Fiction Review

Two days of The Poisoned Pen’s Hot Book of the Week. Although to be honest, when we share those author conversations, many of the books are hot. The current Hot Book of the Week is Laura Lippman’s Dream Girl. You can find signed copies of it in the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2TWlymZ

Here’s the description of Dream Girl.

“With this tip of the hat to Stephen King’s Misery, Dream Girl is funny and suspenseful, with a dread-worthy final twist.” —People

“My dream novel. I devoured this in three days. The sharpest, clearest-eyed take on our #MeToo reckoning yet. Plus: enthralling.” —Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of Dare Me and The Fever

Following up on her acclaimed and wildly successful New York Times bestseller Lady in the Lake, Laura Lippman returns with a dark, complex tale of psychological suspense with echoes of Misery involving a novelist, incapacitated by injury, who is plagued by mysterious phone calls.

In the end, has anyone really led a blameless life?

Injured in a freak fall, novelist Gerry Andersen is confined to a hospital bed in his glamorous high-rise apartment, dependent on two women he barely knows: his incurious young assistant, and a dull, slow-witted night nurse.

Then late one night, the phone rings. The caller claims to be the “real” Aubrey, the alluring title character from his most successful novel, Dream Girl. But there is no real Aubrey. She’s a figment born of a writer’s imagination, despite what many believe or claim to know. Could the cryptic caller be one of his three ex-wives playing a vindictive trick after all these years? Or is she Margot, an ex-girlfriend who keeps trying to insinuate her way back into Gerry’s life?

And why does no one believe that the call even happened?

Isolated from the world, drowsy from medication, Gerry slips between reality and a dreamlike state in which he is haunted by his own past: his faithless father, his devoted mother; the women who loved him, the women he loved.

And now here is Aubrey, threatening to visit him, suggesting that she is owed something. Is the threat real or is it a sign of dementia? Which scenario would he prefer? Gerry has never been so alone, so confused ““ and so terrified.

Chilling and compulsively readable, touching on timely issues that include power, agency, appropriation, and creation, Dream Girl is a superb blend of psychological suspense and horror that reveals the mind and soul of a writer.

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Since Laura Lippman’s debut in 1997, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her daughter.

Have you checked out Beatriz Williams’ Our Woman in Moscow? There are signed copies available in the Web Store of this Hot Book of the Week. https://bit.ly/3gTTGHK

Here’s Our Woman in Moscow.

MOST ANTICIPATED NOVEL OF SUMMER 2021 ACCORDING TO BUSTLE, BUZZFEED, AND SHEREADS! INAUGURAL BOOK CLUB PICK FOR NEW PEACOCK SHOW “BOOKED”!

The New York Times bestselling author of Her Last Flight returns with a gripping and profoundly human story of Cold War espionage and family devotion.

In the autumn of 1948, Iris Digby vanishes from her London home with her American diplomat husband and their two children. The world is shocked by the family’s sensational disappearance. Were they eliminated by the Soviet intelligence service? Or have the Digbys defected to Moscow with a trove of the West’s most vital secrets?

Four years later, Ruth Macallister receives a postcard from the twin sister she hasn’t seen since their catastrophic parting in Rome in the summer of 1940, as war engulfed the continent and Iris fell desperately in love with an enigmatic United States Embassy official named Sasha Digby. Within days, Ruth is on her way to Moscow, posing as the wife of counterintelligence agent Sumner Fox in a precarious plot to extract the Digbys from behind the Iron Curtain.

But the complex truth behind Iris’s marriage defies Ruth’s understanding, and as the sisters race toward safety, a dogged Soviet KGB officer forces them to make a heartbreaking choice between two irreconcilable loyalties.

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Beatriz Williams is the bestselling author of thirteen novels, including Her Last Flight, The Summer Wives, and The Golden Hour, as well as All the Ways We Said Goodbye, cowritten with Lauren Willig and Karen White. A native of Seattle, she graduated from Stanford University and earned an MBA in finance from Columbia University. She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

Barbara Peters, owner of The Poisoned Pen, recently hosted authors John McMahon and David Ricciardi for a virtual event. McMahon is the author of A Good Kill and Ricciardi wrote Shadow Target. Signed copies of both books are available at the Web Store. https://store.poisonedpen.com/

Here’s the description of A Good Kill.

An electrifying mystery featuring a troubled small-town police detective faced with three interwoven crimes that reveal sinister secrets about his community–and the deaths of his family, by the Edgar Award-and Thriller Award- short-listed author whose novels have been described by the New York Times Book Review as “pretty much perfect.”

In the years since the mysterious deaths of his wife and child, P.T. Marsh, a police detective in the small Georgia town of Mason Falls, has faced demons–both professional and personal. But when he is called to the scene of a school shooting, the professional and personal become intertwined, and he suspects that whoever is behind the crime may be connected to his own family tragedy.

