Meg's Picks: May 2018, part 1

New books from new favorites? Yes, please!

The Favorite Sister, by Jessica Knoll. Knoll's 2015 debut novel, The Luckiest Girl Alive, gained instant recognition among readers who like twisted psychological thrillers like those written by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, etc.). It has also been optioned for film and spent a number of weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. So the buzz surrounding her second novel, The Favorite Sister, is totally understandable. Here, five uber-successful, driven women are cast in a reality series called Goal Diggers, set in New York City. What the producers never imagined was that the season would end in murder... If you like a summer book full of scandal and secrets with a page-turning plot, this should be on your list.

Love and Ruin, by Paula McLain. The author who brought the tumultuous relationship between Ernest Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in The Paris Wife (2011) now returns with the story of Hemingway and his third wife, writer Martha Gelhorn. When she meets Hemingway in Key West in 1936, she is in her late 20s and has just published her first novel; Hemingway is a decade older and still married to his second wife, Pauline. Burned by a previous love affair with a married man, Martha insists that her deepening relationship with Hemingway is purely platonic. When he leaves to write about the civil war in Spain, Gelhorn travels with him and finds her calling as a journalist, even as their affair together begins. But by the time Hemingway divorces Pauline and marries Martha in 1940, she is troubled by his outsize personality, worrying that he will crush her own spirit and career. McLain's faithfulness to fact and timeline and her deft touch with detail make her novels touching and deeply compelling. Fans should put their requests in now. Also available in Large Print.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by Ruth Ware. Ware (The Lying Game, The Woman in Cabin 10, etc.) has been growing steadily in popularity among readers of suspense fiction. On a day that begins like any other, Hal receives a letter bequeathing her a substantial inheritance. While she quickly realizes that the letter was sent to the wrong person, she also knows opportunity when she sees it. As a tarot card reader, she's developed excellent cold reading skills. Perhaps she can claim the money after all? But when she attends the funeral for the deceased, she slowly becomes aware that something is very, very wrong, both about the situation and the inheritance at the center of it all. Told with Ware's signature gothic menace, this is a must for readers who like their summer reads full of chills.