November 21, 2025
New Fiction
The Spirit of Scatarie by Lesley Crewe – Christmas Day, 1922: three babies are born on Scatarie Island, off the coast of Cape Breton. Although born to different parents, Hardy, Same, and Mary Alice grow up together in their wild homeplace, exploring the rocky coastline, picking bakeapples, and scavenging treasures from the countless ships that have wrecked there over the centuries. But change is lapping at the shores of this isolated island, the Second World War the biggest change of all. One friend leaves to fight, one tends the light, and one struggles to understand how a place where wealth is measured in fish and family can possibly survive this outmigration. Only one of them knows about Cara. A girl who wrecked on the island’s shores a hundred years earlier, emigrating from Ireland. A girl who fell in love with the windswept grasses and salt-scrubbed air and tight community of Scatarie, and remains as a spirit. A girl who keeps watch, everywhere from the rugged island to the blood-soaked beaches of France…nudging the three friends towards their destinies.
Nash Falls by David Baldacci – Walter Nash is an intelligent man, tough but fair-minded. He has a wife and a daughter and a very high-level position at Sybaritic Investments, where his innate skills and dogged tenacity have carried him to the top of the pyramid in his business career. Despite never going on grand adventures, and always working too many hours, he has a happy upscale life with his family. However, following the funeral of his estranged Vietnam veteran father, Nash is unexpectedly approached by the FBI in the middle of the night. They have an important request: become their inside man to expose an enterprise that is laundering large sums of money through Sybaritic. At the top of this illegal operation is Victoria Steers, an international criminal mastermind whom the FBI has been trying to bring down for years. Nash has little choice but to accept the FBI’s demands and try to bring Steers and her partners to justice. But when Steers discovers that Nash is working with the FBI, she turns the tables on him in a way he never could have contemplated. And that forces Nash to take the ultimate step both to survive and to take his revenge: He must become the exact opposite of who he has always been. And even that may not be enough.
The Last Death of the Year by Sophie Hannah – New Year’s Eve, 1932. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool arrive on the tiny Greek island of Lamperos to celebrate the holiday with what turns out to be a rather odd community living in a dilapidated house. A dark sense of foreboding overshadows the beautiful island getaway when the guests play a New Year’s Resolutions game after dinner and one written resolution gleefully threatens to perform “the last and first death of the year.” Hours later, one of the home’s residents is found dead on the terrace. In light of the shocking murder, Poirot reveals to Catchpool the real reason he’s brought him to the island and both men resolve to ensure that the first murder will be the last.
Yous Truly by Abby Jimenez – Dr. Briana Ortiz’s life is seriously flatlining. Her divorce is just about finalized, her brother’s running out of time to find a kidney donor, and that promotion she wants? Oh, that’s probably going to the new man-doctor who’s already registering eighty-friggin’-seven on Briana’s “pain in my ass” scale. But just when all systems are set to hate, Dr. Jacob Maddox completely flips the game…by sending Briana a letter. And it’s a really good letter. Like the kind that proves that Jacob isn’t actually Satan. Worse, he might be this fantastically funny and subversively likeable guy who’s terrible at first impressions. Because suddenly he and Bri are exchanging letters, sharing lunch dates in her “sob closet,” and discussing the merits of freakishly tiny horses. But when Jacob decides to give Briana the best gift imaginable – a kidney for her brother – she wonders just how she can resist this quietly sexy new doctor…especially when he calls in a favor she’s refuse.