May 30, 2025
New Fiction
Parents Weekend by Alex Finlay – In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families gather over dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids – five residents of Campisi Hall – never show up to dinner. At first, everyone thinks they’re just being college students, irresponsibly forgetting about the gathering or skipping out to go to a party. But as the hours tick by and another night falls with not so much as a text from the students, panic ensues. Soon the campus police call in reinforcements. Search parties are formed. Reporters swarm the small enclave. Rumors swirl and questions arise. Libby, Blane, Mark, Felix, and Stella – The Five, as the podcasters, bloggers, and TikTok sleuths call them – come from very different families. What drew them out on that fateful night? Could it be the sins of their mothers and fathers come to cause them peril – or a threat to the friend group from withing?
The Retirement Plan by Sue Hincenbergs – After thirty years of friendship, Pam dreams of her perfect retirement with Nancy, Shalisa, Marlene, and their husbands – until their husbands pool their funds for an investment that goes terribly wrong. Suddenly, their golden years are looking as dreary as their marriages. But when the women discover their husbands have seven-figure life insurance policies, a new dream forms. And this time, they need a hitman. Meanwhile, their husbands are working on their own secret retirement scheme, and when things begin to go sideways, they fear it’s back-fired. The husbands scramble to stay alive…but soon realize they may not be quick enough to outmaneuver their wives.
Fair Play by Louise Hegarty – A groups of friends gather at an Airbnb on New Year’s Eve. It is Benjamin’s birthday, and his sister, Abigail, is throwing him a jazz-age murder mystery-themed party. As the night plays out, champagne is drunk, hors d’oeuvres consumed, and relationships forged, consolidated and frayed. In the morning, all of them wake up – except Benjamin. Soon an eminent detective arrives, and Abigail suddenly finds herself starring in a murder mystery of her own while she tries to wrap her mind around her brother’s death. Will the culprit be revealed? And how can Abigail, now alone, piece herself back together in the wake of this loss?
The Girls of Good Fortune by Kristina McMorris – Oregan, 1888. Amid the subterranean labyrinth of Portland’s notorious Shanghai Tunnels, a woman awakens in an underground cell, drugged and disguised. Celia soon realizes she’s a “shanghaied” victim on the verge of being shipped off as forced labor, leaving behind those she loves most. Although well accustomed to adapting for survival – being half-Chinese, passing as white during an era fraught with anti-Chinese sentiment – she fears that far more than her own fate hangs in the balance. As she pieces together the twisting path that led to her abduction, from serving as a maid for the family of a dubious mayor to becoming entwined in the case of a gold miners’ massacre, revelations emerge of a child left in peril. Desperate, Celia must find a way to escape and return to a place where unearthed secrets could prove deadlier than the dark recesses of Chinatown.