Jason Matthews

4.4 stars on Amazon 3.9 on Goodreads

Amazon Editor’s pick: Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense 

Book 1 of The Red Sparrow trilogy 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

North Carolina

A Novel

Includes an excerpt of: Palace of treason.

Red Sparrow

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Jasmine Aimaq

4.2 stars on Amazon and 3.7 on Goodreads

Amazon Editor’s pick: Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Jasmine Aimaq's stunning debut explores Afghanistan on the eve of a violent revolution and the far-reaching consequences of a young Kochi girl's tragic death.

Afghanistan, 1970s. Born to an American mother and a late Afghan war hero, Daniel Sajadi has spent his life navigating a complex identity. After years in Los Angeles, he is returning home to Kabul at the helm of a US foreign aid agency dedicated to eradicating the poppy fields that feed the world's opiate addiction.
   
But on the drive out of Kabul for an anniversary trip with his wife, Daniel accidentally hits and kills a young Kochi girl named Telaya. He is let off with a nominal fine, in part because nomad tribes are ignored in the eyes of the law, but also because a mysterious witness named Taj Maleki intercedes on his behalf. Wracked with guilt and visions of Telaya, Daniel begins to unravel, running from his crumbling marriage and escalating threats from Taj, who turns out to be a powerful opium khan willing to go to extremes to save his poppies.
 
This groundbreaking literary thriller reveals the invisible lines between criminal enterprises and political regimes--and one man's search for meaning at the heart of a violent revolution.

The Opium Prince

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Ellis Avery

Agreeing to model nude for Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka to avoid prostitution in 1927 Paris, young American Rafaela Fano inspires the artist's most iconic Jazz Age images and becomes her lover while discovering darker truths about Tamara's private life. By the award-winning author of The Teahouse Fire.

The Last Nude

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Jeremiah Healy

4.4 stars on Amazon and 3.6 on Goodreads

A John Francis Cuddy mystery series book 13 

While investigating the murder of his friend's granddaughter, P.I. Francis Cuddy soon finds he'll have to evade not only a killer, but a personal freefall into the ultimate human darkness.

Spiral

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Mark Winegardner

4.2 stars on Amazon and 3.6 on Goodreads

Book 1 of The Godfather Returns series 

The missing years from the greatest crime saga of all time

A sequel to Mario Puzo's blockbuster novel, The Godfather, continues the saga of the Corleone family, beginning in 1955 and recounting the events that occurred between the end of the original novel and the episodes chronicled in Coppola's movie sequels. 350,000 first printing.

The Godfather Returns

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Laura Joh Rowland

4.4 stars on Amazon and 3.9 on Goodreads

Book 13 of Sano Ichiro series 

Japan, March 1700. Near a Shinto shrine in the hills, a windstorm knocks down a tree to uncover a human skeleton, long buried and forgotten. Meanwhile, in the nearby city of Edo, troops ambush and attack Lady Reiko, the wife of Sano Ichiro, the samurai detective who has risen to power and influence in the shogun's court. The troops who attacked Reiko appear to belong to Sano's fiercest enemy, Lord Matsudaira, who denies all responsibility. But if the rivals are not to blame for each other's misfortune, who is?
Just as Sano's strife with Matsudaira begins to escalate to the brink of war, the shogun orders Sano to investigate the origins of the mysterious skeleton, buried with swords that identify it as belonging to the shogun's cousin, who disappeared forty years earlier on the night that a cursed kimono touched off a fire that nearly destroyed the city.
Suddenly, Sano and Reiko are forced to confront dangerous, long-buried secrets that expose Sano's own mother as the possible culprit. The shogun gives Sano and Reiko just three days to clear her name--or risk losing not only their position at court but their families' lives.

The Fire Kimono

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Ben Sanders

4.0 stars on Amazon and 3.6 stars on Goodreads

Book 1 of Marshall Grade series 

A former undercover cop now in witness protection finds himself pulled into the search for a missing woman; film rights sold to Warner Bros with Bradley Cooper attached to star and produce.

