Having Read That with Brian Vakulskas

Author: Jennifer Donnelly

Book: BEASTLY BEAUTY

Publishing: Scholastic Press (May 7, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

From New York Times bestselling, award-winning author Jennifer Donnelly comes a revolutionary, gender-swapped retelling of Beauty and the Beast that will forever change how you think about beauty, power, and what it really means to follow your heart.

What makes a girl “beastly?” Is it having too much ambition? Being too proud? Taking up too much space? Or is it just wanting something, anything, too badly?

That’s the problem Arabella faces when she makes her debut in society. Her parents want her to be sweet and compliant so she can marry well, but try as she might, Arabella can’t extinguish the fire burning inside her — the source of her deepest wishes, her wildest dreams.

When an attempt to suppress her emotions tragically backfires, a mysterious figure punishes Arabella with a curse, dooming her and everyone she cares about, trapping them in the castle. As the years pass, Arabella abandons hope. The curse is her fault — after all, there’s nothing more “beastly” than a girl who expresses her anger — and the only way to break it is to find a boy who loves her for her true self: a cruel task for a girl who’s been told she’s impossible to love.

When a handsome thief named Beau makes his way into the castle, the captive servants are thrilled, convinced he is the one to break the curse. But Beau — spooked by the castle’s strange and forbidding ladies-in-waiting, and by the malevolent presence that stalks its corridors at night — only wants to escape. He learned long ago that love is only an illusion. If Beau and Arabella have any hope of breaking the curse, they must learn to trust their wounded hearts, and realize that the cruelest prisons of all are the ones we build for ourselves.

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Author: Caroline Cleveland

Book: WHEN CICADAS CRY: A Novel

Publishing: Union Square & Co. (May 7, 2024)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

A high-profile murder case—A white woman has been bludgeoned to death with an altar cross in a rural church on Cicada Road in Walterboro, South Carolina. Sam Jenkins, a Black man, is found covered in blood, kneeling over the body. In a state already roiling with racial tension, this is not only a murder case, but a powder keg.

A haunting cold case—Two young women are murdered on quiet Edisto Beach, an hour southeast of Walterboro, and the killer disappears without a trace. Thirty-four years later the mystery remains unsolved. Could there be a connection to Stander’s case?

A killer who’s watching—Stander takes on Jenkins’s defense, but he’s up against a formidable solicitor with powerful allies. Worse, his client is hiding a bombshell secret. When Addie Stone reopens the cold case, she discovers more long-buried secrets in this small town. Would someone kill again to keep them?

Ideal for fans of mystery, suspense, and thrillers in the vein of Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls and Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark, as well as for readers who followed the high-profile Murdaugh murder trial, held in the same small town as in When Cicadas Cry.

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Author: Mike Papantonio (with Christopher Paulos)

Book: SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY: A Legal Thriller

Publishing: Arcade (March 19, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

“The purpose of the lawsuit is to fully expose the bank’s willing support to groups that are killing Americans—and others—overseas.” This announcement by attorney Nicholas “Deke” Deketomis sets up the gladiatorial arena between Big Banking and a team of well-meaning lawyers.

The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars introduced the concept of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) and EFPs (Explosively Formed Penetrators) that seriously maim or kill. It appears that these bombs are still being made and utilized by terrorists overseas. Who is funding them? Could it possibly be a large global bank with a major branch in New York? Is a reverse money laundering scheme in place that allows money transactions to bypass Department of Justice sanctions?

Deke and his colleagues—co-counsel Michael Carey and investigators Carol Morris and Jake Rutledge—set out to uncover the deceit and bring the white collar criminals to justice. With the help of Michael’s friend and war veteran, Joel Hartbeck—who first blows the whistle against the bank—the Deketomis team quickly discovers that they may have tackled more than they bargained for. A dangerous, well-funded paramilitary group might be involved in protecting the bank’s interests, and Hartbeck soon goes missing. As Deke’s lawsuit progresses, the sudden appearance of IEDs and EFPs on US highways cause death and destruction. Who is behind this evil?

Readers who devour the financial-action-legal thrillers of Joseph Finder, Stephen Frey, and James Grippando will enjoy Suspicious Activity.

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Author: Philip Cioffari

Book: NIGHT AND ITS LONGINGS

Publishing: Livingston Press (March 26, 2024)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

Jake Garrett, a writer living in New York’s Greenwich Village, is paid a surprising late-night visit from the husband whose wife, Vera, Jake had an affair with ten years earlier. Even more surprising: the husband asks Jake to help find her, for she’s disappeared. Jake is thrust back into a world he thought had been lost to him forever. Jake’s undying love for Vera propels his search for her through the night-time streets of the city and, finally, to the remote beaches of the Carolina coast. This is a tale of lost love, adultery, and crime told in a taut, lyrical style—keeping the love story and the mystery inseparably intertwined. At its heart pulses the greatest mystery of all: the Self—why we do what we do, how we make amends for a life gone wrong, and how in the darkness of night, we see ourselves in the clearest light.

