What I’m looking forward to …

It’s now August and lately I’ve been feeling like summer is whizzing by at high speed.   As I await the release of several new hot mysteries and thrillers, there are days when time can’t move fast enough.  Here’s a sample of what I can’t wait to get my hands on!

The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny 

Louise Penny is back with the 11^th in her highly successful Chief Inspector Gamache series.  Penny tells a marvelous tale set in Three Pines, a fictional village in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where there are more serious crimes than residents.  This latest is the second novel since Gamache retired from the Surete du Quebec and he has lost none of his charm or ability to catch a killer. 

Hardly a day goes by when nine year old Laurent Lepage doesn't cry wolf. From alien invasions, to walking trees, to winged beasts in the woods, to dinosaurs spotted in the village of Three Pines, his tales are so extraordinary no one can possibly believe him. Including Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache, who now live in the little Quebec village.  But when the boy disappears, the villagers are faced with the possibility that one of his tall tales might have been true – Publisher

Speaking in Bones by Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs is back with another Dr. Temperance Brennan forensic anthropologist mystery.  Her last novel Bones Never Lie ended on a great personal note for two of her main characters and we’ll have to wait a little longer to see where that leads.  In this latest in the Bones series Dr. Brennan investigates what looks to be a typical missing person case, only to find herself digging up bones possibly left by a serial killer, a cult, or perhaps something not entirely of this world.

For every case that Temperence Brennan has solved, there remain numerous bodies that remain unidentified in her lab. Information on some of these cold cases is available online, where amateur detectives sometimes take a stab at solving cases.  When Tempe gets a call from Hazel “Lucky” Strike, a web sleuth who believes she’s successfully connected a body in Tempe’s lab to a missing eighteen-year-old girl, Tempe writes it off as another false alarm. Tempe has little patience for chasing false leads. But when the bones in the lab match the missing girl’s medical records, Tempe re-opens the case, returning to the spot where her remains were originally found.--Publisher

Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay I tell anyone who asks (and some that don’t) that if they enjoy thrillers and haven’t been introduced to Linwood Barclay then they must absolutely read his novels.  His books have all been stand alones and that makes it easy to pick up any one of them and enjoy.  However, this is about to change with the release of Broken Promise, the first in a thriller trilogy.

After his wife's death and the collapse of his newspaper, David Harwood has no choice but to uproot his nine-year-old son and move back into his childhood home in Promise Falls, New York. David believes his life is in free fall, and he can't find a way to stop his descent.
Then he comes across a family secret of epic proportions. A year after a devastating miscarriage, David's cousin Marla has continued to struggle. But when David's mother asks him to check on her, he's horrified to discover that she's been secretly raising a child who is not her own--a baby she claims was a gift from an "angel" left on her porch.—Publisher

X by Sue Grafton

I rarely think about how many letters are in the alphabet but X by Sue Grafton reminds me that there are only 2 more left and for that I am deeply sad.  I have been a fan of Grafton’s since the early 1980s when I first met her abrasive, single, street smart P.I. Kinsey Millhone.  Her stories still take place in the eighties and that is both confusing for some and refreshing for others who remember life without cell phones and the internet. Kinsey and I have been her through many ups and downs including exploding residences, broken relationships and suspects that would have sent an ordinary P.I. running in the other direction.  Here’s a sample of what X has in store for Kinsey and her readers.

PI Kinsey Millhone's life is going smoothly for once. She has money in the bank from an inheritance, and she has just collected an advance for the fairly simple job of locating a recently released prisoner. But the good times don't last long, as Kinsey finds that her fee was paid with counterfeit money and her client isn't who she claims to be. Further complicating her life is the discovery of a case file in a deceased colleague's business records, which puts Kinsey on the trail of a possible serial killer.  – Library Journal

The Girl in the Spider’s Web: a Lisbeth Salander novel by David Lagercrantz.

Like many fans of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy I did a double take when I first heard about this latest Lisbeth Salander novel.  After Larsson’s death in 2004 there was a huge public battle over his estate between Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson’s long-term partner and Erland and Joakim Larsson of the Stieg Larsson Estate.  Rumours swirled of a possible fourth manuscript on Larsson’s computer, secret plans to publish this book under Larsson’s  name, and of course financial battles between Gabrielsson and the estate.  Now the estate has given David Lagercrantz permission to continue the Millenium series.   Erland and Joakim Larsson of the Stieg Larsson Estate have said that “by letting Lagercrantz write his own ‘Millennium’ novel we keep alive the characters and the universe Larsson created”.  Fans of Larsson’s work will get to decide if he’s truly kept that universe alive.

Louise