With her latest introspective novel, “Just a Regular Boy,” Catherine Ryan Hyde takes us on a journey that we’d never imagine taking ourselves — going with a survivalist and his five-year-old son into the wilds of northern Idaho to survive what he believes is a coming apocalypse. Remy’s father, Roy, plans to survive off the land, and he believes that he has everything they need to survive.
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Can the stories we tell ourselves have the power to save us? In “The Secret Book of Flora Lea,” author Patti Callahan Henry brings us a tale within a tale as we meet two sisters, bound by the fantasy world that the elder sister, Hazel, creates and shares with her much younger sister, Flora, during difficult times. Their father is killed the first week he starts training to fight in WWII, and the family is bereft from his loss. When their mother goes to work to do her part in the war effort, Hazel cares for Flora and tells her stories to keep her busy and happy. We especially see the sisters’ bond as they are evacuated from London and parted from their very loving mother, and sent to a small village on the River Thames near Oxford, where they are lucky enough to go live with a wonderful woman and her son.
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Forget the debutantes in this clever new historical romance series starting with “The Scandalous Ladies of London: The Countess,” by Sophie Jordan. This series isn’t about the teenage girls (because aren’t seventeen and eighteen-year old girls still pretty much children?), but rather about their mothers and other women who are not quite in their prime. While these “ladies of London” are not still in the early blush of youth, they are mature women who want to have romance and love in their lives.
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It’s not often that a sequel is written over four decades after the first book, but in “Where Are the Children Now?” that’s exactly what Alafair Burke has done with Mary Higgins Clark’s “Where Are the Children?” which was published in 1975. While some readers might want to reread the first book, it’s really not necessary as Burke does a masterful job cluing us in as to what transpired all those years before, while making the sharing of that backstory completely natural and a part of the story.
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Author Charlie N. Holmberg writes a lot of fantasy, and her latest novel, “Heir of Uncertain Magic” is the sequel to “Keeper of Enchanted Rooms,” the first book in the “Whimbrel House” series. Unfortunately, neither title gives even a hint of the delightful character of this magic-filled series about two fairly tortured souls in search of some stability and in desperate need of some love in their lives. We meet those two, Merritt Fernsby and Hulda Larkin, in the first book as Merritt inherits a magical house, and Hulda is sent to help him figure out how to control the magic of the house. It’s filled with action, danger, and some truly heart-wrenching moments.
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In his latest novel, brilliant “Going Zero,” author Anthony McCarten goes to great lengths to scare the dickens out of us by exploring the issue of privacy—and the fact that any notion that it still exists is archaic—in this brave new world of technology which surrounds us almost everywhere we go. Billionaire tech mogul Cy Baxter has a brilliant idea for the future. His technology will enable the law enforcement agencies of our country to stop crime almost before it happens. The only downside? In order for it to work, the government, in concert with his tech company, will be able to monitor virtually our every move, every conversation, every action.
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While “The Seaside Library” is about the lengths to which friends will go to protect and support each other, it’s not basically about a library. The setting is Mariners Island, a fictional island author Brenda Novak imagines off the coast of New England where all three main characters grew up. Ivy, Ariana, and Cam were best friends, and when a tragedy occurred one summer, the teenagers lied to protect Cam. That lie grew and took on a life of its own in the next two decades.
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Lauren Willig is known for historical fiction that delves deeply into little-known aspects of war and the women who have supported victims of war. In “Two Wars and a Wedding,” she presents Betsy Hayes, a valiant woman, who is based on a real figure. Betsy becomes a nurse and ultimately saves lives when those in charge of the war efforts would do otherwise.
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There’s a saying that no good deed goes unpunished, and in “Not So Perfect Strangers,” L. S. Stratton takes that adage to the max by showing how Tasha Jenkins suffers from the good deed she does late one night when she gives a stranger a ride. Tasha has been planning to leave her abusive husband, and she and her teenage son are staying in a hotel just prior to getting on a plane and going back South, where Tasha has family, to live. She is determined to leave D.C. and Kordell Jenkins, whose abusive tendencies have kept her basically a prisoner in her own home. To “punish” her, he took away Tasha’s car keys, her phone, her credit cards. And he hasn’t let her work. So when she finally makes plans to get away, she is shocked when her son disappears and she finds a note in their hotel room that he doesn’t want to leave his dad or his girlfriend.
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The question of love—is it something that hits like lightning at first sight or is it something that grows slowly, over time—is one of the issues that Sally Hepworth explores in her newest novel, “The Soulmate.” The other main issue is about trust and how much we can ever trust another person. As in many of her novels, Hepworth plays with the information she provides. The narrative is told from the perspectives of Amanda and Pippa, the two female main characters, with Amanda’s narrative providing “before” and “after” indicators and Pippa’s narrative shared with “now” and “then” labels.
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In “Code 6,” James Grippando provides a thriller with a dual plot line; both plot lines deal with information and how technology makes mining data about people so easy that even the most primitive technology identified those of Jewish descent for the Nazis. The main character is Kate Gamble, whose father is the CEO of a huge technology company that specializes in data integration. His company has ties with the CIA, the NSA, and other counterterrorism organizations. Kate is graduating from law school, but she really wants to be a playwright. She is writing a play about the beginning of data mining and its dangers, which she hides from her father because of his own business. He might not be pleased that the subject of her play is the dark side of data technology.
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Jacqueline Winspear forces us to ponder the question of how we deal with evil in her latest historical fiction, “The White Lady.” Do people betray others because they are evil, or is it simply due to the base instincts of man? I say “man” because in this novel, and as we usually see in life, it’s often the males of our species who perpetrate the ultimate betrayals and the ultimate greedy grabs for gold and power. Those in the throes of such attempts to claw their way to positions of influence will usually step on anyone in their way, including women and children. And that’s what Winspear clearly demonstrates in this powerful, thrilling novel.
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