a simpler life running a bookshop in a small English seaside town. But only a couple of months into his new career, Julian's evening is disrupted by a visitor. Edward, a Polish émigré living in Silverview, the big house on the edge of town, seems to know a lot about Julian's family and is rather too interested in the inner workings of his modest new enterprise. (October)
The Missing Piece
by John T. Lescroart

Mystery. The most recent entry of the Dismas Hardy series. No one mourned when San Francisco DA Wes Farrell put Paul Riley in prison eleven years ago for the rape and murder of his girlfriend. And no one is particularly happy to see him again when he's released after The Exoneration Initiative uncovered evidence that pinned the crime on someone else. In fact, Riley soon turns up murdered, surrounded by the loot from his latest scam. To the cops, it's straightforward: the still-grieving father of Riley's dead girlfriend killed the former prisoner. Farrell, now out of politics and practicing law with master attorney Dismas Hardy, agrees to represent the defendant, Doug Rush--and is left in the dust when Rush suddenly vanishes. Farrell and Hardy ask PI Abe Glitsky to track down the potentially lethal defendant. (November) 
Dear Santa
by Debbie Macomber

Holiday Fiction. Lindy Carmichael isn't feeling particularly joyful when she returns home to Wenatchee, Washington, for Christmas. The man she thought was "the one" has cheated on her with her best friend, and she feels completely devoid of creativity in her graphic-design job. Reading through a box of childhood letters to Santa and reminiscing about what she'd wished for as a young girl may be just the inspiration Lindy needs. With her mother's encouragement, she decides to write a new letter to Santa, one that will encourage her to have faith and believe just as she'd done all those years ago. Little does Lindy know that this exercise in gratitude will cause her wishes to unfold before her in miraculous ways. (October)
The Brides of Maracoor
by Gregory Maguire

Fantasy. The first in a three-book series spun off the iconic Wicked Years, featuring Elphaba's granddaughter, the green-skinned Rain. Washed ashore comatose on a foreign island, Rain is taken in by a community of single women committed to obscure devotional practices.
As the mainland of Maracoor sustains an assault by a foreign navy, the island's civil-servant overseer struggles to understand how an alien arriving on the shores of Maracoor could threaten the stability and wellbeing of an entire nation. (October)
Three Sisters
by Heather Morris

Historical Fiction. From the author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey. Against all odds, three Slovakian sisters have survived years of imprisonment in the most notorious death camp in Nazi Germany: Auschwitz. Now, the allies are closing in and Livia, Magda, and Cibi have one last hurdle to face: the death march from Auschwitz, as the Nazis try to erase any evidence of the prisoners held there. Due to a last minute stroke of luck, the three of them are able to escape formation and hide in the woods for days before being rescued. From there, the three sisters travel to Israel, to their new home, but the battle for freedom takes on new forms. (October)
Fear No Evil
by James Patterson

Thriller. Dr. Alex Cross and Detective John Sampson venture into the rugged Montana wilderness--where they will be the prey. They're not on the job, but on a personal mission. Until they're attacked by two rival teams of assassins, controlled by the same mastermind who has stalked Alex and his family for years. (November) 
2 Sisters Detective Agency
by James Patterson

Thriller. Attorney Rhonda Bird returns home after a long estrangement when she learns her father has died. There she makes two important discoveries: her father stopped being an accountant and had opened up a private detective agency, and she has a teenage half sister named Baby. Baby brings in a client to the detective agency, a young man who claims he was abducted. During the course of the investigation, Rhonda and Baby become entangled in a dangerous case involving a group of overprivileged young adults who break laws for fun, their psychopath ringleader, and an ex-assassin victim who decides to hunt them down for revenge. (October)
Wish You Were Here
by Jodi Picoult

Fiction. Diana O'Toole is perfectly on track. She's an associate specialist at Sotheby's now, but her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client. She's not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galapagos--days before her thirtieth birthday. But then a virus that felt worlds away has appeared in the city, and on the eve of their departure, Finn breaks the news: It's all hands on deck at the hospital. He has to stay behind. You should still go, he assures her, since it would be a shame for all of their nonrefundable trip to go to waste. And so, reluctantly, she goes. Almost immediately, Diana's dream vacation goes awry. Completely isolated, she must venture beyond her comfort zone. (November)
The Becoming
by Nora Roberts

Fantasy. The second book of the Dragon Heart Legacy. The world of magick and the world of man have long been estranged from one another. But some can walk between the two--including Breen Siobhan Kelly. She has just returned to Talamh with her friend, Marco, who's dazzled and disoriented by this realm--a place filled with dragons and faeries and mermaids (but no WiFi, to his chagrin). Marco is welcomed kindly by her people--and by Keegan, leader of the Fey. Keegan has trained Breen as a warrior, and his yearning for her has grown along with his admiration of her strength and skills. But one member of Breen's bloodline is not there to embrace her. Her grandfather, the outcast god Odran, plots to destroy Talamh--and now all must unite to defeat his dark forces. (November)
The Butler
by Danielle Steel

Fiction. The moment the plane touched down at Ministro Pistorini Airport in Buenos Aires, Joachim von Hartmann knew in every fiber of his being that he was home. It was almost as if his heart and soul, and even his body, knew it. He had left as a boy of seventeen, twenty-five years before, when he moved to France with his mother, and new French stepfather. Eight years later, he went to England on a lark, which turned into a worthy career for the past seventeen years. His roots are now firmly planted in Europe, but his heart had remained in Buenos Aires. (October)
Flying Angels
by Danielle Steel

Historical Fiction. Audrey Parker’s life changes forever when Pearl Harbor is attacked on December 7, 1941. Her brother, a talented young Navy pilot, had been stationed there, poised to fulfill their late father’s distinguished legacy. Fresh out of nursing school with a passion and a born gift for helping others, both Audrey and her friend Lizzie suddenly find their nation on the brink of war. Driven to do whatever they can to serve, they enlist in the Army and embark on a new adventure as flight nurses. Risking their lives on perilous missions, they join the elite Medical Air Evacuation Transport Squadron and fly into enemy territory almost daily to rescue wounded soldiers from the battlefield. (November)
Oh William!
by Elizabeth Strout

Literary Fiction. Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are.  So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret--one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. (October)
The Lincoln Highway
by Amor Towles

Historical Fiction. In June 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction-to the City of New York. (October)
Foul Play
by Stuart Woods

Thriller. Stone Barrington is nearing his New York City abode when he stumbles into trouble. As it turns out, a new client is in danger--and with both business and the safety of the city at stake, he has no choice but to get involved. When it soon becomes clear that a complicated scheme is being hatched, Stone will need to use his expertise and connections to unravel the clever plot. From ritzy Manhattan high-rises to the lush serenity of the Connecticut countryside, the game of cat and mouse can end with only one victor. (October)
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