It’s been quite the hectic month! Of course, when am I not saying that!? Anyway, apologies for this post being a little late. Hopefully this still gives you time to pre-order any titles I mention! Luckily, this list is shorter than usual. Perhaps my tastes have become more discriminating? In any case, following is the first half of my “most anticipated” books of April list. As usual, click on the book title or cover to pre-order!
The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist by Tanya Byron (April 7):
A respected psychologist and British media personality, Tanya Byron recounts the unforgettable cases she encountered while training, offering a moving portrait of the making of a young clinician.
In my session with Imogen, the words were still not coming. I had to move past my own frustration and relax. But it is very hard to relax when you are looking into the eyes of a mute little girl who wants to be dead. You don’t want to relax; you want to pull her into your arms, hold her and then shake her until she tells you why. You long to say, “Why do you want to die? You’re twelve years old.”
Gripping, unforgettable and deeply affecting, The Skeleton Cupboard recounts the patient stories that most influenced Professor Tanya Byron, covering years of training that forced her to confront the harsh realities of the lives of her patients and the demons of her own family’s history. Among others, we meet Ray, a violent sociopath desperate to be treated with tenderness and compassion; Mollie, a talented teenager intent on starving herself; and Imogen, a twelve-year old so haunted by a secret that she’s intent on killing herself.
Byron brings the reader along as she uncovers the reasons each of these individuals behave the way they do, resulting in a thrilling, compulsively readable psychological mystery that sheds light on mental illness and what its treatment tells us about ourselves.
One Mile Under by Andrew Gross (April 7):
Leading a tour down the rapids outside Aspen, Colorado, whitewater guide Dani Haller comes upon a dead body of a close friend. Trey Watkin’s death is ruled an accident. Finding evidence that seems to back up her suspicions that it wasn’t, she takes her case to Wade Dunn, the local police chief and her ex-stepfather, with whom she shares some unresolved history. Wade insists the case is closed, but Rooster, a hot air balloon operator in town, claims he saw something from the air she should know. When he suddenly dies in a fiery crash, Dani threatens to take her suspicions public, goading Wade into tossing her in jail.
When an old friend contacts Ty Hauck and says his daughter is in trouble, he doesn’t hesitate to get involved. Together, the two step into a sinister scheme running deep beneath the surface of a quiet, Colorado town which has made a deal with devil to survive. But in the square-off between giant energy companies and beaten-down ranchers and farmers, one resource is even more valuable in this drought-stricken region than oil. They both will kill for it—Water.
One Mile Under is a thrilling rapid run of hair-raising twists and unforeseen turns set against one of the most provocative environmental issues of our time.
Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova (April 7):
Joe O’Brien is a forty-four-year-old police officer from the Irish Catholic neighborhood of Charlestown, Massachusetts. A devoted husband, proud father of four children in their twenties, and respected officer, Joe begins experiencing bouts of disorganized thinking, uncharacteristic temper outbursts, and strange, involuntary movements. He initially attributes these episodes to the stress of his job, but as these symptoms worsen, he agrees to see a neurologist and is handed a diagnosis that will change his and his family’s lives forever: Huntington’s Disease.
Huntington’s is a lethal neurodegenerative disease with no treatment and no cure. Each of Joe’s four children has a 50 percent chance of inheriting their father’s disease, and a simple blood test can reveal their genetic fate. While watching her potential future in her father’s escalating symptoms, twenty-one-year-old daughter Katie struggles with the questions this test imposes on her young adult life. Does she want to know? What if she’s gene positive? Can she live with the constant anxiety of not knowing?
As Joe’s symptoms worsen and he’s eventually stripped of his badge and more, Joe struggles to maintain hope and a sense of purpose, while Katie and her siblings must find the courage to either live a life “at risk” or learn their fate.
Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo (April 7):
This is the story of Olav: an extremely talented “fixer” for one of Oslo’s most powerful crime bosses. But Olav is also an unusually complicated fixer. He has a capacity for love that is as far-reaching as is his gift for murder. He is our straightforward, calm-in-the-face-of-crisis narrator with a storyteller’s hypnotic knack for fantasy. He has an “innate talent for subordination” but running through his veins is a “virus” born of the power over life and death. And while his latest job puts him at the pinnacle of his trade, it may be mutating into his greatest mistake….