As Marsh and his partner Remy investigate the shooting, they discover that it is far from straightforward, and their search for answers leads them to a conspiracy at the highest levels of local government–including within the police force. The stakes in the case become increasingly high, culminating in a showdown that has Marsh questioning everything he knows, and wondering if some secrets are better left undiscovered.

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John McMahon is the author of The Good Detective and The Evil Men Do. In his role as an ad agency creative director, he has won a Gold Clio for his work with Fiat, and he’s written a Superbowl spot for Alfa Romeo. He currently lives in Southern California with his family and two rescue animals.

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Here’s Shadow Target.

Someone is assassinating CIA field officers and Jake Keller’s name is next on the list in the latest thrilling novel from the author Publishers Weekly calls “a fresh voice in the crowded spy thriller field.”

Jake doesn’t know who is trying to kill him and he doesn’t know why. Still, it’s a threat he can’t ignore.

When his small plane crashes in the Alps, Jake is the only survivor. A rescue helicopter soon arrives, but the men inside are not there to save anyone. They are determined to complete the murderous job they started.

Jake escapes from the mountainside deathtrap, but it won’t be the only attempt on his life. If he’s to have any chance at surviving, he’ll have to find out who’s behind the killings. But the circle of people Jake can trust is distressingly small as he suspects that someone inside the Agency is feeding his every move to the very people who are trying to end his life.

Jake’s quest takes him to the candle-lit cathedrals of Paris and the rain-slicked streets of London. He makes contact with old friends and new enemies along the way—but his true nemesis may be closer than he imagines.

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A keen outdoorsman, David Ricciardi incorporates many personal experiences into his work. He’s backpacked through the mountains of the western United States and Alaska, received extensive training from law enforcement and U.S. special operations personnel, and once woke up for a two A.M. watch aboard a sailboat only to discover that it was headed the wrong way through the Atlantic sea-lanes in heavy weather, with one of the crew suffering from hypothermia. In addition to being an avid sailor, David is also a certified scuba-rescue diver and a former ski instructor.

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Enjoy the conversation, shared on YouTube.

Let’s talk science fiction, apocalyptic fiction, and comic books. That’s what host Patrick King from The Poisoned Pen discussed with Benjamin Percy, author of The Ninth Metal. That first book in The Comet Cycle is available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3wIgkK1

Here’s the summary of The Ninth Metal.

“[In THE NINTH METAL] debris from a comet drops a fabulously valuable new metal on Northfall, MN., turning it into a bloody, brawling boomtown. Great characters, fine writing, totally engrossing.”
—Stephen King

“Take one part dystopia, one part sci-fi, two parts apocalypse, then ride them roughshod through a bleak and bloody western, and it still wouldn’t get close to what Ben Percy does here, which is blow open the core of humanity’s dark heart.”
—Marlon James, Booker Prize award-winning author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“Whether you choose to think of him as the Elmore Leonard of rural Minnesota or the Stephen King of Science Fiction, Ben Percy—with his extraordinary and unrelenting eye—dishes up humanity like some kind of otherworldly blue plate special, at once deeply familiar and wildly new.”
—Margaret Stohl, #1 New York Times best-selling author of the Caster Chronicles

“When Benjamin Percy publishes a novel, I have got to read that novel. The Ninth Metal continues his streak of thrilling, incisive genre bending goodness. It’s a sci-fi novel, a crime novel and a super-hero novel, too. Audacious and intelligent and exactly what I was dying to read.”
—Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

IT BEGAN WITH A COMET…

At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet’s debris field and the sky rained fire.

The town of Northfall, Minnesota will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source…and a weapon.

John Frontier—the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall—returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community.

In this gut-punch of a novel, the first in his Comet Cycle, Ben Percy lays bare how a modern-day goldrush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family—the Frontiers—hopes to control it all.

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BENJAMIN PERCY has won a Whiting Award, a Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA fellowship, and the iHeartRadio Award for Best Scripted Podcast. He is the author of the novels The Ninth Metal, The Unfamiliar Garden, The Dark Net, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding, three story collections, and an essay collection, Thrill Me. He also writes Wolverine and X-Force for Marvel Comics. He lives in Minnesota with his family.

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Enjoy the conversation with Benjamin Percy.

John Charles from The Poisoned Pen introduces Kristan Higgins, author of Pack Up the Moon. (She will also introduce her dog in the video.) There are some signed copies of her book still available through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/35wwF8G

Here’s the summary of Pack Up the Moon.

