THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH de George Dawes Green

A new suspense novel from the Edgar award-winning author of The Caveman’s Valentine.

THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH
by George Dawes Green
Celadon/St. Martin’s Press, July 2022
(via The Friedrich Agency)

When matriarch Morgana Musgrove calls upon her prodigal son Ransom to help her with a case, the defunct M. Musgrove & Family Detective Agency is back in business, albeit reluctantly. Tensions rise between the Musgroves and whispers of a mysterious lost “Kingdom”—descendants of the African-American soldiers who fought for King George, and afterwards formed a secret community, refusing to return to slavery—float in the sultry Savannah night. The family of investigators creeps closer and closer to exposing the city’s seedy underbelly, and a depraved history that a powerful few are determined to keep hidden, no matter the cost…

George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth and Unchained, is an internationally celebrated author. His first novel, The Caveman’s Valentine, won the Edgar Award and became a motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson. The Juror was an international bestseller in more than twenty languages and was the basis for the movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. Ravens was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail, and many other publications. George Green grew up in Georgia and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

AMY AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS de Jincy Willet

Jincy Willett’s most beloved characters return in this wickedly smart and funny take on the thriller genre by one of our most acclaimed literary humorists.

AMY AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS
by Jincy Willet
St. Martin’s Press, August 2022

Carla Karolac is doing just fine. Having escaped the clutches of her controlling mother and founded a successful writing retreat in which participants are confined to windowless cells until they hit their daily word count, she lives a comfortable, if solitary, existence. If only her therapist, Toonie, would stop going on about Carla’s nonexistent love life and start addressing her writer’s block, she might be able to make some progress. But then Carla finds Toonie murdered, and suddenly her unfinished memoir is the least of her concerns. Without quite knowing why, she dials an old phone number.
Amy Gallup, retired after decades as a writing instructor, is surprised to hear from her former student Carla out of the blue, three years since they last spoke. She’s even more shocked when she finds out the reason for Carla’s call. Suddenly, she finds herself swept up in a murder investigation that soon brings her whole old writing group back together. But they’ll need all the help they can get, as one murder leads to another, and suspicions of a serial killer mount across San Diego.
Full of Jincy Willett’s trademark dark humor, an unforgettable cast of characters, and two of the most endearingly imperfect protagonists who have ever attempted to solve a murder, AMY AMONG THE SERIAL KILLERS shows us what can be gained when we begin to break down our own walls and let others inside…as long as they aren’t murderers.

Jincy Willet is the author of Jenny and the Jaws of Life, Winner of the National Book Award, and The Writing Class, which have been translated and sold internationally. Her stories have been published in Cosmopolitan, McSweeney’s Quarterly and other magazines. She frequently reviews for The New York Times Book Review.

ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION de Bushra Rehman

From acclaimed poet Bushra Rehman, who is a key figure in South Asian American literary circles, comes an unforgettable story about female friendship and queer love in a Pakistani-American community.

ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION
by Bushra Rehman
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, December 2022

Razia Mirza lives in a tight-knit Muslim neighborhood in Corona, Queens. She has known her best friend Saima since she was born. Broken into three sections, ROSES, IN THE MOUTH OF A LION first chronicles their friendship as city children who find misadventures among the wild grape vines and weeds growing in the parking lots of Queens. When the friendship ends, Razia’s grief and loss transform her forever. In the second section, Razia befriends Taslima, a new girl in the community. Together, they chafe at the restrictions imposed on them and embark on small rebellions: listening to scandalous American music, wearing mini-skirts, and cutting school to explore the city, as Razia begins to question some of the traditions her parents expect her to follow. Section three takes Razia further afield when she’s admitted to Stuyvesant, a specialized high school in Manhattan. There she meets Angela, who lives with her Bohemian mother in the East Village. Razia is attracted to Angela in a way that surprises her but fills her with a new joy of understanding. When their queer relationship is discovered by a Pakistani Aunty in the community, Razia is forced to choose between her family and her own future. Following Razia from girlhood to young adulthood, this novel beautifully chronicles her journey toward reconciling her heritage and Muslim traditions with her desire to be true to her life path. With humor and pathos, we delve into the emotional complexities of religious communities, female friendship and queer desire.

