October 10, 2025
New Fiction
The Solitary Friend by Gail Bowen – Amateur sleuth Joanne Shreve finds herself caught in the middle when her friend Vera Wang, the owner of a discreet escort service, The Right Woman, calls in a favour. Howard Dowhanuik, another long-time friend of Joanne’s and the former premier of Saskatchewan, has been a loyal client for years. That is until he started badgering Vera’s employees, trying to discourage them from performing their “meaningless’ work. Given his recent verbal attacks against any and all opponents on his podcast, Joanne knows his erratic behavior must be part of a larger issue. Can Joanne talk Howard down and make him see sense before he goes too far? To complicate matters, scandalous photos with threatening demands begin targeting Joanne’s friends. With her loved ones’ happiness – and possibly their very lives – at stake, she must race to find the source of the mysterious messages before they make good on their menacing ultimatum.
The Guest in Room 120 by Sara Ackerman – 1905 As a mother of a university and a woman with an iron will, Jane Stanford has made her share of enemies. After a scare at her mansion in San Francisco and on the advice of her doctor, she flees to Honolulu and the fashionable new Moana hotel. But as fate would have it, the island is not as safe as it seems. 2005 Zoe Finch is a bestselling author who desperately needs a jump start on her next novel, and she makes a split decision to attend a writers’ conference at the Moana under an assumed name. As a storm brews offshore, she begins having nightmares that feel hauntingly real. Terrified, Zoe enlists the help of mystery writer Dylan Winters and, over the course of the week, races to uncover the shocking truth of what happened in the hotel one hundred years ago almost to the day. 1905 ‘Iliahi Baldwin’s life changes the moment she lands a job at the Moana. Newly hired and reeling from a tragic loss, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with the formidable Jane Stanford upon her arrival, which leaves young ‘Ili devastated when the unthinkable happens. ‘Ili knows things, but there are powerful people who need the truth to remain hidden, and to cross them could prove disastrous.
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan – 2119, the highlands of the UK. Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. At the heart of this obsession is a legendary lost poem read aloud once in 2014 and never heard again. As the century progressed into climate catastrophe and war, the poem became a myth, a symbol of what could have been and all that has been lost. When Tom uncovers a clue that may lead to the poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.
A Slowly Dying Cause by Elizabeth George – Michael Lobb has just been found dead on the floor of his family’s tin and pewter workshop. It’s suspicious enough that his body was found by a representative of Cornwall EcoMining, a company keen on acquiring his family’s land, and it’s made even worse when it is revealed that Michael has been the majority owner of his family’s business and the sole obstacle preventing a deal from being made. But it doesn’t take long for Inspector Beatrice Hannaford to unearth the layers of estrangement that surrounded Michael in his final days, pointing suspicions elsewhere. In comes Kayla, a young woman half Michael’s age, who has just been made his widow. Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers are brought in to help solve the crime and search for justice in a community where lust, greed, and family traditions collide with devastating consequences.