Patrick Hoffman burst onto the crime fiction scene with The White Van, a captivating thriller set in the back streets of San Francisco, which was named a Wall Street Journal best mystery of the year and was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. Hoffman returns with Every Man a Menace, the inside story of an increasingly ruthless ecstasy-smuggling ring.
San Francisco is about to receive the biggest delivery of MDMA to hit the West Coast in years. Raymond Gaspar, just out of prison, is sent to the city by his boss—still locked up on the inside—to check in on the increasingly erratic dealer expected to take care of distribution. In Miami, meanwhile, the man responsible for shipping the drugs from Southeast Asia to the Bay Area has just met the girl of his dreams—a woman who can’t seem to keep her story straight. And thousands of miles away, in Bangkok, someone farther up the supply chain, a former conscript of the Israeli army, is about to make a phone call that will put all their lives at risk.
Stretching from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia to the Golden Gate of San Francisco, Every Man a Menace offers an unflinching account of the making, moving, and selling of the drug known as Molly—pure happiness sold by the brick, brought to market by bloodshed and betrayal.
Set in the austere woods of northern Minnesota, History of Wolves is a coming-of-age-plus-crime story that explores, in the words of Emily Fridlund’s young narrator Linda, “the difference between what you want to believe and what you do.” Pivoting around a morally complex question—how complicit is the observer of a ‘crime’, a girl who neither fully understands her world, nor the consequences of her inaction? —History of Wolves is a beautifully paced, gorgeously written novel about guilt, innocence, negligence, well-meaning belief, and the loss of a child.
The break out new novel by New York Times Notable Author Mary-Beth Hughes follows a small family in the aftermath of love and disgrace in 1970s London, New York, and the Jersey Shore. From the outside in, the Devlin family lead almost-perfect lives. Dashing father, Nick, is a successful businessman long married to sweetheart Jean, who upholds the family home and throws dinner parties while daughter Lily attends Catholic school and is disciplined into modesty by the nuns. Under the surface, however, the Devlins are silently broken by the death of their little boy. As Nick’s older brother, a man driven by callous and rapacious urges, inducts Nick into the cut-throat world of cosmetics the Devlin family are further fragmented by betrayals, and victims of the cruelest kind of hurt. In The Loved Ones Hughes takes her gimlet eye deep into the secret places between men and women to give an incisive portrayal of one family’s struggle to stay together against stacked odds of deception, adultery, and loss. Years in the making, this is Hughes’ astonishing and compulsively readable break out, a darkly brilliant Mad Men-esque drama of family secrets and professional lies, and a sweepingly cinematic novel of relationships defined by an era of glamour and decadence.
Morten Storm was an unlikely jihadi. A six-foot-one red-haired Dane, Storm spent his teens throwing punches with a biker gang and getting thrown in jail. A book about the Prophet Mohammed prompted his conversion to Islam, and Storm sought purpose in a community of believers. He attended a militant madrasah in Yemen, named his son Osama, and became close friends with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born terrorist cleric. But after a decade of jihadi life, he not only repudiated extremism but, in a quest for atonement, became a double agent for the CIA and British and Danish intelligence. Agent Storm takes readers inside the jihadist world like never before, showing the daily life of zealous men set on mass murder, from dodging drones with al Qaeda leaders in the Arabian Desert to training in extremist gyms in Britain to carrying out supply drops in Kenya. The book also provides a tantalizing look at his dangerous life undercover, as Storm traveled the world for missions targeting its most dangerous terrorists and into the world’s most powerful spy agencies: their tradecraft, rivalries, and late-night carousing, as well as their ruthless use of a beautiful blonde in an ambitious honey trap. Agent Storm is a captivating, utterly unique, real-life espionage tale.
Renowned for his gritty and revelatory visions of the Caribbean, the National Book Award–winning Bob Shacochis returns to occupied Haiti with The Woman Who Lost Her Soul. When Tom Harrington, a humanitarian lawyer, travels to Haiti to investigate the murder of a beautiful photojournalist, he is confronted with a dangerous landscape of poverty, corruption, and voodoo. It’s the late 1990s, a time of brutal guerrilla warfare and civilian kidnappings, and everyone has secrets. The journalist, whom he knew years before as Jackie Scott, had a bigger investment in Haiti than it seemed, and to make sense of her death, Tom must plunge back into a thorny past and his complicated ties to both Jackie and Eville Burnette, a member of the Special Forces who was assigned to protect her. Moving from the violent, bandit-dominated Dubrovnik of World War II to an exquisitely rendered Istanbul in the 1980s, Shacochis draws Jackie’s shadowy family history with daring immediacy. Caught between her first love and the unsavory attentions of her father—an elite spy and quintessential Cold War warrior pressuring his daughter to follow in his footsteps—seventeen-year-old Jackie hatches a desperate escape plan that puts her on course to becoming the soulless woman that Tom Harrington equally feared and desired. Set over fifty years and in four countries backdropped by different wars, The Woman Who Lost Her Soul is a magnum opus that brings to life, through the mystique and allure of history, a complex and disturbing story about the coming of age of America in a pre-9/11 world.
“It’s that moment about two months in, when you think you’ve finally got a handle on the place. Everything clicks and it all feels within your grasp…at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”
From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the ’30s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives. English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the Territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers’ deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell’s poor health, are hungry for a new discovery. When Bankson finds them a new tribe nearby, the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and romantic firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone’s control.
Set between two World Wars and inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead, Euphoria is an enthralling story of passion, possession, exploration, and sacrifice from accomplished author Lily King.