American Blood

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Lawrence Wright

4.3 stars on Amazon and 3.8 on Goodreads

Goodreads Choice Award: Nominee for Best Science Fiction 2020

"At an internment camp in Indonesia, within one week, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When the microbiologist and epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will soon have staggering repercussions across the globe: an infected man is on his way to join the millions of worshippers in the annual Hajj to Mecca. Now, Henry joins forces with a Saudi doctor and prince in an attempt to quarantine the entire host of pilgrims in the holy city"--

The End of October

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Phoebe Wynne

Phoebe Wynne's Madam is a riveting, modern gothic debut with shades of The Secret History, The Stepford Wives, and a dash of Circe, set at a secretive all girls’ boarding school perched on a craggy Scottish peninsula. They want our silence... They want our obedience... Let them see our fire burn For 150 years, high above rocky Scottish cliffs, Caldonbrae Hall has sat untouched, a beacon of excellence in an old ancestral castle. A boarding school for girls, it promises that the young women lucky enough to be admitted will emerge “resilient and ready to serve society.” Into its illustrious midst steps Rose Christie: a 26-year-old Classics teacher, Caldonbrae’s new head of the department, and the first hire for the school in over a decade. At first, Rose is overwhelmed to be invited into this institution, whose prestige is unrivaled. But she quickly discovers that behind the school’s elitist veneer lies an impenetrable, starkly traditional culture that she struggles to reconcile with her modernist beliefs--not to mention her commitment to educating “girls for the future.” It also doesn’t take long for Rose to suspect that there’s more to the secret circumstances surrounding the abrupt departure of her predecessor--a woman whose ghost lingers everywhere--than anyone is willing to let on. In her search for this mysterious former teacher, Rose instead uncovers the darkness that beats at the heart of Caldonbrae, forcing her to confront the true extent of the school’s nefarious purpose, and her own role in perpetuating it. A darkly feminist tale pitched against a haunting backdrop, and populated by an electrifying cast of heroines, Madam will keep readers engrossed until the breathtaking conclusion.

Madam

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Pete Hamill

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Moving from Ireland to New York City in 1741, Cormac O'Connor witnesses the city's transformation into a thriving metropolis while he explores the mysteries of time, loss, and love. By the author of Snow in August and A Drinking Life. 150,000 first printing.

Forever

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Rich Shapero

Take a delirious hyper-metaphorical ride with a love triangle into a fiery cosmos. Shapero’s outer space uncannily mirrors inner space, daring us to ditch our expectations and probe the depths of human desire.

Rin, Tongue and Dorner

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Rebecca Solnit

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography “An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood “A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire Messud, Harper's “Nobody who reads it will ever think of Nineteen Eighty-Four in quite the same way.” —Vogue A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world “In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power. Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit’s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.

Orwell's Roses

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Christopher Rice

Four high-school friends discover the fragile boundaries between friendship and betrayal as they are torn apart by passion, envy, dark secrets, and two violent deaths, as the casual cruelties of adolescence are transformed into murder.

A Density of Souls

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James Lee Burke

4.2 stars on Amazon and 4.0 on Goodreads

Book 3 of Hackberry Holland series 

Amazon’s Editors pick: Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Interviewing an alcoholic Native American who witnessed a murder along the Texas-Mexico border, Sheriff Hack Holland and his deputy, Sam Tibbs, recognize the work of serial killer Preacher Jack Collins in an investigation that is assisted by the enigmatic Anton Ling.

Feast Day of Fools

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Selden Edwards

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The exiled scion of a prominent Boston banking family, forty-seven-year-old Wheeler Burden is living in 1988 San Francisco until he is mysteriously transported to fin de sicle Vienna, a city that he finds strangely familiar, where he finds a mentor in Sigmund Freud, falls in love with a young American woman, and gains insight into the war-hero father he never knew. A first novel. 100,000 first printing.

The Little Book

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Albert L. French

A mesmerizing tale of passion, race and tragedy in a small mid-century Southern town by the acclaimed author of Billy. In Suppy, North Carolina, Holly is a young white girl from the wrong side of the tracks whose lonely, listless world is transformed when she falls in love with a black soldier. The town's savage response to their romance forces the lovers to attempt an escape and leaves no doubt as to the consequences of crossing prescribed boundaries.

