Archives de catégorie : Fiction

CATCHPENNY de Charlie Huston

A thief who can travel through mirrors, a video game that threatens to spill out of the virtual world, a doomsday cult on a collision course with destiny, and a missing teenager at the center of it all. With the world on the brink of every kind of apocalypse, humanity needs a hero. What it gets is Sid Catchpenny.

CATCHPENNY
by Charlie Huston
Vintage, November 2023
(via Writers House)

Sidney Catchpenny has had a bad run. Laid low by a yearslong bout of debilitating depression, he’s all but squandered his reputation as one of the most uniquely talented thieves in LA. There aren’t many who can do what Sid does. He’s a sly, a special kind of crook with the uncanny ability to move through mirrors. And the spoils he’s after are equally unusual. Forget jewels and cold cash—Sid steals curiosities—items imbued with powerful mojo, a magical essence gleaned from the accumulated emotion that seeps into interesting, though often often banal objects. That spot on the carpet where your old dog used to lay at your feet? The passed-down family heirloom nobody wants but everybody refuses to throw away? These curiosities are full of mojo, which is both the currency of the criminal underground and the secret source of magic in the world.
When a friend from Sid’s past comes looking for his help with an important client, and the chance to pay off old debts presents itself, Sid seizes the opportunity … as best he can. But the case he stumbles into is more complicated than it seems, and it portends a seismic shift in the world, one that will leave no one untouched. As the fog of his depression begins to lift, Sid sees connections everywhere he looks, and the once disparate threads of the case—a missing teenage girl, an entire bedroom saturated with mojo, and Sid’s own long-dead wife—begin to coalesce.

“I absolutely loved it. CATCHPENNY is a brilliant book, full of heart and the language is pitch-perfect. If Elmore Leonard had ever written a fantasy novel, this would be it. It’s got a much keener edge than most fantasy novels, and the characters rock.” —Stephen King

Charlie Huston is the author of the bestsellers The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death and The Shotgun Rule, as well as the Henry Thompson trilogy, the Joe Pitt casebooks, and several titles for Marvel Comics.

DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG d’Eve J. Chung

Told in assured, evocative prose, with impeccably drawn characters, DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG is a hopeful, powerful story about the resilience of women in war, the enduring love between mothers, daughters and sisters, and the sacrifices made to lift up future generations.

DAUGHTERS OF SHANDONG
by Eve J. Chung
Berkley, Spring 2024
(via Writers House)

Daughters are the Ang’s family curse.
In 1948, the civil war ravages the countryside, but in rural Shandong the wealthy landowning Angs are more concerned with their lack of an heir. Hai is the eldest of four girls and spends her days looking after her baby sisters. Headstrong Di, who is just a year younger, learns to hide in plain sight, and their mother, abused by the family for failing to birth a boy, finds her own small acts of rebellion in the kitchen. As the communist army closes in on their town, the prosperous household flees, leaving behind the girls and their mother because they are useless mouths to feed.
Without an Ang male to punish, the land-seizing cadres choose Hai, as the eldest child, to stand trial for her family’s crimes. She barely survives their brutality. Realizing that worse is yet to come, the women plan their escape. Starving and penniless, but resourceful, they forge their travel permits and embark on a thousand-mile journey to confront the family that abandoned them.
From the countryside to Qingdao, and onward to British Hong Kong and eventually Taiwan, they witness the changing hands of a nation and the plight of multitudes caught in the wake of revolution. But with the loss of their home and the life they’d known also comes a new freedom to take hold of their own fate, to shake free of the bonds of their gender, and to claim their own story.

Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American human rights lawyer focusing on gender equality and women’s rights. She lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs.

SUSPICIOUS MINDS d’Ace Atkins

Ace Atkins, the New York Times bestselling author of the Quinn Colson series, delivers an unputdownable new standalone thriller.

