Thursday, June 27, 2019

Meg's Picks: July 2019, part 2

Summer reads come in all shapes and sizes. If your preferences run serious or suspenseful, these might just be what you were looking for!

The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead. Whitehead's 2016 novel The Underground Railroad won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction. So if we're eager to see what comes next, I think that's only natural. Here, the strand of history he's dramatized follows two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim-Crow era Florida, based on an actual reformatory which operated for 111 years. If you prefer your summer reads serious and intense, you cannot miss this.

Lock Every Door, by Riley Sager. Riley Sager is totally a staff darling here at the library. We loved his debut, Final Girls, and his sophomore novel, The Last Time I Lied. We absolutely anticipate a hat-trick with Lock Every Door, in which Jules's new job as an apartment sitter in one of New York's oldest and most glamorous buildings may just cost more than it pays...

Stone Cold Heart, by Caz Frear. Frear is another new favorite, following her stellar suspense debut last summer, Sweet Little Lies, with a second novel featuring Detective Constable Cat Kinsella. She's back at London Metropolitan Police with her wisecracking partner Parnell, both of them trying to avoid the ire of boss DI Kate Steele. It's all business when they catch a case, though, involving a young Australian woman who's turned up dead following a party thrown by her new boss. The lead suspect's alibi is his wife, and she contradicts him, but which one is lying, and why? Murder is only the beginning of the mystery here.

Someone We Know, by Shari Lapena. Following 2018's An Unwanted Guest. Someone has been sneaking into houses, and their inhabitants computers, in a quiet suburb in upstate New York. They've been learning their neighbors' secrets, and perhaps sharing them. Who is he? What might he have learned? After two anonymous letters show up, rumors circulate, suspicions grow, and then a woman is found murdered. How far will these nice, unassuming neighbors go in order to keep their secrets?

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