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Fiction Finds
September 2026 |
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My Grandfather, the Master Detective
by Masateru Konishi
A Japanese The Thursday Murder Club, taking healing fiction for a mystery-filled spin with this bestseller that has sold more than 200,000 copies in Japan. He's not your average Grandpa. As a lover of classic crime stories, it's no surprise that schoolteacher Kaede encounters everyday mysteries more often than your typical twenty-seven-year-old. Solving them is another matter, though. For that, she turns to her beloved grandfather, who retains a keen sharpness of mind despite his dementia, and who was once a key member of The Waseda Mystery Club. From impossible locked room murders to confounding missing persons cases, the grandfather-granddaughter duo weave stories to get to the bottom of every mystery. But all the while, an insidious shadow from Kaede's past slowly closes in on her . . . Steeped in references to classic crime from Christie to Chesterton to Poe, My Grandfather, the Master Detective plays with the genre, capturing readers' imagination in this Tokyo-set escapist mystery. Its charming characters and affectionate focus on relationships echo heartwarming Japanese titles such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold.
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The Optimists
by Brian Platzer
A beloved schoolteacher chronicles the meteoric rise of his most dazzling student in this ambitious, big-hearted story of learning and legacy. Mr. Keating is an extraordinary teacher: brilliant, dedicated, and possibly a few pages ahead in a book no one else is reading. He's a magician, able to enchant fourteen-year-olds into a love of writing and literature. Yet no student has lived up to the promise of their potential more than Clara Hightower. Over the course of three decades, Clara goes from kindergarten thief to a high school genius, Silicon Valley celebrity, and, finally, animal rights activist turned terrorist. But to tell Clara's story, Mr. Keating must tell his own, including his courtship and marriage, his dreams of writing and comedy, his days in the classroom in lower Manhattan and his rivalry and friendship with his head of school, and his eventual stroke and the isolation that follows. Fiercely original, The Optimists is a love story, a joke book, and a meditation on the meaning of life and death. Tender and insightful, it's a profound testament to the lessons that reach far beyond the classroom.
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A Sociopath's Guide to a Successful Marriage
by Mk Oliver
Meet Lalla Rook. Lalla has a lot on her to-do list: help her husband make partner by flattering his masculinity, secure her dream home in Hampstead, get her daughter into private school, host her four-year-old's birthday party, and remove the dead body from her living room. Lalla can't pretend she hasn't missed the adrenaline rush that comes with transgressing. And, as a wife and mother, she's already an expert multitasker. So, disposing of a body, framing a friend, and being the world's best homemaker should be easy to achieve. It's just that her husband seems distracted, her daughter faces an uncertain academic future, and then there is the unexpected intruder in her living room, a stranger she has stabbed seven times. Avoiding the law is the least of her worries--not when she has a past to keep hidden.
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Down Time
by Andrew Martin
A terribly funny and lovably louche novel about five friends growing older, if not always up, from Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America. Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won't leave him--despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope. Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals in their orbit, are getting older. There's Malcolm, with his own alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a doctor with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square--yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives they've made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and being good as the earth whirls to its end. Down Time marks the delightful return of Andrew Martin, the author of the pitch-perfect slacker classics Early Work and Cool for America. Compulsively readable and contagiously intelligent, this is a wryly comic social novel of settling down, selling out, growing up, and getting out that turns a terribly funny and hyper-literate eye on our most desperately guarded ambitions: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to stay sane, if only just.
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The Jills
by Karen Parkman
Virginia is a Jill--a professional Buffalo Bills cheerleader--living the life she's always dreamed of. She spends her weekdays practicing, her weekends cheering, and her nights hopping between events and bars and clubs with her close-knit band of teammates, especially her best friend, Jeanine, whose dynamic friendship has given Virginia confidence in spades and allowed her to put aside her troubled past with her sister, Laura. But one Sunday, Jeanine fails to show up for a game, and all her calls and texts go unanswered. Aided by a worried network of Jills, ex-boyfriends, and seedy fixtures of Buffalo's criminal underground, Virginia embarks on an investigation into Jeanine's disappearance. But as her search grows increasingly dangerous and spirals into obsession, disturbing questions about who Jeanine really is begin to emerge. Soon, Virginia finds herself wondering how well she knows her friend, if she can trust the people and institutions she thought were protecting her, and whether--when trying to save the people she cares about most--she's capable of saving herself, too.
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The Johnson Four
by Christina Hammonds Reed
In the 1960s, Odysseus Johnson is determined to turn his three sons into music stars. After another failed audition, the family encounters Christmas Jones the Third, the ghost of a lonely Black child performer with a horrific past. Christmas secretly follows the Johnsons home and gradually becomes part of the family. When they move to California, the brothers finally seem destined for fame, until a violent act tears them apart. Spanning decades and moving through the music industry, Vietnam, institutionalization, and even the afterlife, The Johnson Four is a sweeping story of ambition, fame, trauma, and a fractured family struggling to find its way back together.
