Summer Reading : New Books! - Fiction

Four new novellas by the master of suspense. In the title story, Holly Gibney must face her fears. In “Mr. Harrigan's Phone,” an intergenerational friendship has a disturbing afterlife. “The Life of Chuck” explores how each of us contains multitudes, and in “Rat,” a struggling writer must contend with the darker side of ambition."

Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business to Charlie. Reluctantly, Charlie has to finish the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains, but with hyper-intelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying hench person at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good. In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.

A raucous journey through contemporary Hawaiian identity and womanhood. This collection follows a cast of mixed native Hawaiian and Japanese women through a landscape of inherited wisdom and the ghosts of colonization. This inruly sexuality and generational memory overflow the postcard image of paradise where the superstitions of the islands take on the weight of truth. Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is both a fierce love letter to Hawaiian identity and mythology, and a searing dispatch from an occupied territory threatening to erupt with violent secrets.

White lies. Dark humor. Deadly consequences. Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars, but Athena's a literary darling, and June is a nobody. When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals Athena's just-finished masterpiece, and sends it to her agent as her own work. As June races to protect her secret she grapples with questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation, as well as the terrifying alienation of social media.

Between 1865 – 1889 while Louella was enslaved on the Montgomery Plantation, she built a kingdom for people who dared to dream of a different way of life. The American Queen weaves together themes of love, hate, hope, trust, and resilience in the face of great turmoil.

When William Waters meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano it's as if the world has lit up around him. But when darkness from William's past surfaces, it results in a rift that changes their lives. Will their love be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?t.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she begins working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium. While there she forms a remarkable friendship with Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus who knows more than anyone can imagine. Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared, and now must use every trick his invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Drawing on lived experience and cultural memory, Norma Dunning’s stories center on modern-day Inuk characters in Tainna. Dunning's characters are united by shared feelings of alienation, displacement and loneliness resulting from their experiences in a hostile land where prejudice, misogyny and inequity are often found hidden in plain sight.

It's the early 1960s and chemist Elizabeth Zott’s all-male team at Hastings Research Institute takes a very unscientific view of equality. After being forced out of her position at Hastings, Zott becomes the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking proves revolutionary because Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.

After the body of a brutally beaten woman is found on a beach in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Detective Osama Ibrahim, along with the help of female coroner Katya, discovers that the victim was a controversial filmmaker and must discern who wanted her dead.