Peter Swanson

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Maryland

A Novel

In this spectacularly devious novel by New York Times bestselling author Peter Swanson, a private eye starts to follow a possibly adulterous husband, but little does he know that the twisted trail will lead back to the woman who hired him

There was always something slightly dangerous about Joan. So, when she turns up at private inves­tigator Henry Kimball's office asking him to investigate her husband, he can't help feeling ill at ease. Just the sight of her stirs up a chilling memory: He knew Joan in his previous life as a high school English teacher, when he was at the center of a tragedy.

Now Joan needs his help in proving that her husband is cheating. But what should be a simple case of infidelity becomes much more complicated when Kimball finds two bodies in an uninhabited suburban home with a FOR SALE sign out front. Suddenly it feels like the past is repeating itself, and Henry must go back to one of the worst days of his life to uncover the truth.

Is it possible that Joan knows something about that day, something she's hidden all these years? Could there still be a killer out there, someone who believes they have gotten away with murder? Henry is determined to find out, enlisting help from his old nemesis Lily Kintner--but as he steps closer to the truth, a murderer is getting closer to him, and in this hair-raising game of cat and mouse only one of them will survive.

The Kind Worth Saving

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Stuart Turton

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

"Agatha Christie meets Groundhog Day...quite unlike anything I've ever read, and altogether triumphant." -- A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Woman in the Window Shortlisted for the Costa Award One of Stylist Magazine's 20 Must-Read Books of 2018 One of Harper's Bazaar's 10 Must-Read Books of 2018 One of Guardian's Best Books of 2018 The Rules of Blackheath Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let's begin... *** Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others... The most inventive debut of the year twists together a mystery of such unexpected creativity it will leave readers guessing until the very last page.

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

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Josh Winning

In this incendiary mash-up of horror and suspense, a notorious slasher film is remade…and the curse that haunted it is reawakened. Arriving in L.A. to visit the set of a new streaming horror series, journalist Laura Warren witnesses a man jumping from a bridge, landing right behind her car. Here we go, she thinks. It’s started. Because the series she’s reporting on is a remake of a ’90s horror flick. A cursed ’90s horror flick, which she starred in as a child—and has been running from her whole life. In The Guesthouse, Laura played the little girl with the terrifying gift to tell people how the Needle Man would kill them. When eight of the cast and crew died in ways that eerily mirrored the movie’s on-screen deaths, the film became a cult classic—and ruined her life. Leaving it behind, Laura changed her name and her accent, dyed her hair, and moved across the Atlantic. But some scripts don’t want to stay buried. Now, as the body count rises again, Laura finds herself on the run with her aspiring actress sister and a jaded psychic, hoping to end the curse once and for all—and to stay out of the Needle Man’s lethal reach.

Burn the Negative

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Jason Mott

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER*** Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction Longlisted for the 2022 Carnegie Medal Fiction, the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books you Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of The NY Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021 An astounding work of fiction from a New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters’ stories build and build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America. Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists it truly becomes its title.

Hell of a Book

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Stephen Graham Jones

In her quickly gentrifying rural lake town Jade sees recent events only her encyclopedic knowledge of horror films could have prepared her for in this latest novel from the Jordan Peele of horror literature, New York Times bestselling author Stephen Graham Jones. “Some girls just don’t know how to die…” Shirley Jackson meets Friday the 13th in My Heart Is a Chainsaw, written by the author of The Only Good Indians Stephen Graham Jones, called “a literary master” by National Book Award winner Tananarive Due and “one of our most talented living writers” by Tommy Orange. Alma Katsu calls My Heart Is a Chainsaw “a homage to slasher films that also manages to defy and transcend genre.” On the surface is a story of murder in small-town America. But beneath is its beating heart: a biting critique of American colonialism, Indigenous displacement, and gentrification, and a heartbreaking portrait of a broken young girl who uses horror movies to cope with the horror of her own life. Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies…especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. And Jade narrates the quirky history of Proofrock as if it is one of those movies. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold. Yet, even as Jade drags us into her dark fever dream, a surprising and intimate portrait emerges…a portrait of the scared and traumatized little girl beneath the Jason Voorhees mask: angry, yes, but also a girl who easily cries, fiercely loves, and desperately wants a home. A girl whose feelings are too big for her body. My Heart Is a Chainsaw is her story, her homage to horror and revenge and triumph.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw

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Kathleen Glasgow

Liz Lawson

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Who killed Brooke Donovan? It's the biggest mystery of the summer, and everyone in Castle Cove thinks it's the wrong guy. Fans of One of Us Is Lying and Riverdale can't miss this page-turning who-done-it that's sure to be the next must read Young Adult thriller!

Last summer, Alice Ogilvie's basketball-star boyfriend Steve dumped her. Then she disappeared for five days. She's not talking, so where she went and what happened to her is the biggest mystery in Castle Cove. Or it was, at least. But now, another one of Steve's girlfriends has vanished: Brooke Donovan, Alice's ex-best friend. And it doesn't look like Brooke will be coming back. . .
 
