Wednesday, May 8, 2024

What's Releasing (5/8/24 edition)

 


What's releasing the week of 5/13/24:


Think Twice by Harlan Coben

How can a man who’s already dead be wanted for murder?
 
Three years ago, sports agent Myron Bolitar gave a eulogy at the funeral of his client, renowned basketball coach Greg Downing. Myron and Greg had history: initially as deeply personal rivals, and later as unexpected business associates. Myron made peace and moved on – until now, when twofederal agents walked into his office, demanding to know where Greg Downing is.

According to the agents, Greg is still alive—and has been placed at the scene of a double homicide, making him their main suspect. Shocked, Myron needs answers.

Myron and Win, longtime friends and colleagues, set out to find the truth, but the more they discover about Greg, the more dangerous their world becomes. Secrets, lies, and a murderous conspiracy that stretches back into the past churn at the heart of Harlan Coben's blistering new novel.


Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk by Kathleen Hanna

An electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.

Hey girlfriend I got a proposition, goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you want.

Kathleen Hanna's rallying cry to feminists echoed far and wide through the punk scene of the 90s and beyond. Her band, Bikini Kill, embodies this iconic time, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like "Rebel Girl" and "Double Dare Ya" are more powerful than ever. But where did this transformative voice come from?

In Rebel Girl, Hanna's raw and insightful new memoir, she takes us from her tumultuous childhood home to her formative college years in Olympia, Washington, and on to her first years on tour, fighting hard for gigs and for her band. As Hanna makes clear, being in a "girl band," especially a punk girl band, in those years was not a simple or safe prospect. Male violence and antagonism threatened at every turn, and surviving as a singer who was a lightning rod for controversy took limitless amounts of determination.

But the relationships she developed during those years buoyed her—including with her bandmates, Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilcox, and Johanna Fateman; her friendships with Kurt Cobain and Ian MacKaye; and her introduction to Joan Jett— were all a testament to how the punk world could nurture and care for its own. Hanna opens up about falling in love with Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys and her debilitating battle with Lyme disease, and she brings us behind the scenes of her musical growth in her bands, Le Tigre and The Julie Ruin. She also writes candidly about the Riot Grrrl movement, documenting with love its grassroots origins but critiquing its later exclusivity.

In an uncut voice all her own, Hanna reveals the hardest times along with the most joyful—and how it continues to fuel her revolutionary art and music.


I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons by Peter S. Beagle

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Unicorn comes a new novel with equal amounts of power and whimsy in which a loveable cast of characters trapped within their roles of dragon hunter, princess, and more must come together to take their fates into their own hands.

Dragons are common in the backwater kingdom of Bellemontagne, coming in sizes from mouse-like vermin all the way up to castle-smashing monsters. Gaius Aurelius Constantine Heliogabalus Thrax (who would much rather people call him Robert) has recently inherited his deceased dad’s job as a dragon catcher/exterminator, a career he detests with all his heart in part because he likes dragons, feeling a kinship with them, but mainly because his dream has always been the impossible one of transcending his humble origin to someday become a prince’s valet. Needless to say, fate has something rather different in mind...


The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren

Christina Lauren, the instant New York Times bestselling and “reigning romance queens” (PopSugar), returns with a delicious new romance between the buttoned-up heir of a grocery chain and his free-spirited artist ex as they fake their relationship in order to receive a massive inheritance.

Anna Green thought she was marrying Liam “West” Weston for access to subsidized family housing while at UCLA. She also thought she’d signed divorce papers when the graduation caps were tossed, and they both went on their merry ways.

Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the heartless corporation his family built from the ground up. He is interested, however, in his one-hundred-million-dollar inheritance. There’s just one catch.

Due to an antiquated clause in his grandfather’s will, Liam won’t see a penny until he’s been happily married for five years. Just when Liam thinks he’s in the home stretch, pressure mounts from his family to see this mysterious spouse, and he has no choice but to turn to the one person he’s afraid to introduce to his one-percenter parents—his unpolished, not-so-ex-wife.

But in the presence of his family, Liam’s fears quickly shift from whether the feisty, foul-mouthed, paint-splattered Anna can play the part to whether the toxic world of wealth will corrupt someone as pure of heart as his surprisingly grounded and loyal wife. Liam will have to ask himself if the price tag on his flimsy cover story is worth losing true love that sprouted from a lie.


Locked in Pursuit by Ashley Weaver

The fourth instalment in Ashley Weaver's delightful series, Locked in Pursuit follows safecracker Electra McDonnell fighting Nazis at every turn as World War II looms over London.

