Meg's Picks: June 2014, part 2

My list of picks today definitely has something for everyone.  Suspense/thrillers, short stories, mysteries, historical fiction, a little science fiction...you name it, I've got it.

I Love You More, by Jennifer Murphy.  Oliver Lane is murdered at his summer home, and his wife Diana seems to be the most likely suspect.  What their twelve-year-old daughter Picasso knows, and what investigators soon uncover, is that Oliver had two other families with two other wives.  And while each of the three women disavow any knowledge of the two "other women" in her husband's life, Picasso also knows all three had met prior to Oliver's death.  I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think this title may be one of the sleeper hits of the summer. 

The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith.  This is J.K. Rowling's second outing in her Cormoran Strike series under the Robert Galbraith pseudonym, following last year's popular debut The Cuckoo's Calling. Here, private detective Strike is called in when novelist Owen Quine goes missing--initially his wife believes he's simply gone off for a few days as is his wont.  But Strike soon discovers that there's much more behind Quine's disappearance: Quine's recently finished manuscript features poisonous pen-portraits of nearly everyone he knows, and the suspect list seems virtually endless.  Sure to be a hit.

FaceOff, by various.  This anthology is truly unprecedented.  Edited by David Baldacci, the collection features eleven short stories--each story has been co-written by a pair of critically acclaimed thriller authors, in which their series characters go head to head.  Intrigued?  Imagine M.J. Rose's Malachai Samuels vs. Lisa Gardner's D.D. Warren, or Paul Madriani vs. Alexandra Cooper by Steve Martini and Linda Fairstein.  Jeffrey Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme vs. John Sandford's Lucas Davenport?  Really, these pairings are fascinating and I am totally intrigued.

Written In My Own Heart’s Blood, by Diana Gabaldon.  Gabaldon continues her long-running series of time travel and history (started in Outlander) with this new installment, which finds the Frasers picking up the pieces in the midst of war's turmoil (this time, the American Revolution) in the wake of a series of upheavals (people coming back from the dead and the proposal of marriage to a Quaker, among other things).  But they can rest easy knowing that daughter Brianna and her family are safe in twentieth-century Scotland.  Or are they?  The series has been popular for over twenty years for a reason, folks.