New Books Hitting Shelves This Week
The Teller of Small Fortunes
Tao is an immigrant fortune teller, traveling between villages with just her trusty mule for company. She only tells "small" fortunes: whether it will hail next week; which boy the barmaid will kiss; when the cow will calve. She knows from bitter experience that big fortunes come with big consequences…
Even if it’s a lonely life, it’s better than the one she left behind. But a small fortune unexpectedly becomes something more when a (semi) reformed thief and an ex-mercenary recruit her into their desperate search for a lost child. Soon, they’re joined by a baker with a "knead" for adventure, and-of course-a slightly magical cat.
Tao starts down a new path with companions as big-hearted as her fortunes are small. But as she lowers her walls, the shadows of her past close in-and she’ll have to decide whether to risk everything to preserve the family she never thought she could have.
Hexed
Venesa Andersen has never been good. She wasn’t good enough for her parents, and she isn’t good enough for the gangster uncle who took her in after they died. But she’s cunning. Beautiful. Dutiful to her uncle’s demands. And she doesn’t have time for a moral compass, anyway. When her runaway cousin returns to their coastal southern town, she brings a man with her…and Venesa soon realizes he’s the only one who’s ever seen her for her.
There’s just one problem: she can never have him.
Enzo “Loverboy” Marino is a wealthy businessman by day and prince of the underworld by night. Underboss to a notorious mafia syndicate, he answers to no one except his father, the strongest don in the Northeast. When he’s tasked with marriage, Enzo doesn’t think twice.
Until he meets his fiancée’s cousin.
Venesa is everything he never knew he wanted, bewitching him with her sultry voice and supple curves. But Enzo learned long ago that for a man like him, life is better without the things you want.
When plans unravel and temptation sings its siren song, they’ll both have to choose what’s more important: duty to their families, or a forbidden love that was never supposed to be.
The Author's Guide to Murder
There’s been a sensational murder at historic Castle Kinloch, a gothic fantasy of grey granite on a remote island in the Highlands of Scotland. Literary superstar Brett Saffron Presley has been found dead-under bizarre circumstances-in the castle tower’s book-lined study. Years ago, Presley purchased the castle as a showpiece for his brand and to lure paying guests with a taste for writerly glamour. Now it seems, the castle has done him in…or, possibly, one of the castle’s guests has. Detective Chief Inspector Euan McIntosh, a local with no love for literary Americans, finds himself with the unenviable task of extracting statements from three American lady novelists.
The prime suspects are Kat de Noir, a slinky erotica writer; Cassie Pringle, a Southern mom of six juggling multiple cozy mystery series; and Emma Endicott, a New England blue blood and author of critically acclaimed historical fiction. The women claim to be best friends writing a book together, but the authors’ stories about how they know Brett Saffron Presley don’t quite line up, and the detective is getting increasingly suspicious.
Why did the authors really come to Castle Kinloch? And what really happened the night of the great Kinloch ceilidh, when Brett Saffron Presley skipped the folk dancing for a rendezvous with death?
The Lake of Lost Girls
It’s 1998, and female students are going missing at Southern State University in North Carolina, but freshman Jessica Fadley, once a bright and responsible student, is going through her own struggles. Just as her life seems to be careening dangerously out of control, she suddenly disappears.
Twenty-four years later, Jessica’s sister Lindsey is desperately searching for answers and uses the momentum of a new chart-topping true crime podcast that focuses on cold cases to guide her own investigation. Soon, interest reaches fever pitch when the bodies of the long-missing women begin turning up at a local lake, which leads Lindsey down a disturbing road of discovery.
In the present, one sister searches to untangle a complicated web of lies.
In the past, the other descends ever deeper into a darkness that will lead to her ultimate fate.
This propulsive and chilling suspense is a sharp examination of sisterhood and the culture of true crime.
Before We Forget Kindness
In the fifth book in the sensational, cozy Before the Coffee Gets Cold series translated from Japanese, the mysterious café where customers arrive hoping to travel back in time welcomes four new guests:
The father who could not allow his daughter to get married
A woman who couldn't give Valentine's Day chocolates to her loved one
A boy who wants to show his smile to his divorced parents
A wife holding a child with no name . . .
They must follow the café's strict rules, however, and come back to the present before their coffee goes cold. Another moving and heartwarming tale from Toshikazu Kawaguchi, in Before we forget kindness our new visitors wish to go back into their past to move on their present, finding closure and comfort so they can embark on a beautiful future.
