Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2023 Adult Fiction

THE RUINOUS LOVE TRILOGY de Brynne Weaver

A dark romantic comedy series of interconnected stand-alone novels following the Kane brothers and the murderous women they fall for. Each novel is told in dual POV and concludes with a happy ending.

THE RUINOUS LOVE TRILOGY
by Brynne Weaver
Zando, 2023 – 2024
(via The Whalen Agency)

Book One: BUTCHER & BLACKBIRD (August 2023)

Every serial killer needs a friend.

Every game must have a winner.

When a chance encounter sparks an unlikely bond between rival murderers Sloane and Rowan, the two find something elusive—the friendship of a like-minded, pitch-black soul. From small town West Virginia to upscale California, from downtown Boston to rural Texas, the two hunters collide in an annual game of blood and suffering, one that pits them against the most dangerous monsters in the country.

But as their friendship develops into something more, the restless ghosts left in their wake are only a few steps behind, ready to claim more than just their newfound love.

Can Rowan and Sloane dig themselves out of a game of graves?

Or have they finally met their match?

Book Two: LEATHER & LARK (February 2024)

Every killer claims a soul.

Every phantom wants revenge.

Contract killer Lachlan Kane just wants a quieter life, to work in his leather studio and forget about the traumatic past that’s forged him into a deadly weapon. But he needs to repay an endless debt, at least until the day his boss offers him a deal: marry Lark Montague, the daughter of his most valued business partner. The only problem?

They can’t stand each other.

Indie singer-songwriter Lark is the sunshine and glitter that burns through every cloud and clings to every crevice that Lachlan tries to hide inside. A rich family, a privileged life, a dearth of responsibilities—Lark has had an easy life. At least, that’s how it seems. But Lark is on the verge of losing her security. And now it’s time to prove she can get control of her haphazard future. What better way than to marry a man who’s the exact opposite of her usual type?

As Lachlan and Lark navigate the intrigue and secrets of the hidden world that binds them together, it becomes harder to discern a fake marriage from a real one. But it’s not just familiar dangers that haunt them.

There’s another phantom lurking on their doorstep.

And this one has come for blood.

Book Three: SCYTHE & SPARROW (September 2024)

Every flight has a landing.

Every circus has a final curtain.

Doctor Fionn Kane is running from a broken heart, one he hopes to mend in small-town Nebraska far away from his former fiancé and his derailed surgical career. It’s a simpler life: head down, work hard, and absolutely no romantic relationships. He wants none of the circus he left behind in Boston.

But the Silveria Circus finds him.

Motorcycle performer Rose Evans has spent a decade on the road with Silveria, and it suits her just fine, especially when she has the urge to indulge in a little murder and mayhem when she’s not in the spotlight. But when a kill goes awry and she ends up with a broken leg, she finds herself stuck in Nebraska at the home of the adorably nerdy town doctor.

The problem is, not every broken heart can be sewn back together.

…And the longer you stay in one place, the more likely your ghosts are to catch up.

Brynne Weaver has been everything from an archaeologist to a deep sea core analyst, an equestrian professional to a specialist in clinical research. She’s traveled the world, taken in more stray animals than her husband would probably prefer, and nurtured her love for both dark comedies and swoon-worthy romances. But during all those adventures, the constant thread in Brynne’s life has been writing. After self-publishing her debut book in 2021, Brynne has since carved a name for herself in the genre of dark romance with eight published works. Her most recent novel, the dark romantic comedy BUTCHER & BLACKBIRD, hit #1 in Romantic Suspense in New Releases on Amazon.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN de Griffin Hansbury

A poignant and provocative story of transgender awakening in a working-class American town.

SOME STRANGE MUSIC DRAWS ME IN
by Griffin Hansbury
W. W. Norton, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the summer of 1984, teenage Mel becomes entranced with the trans woman who appears in her blue-collar American town. Through the world-expanding time she spends with the woman, Sylvia, and the changes of adolescence, Mel soon discovers she is not the girl she thought she was—in fact, she might not be a girl at all. In the wake of this revelation, Mel navigates gender, sexuality, and an intense friendship with her childhood best friend in a hostile time and place for both girls and queers.

Moving back and forth to 2019, Mel has become Max, a middle-aged trans man. He returns to his hometown in the wake of his mother’s death, still reeling from his own politically-incorrect, gender-related scandal at his workplace, and bearing the burden of guilt from that pivotal teenage summer. As he reunites with his wayward older sister, spends time with his preteen great-niece and reckons with his past, Max works to come to terms with what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amidst constantly changing social norms.