Every month, a letter. That’s what Lauren decides to leave her husband when she finds out she’s dying. Each month, she gives Josh a letter containing a task to help him face this first year without her, leading him on a heartrending, beautiful, often humorous journey to find happiness again in this new novel from the New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins.

Joshua and Lauren are the perfect couple. Newly married, they’re wildly in love, each on a successful and rewarding career path. Then Lauren is diagnosed with a terminal illness. 
 
As Lauren’s disease progresses, Joshua struggles to make the most of the time he has left with his wife and to come to terms with his future–a future without the only woman he’s ever loved. He’s so consumed with finding a way to avoid the inevitable ending that he never imagines his life after Lauren.
 
But Lauren has a plan to keep her husband moving forward. A plan hidden in the letters she leaves him. In those letters, one for every month in the year after her death, Lauren leads Joshua on a journey through pain, anger, and denial. It’s a journey that will take Joshua from his attempt at a dinner party for family and friends to getting rid of their bed…from a visit with a psychic medium to a kiss with a woman who isn’t Lauren. As his grief makes room for laughter and new relationships, Joshua learns Lauren’s most valuable lesson: The path to happiness doesn’t follow a straight line. 
 
Sometimes heartbreaking, often funny, and always uplifting, this novel from New York Times bestselling author Kristan Higgins illuminates how life’s greatest joys are often hiding in plain sight.

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Kristan Higgins is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of twenty novels, which have been translated into more than two dozen languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide. She lives in Connecticut with her husband, two children, and dogs. If you want to know when Kristan’s next book will be out and hear news of her appearances, subscribe to her mailing list at www.kristanhiggins.com.

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Enjoy John Charles’ discussion with Kristan Higgins.

I’ve been waiting to share this conversation with you because it was so much fun if you enjoy traditional mysteries set in England. Connie Berry is the author of the Kate Hamilton mysteries, featuring an American antiques dealer in England. Her latest book, The Art of Betrayal, was the topic, along with antiques, when she spoke with guest host Jane Cleland. You can find signed copies of The Art of Betrayal, along with copies of Berry’s other mysteries, in the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2w8VlGd

Here’s the description of The Art of Betrayal.

In Connie Berry’s third Kate Hamilton mystery, American antique dealer Kate Hamilton’s spring is cut short when a body turns up at the May Fair pageant.

Spring is a magical time in England–bluebells massing along the woodland paths, primrose and wild thyme dotting the meadows. Antiques dealer Kate Hamilton is spending the month of May in the Suffolk village of Long Barston, enjoying precious time with Detective Inspector Tom Mallory. While attending the May Fair, the annual pageant based on a well-known Anglo-Saxon folktale, a body turns up in the middle of the festivities.

Kate is even more shocked when she learns the murder took place in antiquity shop owner Ivor Tweedy’s stockroom and a valuable Chinese pottery jar that she had been tasked with finding a buyer for has been stolen. Ivor may be ruined. Insurance won’t cover a fraction of the loss.

As Tom leads the investigation, Kate begins to see puzzling parallels between the murder and local legends. The more she learns, the more convinced she is that the solution to both crimes lies in the misty depths of Anglo-Saxon history and a generations-old pattern of betrayal. It’s up to Kate to unravel this Celtic knot of lies and deception to save Ivor’s business.

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Connie Berry is the author of the Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. During college she studied at the University of Freiburg in Germany and St. Clare’s College, Oxford, where she fell under the spell of the British Isles. In 2019 Connie won the IPPY Gold Medal for Mystery and was a finalist for the Agatha Award’s Best Debut. She’s a member of Mystery Writers of America and is on the board of the Guppies and her local Sisters in Crime chapter. Besides reading and writing mysteries, Connie loves history, foreign travel, cute animals, and all things British. She lives in Ohio with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. You can learn more about Connie and her books at her website www.connieberry.com.

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Enjoy the conversation!

The background of author Don Bentley fits perfectly for the latest Jack Ryan, Jr. novel, Tom Clancy: Target Acquired. And, guest host Brad Taylor has an interesting background as well, but you’ll have to watch the virtual event to hear about their backgrounds. I’m not sure there are any signed copies of Target Acquired still available, but you can certainly order a book through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/3t6USvV

Here’s the summary of Tom Clancy: Target Acquired.

Jack Ryan, Jr., will do anything for a friend, but this favor will be paid for in blood in the latest electric entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling series.

Jack Ryan, Jr. would do anything for Ding Chavez. That’s why Jack is currently sitting in an open-air market in Israel, helping a CIA team with a simple job. The man running the mission, Peter Beltz, is an old friend from Ding’s Army days. Ding hadn’t seen his friend since Peter’s transfer to the CIA eighteen months prior, and intended to use the assignment to reconnect. Unfortunately, Ding had to cancel at the last minute and asked Jack to take his place. It’s a cushy assignment–a trip to Israel in exchange for a couple hours of easy work, but Jack could use the downtime after his last operation.

