"The Cutting"

New from Minotaur Books: The Cutting by James Hayman.

About the book, from the publisher:

From a formidable new voice in suspense fiction comes an edge-of-the-seat story of a homicide detective on the trail of a killer, who slays with exacting precision, and who harbors a terrifying motive

Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe moved from New York City to Portland, Maine, to escape a dark past: both the ex-wife who’d left him for an investment banker, and the tragic death of his brother, a hero cop gone bad. He sought to raise his young daughter away from the violence of the big city . . . so he’s unprepared for the horrific killer he discovers, whose bloody trail may lead to Portland’s social elite.

Early on a September evening, the mutilated body of a pretty teenaged girl, a high school soccer star, is found dumped in a scrap-metal yard. She had been viciously assaulted, but her heart had been cut out of her chest with surgical precision. The very same day a young businesswoman, also a blonde and an athlete, was abducted as she jogged through the streets of the city’s west end. McCabe suspects both crimes are the work of the same man---a killer who’s targeting the young---who is clearly well-versed in complex surgical procedures, and who may have struck before. Just as the investigation is beginning, McCabe’s ex-wife reemerges, suddenly determined to reclaim the daughter she heedlessly abandoned years earlier.

With the help of his straight-talking (and, at times, alluring) partner, Maggie Savage, McCabe begins a race against time to rescue the missing woman and unmask a sadistic killer---before more lives are lost.

Visit James Hayman's website.

"K Blows Top"

New from PublicAffairs: K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist by Peter Carlson.

About the book, from the publisher:

This hilarious account of Khrushchev's 1959 U.S. tour is also a supremely entertaining evocation of the history and atmosphere of Cold War America

Khrushchev's 1959 trip across America was one of the strangest exercises in international diplomacy ever conducted—"a surreal extravaganza," as historian John Lewis Gaddis called it. Khrushchev told jokes, threw tantrums, sparked a riot in a San Francisco supermarket, wowed the coeds in a home economics class in Iowa, and ogled Shirley MacLaine as she filmed a dance scene in Can-Can. He befriended and offended a cast of characters including Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe.

Published for the fiftieth anniversary of the trip, K Blows Top is a work of history that reads like a Vonnegut novel. This cantankerous communist's road trip took place against the backdrop of the fifties in capitalist America, with the shadow of the hydrogen bomb hanging over his visit like the Sword of Damocles. As Khrushchev kept reminding people, he was a hot-tempered man who possessed the power to incinerate America.

"The Fixer Upper"

New from Harper: The Fixer Upper by Mary Kay Andrews.

About the book, from the publisher:

The delightful New York Times bestselling author returns with a hilarious novel about one woman's quest to redo an old house . . . and her life.

After her boss in a high-powered Washington public relations firm is caught in a political scandal, fledgling lobbyist Dempsey Jo Killebrew is left almost broke, unemployed, and homeless. Out of options, she reluctantly accepts her father's offer to help refurbish Birdsong, the old family place he recently inherited in Guthrie, Georgia. All it will take, he tells her, is a little paint and some TLC to turn the fading Victorian mansion into a real-estate cash cow.

But, oh, is Dempsey in for a surprise when she arrives in Guthrie. "Bird Droppings" would more aptly describe the moldering Pepto Bismol–pink dump with duct-taped windows and a driveway full of junk. There's also a murderously grumpy old lady, one of Dempsey's distant relations, who has claimed squatter's rights and isn't moving out. Ever.

Furthermore, everyone in Guthrie seems to know Dempsey's business, from a smooth-talking real-estate agent to a cute lawyer who owns the local newspaper. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the pesky FBI agents who show up on Dempsey's doorstep, hoping to pry information about her ex-boss from her.

All Dempsey can do is roll up her sleeves and get to work. And before long, what started as a job of necessity somehow becomes a labor of love and, ultimately, a journey that takes her to a place she never expected—back home again.

Visit Mary Kay Andrews's website.

"Sworn to Silence"

New from Minotaur Books: Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo.

About the book, from the publisher:

Some secrets are too terrible to reveal... Some crimes are too unspeakable to solve...

