Beartown by Fredrik Backman: A poignant, charming novel about a forgotten town fractured by scandal, and the amateur hockey team that might just change everything. Fredrik Backman knows that we are forever shaped by the places we call home, and explores what can happen when we carry the heavy weight of other people’s dreams on our shoulders.
Ragdoll by Daniel Cole: When William Fawkes is called to a crime scene, he finds a body is made of the dismembered parts of six victims, sewn together like a puppet. Fawkes must identify the victims, but things gets dicey when his reporter ex-wife anonymously receives photographs from the crime scene, along with a list of six names, and the dates on which the Ragdoll Killer plans to murder them.
The Wife by Alafair Burke: Marrying an economics professor she met while catering an East Hampton dinner party, Angela finds her tragic past coming under scrutiny at the same time she is asked to defend her husband against wrongful accusations.
The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah: Lenora Allbright is thirteen in 1974 when her father Ernt, a former Vietnam POW, convinces her mother to move to remote Kaneq, AK. Ernt is secure in his beliefs, but never was a family less prepared for the reality of cold winters and isolation. Locals want to help out, yet the harsh conditions bring out the worst in Ernt whose paranoia takes over their lives.
Hellbent by Gregg Hurwitz: Taken from a group home at age twelve, Evan Smoak was raised and trained as an off-the-books government assassin: Orphan X. Secret government forces are busy trying to scrub the remaining traces of the Orphan Program. With little time remaining, Evan is given his last assignment: find and protect his last protégé and recruit for the program before someone else does.
Still Me by JoJo Moyes: Louisa Clark arrives in New York ready to start a new life, where she is thrown into the world of the superrich Gopniks: Leonard and his much younger second wife, Agnes, and a never-ending array of household staff and hangers-on. Before long, Lou is mixing in New York high society, where she meets Joshua Ryan, a man who brings with him a whisper of her past.
Gwendy’s Button Box by Stephen King: In the summer of 1974, twelve-year-old Gwendy Peterson encounters a man in black who is there to pass along an obligation for Gwendy that is both fantastic and terrifying: she must take possession of and hide from the rest of the world a small box adorned with buttons and levers. The reward for safeguarding the box will transform her life in ways Gwendy could never imagine, but the price to pay for her failure could very well mean the end of everything.
The Take by Christopher Reich: Simon Riske is a freelance industrial spy who lives a mostly quiet life above his auto garage in central London. He is hired to perform the odd job for a bank, an insurance company, or the British Secret Service, when he isn’t expertly stealing a million-dollar watch off the wrist of a crooked Russian oligarch. Riske has maintained his quiet life by avoiding big, messy jobs; until now.