Jack is here merely as an observer, but when he hastens to help a woman and her young son, he finds himself the target of trained killers. Alone and outgunned, Jack will have to use all his skills to protect the life of the child.

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Tom Clancy was the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than eighteen books. He died in October 2013.

Don Bentley spent a decade as an Army Apache helicopter pilot, and while deployed in Afghanistan was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal with “V” device for valor. Following his time in the military, Bentley worked as an FBI special agent focusing on foreign intelligence and counterintelligence and was a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team member.

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Enjoy the conversation about the authors’ background, Jack Ryan, Jr., and writing.

Oh, what a fascinating conversation about Sujata Massey’s latest book, The Bombay Prince. Massey discussed her book, her series, and Bombay’s first female lawyer, Perveen Mistry, with author and host Nev March. You can order a copy through the Web Store. https://bit.ly/2Vo7Ub4

Here’s the summary of The Bombay Prince.

Bombay’s first female lawyer, Perveen Mistry, is compelled to bring justice to the family of a murdered female Parsi student just as Bombay’s streets erupt in riots to protest British colonial rule. Sujata Massey is back with this third installment to the Agatha and Mary Higgins Clark Award-winning series set in 1920s Bombay.

November 1921. Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a fourmonth tour. The Indian subcontinent is chafing under British rule, and Bombay solicitor Perveen Mistry isn’t surprised when local unrest over the royal arrival spirals into riots. But she’s horrified by the death of Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, who falls from a second-floor gallery just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college.

Freny had come for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she confided makes Perveen suspicious that her death was not an accident. Feeling guilty for failing to have helped Freny in life, Perveen steps forward to assist Freny’s family in the fraught dealings of the coroner’s inquest. When Freny’s death appears suspicious, Perveen knows she can’t rest until she sees justice done. But Bombay is erupting: as armed British secret service march the streets, rioters attack anyone with perceived British connections and desperate shopkeepers destroy their own wares so they will not be targets of racial violence. Can Perveen help a suffering family when her own is in danger?

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Sujata Massey was born in England to parents from India and Germany, grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, and lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She was a features reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun before becoming a full-time novelist. The first Perveen Mistry novel, The Widows of Malabar Hill, was an international bestseller and won the Agatha, Macavity, and Mary Higgins Clark Awards. Visit her website at sujatamassey.com.

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I think you’ll enjoy the conversation.

Are you a podcast fan? You do know about The Poisoned Pen’s library of podcasts, don’t you? They’re available via Podbean. Barbara Peters, owner of the bookstore, had this note in her recent newsletter.

Our Podcast Library Keeps Growing Visit our  Podcasts.   92,000 downloads show your interest Easy download links are provided. They are also available on iTunes and Google Music Enjoy conversations from our storied past AND more new conversations: Laurie R. King; Bill Clinton and James Patterson with Lee Child; Don Bentley with Brad Taylor’ Sujata Massey with Nev March. Coming up: Kristan Higgins, Ben Percy.

John McMahon’s latest book in the P.T. Marsh series, A Good Kill, will be released on Tuesday, June 15. He appears on Facebook Live at The Poisoned Pen’s site on Wednesday, June 16 at 5 PM PT, 8 PM ET, to discuss the book. You can order a signed first edition through the Web Store, https://bit.ly/2FplGl1.

Here’s a teaser, the book trailer for A Good Kill.

John McMahon. A Good Kill (Putnam, $27.00 Signed). An electrifying mystery featuring a troubled small-town police detective faced with three interwoven crimes that reveal sinister secrets about his community–and the deaths of his family, by the Edgar Award-and Thriller Award- short-listed author whose novels have been described by the New York Times Book Review as “pretty much perfect.”

In the years since the mysterious deaths of his wife and child, P.T. Marsh, a police detective in the small Georgia town of Mason Falls, has faced demons–both professional and personal. But when he is called to the scene of a school shooting, the professional and personal become intertwined, and he suspects that whoever is behind the crime may be connected to his own family tragedy.

As Marsh and his partner Remy investigate the shooting, they discover that it is far from straightforward, and their search for answers leads them to a conspiracy at the highest levels of local government–including within the police force. The stakes in the case become increasingly high, culminating in a showdown that has Marsh questioning everything he knows, and wondering if some secrets are better left undiscovered. 

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John McMahon is the author of The Good Detective and The Evil Men Do. In his role as an ad agency creative director, he has won a Gold Clio for his work with Fiat, and he’s written a Superbowl spot for Alfa Romeo. He currently lives in Southern California with his family and two rescue animals.