Enter Iris Adams, Alice's tutor. Iris has her own reasons for wanting to disappear, though unlike Alice, she doesn't have the money or the means. That could be changed by the hefty reward Brooke's grandmother is offering to anyone who can share information about her granddaughter's whereabouts. The police are convinced Steve is the culprit, but Alice isn't so sure, and with Iris on her side, she just might be able to prove her theory.
 
In order to get the reward and prove Steve's innocence, they need to figure out who killed Brooke Donovan. And luckily Alice has exactly what they need--the complete works of Agatha Christie. If there's anyone that can teach the girls how to solve a mystery it's the master herself. But the town of Castle Cove holds many secrets, and Alice and Iris have no idea how much danger they're about to walk into. 

The Agathas

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Alex Finlay

From the author of the breakout thriller Every Last Fear, comes Alex Finlay's electrifying next novel The Night Shift, about a pair of small-town murders fifteen years apart—and the ties that bind them. “The night was expected to bring tragedy.” So begins one of the most highly-anticipated thrillers in recent years. It’s New Year’s Eve 1999. Y2K is expected to end in chaos: planes falling from the sky, elevators plunging to earth, world markets collapsing. A digital apocalypse. None of that happens. But at a Blockbuster Video in New Jersey, four teenagers working late at the store are attacked. Only one inexplicably survives. Police quickly identify a suspect, the boyfriend of one of the victims, who flees and is never seen again. Fifteen years later, more teenage employees are attacked at an ice cream store in the same town, and again only one makes it out alive. In the aftermath of the latest crime, three lives intersect: the lone survivor of the Blockbuster massacre who’s forced to relive the horrors of her tragedy; the brother of the fugitive accused, who’s convinced the police have the wrong suspect; and FBI agent Sarah Keller who must delve into the secrets of both nights—stirring up memories of teen love and lies—to uncover the truth about murders on the night shift. Twisty, poignant, and redemptive, The Night Shift is a story about the legacy of trauma and how the broken can come out on the other side, and it solidifies Finlay as one of the new leading voices in the world of thrillers.

The Night Shift

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Diane Marie Brown

A Today Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick



"Propulsive and poignant, Black Candle Women concocts an intoxicating potion of warmth, wisdom, and wonder." --Ava DuVernay



A warm and wry family drama with a magical twist about four generations of Black women, a family curse, and one very complicated year of heartache, miscommunication, and learning to let go.



Generations of Montrose women--Augusta, Victoria, Willow--have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is an unspoken bond between them.



But when seventeen-year-old Nickie Montrose brings home a boy for the first time, their quiet lives are thrown into disarray. For the other women have been withholding a secret from Nickie that will end her relationship before it's even begun: the decades-old family curse that any person they fall in love with dies.



Their surprise guest forces each woman to reckon with her own past choices and mistakes. And as new truths about the curse emerge, the family is set on a collision course dating back to a Voodoo shop in 1950s New Orleans's French Quarter--where a hidden story in a mysterious book may just hold the answers they seek in life and in love...



"Richly imagined and elegantly told, with plenty of satisfying secrets, heartaches, and twists."

--Sadeqa Johnson, New York Times bestselling author of Yellow Wife and The House of Eve

Black Candle Women

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Jahmal Mayfield

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

"A fresh and fierce new voice to crime fiction...a stunning book that takes the reader on an intense and harrowing journey that is truly unforgettable. Consider me a big fan." — Don Winslow, New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel, The Force and City on Fire "Jahmal Mayfield roars to the top of the writer-to-watch list with this sizzling debut. Smoke Kings is straight fire. Every page simmers with an undercurrent of rage, each line a hard dose of smoldering truth. I can't wait to see what Mayfield does next." - Eli Cranor, Edgar Award Winning Novelist of Don't Know Tough In the vein of Get Out and Razorblade Tears, a feast of noir fiction and probing social commentary that asks us to consider what would happen if reparations were finally charged and exacted. Nate Evers, a young black political activist, struggles with rage as his people are still being killed in the streets 62 years after Emmett Till. When his little cousin is murdered, Nate shuns the graffiti murals, candlelight vigils, and Twitter hashtags that are commonplace after these senseless deaths. Instead, he leads 3 grief-stricken friends on a mission of retribution, kidnapping the descendants of long-ago perpetrators of hate crimes, confronting the targets with their racist lineages, and forcing them to pay reparations to a community fund. For 3 of the group members, the results mean justice; for Nate – pure revenge. Not all targets go quietly into the night, though, and Nate and his friends' world spirals out of control when they confront the wrong man. Now the leader of a white supremacist group is hot on their tail as is a jaded lawman with some disturbingly racist views of his own. As the 4 vigilantes fight to thwart their ruthless pursuers, they’re forced to accept an age-old truth: "Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." Smoke Kings is a powerful and propulsive novel with a diverse and unforgettable cast of characters. Like Steph Cha’s Your House Will Pay it explores decades of racial tensions through a fictional landscape where the line between justice and revenge is blurred.