Safecracker Ellie McDonnell hasn’t seen Major Ramsey—her handsome but aloof handler in the British government—since their tumultuous mission together three months before, but when she hears about a suspicious robbery in London she feels compelled to contact him. Together they discover that a rash of burglaries leads back to a hotbed of spies in the neutral city Lisbon, Portugal, and an unknown object brought to London by a mysterious courier.

As the thieves become more desperate and their crimes escalate, it becomes imperative that Ellie and Ramsey must beat them at their own game. Fighting shadowy assailants, enemy agents, and the mutual attraction they’ve agreed not to acknowledge, Ellie and Ramsey work together to learn if it truly takes a thief to catch a thief.


Rednecks by Taylor Brown

A historical drama based on the Battle of Blair Mountain, pitting a multi-ethnic army of 10,000 coal miners against mine owners, state militia, and the United States government in the largest labor uprising in American history.

Rednecks is a tour de force, big canvas historical novel that dramatizes the 1920 to 1921 events of the West Virginia Mine Wars—from the Matewan Massacre through the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War, when some one million rounds were fired, bombs were dropped on Appalachia, and the term “redneck” would come to have an unexpected origin story.

Brimming with the high stakes drama of America’s buried history, Rednecks tells a powerful story of rebellion against oppression. In a land where the coal companies use violence and intimidation to keep miners from organizing, “Doc Moo" Muhanna, a Lebanese-American doctor (inspired by the author’s own great-grandfather), toils amid the blood and injustice of the mining camps. When Frank Hugham, a Black World War One veteran and coal miner, takes dramatic steps to lead a miners' revolt with a band of fellow veterans, Doc Moo risks his life and career to treat sick and wounded miners, while Frank's grandmother, Beulah, fights her own battle to save her home and grandson. Real-life historical figures burn bright among the hills: the fiery Mother Jones, an Irish-born labor organizer once known as "The Most Dangerous Woman in America," struggles to maintain the ear of the miners ("her boys") amid the tide of rebellion, while the sharp-shooting police chief "Smilin" Sid Hatfield dares to stand up to the "gun thugs" of the coal companies, becoming a folk hero of the mine wars.

Award-winning novelist Taylor Brown brings to life one of the most compelling events in 20th century American history, reminding us of the hard-won origins of today's unions. Rednecks is a propulsive, character-driven tale that’s both a century old and blisteringly contemporary: a story of unexpected friendship, heroism in the face of injustice, and the power of love and community against all odds.


Very Bad Company by Emma Rosenblum

A gripping, darkly comic novel from the national bestselling author of Bad Summer People about a team of wealthy and powerful executives on retreat in Miami when one of them goes missing . . .

Every year, executives at the trendy tech startup Aurora gather the company’s top employees for an exclusive retreat in Miami, and this year Caitlin Levy—Aurora’s newest hire—is joining the team as head of events. The benefits are outstanding: a seven-figure salary, stock shares, a discretionary bonus, limitless vacation days—what could possibly go wrong?

When a fellow high-level executive vanishes after the first night, the disappearance has the potential to derail the future of the company’s sale and cost everyone on the team millions. Now more than ever, Caitlin and her colleagues must continue the charade—partaking in team-building exercises, group brainstorms, dinners—in order to keep the future of Aurora afloat amid all the fatal speculations.

Compulsively readable, Very Bad Company is a slick send-up of corporate culture wrapped in a captivating mystery.


The Hunter's Daughter by Nicola Solvinic

A hypnotic, sinister debut mystery about a seemingly good cop who is secretly the daughter of a notorious serial killer.

Anna Koray escaped her father’s darkness long ago. When she was a girl, her childhood memories were sealed away from her conscious mind by a controversial hypnosis treatment. She’s now a decorated sheriff’s lieutenant serving a rural county, conducting an ordinary life far from her father’s shadow.

When Anna kills a man in the line of duty, her suppressed memories return. She dreams of her beloved father, his hands red with blood, surrounded by flower-decked corpses he had sacrificed to the god of the forest.

To Anna’s horror, a serial killer emerges who is copying her father – and who knows who she really is. Is her father still alive, or is this the work of another? Will the killer expose her, destroying everything she has built for herself? Does she want him to?

But as she haunts the forest, using her father’s tricks to the hunt the killer, will she find what she needs most…or lose herself in the gathering darkness?

See the full list

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