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Author: Lisa Gardner

Book: STILL SEE YOU EVERYWHERE: A Novel

Publishing: Grand Central Publishing (March 12, 2024)

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

My name is Frankie Elkin, and finding missing people is what I do.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Gardner comes a harrowing locked-room style thriller set on a remote island. Frankie Elkin is an expert at finding missing people, but not even she could have anticipated this latest request—to locate the long-lost sister of a female serial killer facing execution in three weeks’ time.

“The very definition of the word unputdownable.” — Tess Gerritsen

Frankie Elkin is an expert at finding the missing persons that the rest of the world has forgotten, but even she couldn’t have anticipated this latest request—to locate the long-lost sister of a female serial killer facing execution in three weeks’ time.

She has called herself “death,” but people called her the devil. 

The case was sensational. Kaylee Pierson had confessed from the very beginning, waived all appeals. Despite the media’s chronicling of her tragic circumstances—the childhood spent with a violent father—no one could find sympathy for “the Beautiful Butcher” who had led eighteen men home from bars before viciously slitting their throats.

When was the last time your search ended with finding the living? 

Unable to resist the chance for a rescue, Frankie takes on Pierson’s request. Twelve years ago, five-year-old Leilani went missing in Hawaii. The main suspect? Pierson’s tech mogul ex-boyfriend, Sanders MacManus. Now, on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific—the site of MacManus’s latest vanity project—fresh evidence has appeared. In order to learn the truth and possibly save a young woman’s life, Frankie must go undercover at the isolated base camp. Her challenge: A dozen strangers. Countless dangerous secrets. Zero means of calling for help. And then the storm rolls in…

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Author: Ann E. Burg

Book: FORCE OF NATURE: A Novel of Rachel Carson

Publishing: ‎ Scholastic Press (March 5, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

A beautiful and hopeful story of how a young impassioned naturalist grows up to change the world. For everyone who cares about our fragile planet.

Rachel was a girl who loved

science and the sea,

books and writing

and all the creatures of the world.

Rachel was quiet,

a listener by nature.

But when she saw problems,

she could not remain silent.

Some people thought girls

shouldn’t be scientists.

They thought girls

shouldn’t use their voices

to question or challenge,

even to protect

all the creatures of the world.

Luckily Rachel didn’t listen

to them.

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Author: Steve Berry

Book: THE ATLAS MANEUVER (A Cotton Malone Novel)

Publishing: Grand Central Publishing (February 20, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

From celebrated New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry comes the latest Cotton Malone adventure, in which Cotton unravels a mystery from World War II involving a legendary lost treasure, worth billions, known as Yamashita’s Gold.

1945. In the waning months of World War II, Japan hid vast quantities of gold and other stolen valuables in boobytrapped underground caches all across the Philippines. By 1947 some of that loot was recovered, not by treasure hunters, but by the United States government, which told no one about the find. Instead, those assets were stamped classified, shipped to Europe, and secretly assimilated into something called the Black Eagle Trust.

Present day. Retired Justice Department operative, Cotton Malone, is in Switzerland doing a favor for a friend. But what was supposed to be a simple operation turns violent and Cotton is thrust into a war between the world’s oldest bank and the CIA, a battle that directly involves the Black Eagle Trust. He quickly discovers that everything hinges on a woman from his past, who suddenly reappears harboring a host of explosive secrets centering around bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is being quietly weaponized, readied for an assault on the world’s financial systems, a calculated move that will have devastating consequences. Cotton has no choice. He has to act. But at what cost?

From the stolid banking halls of Luxembourg, to the secret vaults of Switzerland, and finally up into the treacherous mountains of southern Morocco, Cotton Malone is stymied at every turn.  Each move he makes seems wrong, and nothing works, until he finally comes face-to-face with the Atlas Maneuver.

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Author: C.J. Box

Book: THREE-INCH TEETH: A Joe Pickett Novel

Publishing: ‎ G.P. Putnam’s Sons (February 27, 2024)

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Synopsis (from the Publisher):

A rogue grizzly bear has gone on a rampage—killing, among others, the potential fiancé of Joe’s daughter. At the same time, Dallas Cates, who Joe helped lock up years ago, is released from prison with a special list tattooed on his skin. He wants revenge on the people who sent him away: the six people he blames for the deaths of his entire family and the loss of his reputation and property.

Using the grizzly attacks as cover, Cates sets out to methodically check off his list. The problem is, both Nate Romanowski and Joe Pickett are on it.

