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 Missing Half
Two women haunted by their sisters' unsolved disappearances band together in this captivating mystery from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of All Good People Here and host of the #1 true crime podcast Crime Junkie.
Nicole “Nic” Monroe is in a rut. At twenty-four, she lives alone in a dinky apartment in her hometown of Mishawaka, Indiana, she’s just gotten a DWI, and she works the same dead-end job she’s been working since high school, a job she only has because her boss is a family friend and feels sorry for her. Everyone has felt sorry for her for the last seven years—since the day her older sister, Kasey, vanished without a trace.
On the night Kasey went missing, her car was found over a hundred miles from home. The driver’s door was open and her purse was untouched in the seat next to it. The only real clue in her disappearance was Jules Connor, another young woman from the same area who disappeared in the same way, two weeks earlier. But with so little for the police to go on, both their cases eventually went cold.
Nic wants nothing more than to move on—from her sister’s disappearance and the state it’s left her in. But then one day, Jules’s sister, Jenna Connor, walks into her life and offers Nic something she hasn’t felt in a long hope. What follows is a gripping tale of two sisters who will do anything to find their missing halves, even if it means destroying everything they’ve ever known.
Bald-Faced Liar
Living a lie becomes a matter of life and death for a woman hiding from her past in a novel of mounting psychological suspense by the bestselling author of Jane Doe and The Hook.
Traveling nurse Elizabeth May has a promising new home in Santa Cruz. And another new identity. It’s a pattern of reinvention for a woman escaping her traumatic childhood—and hiding from the decades of notoriety and destruction that followed. Invisibility has kept Elizabeth safe. Until now. After all these years, someone sees her for who she is.
Threat by threat, a vengeful stalker is dismantling Elizabeth’s carefully constructed lifetime of lies. And no one in her temporary circle can be trusted—not her fleeting new love interest, not the supportive friend she knows only from online forums, and certainly not the police. They’ve never been there for her.
As fear sharpens to terror, Elizabeth soon discovers something about her past that even she didn’t know. The revelation could finally set her on a path of healing and redemption. Or, now alone in the dark, it could be Elizabeth’s worst nightmare.
This Is Not a Game
A unique locked-room debut with a memorable intergenerational relationship and gaming angle, about a grandmother and granddaughter who are snowed in at a lavish party at a mansion where the host has been murdered, and the unlikely sleuthing pair must draw on a unique skillset to navigate a dangerous game together
Widow Mimi lives on idyllic Mackinac Island where cars are not allowed and a Gibson with three onions at the witching hour is compulsory. Her granddaughter, Addie, is getting over the heartbreak of her fiancé, Brian, dumping her and cutting her out of the deal for the brilliantly successful video game, Murderscape, they invented together (with Addie doing most of the heavy lifting).
When Mimi gets an invitation from local socialite Jane Ireland--a seventysomething narcissist who is having an affair with her son-in-law--to a charity auction, it is the perfect excuse to get Addie to join her for the weekend. What Mimi isn’t telling Addie is that a blackmail threat from Jane looms over the party’s invitation.
In case the scene wasn’t already set for a turbulent weekend, a big storm rolls in, trapping everyone in the mansion. And then, Jane’s body is found. Soon Mimi and Addie are caught in a dangerous game, relying on their skills (Mimi loves a crossword puzzle, and Addie is a brilliant game designer, after all) to narrow down the suspects. When another body turns up, the sleuthing pair realize someone else is playing a deadly game, and they might not survive the night. . . .
Big Chief
There There meets The Night Watchman in this gripping literary debut about power and corruption, family, and facing the ghosts of the past.
Mitch Caddo, a young law school graduate and aspiring political fixer, is an outsider in the homeland of his Anishinaabe ancestors. But alongside his childhood friend, Tribal President Mack Beck, he runs the government of the Passage Rouge Nation, and with it, the tribe’s Golden Eagle Casino and Hotel. On the eve of Mack’s reelection, their tenuous grip on power is threatened by a nationally known activist and politician, Gloria Hawkins, and her young aide, Layla Beck, none other than Mack’s estranged sister and Mitch’s former love. In their struggle for control over Passage Rouge, the campaigns resort to bare-knuckle political gamesmanship, testing the limits of how far they will go—and what they will sacrifice—to win it all.
But when an accident claims the life of Mitch’s mentor, a power broker in the reservation’s political scene, the election slides into chaos and pits Mitch against the only family he has. As relationships strain to their breaking points and a peaceful protest threatens to become an all-consuming riot, Mitch and Layla must work together to stop the reservation’s descent into violence.
Thrilling and timely, Big Chief is an unforgettable story about the search for belonging—to an ancestral and spiritual home, to a family, and to a sovereign people at a moment of great historical importance.
Zeal
The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.
Harlem, 2019. Ardelia and Oliver are hosting their engagement party. As the guests get ready to leave, he hands her a love letter on a yellowing, crumbling piece of paper . . .
Natchez, 1865. Discharged from the Union Army as a free man after the war’s end, Harrison returns to Mississippi to reunite with the woman he loves, Tirzah. Upon his arrival at the Freedmen’s Bureau, though, he catches the eye of a woman working there, who’s determined to thwart his efforts to find his beloved. After tragedy strikes, Harrison resigns himself to a life with her.
Meanwhile in Louisiana, the newly free Tirzah is teaching at the Freedmen’s School, and discovers an advertisement in the local paper looking for her. Though she knows Harrison must have placed it, and longs to find him, the risks of fleeing are too great, and Tirzah chooses the life of seeming security right in front of her.
Spanning over a hundred and fifty years, Morgan Jerkins’s extraordinary novel intertwines the stories of these star-crossed lovers and their descendants. As Tirzah's family moves across the country during the Great Migration, they challenge authority with devastating consequences, while of the legacy of heartbreak and loss continues on in the lives of Harrison's progeny.
When Ardelia meets Oliver, she finds his family’s history is as full of secrets and omissions as her own. Could their connection be a cosmic reconciliation satisfying the unfulfilled desires of their ancestors, or will the weight of the past, present and future tear them apart?
Sweeping, textured, and meticulously researched, Zeal is both a story of how one generation’s choices reverberate through the years and an indelible portrait of an enduring love.
