From BBC presenter Craig Henderson comes a brilliant and gripping debut thriller that races through the Motor City at a heart-stopping pace. Perfect for fans of Drive and Blacktop Wasteland, Welcome to the Game follows ex-rally driver Spencer Burnham as he tries to balance his young daughter, drug addiction, and the needs of charismatic gangster Dominic McGrath. As the temperature in the city rises and Child Protective Services circle in closer, Spencer must apply his considerable talents to finally best McGrath and swerve to avoid danger at every turn.
Archives
When the Stars Begin to Fall
“Racism is an existential threat to America,” Theodore Johnson declares at the start of his profound and exhilarating book; furthermore, it’s a refutation of the American Promise enshrined in our Constitution—that all men and women are inherently equal. And yet corrosive racism has remained ingrained in our society. If we cannot overcome it, Johnson argues, while the United States will remain as a geopolitical entity, the promise that made America unique on Earth will have died. When the Stars Begin to Fall lays out in compelling, ambitious ways a pathway to the national solidarity necessary to overcome racism. Weaving memories of his own family’s experiences with strands of history into his elegant narrative, Johnson posits that a blueprint for national solidarity can be found in the exceptional citizenship long practiced by most Black Americans, which resembles the solidarity found among members of the military or in communities recovering from a natural disaster. Understanding that racism is a structural crime of the state, he argues that overcoming it requires us to recognize that a color-conscious society—not a color-blind one—is the true fulfillment of the American Promise. Alive to the power of writers from James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates to Jon Meacham, When the Stars Begin to Fall is an urgent call to undertake the process of overcoming what has long seemed intractable.
Takes One To Know One
Just a few years ago, Corie Geller was busting terrorists as an agent for the FBI. But at thirty-five, she traded in her badge for the stability of marriage and motherhood. Now Corie is married to the brilliant and remarkably handsome Judge Josh Geller and is the adoptive mother of his lovely 14-year-old daughter. Between cooking meals and playing chauffeur, Corie scouts Arabic fiction for a few literary agencies and, on Wednesdays, has lunch with her fellow Shorehaven freelancers at a so-so French restaurant. Life is, as they say, fine. But at her weekly lunches, Corie senses that something’s off and the only way to get to the bottom of it is to dust off her FBI toolkit. Sassy, smart, and wickedly witty, Susan Isaacs is at her formidable best in a novel that is both bitingly wry and ominously thrilling.
Deep River
In the early 1900s, as the oppression of Russia’s imperial rule takes its toll on Finland, the three Koski siblings—Ilmari, Matti, and the politicized young Aino—are forced to flee to the United States. Not far from the majestic Columbia River, the siblings settle among other Finns in a logging community in southern Washington, where the first harvesting of the colossal old-growth forests begets rapid development, and radical labor movements begin to catch fire. The brothers face the excitement and danger of pioneering this frontier wilderness—climbing and felling trees one-hundred meters high—while Aino, foremost of the books many strong, independent women, devotes herself to organizing the industry’s first unions. As the Koski siblings strive to rebuild lives and families in an America in flux, they also try to hold fast to the traditions of a home they left behind.
Virgil Wander
Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals—from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking, kite-flying stranger investigating the mystery of his disappeared son; to Nadine, the reserved, enchanting wife of the vanished man, to Tom, a journalist and Virgil’s oldest friend; and various members of the Pea family who must confront tragedies of their own. Into this community returns a shimmering prodigal son who may hold the key to reviving their town. With intelligent humor and captivating whimsy, Leif Enger conjures a remarkable portrait of a region and its residents, who, for reasons of choice or circumstance, never made it out of their defunct industrial district. Carried aloft by quotidian pleasures including movies, fishing, necking in parked cars, playing baseball and falling in love, Virgil Wander is a swift full journey into the heart and heartache of an often overlooked American Upper Midwest by an award-winning master storyteller.
Happiness
A breathtaking novel of loves lost and new, of man and nature, and of the hidden side of a multicultural metropolis, from award-winning writer Aminatta Forna.
