Fiction I'm currently reading
Explore my latest fiction reads with this curated list of books I'm currently diving into. Discover gripping novels, must-read stories, and literary gems for your next favorite read.
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The Tenderness of Wolves
by Stef Penney
A brilliant and breathtaking debut that captivated readers and garnered critical acclaim in the United Kingdom,The Tenderness of Wolveswas long-listed for the Orange Prize in fiction and won the Costa Award (formerly the Whitbread) Book of the Year. The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner. A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it? One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good. In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages.
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Exposure Behind Closed Doors
by Victoria Taylor Murray
EXPOSURE BEHIND CLOSED DOORS is centered around one earth-shattering week in the life of New Orleans Police Lieutenant, Grieco Storm. A police detective whose passions and convictions run as deep and sizzling as the sultry city he is bound by duty and honor to protect. The discovery of arsenic found in the blood-systems of two International Super Models, Johna Bauer and Ursula Rhee; initially ruled accidental prescription drug overdoses by the city's shady coroner, is what initiated a secret branch of the Justice Department to get involved. Not only was the State of Louisiana suddenly faced with the very real possibility of a serial killer being on the loose in their Historical City, but it was suddenly faced with a potential scandal of such magnitude that it could rock New Orleans back several decades, politically, on its ear!
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Perfect Match
by Jodi Picoult
What happens when you do all the right things for all the wrong reasons? As an assistant district attorney in York County, Maine, Nina Frost prosecutes the sort of crimes that tear families apart. She helps clients navigate their way through a nightmare – even though the legal system is not always the faultless compass they want and need it to be. She learns that the easiest way to cross this devastating minefield time and time again is to offer compassion, battle fiercely for justice, and keep her emotional distance. But when Nina and her husband Caleb discover that their five-year-old son Nathaniel has been sexually abused, that distance is impossible to maintain. The world Nina inhabits now seems different from the one she lived in yesterday; the lines between family and professional life are erased; and answers to questions she thought she knew are no longer easy to find. Overcome by anger and desperate for vengeance, Nina ignites a battle that may cause her to lose the very thing she's fighting for.
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She's Not There
by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith
When her vacation on Block Island is interrupted by her discovery of the body of a murder victim, FBI agent Poppy Rice investigates, which leads her to discover another body and strange clues that link the two deaths.
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Le Fin
by Victoria Taylor Murray
The Lambert Series (Thief Of Hearts, Forbidden and Friendly Enemies), is centered around one earth-shattering week in the life of Nouri St. Charles Sommers, a beautiful young woman that rushed into marriage with a mysterious billionaire...a man she knew nothing about. Two short years later, Nourias fairytale marriage suddenly turns into a nightmare changing her life forever a].Falling in love a] out of love a] in love againa]a fairytale marriage turned nightmarea]implicated and then cleared in two gruesome murdersa]surviving a death threat after being forced into hiding from a stalkera]Nourias one week from hell continues. Now six weeks later, Nourias life continues to spin out of control, drawing the reader deeper and deeper into the turmoil of The Lambert Series with the final book to the series, Le Fin. Nourias billionaire husband, Ethan Sommers, has been shot and killed. Her former lover, high-powered attorney Clint Chamberlain, is feared dead after his car plummets off a bridge in Paris during a rain storm, and if those things arenat bad enough for her to deal with, Nouri suddenly discovers that the man she has finally chosen over both Clint Chamberlain and Charles Mason, homicide detective Gabe Baldwin, has returned to Boston to wed his former fiancA(c)e after an argument Nouri and Gabe had while they were still in France.
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This Must Be Love
by Kasey Michaels
Jane Preston agrees to take the place of her news reporter cousin Molly at a beach front retreat for bigwigs who may recognize Molly from her disastrous Washington internship. Gaining admittance with a nerdy reporter, who's really a bestselling author going incognito for ideas for his next novel, Jane is soon on a sizzling summer adventure. Original.
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The Sanctuary
by Raymond Khoury
More than 250 years after a pretender marquis escapes the decimated palazzo of his vengeful prince, an American Army unit discovers a secret lab in Baghdad where dozens of victims have been subjected to torturous experiments, a finding that places two bold women on the trail of an ancient mystery. By the author of The Last Templar. 150,000 first printing.
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April in Paris
by Michael Wallner
Written in an elegant and arresting style, this page-turner is a thrilling novel by a promising new writer, who has brought the reality of a war-torn past very much to the present.
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Silent in the Grave
by Deanna Raybourn
"Let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave." These ominous words, slashed from the pages of a book of Psalms, are the last threat that the darling of London society, Sir Edward Grey, receives from his killer. Before he can show them to Nicholas Brisbane, the private inquiry agent he has retained for his protection, Sir Edward collapses and dies at his London home, in the presence of his wife, Julia, and a roomful of dinner guests. Prepared to accept that Edward's death was due to a longstanding physical infirmity, Julia is outraged when Brisbane visits and suggests that Sir Edward has been murdered. It is a reaction she comes to regret when she discovers the damning paper for herself, and realizes the truth. Determined to bring her husband's murderer to justice, Julia engages the enigmatic Brisbane to help her investigate Edward's demise. Dismissing his warnings that the investigation will be difficult, if not impossible, Julia presses forward, following a trail of clues that lead her to even more unpleasant truths, and ever closer to a killer who waits expectantly for her arrival.