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Author: Sheriff Tony Thompson MPA-CJ

Book: ANYPLACE BUT HERE: The Uncomfortable Convergence Between Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System

Publishing: Hog Press (December 21, 2023)

CLICK HERE to buy the book!

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

If someone had told me in 2008 that the single most time-consuming issue facing me as one of the newest of America’s three thousand-and-eighty-one sheriffs would be mental health, I would have laughed. I was the SWAT team leader. I was a drug education officer on patrol and a street-level narcotics interdiction officer for a larger (by Iowa standards) sheriff’s office. I would do the occasional court-ordered, emergency mental health committal and the random transport from one health care facility to another mental health facility on a judge’s order from time to time. But that was the extent of my engagement with real, actual, and actionable knowledge of law enforcement and mental health care as a unit. Sure, you would see the news about the mentally ill, you’d encounter the occasional ‘crazy’ guy or gal, and you’d pray that you never had to encounter someone on patrol who wanted a ‘suicide-by-cop’ scenario to play out in real life.

[…]

Today, mental illness and how it intersects with my duties as one of Iowa’s ninety-nine elected sheriffs influences my obligations on a daily basis. I manage nearly three-hundred residential beds in our jail and over sixty percent of them are occupied by someone with a significant mental health diagnosis. The number of emergency mental health committals have steadily risen since I took office in 2009; and our state has slowly and steadily ‘alleviated’ itself of its obligations in the mental health care arena, opting instead to delegate that responsibility down to the counties or mental health regions for which they provide minimal financial or other kinds of supports. They have shut down state run mental health hospitals, privatized mental health care insurance, decentralized the Department of Human Services, and gutted both funding and staffing for mental health care over the past twenty years to create a perfect storm of convergence whereby a nationwide crisis has become a ‘hometown doorstep issue’ for my colleagues and those of us in law enforcement.

[…]

In America today, the fastest growing population in prison is not Blacks, Hispanics, or toothless methamphetamine addicts…it is the mentally ill. We are criminalizing our brothers and our sisters, our neighbors and our friends at an alarming and increasing pace…and are we not challenged to be their keepers? At a truly visceral level, this problem perplexes me to my very being. I am hurt and disappointed, no, perhaps that is too small an assertion for where I find myself standing as a sheriff. Disappointed is a father when a child forgets to pick up the Legos and you ‘find’ them at 11:00pm on your way to the bathroom, stuck to the bottom pad of your left foot. I am not disappointed, I am disrespected. That is perhaps closer to the feelings of frustration, rage, anger, insult, and the hundreds of other feelings that boil just beneath the surface of my calm façade as a law enforcement administrator. You see, I’ve watched legislators pass gun bills that no one really wanted in just one session, yet for twenty years in my state we’ve tried to reform mental health delivery systems that nearly every state citizen recognizes is necessary, to no avail.

[…]

If this book helps to add fuel to someone’s efforts, if my words provide credence to a person’s argument of need for support, or bolsters strength in the observations regarding the importance of mental health reform, great! If something in my stories and narrations cause someone to pay attention and listen to the choir that is likely reading this, giving their real-life experiences more credibility, then all my efforts are well worth it. My goal is to simply champion the message that change must happen. And we can all be those champions of change.

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Author: Mark Greaney

Book: THE CHAOS AGENT: A Gray Man Novel

Publishing: Berkley (February 20, 2024)

CLICK HERE to buy the book!

Synopsis (from the Publisher):

Artificial intelligence leads to shockingly real danger for the Gray Man in this latest entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.

A car accident in Japan.

A drowning in Seoul.

A home invasion in Boston.

Someone is killing the world’s leading experts on robotics and artificial intelligence. Is it a tech company trying to eliminate the competition or is it something even more sinister?

After all, artificial intelligence may be the deadliest battlefield gamechanger since the creation of gunpowder. The first nation to field weapons that can act at the speed of computer commands will rule the battlefield.

It’s an irresistible lure for most, but not for the Gray Man. His quest for a quiet life has led him to Central America where he and his lover, Zoya Zakharova, have assumed new identities. With a list of enemies that  includes billionaires, terrorists, and governments, they need to keep a low profile, but the world’s deadliest assassin can’t expect to hide out forever.

Eventually, they’re tracked down and offered a job by an old acquaintance of Zoya’s. He needs their help extracting a Russian scientist who is on the kill list. They reject the offer, but just being seen with him is enough to put assassins on their trail.

Now, they’re back on the run, but no matter which way they turn, it’s clear that whoever’s tracking them is always going to be one step ahead. Since flight’s no longer possible, fight is the only option left, and no one fights dirtier than the Gray Man.

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