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The News from Dublin: Stories
by Colm Toibin
From Colm Toibin, one of the world's best living literary writers, (The Boston Globe), a brilliant new collection of nine short stories--many never before published. Colm Toibin is a master of the short story, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. Described as his generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power (Los Angeles Times), he brings to these stories an astonishing clarity and compassion. In The Journey to Galway, a mother learns of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in WWII, and must travel from Dublin to share the news with his wife and their three now fatherless children. In Sleep, published in The New Yorker, two lovers part as one of them cannot acknowledge or face his grief and fear after the death of his brother. And in the title story, death, again, is a central character as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin from Enniscorthy to petition the health minister for access to a new drug being tested for tuberculosis. Maurice's younger brother is dying of TB, and this is the only hope. Set in Spain, Ireland, and America, these gorgeous stories explore longing, estrangement from family, grief, the pull of the past, and complex, transcendent love. This collection includes: - The Journey to Galway (originally published in Faber Anthology) - A Free Man (new) - Sleep (originally published in The New Yorker) - The News from Dublin (originally published in Faber Anthology) - A Sum of Money (new) - Barton Springs (originally published in Marlene Dumas catalogue) - Summer of '38 (originally published in The New Yorker) - Five Bridges (originally published in The New Yorker) - The Catalan Girls (new)
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See You on the Other Side
by Jay McInerney
Once again brilliantly combining the lyrical observation of F. Scott Fitzgerald with the laser-bright social satire of Evelyn Waugh, Jay McInerney gives us the stunningly accomplished and profoundly affecting final volume in the tetralogy charting the marriage of Russell and Corrinne Calloway, now in their sixties, against the backdrop of various crises that have bedeviled our society in the past forty years. McInerney's always-sharp insights on social strata and human nature guarantee that in the midst of sadness we are also entertained. --Los Angeles Times The celebration of the thirty-fifth wedding anniversary of Russell Calloway's best friend, Washington Lee--the least likely monogamist of his acquaintance somehow having become over the years a model husband and father--at the Odeon in the Spring of 2020 sparks an at once funny and moving autumnal reckoning with mortality as the specter of the Covid-19 virus spreads. In this moment of unprecedented upheaval--frantic and fraught real-time response, piercing personal and political impact--the Calloways find themselves and their marriage tested in ways they could never have anticipated as fatal consequences ensue.
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Big Little Truths: Reese's Book Club: A Novel: The Sequel to Big Little Lies
by Liane Moriarty
The last time we saw the women of Big Little Lies--Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie--their children were five years old. If someone wasn't invited to a birthday party, feelings were hurt. But ten years have passed and the kids are in high school, navigating all of the drama that accompanies teendom (goodbye playdates, hello drugs, sex, and alcohol). When the high school principal receives a threatening package in the mail, word quickly spreads throughout the community and parents are in an uproar. But Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie have other things to worry about. Celeste's mother-in-law, Mary Louise, is behaving oddly--is it old-age forgetfulness and bluntness or something more sinister? Madeline is facing perhaps the biggest challenge of her life, Jane is at a dangerous fork in her marriage, Bonnie has realized there's only so much solace in yoga. And Renata? Renata is living her best life--revenge is sweet. When a stranger begins lurking around the school asking supposedly innocent questions, this tightly connected group of women must finally face the full repercussions of the big little truths they have and haven't shared with their kids. Because the stakes are now much higher than not being invited to an ice-skating party--and the ice has never been thinner for any of them.
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Best Boy
by Deborah Goodrich Royce
A gripping psychological thriller, Best Boy teeters on the knife-edge of memory and identity when the arrival of a shocking letter threatens the carefully constructed life of a woman desperate to outrun her past. Viveca Stevenson has it all: a handsome and successful husband, an adorable ten-year-old son, and a coastal dream house in Greenwich, Connecticut. She has a solid group of girlfriends and is content with the afterglow of the film career she's left behind. But when a threatening letter arrives--from a man she does not remember--it cracks open a part of her past she thought was buried for good. A terrifying chain of events is set in motion, forcing Viveca to confront what happened on a shattering Halloween night in high school when she had a different name, a different face, a different voice. Who is the man contacting her now and was he really the best boy on her most famous film, Misty? Why can't she remember him--or that night? A taut psychological thriller, Best Boy explores identity, memory, and the dangerous power of forgetting.
