From “one of the genre’s most exciting voices” (E! News) comes one of the year’s most-anticipated thrillers.
IF SOMETHING HAPPENS TO ME
by Alex Finlay
Minotaur, May 2024
(via Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency)
For the past five years, Ryan Richardson has relived that terrible night. The car door ripping open. The crushing blow to the head. The hands yanking him from the vehicle. His girlfriend Ali’s piercing scream as she is taken. With no trace of Ali or the car, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Ryan. But with no proof and a good lawyer, he’s never charged, though that doesn’t matter to the podcasters and internet trolls. Now, Ryan has changed his last name, and entered law school. He’s put his past behind him. Until, on a summer trip abroad to Italy with his law-school classmates, Ryan gets a call from his father: Ali’s car has finally been found, submerged in a lake in his hometown. Inside are two dead men and a cryptic note with five words written on the envelope in Ali’s handwriting: If something happens to me… Then, halfway around the world, the unthinkable happens: Ryan sees the man who has haunted his dreams since that night. As Ryan races from the rolling hills of Tuscany, to a rural village in the UK, to the glittering streets of Paris in search of the truth, he has no idea that his salvation may lie with a young sheriff’s deputy in Kansas working her first case, and a mobster in Philadelphia who’s experienced tragedy of his own.
Alex Finlay lives in Washington, D.C. and is the author of several critically-acclaimed novels, including the 2021 breakout, Every Last Fear. His work has appeared on numerous best-of-the-year lists, been published in twenty-two languages around the world, and Every Last Fear is currently in development for a major television limited series.
When Silvia and her mother finally land in a place called Island City, after being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-too-distant future, they end up living and working at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower where Silvia’s aunt, Ena, serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family’s past. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place she was born and spent her early years; nor does she know why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give a young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia’s lonely and impoverished reality.
Charles Bliss, raised by a single mother in a hardscrabble Maine fishing town, is a highly respected and much appreciated English teacher at Carrington Academy, an elite Connecticut prep school, from which he graduated some years ago as a scholarship student. Recently, Charles’s highly touted debut novel debut unexpectedly bombed, so he is grateful for his job at Carrington, while working feverishly on a new manuscript by night to capture the literary glory that was almost his. 
When Detective Adam McAnnis first shows up at club West Heart in upstate New York, his motivations for being there are unclear. But when a dead body is found shortly after his arrival, everyone at the club is suspect. The complication? The folk of West Heart have their own language—the language of high society—and Detective McAnnis is an outsider. In order to solve the murder, McAnnis must not only sleuth for clues but infiltrate a tight-knit community that has no intention of ratting out one of their own.
11-year-old Frederick is plucked from an orphanage to be a servant to the wizard Lord Schofield. With help from Billy Bly, the brownie who has been his « fairy guardian » over the years, Frederick quickly proves his worth and excels at the difficult tasks assigned by Lord Schofield.