Archives par étiquette : Writers House

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.

WANDER IN THE DARK de Jumata Emill

From the acclaimed author of The Black Queen comes a stunning new YA novel in the spirit of This Is Us, but with the propulsive, page-turning suspense synonymous with Karen McManus, Kara Thomas, and Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé.

WANDER IN THE DARK
by Jumata Emill
Delacorte, Spring 2024
(via Writers House)

Amir Trudeau, the troubled son of local celebrity chef and restaurateur Martin Trudeau, isn’t without his share of problems. He hates his new school, his mother doesn’t like any of his friends, and his estranged half-brother Marcel is continuously trying to repair a relationship that Amir wants no part of. As far as Amir is concerned, years of hurt feelings that began the day their father divorced Amir’s mother and then moved on to achieve fame and fortune after marrying Marcel’s mother isn’t something that will ever be undone. But when Amir wakes up in the middle of the night and finds Chloe Danvers, a pretty and popular white girl he barely knows, stabbed to death, he suddenly finds himself with much bigger things to worry about.
Chloe is from an upper middle-class family with connections, and the last person she was with is a Black man caught fleeing the scene via security cameras. Everyone thinks the killer is Amir, including the police, and so in order to clear his name he’s going to have to rely on the people he trusts least—especially Marcel. Marcel sees helping Amir clear his name as way to repair their relationship, but he quickly learns that finding out why someone fatally stabbed Chloe will force the Trudeaus to confront truths that might tear them further apart, and reveal the twisted secrets festering within the hallowed halls of the elite private school the brothers attend.

Jumata Emill is a journalist who has covered crime and local politics in Mississippi and parts of Louisiana. He earned his BA in mass communications from Southern University and A&M University. He’s a Pitch Wars alum and a member of the Crime Writers of Color. When he’s not writing about murderous teens, he’s watching and obsessively tweeting about every franchise of the Real Housewives. Jumata lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

BEAST de Jennifer Donnelly

New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Donnelly delivers an explosive reimagining of a tale as old as time! Think Beauty and the Beast meets Inside Out in this gender-reversed retelling, in which the beast is a mysterious noblewoman named Arabella, and the beauty is a handsome and cheeky thief named Beau—who stumbles into Arabella’s castle when he’s on the run after a robbery goes wrong.

BEAST
by Jennifer Donnelly
Scholastic, May 2024
(via Writers House)

A roaring fire and a grand feast await Beau when he arrives at Arabella’s domain, but it abruptly ends when a golden clock strikes midnight and a savage beast emerges. Beau escapes the vicious creature but becomes a prisoner in the castle. The next day, he meets the beautiful, disdainful Arabella, her tight-lipped servants, and a collection of sinister courtiers who behave very strangely, including the smile-until-your-face-cracks (literally) Lady Elge; the shuffling, mumbling Lady Iglut; and the rampaging Lady Rega.
Determined to escape, Beau steals a master key and lets himself into the cellar, where he hunts for a way out, but instead of finding the tunnel he’s certain must exist, he finds a child who’s been locked away. Her name is Hope. She appears to be a pitiful creature, but it’s a ruse. She steals his key, then leads him on a chase through the castle as she searches for her lost sisters, Faith and Love.
With Hope’s help, Beau learns that Arabella was cursed to turn into a beast every night when the clock strikes twelve,

and that the one who cursed her is none other than the forbidding Lady Espidra—the most fearsome of all Arabella’s courtiers. He also discovers why Arabella was cursed—and that the wounded, gifted young woman is as much a prisoner in the castle as he is. As he begins to fall in love with Arabella, Beau becomes determined to help her break the curse, but what he doesn’t know is that the golden clock is ticking—and time is running out.
BEAST is a story about two damaged people learning to love and forgive, but it’s also about how we all get trapped in prisons of our own making—and how we need to learn how to tear down walls and build bridges if we’re ever going to escape them.

Jennifer Donnelly is the author of A Northern Light, which was awarded a Printz Honor and a Carnegie Medal; Revolution (named a Best Book by Amazon, Kirkus Reviews, School Library Journal, and the Chicago Public Library, and nominated for a Carnegie Medal); the Deep Blue series; and many other books for young readers, including Lost in a Book, which spent more than 20 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.