Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Reading Ahead: April 2015, part 2

You remember last week when I promised that April had lots of suspense and thriller novels scheduled to be released? I wasn't kidding! Check it out!




Gathering Prey, by John Sandford. They call them Travelers. They move from city to city, panhandling, committing no crimes—they just like to stay on the move. And now somebody is killing them. Lucas Davenport’s adopted daughter, Letty, is home from college when she gets a phone call from a woman Traveler she’d befriended in San Francisco. The woman thinks somebody’s killing her friends, she’s afraid she knows who it is, and now her male companion has gone missing. She’s hiding out in North Dakota, and she doesn’t know what to do. Letty tells Lucas she’s going to get her, and, though he suspects Letty’s getting played, he volunteers to go with her. When he hears the woman’s story, though, he begins to think there’s something in it. Little does he know...

The Promise, by Robert Crais. If you want to know what your fellow suspense readers are going to be talking about this spring, I'd bet this is going to be it. Scott James and K-9 partner Maggie, heroes of Crais's Suspect, join forces with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike when the two teams find their cases intertwining. From inner-city drug traffickers to a shadowy group of Afghan war veterans with ties to a terrorist cell, the people they encounter on that trail add up to ever-increasing odds, and soon the four of them are fighting to find a missing woman not only before she is killed . . . but before the same fate happens to one of them.

Blood on Snow, by Jo Nesbo. Many readers are familiar with Nesbo's Harry Hole series, but what you may be missing are the great stand-alone novels, like The Son, that he has also published. Here again he gives readers a stand-alone, and this is one I really can't wait to get a copy of. This is the story of Olav: an extremely talented “fixer” for one of Oslo’s most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has a capacity for love that is as far-reaching as is his gift for murder. He is our straightforward, calm-in-the-face-of-crisis narrator with a storyteller’s hypnotic knack for fantasy. He has an “innate talent for subordination” but running through his veins is a “virus” born of the power over life and death. And while his latest job puts him at the pinnacle of his trade, it may be mutating into his greatest mistake... The perfect antihero, dark psychological fiction? Yes, please!


Every Fifteen Minutes, by Lisa Scottoline. Dr. Eric Parrish is the Chief of the Psychiatric Unit at Havemeyer General Hospital outside of Philadelphia. Recently separated from his wife Alice, he is doing his best as a single Dad to his seven-year-old daughter Hannah. His work seems to be going better than his home life, however. His unit at the hospital has just been named number two in the country and Eric has a devoted staff of doctors and nurses who are as caring as Eric is. But when he takes on a new patient, Eric's entire world begins to crumble. Seventeen-year-old Max has a terminally ill grandmother and is having trouble handling it. That, plus his OCD and violent thoughts about a girl he likes makes Max a high risk patient. Max can't turn off the mental rituals he needs to perform every fifteen minutes that keep him calm. With the pressure mounting, Max just might reach the breaking point. When the girl is found murdered, Max is nowhere to be found. Worried about Max, Eric goes looking for him and puts himself in danger of being seen as a "person of interest" himself. Are these unfortunate events truly random, or is someone working to systematically bring Eric's life crashing down?

I have to say, I had one more title that I'd hoped to share with you, but the publication date has been pushed back by a couple of months. Frustrating! Ah well, more for us to look forward to when the weather's nicer!







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