A key figure in the South Asian American literary and Women of Color feminist circle, Bushra Rehman is a writer and speaker of tremendous power. Her connection with audiences comes from years of being on the road, sharing her particular brand of storytelling, political writing, and poetry. As a young woman, Rehman coedited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, a seminal work on race and American feminism. Inspired by the writers in Colonize This! Rehman’s wrote her autobiographical novel Corona (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2013), a dark comedy about Razia Mirza, a young Pakistani woman growing up in a tight-knit Muslim community in Corona, Queens. Rehman’s latest work, Marianna’s Beauty Salon (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018), is a collection of poems, gathered over twenty years of her life in the South Asian queer activist scene.

L.A. WEATHER

Storm clouds are on the horizon in L.A. WEATHER, a fun, fast-paced novel of a Mexican-American family from the author of the #1 Los Angeles Times bestseller Esperanza’s Box of Saints.

L.A. WEATHER
by María Amparo Escandón
St. Martin’s Press, September 2021

L.A. is parched, dry as a bone, and all Oscar, the weather-obsessed patriarch of the Alvarado family, desperately wants is a little rain. He’s harboring a costly secret that distracts him from everything else. His wife, Keila, desperate for a life with a little more intimacy and a little less Weather Channel, feels she has no choice but to end their marriage. Their three daughters―Claudia, a television chef with a hard-hearted attitude; Olivia, a successful architect who suffers from gentrification guilt; and Patricia, a social media wizard who has an uncanny knack for connecting with audiences but not with her lovers―are blindsided and left questioning everything they know. Each will have to take a critical look at her own relationships and make some tough decisions along the way.
With quick wit and humor, Maria Amparo Escandón follows the Alvarado family as they wrestle with impending evacuations, secrets, deception, and betrayal, and their toughest decision yet: whether to stick together or burn it all down.

*** Named one of Harper’s Bazaar Best Books 2021 ***
*** A Best Book of September 2021 (Barnes & Noble, Alta, PopSugar, Bustle, CNN, E! News, Ms. Magazine, Nylon, Good Morning America, and more!)***

“This story beautifully weaves together the theme of family and uses weather as a metaphor to peel back the curtain on the layered lives of three sisters and their parents.” ― Reese Witherspoon
“Enchanting.” ― Oprah Quarterly
« Absorbing, moving, comic and tragic, L.A. Weather will capture readers and never let them go. » ― Shelf Awareness
« A year in the life of a Mexican Jewish family whose problems include a near-drowning, a drought and drama galore as the marriages of the parents and all three daughters go off the rails. » ― People

María Amparo Escandón is the author of #1 L.A. Times bestseller Esperanza’s Box of Saints and González & Daughter Trucking Co. Named a writer to watch by both Newsweek and the L.A. Times, she was born in Mexico City and has lived in Los Angeles for nearly four decades.

THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR de Nina de Gramont

A beguiling novel of star-crossed lovers, heartbreak, revenge, and murder—and a brilliant re-imagination of one of the most talked-about unsolved mysteries of the twentieth century.

THE CHRISTIE AFFAIR
by Nina de Gramont
St. Martin’s Press, February 2022

Every story has its secrets.
Every mystery has its motives.
“A long time ago, in another country, I nearly killed a woman. It’s a particular feeling, the urge to murder. It takes over your body so completely, it’s like a divine force, grabbing hold of your will, your limbs, your psyche. There’s a joy to it. In retrospect, it’s frightening, but I daresay in the moment it feels sweet. The way justice feels sweet.”

The greatest mystery wasn’t Agatha Christie’s disappearance in those eleven infamous days, it’s what she discovered.
London, 1925: In a world of townhomes and tennis matches, socialites and shooting parties, Miss Nan O’Dea became Archie Christie’s mistress, luring him away from his devoted and well-known wife, Agatha Christie. The question is, why? Why destroy another woman’s marriage, why hatch a plot years in the making, and why murder? How was Nan O’Dea so intricately tied to those eleven mysterious days that Agatha Christie went missing?

Nina de Gramont is a professor of Creative Writing at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She is the author of The Last September (Algonquin, 2015) as well as several Young Adult novels.