Misery Hates Company
Miss Marigold Manners may be steeped in the etiquette of her old-money Boston family, but she is also an accomplished, modern woman and an avid student of archaeology who can handle any situation with poise. When the death of her parents leaves her too destitute to pursue her academic career and she receives a letter from a distant relative on Great Misery Island, Marigold decides she must do what any person of superior sense and greater-than-average curiosity would: she mounts her trusty bicycle and heads up the craggy, fog-shrouded coast of New England for a date with fate.
Marigold arrives at Hatchet Farm, a moldering, gothic pile of a house inhabited by relatives so mired in the sins of the past, they have no future. She sets out to modernize the recluses with a brisk, ruthless efficiency, but her well-intentioned plans to manage their lives lead to malice-and murder. Marigold spies a body floating in the stormy waters surrounding the island, and her suspicions immediately turn to her hostile, weapon-wielding relatives when one of the local girls turns up missing. And she might not be the only one.
When another dead body is found in the garden of the estate, Marigold finds herself accused. She must enlist the help of an eccentric, colorful cast of friends and found family to save herself-and everything she holds dear. As secrets are uncovered and lies exposed, the question of “who done it?” turns into “who didn’t do it?” and Marigold must face a truth that shatters her steely poise and shakes her very sense of self.
Kings and Bones
When Murgha’s degenerate father bets their last bit of coin and her in a high-stakes game of kings and bones, she fears she will become the property of the lecherous ambassador. But when the most fearsome dark fae she has ever seen steps into the game and wins the pot, she knows her fate is much worse. She is now owned by the enemy.
Now in the hands of a shadow fae priest with an agenda of his own, Murgha mistrusts his motives and the secrets he keeps. But she realizes quickly that her unexpected fall into the keeping of Vallon isn't so surprising after all. The gods have plans for them both, and their new path together is just the beginning.
Eleanore of Avignon
Provence, 1347. Eleanore (Elea) Blanchet is a young midwife and herbalist with remarkable skills. But as she learned the day her mother died, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is draw attention to herself. She attends patients in her home city of Avignon, spends time with her father and twin sister, gathers herbs in the surrounding woods, and dreams of the freedom to pursue her calling without fear.
In a chance encounter, Elea meets Guigo de Chauliac, the enigmatic personal physician to the powerful Pope Clement, and strikes a deal with him to take her on as his apprentice. Under Chauliac’s tutelage she hones her skills as a healer, combining her knowledge of folk medicine with anatomy, astrology, and surgical techniques.
Then, two pieces of earth-shattering news: the Black Death has made landfall in Europe, and the disgraced Queen Joanna is coming to Avignon to stand trial for her husband’s murder. She is pregnant and in need of a midwife, a role only Elea can fill.
The queen’s childbirth approaches as the plague spreads like wildfire, leaving half the city dead in its wake. The people of Avignon grow desperate for a scapegoat and a group of religious heretics launch a witch hunt, one that could cost Elea-an intelligent, talented, unwed woman-everything.
The Improvisers
Velma Frye is many things. A pilot, a former bootlegger, a well-seasoned traveler, a jazz pianist…and a wielder of celestial magic. She’s also a member of the mystical Rhodes family as well as an investigator for arcane oddities for a magic rights organization, dealing with both simple and complicated cases. And when a pocket watch instigates a magical brawl after one of her flight shows, things become very complicated.
In 1930s America, enchanted items are highly valuable, especially in the waning days of the magical Prohibition. As Velma digs deeper, she discovers the watch is part of a collection of dangerous artifacts manipulating people across the country-and in some cases, leading to their deaths. Something about all this is tickling Velma’s memories, and the more she discovers, the more these seemingly isolated incidents feel as if they’re building to something apocalyptic.
Connecting the dots isn’t easy, though, and further complicating her work is journalist Dillon Harris. He hounds her steps, and while not actively sabotaging her investigation, he also clearly knows more than he lets on. Whether it’s his presence that she finds so vexing or his easygoing charm, that’s a mystery she isn’t interested in solving. Because someone is out there seeding cursed objects with the intent on wreaking havoc, and Velma will have to use every trick in her tool kit, including some well-placed magical improvisation, to win the day.
Revenant-X
The crew of the Artemis - led by Firewatch agent Alexandra Petrova - have survived the furious onslaught of the Basilisk and broken through the space blockade around Paradise-1. Now they can pursue their original mission and investigate why Earth's first deep space colony has fallen silent.
The answer seems obvious: the site is deserted.
Or so they think.
Some of the colonists remain . . . but they're no longer human.
Petrova and her crew now face a desperate struggle to survive as they attempt to uncover the mystery of what has befallen the colony.
If they fail, the darkness that has fallen over Paradise-1 will consume them.
Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10