In the sleepy rural town of Painters Mill, Ohio, the Amish and “English” residents have lived side by side for two centuries. But sixteen years ago, a series of brutal murders shattered the peaceful farming community. In the aftermath of the violence, the town was left with a sense of fragility, a loss of innocence. Kate Burkholder, a young Amish girl, survived the terror of the Slaughterhouse Killer but came away from its brutality with the realization that she no longer belonged with the Amish.

Now, a wealth of experience later, Kate has been asked to return to Painters Mill as Chief of Police. Her Amish roots and big city law enforcement background make her the perfect candidate. She’s certain she’s come to terms with her past—until the first body is discovered in a snowy field. Kate vows to stop the killer before he strikes again. But to do so, she must betray both her family and her Amish past—and expose a dark secret that could destroy her.

Visit Linda Castillo's website.

"Just Like Family"

New from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: Just Like Family: Inside the Life of Nannies, the Parents They Work for, and the Children They Love by Tasha Blaine.

About the book, from the publisher:

When she was in her early thirties,Tasha Blaine briefly became a nanny. She expected an easy, nine-to-five stint, but instead she discovered the vast, varied, and largely unknown world of nannies. Often overlooked and invisible, these women also hold great power in the families they work for. Blaine was learning what so many parents want to know: What does our nanny think of us? And what happens all day behind our front door? To find out, Blaine interviewed nannies all over the country and immersed herself in the lives of three of them. We meet Claudia, who left the Caribbean to become a nanny in New York and is struggling to support her own child she left behind.We get to know Vivian, a young, white, college-educated woman from Boston, who wins a Nanny of the Year award even as she absorbs the painful truth that her role in the family is shrinking as her charges grow up. And we witness the struggles of Kim, a top Texas nanny who dreams of having her own family, as she moves in with a couple expecting their first baby. In telling the true stories behind the fantasies and fears we have about nannies, Just Like Family takes us deep inside the lives of women whose job it is to love.

Visit Tasha Blaine's website.

"East of the Sun"

New from Touchstone: East of the Sun by Julia Gregson.

About the book, from the publisher:

As the Kaisar-i-Hind weighs anchor for Bombay in the autumn of 1928, its passengers ponder their fate in a distant land. They are part of the "Fishing Fleet" -- the name given to the legions of Englishwomen who sail to India each year in search of husbands, heedless of the life that awaits them. The inexperienced chaperone Viva Holloway has been entrusted to watch over three unsettling charges. There's Rose, as beautiful as she is naïve, who plans to marry a cavalry officer she has met a mere handful of times. Her bridesmaid, Victoria, is hell-bent on losing her virginity en route before finding a husband of her own. And shadowing them all is the malevolent presence of a disturbed schoolboy named Guy Glover.

From the parties of the wealthy Bombay socialites to the poverty of Tamarind Street, from the sooty streets of London to the genteel conversation of the Bombay Yacht Club, East of the Sun is graced with lavish detail and a penetrating sensitivity -- historical fiction at its greatest.

"Gregson delivers 1928 India in livid, vivid color. East of the Sun is a fantastic book, one that endures in the mind long after the final page is turned."
--Monica Stark, January Magazine

Visit Julia Gregson's website.

"The Pretend Wife"

New from Bantam: Bridget Asher's The Pretend Wife.

About the book, from the publisher:

What would life be like with the one who got away? From the author of My Husband’s Sweethearts—hailed as “a laugh-and-cry novel”* that’s “whip-smart, tender…an undiluted joy to read”**—comes this bighearted, funny, fiercely perceptive tale about a happily married woman and the little white lie that changed everything.…

For Gwen Merchant, love has always been doled out in little packets—from her father, a marine biologist who buried himself in work after her mother’s death; and from her husband, Peter, who’s always been respectable and safe. But when an old college boyfriend, the irrepressible Elliot Hull, invites himself back into Gwen’s life, she starts to remember a time when love was an ocean.

What does Elliot want? In fact, he has a rather surprising proposition: he wants Gwen to become his wife. His pretend wife. Just for a few days. To accompany him to his family’s lake house for the weekend so that he can fulfill his dying mother’s last wish. Reluctantly Gwen agrees to play along—with her husband Peter’s full support. It’s just one weekend—what harm could come of it?

