Archives par étiquette : Writers House

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.

MOLLY AND BEAR de Bob & Vicki Scott

Based on the beloved comic strip by Bob Scott, the Molly and Bear series by Bob and Vicki Scott is a pitch-perfect, lighthearted, hilarious odd couple graphic novel adventure that’s sure to become a new favorite for middle-grade readers.

MOLLY AND BEAR
by Bob & Vicki Scott
Aladdin/Simon & Schuster, Summer 2024
(via Writers House)

11 year old Molly has an unusual new BFF: an 800 pound scaredy bear! When Bear wanders into Molly’s life, it doesn’t take long for her to figure out she’s just met her new bestie. Loyal, sweet, inquisitive…and terrified of almost everything. . . Bear makes a great new friend. And he’s not scary AT ALL! But try telling that to the rest of the world.
Molly eventually convinces her mom and dad to let Bear stay with them, but convincing everyone else that Bear isn’t dangerous (not to mention convincing Bear that he isn’t in constant danger!) is going to take some work. Lucky for Bear, Molly doesn’t give up easily so she’s up for the challenge.

Bob and Vicki Scott began their careers in animation and have worked on films for Dreamworks and Pixar. Molly and the Bear, which is based on Bob’s syndicated comic strip Bear with Me, is their middle-grade debut.

NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS de Meredith Adamo

Sold in a heated auction, debut author Meredith Adamo’s intricate YA novel is part mystery, part Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, and part HBO’s The Flight Attendant. The perfect combination of plot-filled page-turner and powerful coming-of-age tale, NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS announces Meredith as a major new voice in YA fiction.

NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS
by Meredith Adamo
Bloomsbury, April 2024
(via Writers House)

I think, inexplicably, of another photo. Last fall, late October. The night of the bonfire at Durand Eastman Beach. In the photo, I wear tight denim shorts, beat-up white Keds, a black zip-up that isn’t mine. It’s bad enough how I tilt my head, just so, a hickey bruised on the curve of my neck, but even worse is my smile. Sly. Coy. Like I know more in this moment than some girls ever know. I didn’t know shit. I especially didn’t know that when the night sky filled with stars, when the fire hissed, half-dead, when every phone pinged with SIX NEW PHOTOS, I’d so seamlessly become the worst of me: Jo at seventeen, outcast. But I guess that’s the trouble with girls like me. We always get what we deserve.
Seventeen-year-old Jo-Lynn Kirby used to be “brace-faced but beautiful, a tiara pinned in her sun-streaked hair.” She used to be “sophomore class president, stunned at her landslide victory […], June’s Scooper of the Month at Costello’s Frozen Custard, posing a touch too proudly with her bonus check. . . ” but now she’s. . . just not. Now Jo is a wild girl, reckless girl, difficult girl, who rolls her eyes a little too much, whose grades have plummeted to the point that she’s on academic probation; now Jo is the girl whose Nudes were leaked to the entire school. And then her former best friend: pretty, nice, Maddie Price, uncharacteristically, cryptically, and desperately asks Jo for help—telling Jo she’s in trouble, that she thinks Jo can help her—just hours before Maddie disappears.
What quickly seems to the community like a simple runaway doesn’t add up that way to Jo-Lynn—and it doesn’t seem that way to Jo’s classmate and Eastman High’s Salutatorian Hudson Harper-Moore either. To dig deeper into Maddie’s disappearance, Jo needs to get in with, and back with, the group of classmates she left behind—and Jo and Hudson decide the only way to seamlessly do that is to pretend they’re dating. But for Jo, going back to social life from social outcast means she must confront all she’d rather leave behind: the boys who betrayed her; the girls who whisper that she had it coming; the secrets that tore her and Maddie apart. Yet as Jo finds allies in girls she once alienated, a true mentor in her Senior Experience Journalism supervisor, and as she develops very real feelings for Hudson, she risks losing more than she ever knew she wanted. . . as the clues to Maddie’s disappearance pull Jo deeper and deeper into a web of lies, whose stories can and can’t Jo trust? Especially when she’s still figuring out her own story, and her own truth. . .

Meredith Adamo is a YA author based in hot, humid North Carolina, but she’s originally from Rochester, New York, which is her favorite place on the planet. She likes to write about girls who can make you laugh and break your heart—ideally on the same page. Her non-writing interests include collecting vintage bakeware, crocheting the ugliest blankets you’ve ever seen, and grocery shopping. NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS is her debut novel.