Anticipated Thrillers in 2014

Publishers plan their year way in advance of titles being published. I have a list of mysteries and thrillers that are coming out in 2014 - hardly all inclusive - but some of these are authors that I know you want to know about. Not all of them are in the catalog. I order things about 3 to 4 months in advance so most of the ones published before June will be in the catalog. Those published after then, you will just have to try to remember.

OK - in February:
J.D Robb comes out with the next In Death title, Concealed in Death. Eve Dallas is on the case when her husband initiates a building demolition by swinging the first sledge hammer into a wall....and uncovered two skeletons.

Janet Evanovich comes out with her 2nd Fox and O'Hare title, The Chase. Rrenowned thief and con artist Nicolas Fox partners with Special Agent Kate O’Hare to bring down Carter Grove, a former White House chief of staff and the ruthless leader of a private security agency, who has stolen a Chinese artifact from the Smithsonian.

Jonathan Kellerman's next Alex Delaware title, Killer comes out this month. In this one, Delaware gets involved in an ugly child custody case which eventually results in murder and then the child at the center of it, disappears.

March titles:
Heather Graham comes out with Waking the Dead. This is the second title for her that hits the romantic suspense genre. Her characters are Danielle Cafferty - the owner of an antique shop - and Michael Quinn - a private detective. This time, they investigate a mysterious painting that seems to bring death.

Harlan Coben - one of my favorite authors - comes out with Missing You. I can't wait!  NYPD Detective Kat Donovan recognizes the person in an online dating profile. It's her ex-fiance. When she reaches out to him, she gets involved with dark secrets and murder.

No exciting titles in April I'm afraid but the next two months are blockbusters.
May titles:
James Paterson continues his Women's Murder Club with Unlucky 13. Detective Lindsay Boxer has a murder to investigate but there have been reported sightings of her ex-colleague-turned-ruthless-killer Mackie Morales.  Could this be related?

Steve Berry has Cotton Malone's 9th title coming out , The Lincoln Myth. What was the secret that was passed down from president to president until it arrived in Lincoln's hands? What is Cotton trying to protect?

John   Sandford comes out with the next Lucas Davenport title, Field of Prey. A dead body is found stuffed down a cistern....and then another....and then another....and then..... One body a summer for many many years. Sounds like the perfect case for Davenport.

James Rollins comes out with another Sigma Force novel, The Kill Switch. Former Army Ranger Tucker Wayne and his stalwart companion, Kane, a military working dog of exceptional abilities, are called into action to stop a biochemical disaster.

Jeffrey Deaver has his 11th Lincoln Rhyme's title, The Skin Collector. Rhyme  and his associate Amelia Sachs  are called in when apparently, a tattoo artist is engraving with not dyes but with poison.


June titles:
James Patterson  comes out with Invisible. Emmy Dockery has taken leave from her job as an FBI researcher. She is obsessed with finding a link between hundreds of unsolved cases that she is sure are connected. No one believe her. Who, exactly, is crazy?

Karin Slaughter has her first standalone thriller, Cop Town. The working title was The Truth About Pretty Girls which sounds like a pretty good title for this work about about a rookie cop making her own way in the boys’ club that is the Atlanta Police Department in the 1970s.

Steven King's Mr. Mercedes. I mentioned this one last week too.  A retired cop chases a terrorist with a bomb.

OK - most if not all of these you will find in the catalog. Some will be hard to wait for I guess. I am sure that there will be some surprises. There always are. But this is a good place to start.

Books To Look Forward To In 2014

Several different newspapers/magazines have published lists recommending titles for books that will be published this year. There are quite a few which seem worthy to me.

USA Today suggests the following:

Under the Wide & Starry Sky by Nancy Horan. Horan's last title was the well received Loving Frank. This title out Jan. 21st is about the love affair between the Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson (author of The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island among others) and Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne - the divorced mother of three who was a decade older.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris which is out on Jan 28th. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage. Harris is brilliant with this type of historical literary thriller.

Still Life With Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen. Quindlen is one of my favorite authors and this book out on Jan 28th also. In this novel she ponders life and love after age 60. You might remember one of her latest nonfiction titles Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake and hitting another of my tender spots, Good Dog, Stay.

Blood Will Out by Walter Kirn is out on March 3rd. This nonfiction work reveals Kirn's relationship with a real life Mr. Ripley - the man he had considered a friend,  who presented himself as Clark Rockefeller but was actually a double murderer. True crime aficionados get ready.

Frog Music by Emma Donoghue  the acclaimed author of Room is coming out on April 7th.  This novel is based on the real unsolved murder of Jenny Bonnet in 1876 San Francisco. This is a story also about the bohemian culture in the city at this time.

Next - one's suggested by The Hollywood Reporter:

Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabe Sherman. This is the long anticipated story of Roger Ailes, the Chairman of Fox News. This one actually came out on Jan 14th. It is on order and in the catalog.

Hollow City by Ransom Riggs also out on the 14th and in the catalog. This is the sequel to the run away hit Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.  It continues this curious blend of fantasy, thriller with historical photographs.

Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman, the wife of author Michael Chabon. This novel, out April 1st, is based on a true life search for a train loaded with Hungarian gold which disappeared at the end of WWII.