SUSPICIOUS MINDS
by Ace Atkins
William Morrow, Winter 2024
(via Writers House)

Photo: © Joe Worthem

Addison McKellar has it all — the big house, two kids at the right schools, the club memberships, friends, and a handsome, successful husband. Until the day her husband, Dean, leaves for a short business trip and just doesn’t come back. No messages. Her calls and texts unanswered. Fearing the worst, she hires private investigator Porter Hayes, an old friend of her father’s and a legend in Memphis. Hayes starts pulling at loose threads, and Addison’s entire life unravels.
Her husband’s prosperous construction firm? It doesn’t exist. Instead, her easy, affluent lifestyle is funded by blood money from Dean’s shadowy international mercenary firm. Her upstanding husband is a hired killer who runs a small army of hired killers and weapons dealers — and she doesn’t even know his real name.
Porter Hayes, once one of Memphis’s first black police detectives, has confronted evil in many forms over the years. He wants to help Addison get free of this dangerous man and keep her children safe — even if no one else in her privileged world believes her story.
As the real reason behind Dean’s disappearance becomes clear, Addison and Hayes cross paths with Russian mobsters, federal agents, international thieves, arms dealers, and an aging It Girl in this darkly comic thriller with echoes of classic Hitchcock.

Ace Atkins is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of almost thirty novels. Atkins, a former SEC football player, started his career as a crime beat reporter in Florida before becoming a full time novelist. Since then he’s written eleven books in the Quinn Colson series and several true crime novels based on infamous crooks and killers. He was also chosen by Robert B. Parker’s family to continue the Spenser series in 2010, adding ten novels to that iconic franchise.

THE BOYS de Sameer Pandya

A compulsively readable and incisive look at a violent incident among a group of teenage boys that brings three very different sets of parents together: it’s about class, race, education and privilege, and the conflict when all of those slam together.

THE BOYS
by Sameer Pandya
Ballantine, Winter 2024
(via The Gernert Company)

Reveling in the triumph of a high school football win, a group of newly-friended boys find themselves at a party and—as sometimes happens—might or might not have beaten the crap out the kid that has annoyed them all their lives. These all-stars are suspended for the season, but instead of dwelling tight on the boys, Sameer wraps the narrative around their troubled parents and how they react and interact and judge and confront this family crisis. THE BOYS is about class, and race, and education and the privilege of passing and the lack of privilege if you don’t, and the conflict we find when all of those slam together. It’s about the kids inside each parent, and the games the world makes each of us play.

Sameer Pandya is the author of Members Only and the story collection The Blind Writer, which was long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. He is also the recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship. His fiction, commentary, and cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and Narrative Magazine. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

DARK CORNERS de Megan Goldin

Rachel Krall, the true crime podcaster star of Megan Goldin’s bestseller The Night Swim,returns in this electrifying new thriller to search for a popular influencer who disappears after visiting a suspected serial killer.

DARK CORNERS
by Megan Goldin
St. Martin’s Press, August 2023
(via The Gernert Company)

Terence Bailey is about to be released from prison for breaking and entering, though investigators have long suspected him in the murders of six women. As his release date approaches, Bailey gets a surprise visit from Maddison Logan, a hot, young influencer with a huge social media following. Hours later, Maddison disappears, and police suspect she’s been kidnapped―or worse. Is Maddison’s disappearance connected to her visit to Bailey? And why was she visiting him in the first place?
When they hit a wall in the investigation, the FBI reluctantly asks for Rachel Krall’s help in finding the missing influencer. Maddison seems to only exist on social media; she has no family, no friends, and other than in her posts, most people have never seen her. Who is she, really? Using a fake Instagram account, Rachel goes undercover to BuzzCon, a popular influencer conference, where she discovers a world of fierce rivalry that may have turned lethal.
When police find the body of a woman with a tattoo of a snake eating its tail―identical to a tattoo Rachel had seen on Bailey’s hand―the FBI must consider a chilling possibility: Bailey has an accomplice on the outside and a dangerous obsession with influencers, including Rachel Krall herself. Suddenly the target of a monster hiding in plain sight, Rachel is forced to confront the very real dangers that lurk in the dark corners of the internet.

Megan Goldin, author of The Escape Room and The Night Swim, worked as a correspondent for Reuters and other media outlets where she covered war, peace, international terrorism and financial meltdowns in the Middle East and Asia. She is now based in Melbourne, Australia where she raises three sons and is a foster mum to Labrador puppies learning to be guide dogs.