London. A fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. Distracted, two pedestrians collide—Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist. Attila has arrived in London with two tasks: to deliver a keynote speech on trauma, as he has done many times before; and to contact his “niece” Ama who hasn’t called home in a while. Ama has been swept up in an immigration crackdown, and now her young son Tano is missing. Meeting again by chance, Attila and Jean begin to mobilize neighborhood rubbish men, security guards, hotel doormen, traffic wardens—mainly West African immigrants—to search for the boy; a deepening friendship between the two of them also unfolds. Meanwhile a consulting case causes Attila to question the impact of his own ideas on trauma, the values of the society he finds himself in and a grief of his own. In this masterful tale of love and loss, of cruelty and kindness, Forna asks us to consider the interconnectedness of lives, our coexistence with one another and all living creatures, and the true nature of happiness.
Fever
A stunning standalone from a master of suspense, a powerful story of love, survival, and betrayal set in a world devastated by a fatal virus known as ‘the Fever.’
Deon Meyer is a household name in South Africa and has garnered fans around the world for his bestselling Benny Griessel thriller series. However, Fever is like nothing else Meyer has written before—a standalone, epic, post-apocalyptic thriller that is as thought-provoking as it is page-turning.
Nico Storm and his father Willem drive a truck through a desolate land. They are among the few in South Africa—and the world, as far as they know—to have survived a devastating virus. Willem Storm, a thinker and a leader, has a vision for a new community rebuilt from the ruins. And so Amanzi is formed by a disparate group of survivors: Melinda, rescued from brutal thugs, Hennie, with his vital Cessna plane, Beryl with her ragtag group of orphans, and Domingo, the man with the tattooed hand. And then there is Sofia, the most beautiful girl that Nico has ever seen, who changes everything.
As the community grows, so do the challenges it must face—not just from external attacks, but also from within. And Nico will have his strength and loyalty tested to their limits as he undergoes an extraordinary rite of passage in this brand new world.
The Prague Sonata
Music and war, war and music—these are the twin motifs around which Bradford Morrow has composed his magnum opus, The Prague Sonata, a novel over ten years in the making.
In the early days of the new millennium, pages of a weathered original sonata manuscript—the gift of a Czech immigrant living out her final days in Queens—come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. To Meta’s eye, it appears to be an authentic eighteenth-century work; to her discerning ear, the music rendered there is hauntingly beautiful, clearly the composition of a master. But there is no indication of who the composer might be. The gift comes with the request that Meta attempt to find the manuscript’s true owner—a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since the Second World War forced them apart—and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvořák and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn’t the only one after the music’s secrets. Magisterially evoking decades of Prague’s tragic and triumphant history, from the First World War through the Velvet Revolution, and moving from postwar London to the heartland of immigrant America, The Prague Sonata is both epic and intimate, evoking the ways in which individual notes of love and sacrifice become part of the celebratory symphony of life.
The Last Hack
There are no women on the Internet. It is one of the cardinal rules of hacking, and not since Lisbeth Salander famously violated it in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series has the maxim been so compellingly broken as in The Last Hack, the new Jack Parlabane thriller from one of the smartest minds in crime fiction, Christopher Brookmyre.
Sam Morpeth has had to grow up way too fast. Left to fend for a younger sister with learning difficulties when their mother goes to prison, she is forced to watch her dreams of university evaporate. But Sam learns what it is to be truly powerless when a stranger begins to blackmail her online. Meanwhile, reporter Jack Parlabane seems to have finally gotten his career back on track with a job at a flashy online news start-up, but his success has left him indebted to a volatile source on the wrong side of the law. Now that debt is being called in, and it could cost him everything. Thrown together by a common enemy, Sam and Jack are about to discover they have more in common than they realize—and might be each other’s only hope.
See What I Have Done
Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Or did she?
In this riveting debut novel, See What I Have Done—which Paula Hawkins calls “eerie and compelling”—Sarah Schmidt masterfully reimagines one of the most infamous murder cases of all time.
On the morning of August 4, 1892, Lizzie Borden calls out to her maid: Someone’s killed Father. The brutal ax-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts, leaves little evidence and many unanswered questions. While neighbors struggle to understand why anyone would want to harm the respected Bordens, those close to the family have a different tale to tell—of a father with an explosive temper; a spiteful stepmother; and two spinster sisters, with a bond even stronger than blood, desperate for their independence.
As the police search for clues, Emma comforts an increasingly distraught Lizzie whose memories of that morning flash in scattered fragments. Had she been in the barn or the pear arbor to escape the stifling heat of the house? When did she last speak to her stepmother? Were they really gone and would everything be better now? Shifting among the perspectives of the unreliable Lizzie, her older sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, and the enigmatic stranger Benjamin, the events of that fateful day are slowly revealed through a high-wire feat of storytelling.