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King due out on June 3rd. No one does the story of the battle between good and evil as well as King. This one deals with a retired detectives chase for a terrorist with a bomb - one that King thought was scarily close to the Boston Bombing.

Armada by Ernie Cline out sometime in July. First of all, you have to understand that I LOVED Ready Player One. This covers that same territory and has already been purchased by Universal. It is not in the catalog yet but I can't wait!!!!

Untitled by Robert Galbraith and we all know who that really is. After the dramatic success of  The Cuckoo's Calling, Rowling has her second in the series coming. No real publication date yet but sometimes in the summer is what they are saying.

That is a taste of what is coming out. Of course, there will be others that come up later but it looks like an exciting year to me.

February LibraryReads Announced

I am back after a holiday break from the blog. This past week, LibraryReads announced the top 10 titles that librarians think are winners for February. All are in our catalog so you can place your holds if they strike you as something you would like to ready=.

Number 1 on the list is one that I have been looking forward to reading, Red Rising by Pierce Brown. Reviewers are calling better than The Hunger Games. This title is the first in a trilogy and it is dystopian to the max. Darrow is a miner and a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he digs all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of the planet livable for future generations.  Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better future for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow and Reds like him are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class. Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow joins a resistance group in order to infiltrate the ruling class and destroy society from within. He will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so. Doesn't that sound exciting? I will have to give this one a try.

The rest are - 

The Good Luck of Right Now by Matthew Quick - the author of The Silver Linings Playbook. Quick has a knack for writing oddball characters that touch your heart. He continues in this title. One review calls it a "moving story, populated with his usual range of damaged, quirky, lovable characters, but containing a core of significant philosophical substance." Bartholomew Neil is 38, has always lived with his mother and never had a job. When his mother dies, he has to go about finding his new place. Give this one a try.

This Dark Road To Mercy by Wiley Cash. Cash's second novel also takes place in western North Carolina near the Appalachian Mountains. 2 young sisters are thrown into the foster care system when their mother unexpectedly dies. Just as they are settling in with their foster family, their shady father whom they have rarely seen appears and steals them away. 

The Martian by Andy Weir. A debut science fiction thriller. Six days ago, astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first men to walk on the surface of Mars. Now, he's sure he'll be the first man to die there. 

It started with the dust storm that holed his suit and nearly killed him-and that forced his crew to leave him behind, sure he was already dead. Now he's stranded millions of miles from the nearest human being, with no way to even signal Earth that he's alive-and even if he could get word out, his food would be gone years before a rescue mission could arrive. Are you waiting with bated breath?

Perennial favorite Laura Lippman's new title After I'm Gone has made the list.Bookie Felix Brewer mysteriously disappears just before being indicted leaving behind his wife, Bernadette and their three little girls. Though Bambi has no idea where her husband-or all of his money-might be, she suspects his devoted young mistress, Julie, does. Then Julie disappears ten years to the day that Felix went on the lam, everyone assumes she's left to join her old lover-until her remains are eventually found in a secluded wooded park.

Now, twenty-six years after Julie went missing, Roberto "Sandy" Sanchez, a retired Baltimore detective working cold cases for some extra cash, is investigating her murder. What he discovers is a tangled web of bitterness, jealously, resentment, greed, and longing stretching over three decades. 

Isabel Allende's newest, Ripper, is a suspenseful literary thriller. This title  is a fast-paced mystery involving a teenage sleuth who must unmask a serial killer in San Francisco when her mother disappears. Some Allende's biggest fans are not happy with her for writing in the mystery genre but other's love it. See what you think.

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin. This is another one that has interested me.I like historical novels and I love mysteries - this seems to combine those. In 1872 the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo was intact and there was no sign of struggle, but the crew was gone. They were never found.  While on a voyage to Africa, a rather hard-up and unproven young writer named Arthur Conan Doyle hears of the Mary Celeste and decides to write an outlandish short story about what took place. This story causes quite a sensation back in the United States, particularly between sought-after Philadelphia spiritualist medium Violet Petra and a rational-minded journalist named Phoebe Grant, who is seeking to expose Petra as a fraud. Then there is the family of the Mary Celeste's captain, a family linked to the sea for generations and marked repeatedly by tragedy. Each member of this ensemble cast holds a critical piece to the puzzle of the Mary Celeste. HMMM - sounds good to me!

The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon. A mystery based on the real life disappearance of New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph Crater told through the voices of three woman.

The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon is next. The small Vermont town of West Hall has been the scene of quite a few mysterious deaths. One was Sara Harrison Shea, who, in 1908, was found dead in the field behind her house just months after the tragic death of her daughter, Gertie. Now, in present day, nineteen-year-old Ruthie lives in Sara's farmhouse with her mother, Alice, and her younger sister, Fawn. Ruthie wakes up one morning to find that Alice has vanished without a trace. Searching for clues, she is startled to find a copy of Sara Harrison Shea's diary hidden beneath the floorboards of her mother's bedroom. Read it to find out the conclusion.

Lastly, a nonfiction work. E.E. Cummings : A Life by  the highly acclaimed Susan Cheever. Cummings had an idyllic childhood but turned into a dark young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion against conventional authority and the critical establishment. A book about the evolution of an artist.

OK - out of these 10 - certainly there must be something you would like to read. I have 6 of them on my list.