“This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom and the life-saving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.” ―Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up

Griffin Hansbury is the acclaimed author of Vanishing New York (Dey Street, 2017), based on the celebrated blog written under the pen name Jeremiah Moss. As Hansbury he is the author of The Nostalgist, a novel, and Day For Night, a collection of poems. A two-time NYFA fellow, his writing has appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and online for The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, Salon, and The New York Review of Books.

SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN de Dwayne Alexander Smith & Pamela Samuels Young

SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN, the long-awaited second book from Dwayne Alexander Smith, is a dual POV rom-com suspense.

SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN
by Dwayne Alexander Smith & Pamela Samuels Young
Atria, July 2024
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Jackson Jones and Mackenzie Cunningham are both private investigators operating out of Los Angeles. While Jackson specializes in high-end clientele whose swagger matches his own, Mackenzie is scrappy, defensive, and easily underestimated. Despite many years in the same industry, they first meet when they are both hired to find the same missing woman. Unaware that they’ve entered a competition, they keep bumping heads until it’s clear that something suspicious is afoot. Equally attracted to and frustrated by one another, they soon realize that the client who hired them might actually be setting them up! Just as they shift from rivals to partners, Jackson and Mackenzie find themselves fighting for their lives, a string of bodies piling up around them. With no one to trust but each other, they race to solve the case before they can be forced to pay the price for their involvement.

Dwayne Alexander Smith is the author of Forty Acres, which was previously in development as a Feature Film at Netflix, with Luke Cage’s Cheo Hodari Coker attached to write, and Jay-Z attached to produce. Dwayne is also under contract with Audible to write an eight-episode original radio play for Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God’s imprint. When Dwayne received an NAACP Image Award in 2014 for his debut novel, he happened to meet a fellow author named Pamela Samuels Young, whose novel Anybody’s Daughter won an award that same year.

Pamela Samuels Young has been widely published in both commercial suspense and erotica, and many of her characters have legal backgrounds that mirror Pamela’s own. Netflix is also developing Pamela’s work, having optioned the first two books in her Vernette Henderson series, which follows a Black female attorney from Compton, working in a corporate firm. Felicia D. Henderson is attached as Executive Producer (Empire, Everybody Hates Chris, Sister Sister).

THE UNWEDDING d’Ally Condie

An enticing combination of murder mystery and women’s fiction written with the eloquence and emotional insight that Ally brings to all her books and that we first loved in her YA debut, Matched.

THE UNWEDDING
by Ally Condie
Grand Central, June 2024
(via Writers House)

Ellery Wainwright and her husband, Luke, were supposed to spend their twentieth wedding anniversary together at the luxurious Resort at Broken Point in Big Sur, California. Where better to celebrate a marriage, a family, and a life together than one of the most stunning places on earth? But when Luke, unexpectedly and shockingly asks for a divorce, and her world falls apart, devastated Ellery decides to do the planned trip alone. For years her identity was linked with Luke’s, she was a part of a couple, but now for the first time in decades she is no one’s wife, and, among the happy groups of fellow guests, she’s also no one’s friend. She feels like no one at all. Until she discovers a body in the pool and a bad storm isolates the resort completely.

Suddenly, from belonging to no one, she becomes acquainted with everyone, and becomes a central figure, the only person who can solve the murder.

Ally Condie is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling Matched trilogy and co-author of the Darkdeep middle grade series. She is also the author of the novel Summerlost, an Edgar Award Finalist. A former English teacher, Ally lives with her family outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. Ally has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is the founder and director of the nonprofit WriteOut Foundation.

I CHEERFULLY REFUSE de Leif Enger

A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, this latest novel is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future.

I CHEERFULLY REFUSE
by Leif Enger
Grove Press, April 2024

Set in a not-too-distant America, I CHEERFULLY REFUSE is the tale of a bereaved musician setting sail across a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an illiterate and increasingly desperate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure, and a lawless society. Amidst the Swiftean challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by the beauty around him, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy’s private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake.

I CHEERFULLY REFUSE epitomizes the “musical, sometimes magical and deeply satisfying kind of storytelling” (Los Angeles Times) for which Leif Enger is cherished.

Leif Enger was raised in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his bestselling debut novel Peace Like a River, which won the Independent Publisher Book Award and was one of the Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year. His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, was also a national bestseller, No. 8 on Amazon’s Top 100 Editors’ Picks and a Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award Honor Book for Fiction. His third novel, Virgil Wander, was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was named a best book of the year by Amazon, Library Journal, Bookpage, and Chicago Public Library. He lives with his wife in Duluth, MN.