But as Gwen is drawn into Elliot’s quirky, wonderful family—his astonishingly wise and open mother, his warm and welcoming sister, and his adorable, precocious niece—she starts questioning everything she’s ever expected from love. And as she begins to uncover a few secrets about her own family, it suddenly looks like a pretend relationship just might turn out to be the most real thing she’s ever known.

Visit Bridget Asher's website.

"The Year That Follows"

New from Knopf: The Year That Follows by Scott Lasser.

About the book, from the publisher:

The story of a woman’s search for her brother’s lost son, orphaned in the wake of his sudden death, drives Scott Lasser’s riveting new novel—a work of stunning economy and momentum about a woman’s quest and a family’s longing for wholeness and completion.

Cat is a single mother living in Detroit when her brother is killed in New York, and she sets off in search of his child. Her search is still under way when she gets a call from her father. Sam is eighty and carrying the weight of a secret he has kept from her all her life. He asks Cat to visit him in California, intending to make his peace.

Cat’s journey—toward her father, and her brother’s infant son—and Sam’s journey toward his daughter, his lost son, and a new relationship to both his future and his past are woven into this superbly realized novel about families and the mysteries and ambiguities that inhere in our most primal relations. The result is a deeply stirring work that explores the complexities of home and heritage, and the bonds that even death is powerless to diminish.

Visit Scott Lasser's website.

"The New Valley"

New from Grove Press: The New Valley by Josh Weil.

About the book, from the publisher:

The three linked novellas that comprise Fulbright-winner Josh Weil’s masterful debut bring us into America’s remote and often unforgiving backcountry, and delicately open up the private worlds of three very different men as they confront love, loss, and their own personal demons.

Set in the hardscrabble hill country between West Virginia and Virginia, The New Valley is populated by characters striving to forge new independent lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices—from a soft-spoken middle-aged beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad’s suicide; to a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; to a mildly retarded man who falls in love with a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that will wound them both—each novella is a vivid, stand-alone examination of Weil’s uniquely romanticized relationships. As the men struggle against grief, solitude, and obsession, their desperation slowly leads them all to commit acts that will bring both ruin and salvation. 

Written with a deeply American tone reminiscent of Bobbie Ann Mason, Annie Proulx, and Kent Haruf, The New Valley is a tender exploration of resilience, isolation, and the deep, consuming ache for human connection. Weil’s empathetic, meticulous prose makes this is a debut of inescapable power.

Visit Josh Weil's website.

"Dismantled"

New from Harper: Dismantled by Jennifer McMahon.

About the book, from the publisher:

The New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Island of Lost Girls and Promise Not to Tell returns with a chilling novel in which the secrets of the past come back to haunt a group of friends in terrifying ways.

Dismantlement = Freedom

Henry, Tess, Winnie, and Suz banded together in college to form a group they called the Compassionate Dismantlers. Following the first rule of their manifesto—"To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart"—these daring misfits spend the summer after graduation in a remote cabin in the Vermont woods committing acts of meaningful vandalism and plotting elaborate, often dangerous, pranks. But everything changes when one particularly twisted experiment ends in Suz's death and the others decide to cover it up.

Nearly a decade later, Henry and Tess are living just an hour's drive from the old cabin. Each is desperate to move on from the summer of the Dismantlers, but their guilt isn't ready to let them go. When a victim of their past pranks commits suicide—apparently triggered by a mysterious Dismantler-style postcard—it sets off a chain of eerie events that threatens to engulf Henry, Tess, and their inquisitive nine-year-old daughter, Emma.

Is there someone who wants to reveal their secrets? Is it possible that Suz did not really die—or has she somehow found a way back to seek revenge?

Full of white-knuckle tension with deeply human characters caught in circumstances beyond their control, Jennifer McMahon's gripping story and spine-tingling plot prove that she is a master at weaving the fear of the supernatural with the stark realities of life.

Visit Jennifer McMahon's website and her MySpace page.

The Page 69 Test: Promise Not to Tell.

The Page 69 Test: Island of Lost Girls.