Smoke Kings

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Vera Kurian

Edgar Award Nominee for Best First Novel



Named a New York Times Best Thriller of 2021



"I devoured this riveting book through a day of travel...My desire to rush to the end clashed with my desire to savor every word. Who would be the last psychopath standing?" -- New York Times Book Review



"Fresh, fast-paced and fiendishly clever! If you love watching true crime and wonder about the psychopaths among us, this is the book for you!" -- Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author



You should never trust a psychopath. But what if you had no choice?



It would be easy to underestimate Chloe Sevre... She's a freshman honor student, a legging-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. She spends her time on yogalates, frat parties and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her. 



Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study of psychopaths--students like herself who lack empathy and can't comprehend emotions like fear or guilt. The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements.



When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan for revenge into action, she'll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths--and everybody knows you should never trust a psychopath.

Never Saw Me Coming

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Sarah Langan

The author of Good Neighbors, “one of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia” (NPR), returns with a provocative and disconcerting novel about a woman questioning her new home in an exclusive company town after a night out goes terribly wrong. Welcome to Plymouth Valley. A company town owned by the powerful conglomerate BetterWorld, it features state-of-the-art houses, pristine country clubs that are always open, and pantries that never go empty. If you’re lucky enough to live here, you never have to leave. Ever. Linda knows her family is lucky that her husband’s job allowed them to move here. She fervently hopes that Plymouth Valley is the glorious fresh start her family so desperately needs. But in a new place filled with the one percent, she’s terribly lonely. Linda is surprised but relieved when the four most important women in Plymouth Valley invite her on a night out. She’s determined to win them over, but things go disastrously wrong when a party-crasher warns Linda she’s in over her head. The events that follow and their explosive aftermath send her on a downward spiral as she questions everything she thought she knew about her new home, BetterWorld, her marriage, and most of all, her own instincts.

A Better World

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Scott Alexander Howard

For fans of David Mitchell, Ruth Ozeki, and Kazuo Ishiguro, an elegant and exhilarating literary speculative novel about an isolated town neighbored by its own past and future, and a young girl who spots two elderly visitors from across the border: the grieving parents of the boy she loves. Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town. Except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness. When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present. Edme––who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile––is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil’s top candidate. Yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future. A breathlessly moving “unique take on the intersection of fate and free will” (Nikki Erlick, author of The Measure), The Other Valley is “a stellar debut, full of heartbreak and hope wrapped up in gorgeous prose” (Christina Dalcher, author of Vox).

The Other Valley

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Find Her

Jeannine Garsee

When Rinn Jacobs moves to a new town she hopes it will be a fresh start-a place where nobody knows about her past. At first, everything goes according to plan. She falls in with the popular girls at her new school and falls for the very cute boy-next-door Nate. But River Hills High School has a secret. The ghost of a girl who died back when Rinn's mom was a student supposedly haunts a hallway. Rinn's not sure she believes it, but when strange things start happening to her friends, Rinn decides there's only one way to know for sure. She needs to ditch her bipolar meds and see what the voices are really trying to say...

Fans of films likeBlack Swanwill be fascinated by this psychological thriller.

The Unquiet

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J. K. Chukwu

An edgy, bitingly funny debut about a queer, half-Nigerian college sophomore who, enraged and exhausted by the racism at her elite college, is determined to reveal the truth about The Unfortunates--the unlucky subset of Black undergrads who Just. Keep. Disappearing.

Sahara is Not Okay. Entering her sophomore year, she already feels like a failure: her body is too much, her love life is nonexistent, she's not Nigerian enough for her family, her grades are subpar, and, well, the few Black classmates she has are vanishing--or dying. Sahara herself is close to giving up: depression has been her longtime "Life Partner." She believes that this narrative--taking the form of an irreverent, no-holds-barred "thesis" addressed to the powerful University Committee that will judge her--may be her last chance to document the Unfortunates' experience before she joins their ranks...But maybe, just maybe, she and her complex community of BIPOC women aren't ready to go out without a fight.

Jaida Smoot

@journalofjaida

Books Listed

Following

Followers

Peter Swanson

The Kind Worth Saving

Stuart Turton

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Josh Winning

Burn the Negative

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Stephen Graham Jones

My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Kathleen Glasgow; Liz Lawson

The Agathas

Alex Finlay

The Night Shift

Diane Marie Brown

Black Candle Women

Jahmal Mayfield

Smoke Kings

Vera Kurian

Never Saw Me Coming

Sarah Langan

A Better World

Scott Alexander Howard

The Other Valley

Lisa Gardener

Find Her

Jeannine Garsee

The Unquiet

J. K. Chukwu

The Unfortunates

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Browse by categories

Peter Swanson

The Kind Worth Saving

Stuart Turton

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

Josh Winning

Burn the Negative

Jason Mott

Hell of a Book

Stephen Graham Jones

My Heart Is a Chainsaw

Kathleen Glasgow; Liz Lawson

The Agathas

Alex Finlay

The Night Shift

Diane Marie Brown

Black Candle Women

Jahmal Mayfield

Smoke Kings

Vera Kurian

Never Saw Me Coming

Sarah Langan

A Better World

Scott Alexander Howard

The Other Valley

Lisa Gardener

Find Her

Jeannine Garsee

The Unquiet

J. K. Chukwu

The Unfortunates

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