Happy Place
Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college—they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Except, now—for reasons they’re still not discussing—they don’t.
They broke up six months ago. And still haven’t told their best friends.
Which is how they find themselves sharing the largest bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blue week they leave behind their daily lives; have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood; and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.
Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Because the cottage is for sale and this is the last week they’ll all have together in this place. They can’t stand to break their friends’ hearts, and so they’ll play their parts. Harriet will be the driven surgical resident who never starts a fight, and Wyn will be the laid-back charmer who never lets the cracks show. It’s a flawless plan (if you look at it from a great distance and through a pair of sunscreen-smeared sunglasses). After years of being in love, how hard can it be to fake it for one week… in front of those who know you best?
A couple who broke up months ago make a pact to pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry.
The Gift
It’s Christmas Eve and Stella Hansen is broke.
She is so broke that despite working two jobs, she can’t even afford a present for her husband on their first Christmas as man and wife. But then a mysterious storekeeper at a pawn shop offers Stella an intriguing trade.
Stella wants more than anything to buy her husband the Christmas gift of his dreams. But will it come at a terrible price?
The Gift is a gripping Christmas-themed thriller inspired by the classic O. Henry tale, The Gift of the Magi.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new housing development, the last thing they expected to uncover was a human skeleton. Who the skeleton was and how it got buried there were just two of the long-held secrets that had been kept for decades by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side, sharing ambitions and sorrows.
Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, which served the neighborhood's quirky collection of blacks and European immigrants, helped by her husband, Moshe, a Romanian-born theater owner who integrated the town's first dance hall. When the state came looking for a deaf black child, claiming that the boy needed to be institutionalized, Chicken Hill's residents—roused by Chona's kindess and the courage of a local black worker named Nate Timblin—banded together to keep the boy safe.
As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear how much the people of Chicken Hill have to struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America and how damaging bigotry, hypocrisy, and deceit can be to a community. When the truth is revealed about the skeleton, the boy, and the part the town’s establishment played in both, McBride shows that it is love and community—heaven and earth—that ultimately sustain us.
I See You've Called in Dead
“Razor-sharp, darkly comedic, and emotionally piercing. With the satirical bite of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, the introspection of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and the reinvention of Andrew Sean Greer's Less, Kenney’s vivid prose transforms the mundane into unexpected hilarity.”
—Booklist (starred review)
An Indie Next & LibraryReads Pick for April
The Office meets Six Feet Under meets About a Boy in this coming-of-middle-age tale about having a second chance to write your life’s story.
Bud Stanley is an obituary writer who is afraid to live. Yes, his wife recently left him for a “far more interesting” man. Yes, he goes on a particularly awful blind date with a woman who brings her ex. And yes, he has too many glasses of Scotch one night and proceeds to pen and publish his own obituary. The newspaper wants to fire him. But now the company’s system has him listed as dead. And the company can’t fire a dead person. The ensuing fallout forces him to realize that life may be actually worth living.
As Bud awaits his fate at work, his life hangs in the balance. Given another shot by his boss and encouraged by his best friend, Tim, a worldly and wise former art dealer, Bud starts to attend the wakes and funerals of strangers to learn how to live.
Thurber Prize-winner and New York Times bestselling author John Kenney tells a funny, touching story about life and death, about the search for meaning, about finding and never letting go of the preciousness of life.
A Proposal to Die For
A fast-paced, witty, and delightful new mystery about a marriage proposal planner whose biggest job yet is threatened by a dead body (or two).
Jessamine Bricker loves a plan. Contingency plans and pros-and-cons lists are her love language, and because of that, her proposal planning business is thriving. But with rent costs rising at her office building, Jess jumps at the chance to plan a proposal between her snobby high school classmate, Diana, and her very wealthy boyfriend, Trenton Tillard…the Fourth.
Roped into joining Diana’s ”pre-bridal” retreat at the exclusive Golden Ash resort, Jess hopes to fade into the background, get some work done, and maybe find some time to unwind. Their first day is anything but relaxing: Diana is furious about the mountain spa’s lack of cell phone reception, the couple next door argues constantly, and Jess swears she just saw a drug deal go down. To top it all off, she’s warned to stay out of the woods by the gruff and sexy chef, Dean Osbourne. Is this a retreat or a horror movie?
As Jess tries to do her job while placating the bride-to-be and her increasingly over-the-top demands, she spends more and more time with the resort owners, finding herself much more in tune with the laid-back Osbourne family than her social climbing “boss.” Between a meditation garden-related drowning and Jess’s discovery of a body in a sauna, it's clear that deadly secrets abound at the Golden Ash. Now it’s up to Jess to unravel the mysteries here in the mountains—before all her plans are cancelled…permanently.
Two Seconds Too Late (Jeopardy Falls #2)
In the stark but beautiful wilds of northern New Mexico, a luxury spa and couple's retreat turns into a chilling nightmare when a woman vanishes without a trace, just hours after a public fight with her boyfriend. Worried something sinister has happened, her friends reach out to investigator Riley MacLeod, an expert skip tracer, for help. The assignment means going undercover at the retreat, which means pairing up with private investigator Greyson Chadwick. Their partnership ignites a tumultuous mix of attraction and distrust as Riley's unorthodox methods clash with Greyson's meticulous approach.
As they delve deeper into the case and a ruthless hitman is unleashed upon them, Riley and Greyson find themselves fighting not only for justice but for their very survival. Staying one step ahead of danger, the pair discovers a hidden truth that rocks them to the core. In their race against the clock, they can only hope that they're not too late.
With her signature pulse-pounding twists, Dani Pettrey weaves a gripping tale of love and survival in the face of unimaginable danger.