Holly

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Katharine McMahon

The #1 UK bestseller comes to America— a sweeping historical novel about love, war, betrayal, and discovery. In 1854, beautiful, adventurous Rosa Barr travels to the Crimean battlefield with Florence Nightingale’s nursing corps. A headstrong idealist, longing to break out of the rigid confines of life as a young lady, Rosa is determined to make a difference in the world. For Mariella Lingwood, Rosa’s cousin, the war is contained within the pages of her scrapbook, in her London sewing circle, and in the letters she receives from her fiancé, Henry—a celebrated surgeon who has also volunteered to work within the shadow of the guns. When Henry falls ill and is sent to recuperate in Italy, Mariella impulsively decides she must go to him. But upon her arrival at his lodgings, she makes a heartbreaking discovery: Rosa has disappeared without a trace. Following the trail of her elusive cousin, Mariella’s epic journey takes her from the domestic restraint of Victorian London to the ravaged landscape of the Crimea and the tragic city of Sebastopol, where she encounters Rosa’s dashing stepbrother, a reckless cavalry officer whose complex past —and future—is inextricably bound up with her own. As Mariella’s quest leads her deeper into the dark heart of the conflict, her ordered world begins to crumble and she finds she has much to learn about secrecy, faithfulness, and love.

The Rose of Sebastopol

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Mark Stanleigh Morris

A powerfully imaginative coming-of-age story seasoned with hooligan humor, this inspiring account of a young man's quest for God is nestled in the central theme of forgiveness and salvation.

Billy Goat Hill

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Terri Blackstock

4.5 stars on Amazon and 4.2 on Goodreads

Book 1 of Moonlighters series

Three sisters--a blogger, a cab driver, and a stay-at home mom--investigate to try and clear their brother's name after he is accused of murder.

Truth Stained Lies

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Mark Billingham

4.2 stars on Amazon and 4.0 on Goodreads

Book 11 of  Tom Thorne series 

"It's been twenty-five years since Tom Thorne last went to work wearing the "Queen's cloth" but now, having stepped out of line once too often, he's back in uniform. He's no longer a detective, and he hates it."

The Dying Hours

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Stephen Amidon

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM VERTICAL ENTERTAINMENT It's the spring of 2001. Drew Hagel has spent the last decade watching things slip away—his marriage, his real estate brokerage, and his beloved daughter, Shannon, now a distant and mysterious high school senior. But as summer approaches, Drew forms an unexpected friendship with Quint Manning, the manager of a secretive hedge fund. Drew sees the friendship leading to vast, frictionless wealth, but Drew doesn't know that Manning has problems of his own: his Midas touch is abandoning him, his restless wife has grown disillusioned, and his hard-drinking son is careening out of control. As the fortunes of the Hagels and the Mannings collide, a terrible accident gives Drew the leverage he needs to stay in the game. At once brilliantly observed and masterfully paced, Human Capital by Stephen Amidon "deftly slices open the rich, corrupt heart of suburban America and lets its dark secrets bleed out" (Elle).

Human Capital

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Jefferson Bass

"The forensic thriller meets a formidable slice of history....A riveting mystery with an intricately emotional conclusion."
--Washington Post

 

Bones of Betrayal is the fourth heart-racing "Body Farm" thriller from the world's top forensic anthropologist. Kathy Reichs calls author Jefferson Bass, "the real deal," and his hero Bill Brockton has already taken his rightful place alongside Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta and the investigators on TV's "C.S.I." In Bones of Betrayal, a hideous murder has links that connect it to World War Two's Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb--adding a fascinating historical element that enriches an already superior crime series.

Bones of Betrayal

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Lolly Winston

Grieving over the death of her husband from cancer, thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton finds her personal and professional world in a shambles and, in an attempt to reinvent her life, moves to Ashland, Oregon, where she encounters a troubled thirteen-year-old girl, a job as the Salad Girl at the local restaurant, and a cute actor as she struggles to recover. A first novel. 150,000 first printing.

Good Grief

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Simon Brett

4.2 stars on Amazon and 3.6 on Goodreads

Book 13 of Charles Paris mysteries series

There is a signed inscription by the author

There is also a cellophane type film that goes around the whole book jacket 

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