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Getting Away with Murder
by Shari Lapena
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The tenth thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Couple Next Door Getting Away with Murder is a deviously delicious thriller that kept me turning pages from the intense opening to the shocking conclusion. --Freida McFadden Shari Lapena is far and away one of the best psychological thriller writers in the world. . . She is intensely bingeable. --Lisa Jewell Jill and Ted adore their New York brownstone the way others adore their children. They have carefully, expensively, made every inch of it their own. It reflects who they are, their status and tastes. With the grand mahogany staircase and state-of-the-art kitchen, it is the stuff of glossy magazines and real-estate dreams. It is their sanctuary. So when Ted's inheritance runs out and he makes a bad investment, they panic. How can they protect their beloved home and enviable lifestyle? The answer is obvious. Or at least, it is obvious to Jill and Ted. The death of one wealthy family member--from whom they stand to inherit millions--could solve all their problems. Together, they will get away with murder. As long as they trust each other.As long as neither makes a mistake.As long as there are no surprises...
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Ransom
by Daniel Silva
Art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon searches for the missing wife of a British billionaire in the electrifying new tale of greed, corruption, and betrayal from #1 New York Times-bestselling novelist Daniel Silva.Alice Winter, one of Britain's most dazzling socialites, seemingly has the perfect life--a lavish home in posh Knightsbridge, a grand estate in Devon, millions of followers on social media who eagerly await her next post. But when she disappears without a trace while on holiday with three old friends from Cambridge, her desperate husband, the real estate baron Edward Knight, turns to none other than Gabriel Allon to find her.He soon discovers that Alice Winter is not the woman she appears to be, that she has a reckless side, that she has secrets. But Edward Knight has a secret too, a secret so dangerous that Gabriel will have no choice but to return to the life he thought he had left behind. An old enemy lurks there, waiting for him to make one misstep, waiting for the perfect moment to exact vengeance.From its irresistible opening chapters to its heart-pounding climax and shocking final twist, Ransom is a riveting, page-turning tour de force that proves yet again why Daniel Silva is the reigning master of international intrigue and suspense.
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Served Him Right: A Twisted Thriller of Betrayal, Vengeful Murder, and Long-Buried Secrets
by Lisa Unger
Edgy and complex. --People, Best New Books A twisty and pacy thriller. --Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid seriesA woman's brunch with friends quickly turns dark in this gripping thriller from New York Times bestselling author Lisa UngerAna Blacksmith has gathered her closest friends and sister Vera for a brunch to celebrate her recent breakup from her boyfriend Paul. But when shocking news about Paul arrives, all eyes are on Ana, the angry ex with a bad reputation. Suspicions only intensify when Ana's best friend falls deathly ill after the brunch.But Ana is not the only one who had a score to settle with Paul. As the investigation unfolds, rumors of a secret network that uses ancient methods to obtain justice begin to emerge. Vengeance is sweet, but it can also be deadly. Ana and Vera are determined to find the truth before Ana takes the fall and their own long-buried history comes to light.Check out these other gripping thrillers from Lisa Unger: Confessions on the 7:45 Last Girl Ghosted Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six The New Couple in 5B
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It Should Have Been You
by Andrea Mara
A suburban neighborhood starts to spiral when one text message causes a nasty chain reaction with horrifying consequences. You press send and your message disappears. Full of secrets about your neighbors, it's meant for your sister. But it doesn't reach her - it goes to the entire local community WhatsApp group instead. As rumor spreads like wildfire through the picture-perfect neighborhood, you convince yourself that people will move on, that this will quickly be forgotten. But then you receive the first death threat. The next day, a woman has been murdered. And what's even more chilling is that she had the same address as you - 26 Oakpark - but in a different part of town. Did the killer get the wrong house? It won't be long before you find out.
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The Keeper
by Tana French
The third and final book in the million-copy-bestselling Cal Hooper trilogy. On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she's dead in the river. In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn't simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fianc e Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty's tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel's death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line. One of the greatest crime novelists writing today (Vox) crafts a masterwork of atmospheric suspense that brings the story of one of her most beloved characters to a spellbinding conclusion.
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The Caretaker
by Marcus Kliewer
Follow the Rites... Nothing less than the survival of humanity is at stake. From Marcus Kliewer, a new titan of the macabre and unsettling (Erin A. Craig, #1 New York Times bestselling author), comes an eerie supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater--and more dangerous--than she ever could have imagined. EXCITING OPPORTUNITY: Caretaker urgently needed. Three days of work. Competitive pay. Serious applicants ONLY. Macy Mullins can't say why the job posting grabbed her attention--it had the pull of a fisherman's lure, barbed hook and all--vaguely ominous. But after an endless string of failed job interviews, she's not exactly in the position to be picky. She has rent to pay, groceries to buy, and a younger sister to provide for. Besides, it's only three days' work. Three days, cooped up in a stranger's house, surrounded by Oregon Coast wilderness. What starts as a peculiar side gig soon becomes a waking nightmare. An unspeakable evil may dwell on this property--and Macy Mullins might just be the only thing standing between it, and the rest of humanity.
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Want to request any of these titles? Place a hold through the online catalog or call the library 831-768-3404 for assistance. |
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Watsonville Public Library
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