Joe Ledger #7: Predator One: A Joe Ledger Novel by Jonathan Maberry (April 7):
On opening day of the new baseball season a small model-kit airplane flies down from the stands and buzzes the mound, where a decorated veteran pilot is about to throw out the first ball. The toy plane is the exact replica of the one flown by the war hero. Everyone laughs, thinking it’s a prank or a publicity stunt. Until it explodes, killing dozens.
Seconds later a swarm of killer drones descend upon the picnicked crowd, each one carrying a powerful bomb. All across the country artificial intelligence drive systems in cars, commuter trains and even fighter planes go out of control. The death toll soars as the machines we depend upon every day are turned into engines of destruction.
Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences go on the hunt for whoever is controlling these machines, but the every step of the way they are met with traps and shocks that strike to the very heart of the DMS. No one is safe. Nowhere is safe. Enemies old and new rise as America burns.
Joe Ledger and his team begin a desperate search for the secret to this new technology and the madmen behind it. But before they can close in the enemy virus infects Air Force One. The president is trapped aboard as the jet heads toward the heart of New York City. It has become Predator One.
All the Rage by Courtney Summers (April 14):
The sheriff’s son, Kellan Turner, is not the golden boy everyone thinks he is, and Romy Grey knows that for a fact. Because no one wants to believe a girl from the wrong side of town, the truth about him has cost her everything—friends, family, and her community. Branded a liar and bullied relentlessly by a group of kids she used to hang out with, Romy’s only refuge is the diner where she works outside of town. No one knows her name or her past there; she can finally be anonymous. But when a girl with ties to both Romy and Kellan goes missing after a party, and news of him assaulting another girl in a town close by gets out, Romy must decide whether she wants to fight or carry the burden of knowing more girls could get hurt if she doesn’t speak up. Nobody believed her the first time—and they certainly won’t now—but the cost of her silence might be more than she can bear.
What You Left Behind by Samantha Hayes (April 14):
Five years ago, 19-year-old Simon Hawkeswell hanged himself in his family home in Warwickshire, England. The reasons behind his choice remain a devastating mystery, and what’s worse, not long after his death a wave of “sympathetic” suicides among local teens rocked the community. But that was then: a short-lived, sinister trend that’s faded into oblivion. Or so everyone thought. When a young man is killed in a freak motorbike accident and the authorities find a suicide note on him, the nightmare of repeat suicides once again threatens their village.
Desperate for a vacation, Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher has just come to Warwickshire for a stay with her sister, Jo, but the atmosphere of the country house is unusually tense. Freddie, Jo’s son, seems troubled and uncommunicative. After yet another young man takes his life, Freddie disappears and Lorraine knows there must be something dark around town that links the suicides. Finding answers should help her find Freddie, but they’ll also lead to a shocking truth: whatever it is—or whoever it is—that’s killing these young people is far more disturbing than she ever could have imagined, and unraveling the secret is just as dangerous as the secret itself.
Wicked, intense, and utterly compulsive, What You Left Behind is a twisted achievement of true psychological suspense, confirming Samantha Hayes as a top thriller writer.
House of Echoes by Brendan Duffy (April 14):
Akin to Jennifer McMahon’s The Winter People and Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, House of Echoes is a debut thriller populated by achingly sympathetic characters, charged with psychological suspense, and rich with a small town’s strange history.
A young New York City couple with a boy and a baby in tow, Ben and Caroline Tierney had it all…until Ben’s second novel missed the mark, Caroline lost her lucrative banking job, and something went wrong with 8-year-old Charlie. When Ben inherits land way upstate from his grandmother, the two of them began to believe in second chances. But upon arriving in Swannhaven, a town that seems to have been forgotten by time, they’re beset by strange sights and disconcerting developments…and they begin to realize they might have made their worst mistake yet. But what dark secret is buried in this odd place? And will Ben and Caroline figure it out soon enough to save their young family?
Where They Found Her by Kimberly McCreight (April 14):
At the end of a long winter in well-to-do Ridgedale, New Jersey, the body of an infant is discovered in the woods near the town’s prestigious university campus. No one knows who the baby is, or how her body ended up out there. But there is no shortage of opinions.
When freelance journalist, and recent Ridgedale transplant, Molly Anderson is unexpectedly called upon to cover the story for the Ridgedale Reader, it’s a risk, given the severe depression that followed the loss of her own baby. But the bigger threat comes when Molly unearths some of Ridgedale’s darkest secrets, including a string of unreported sexual assaults going back twenty years. Meanwhile, Sandy, a high school dropout, searches for her volatile and now missing mother, and PTA president Barbara struggles to help her young son, who’s suddenly having disturbing outbursts.
Told from the perspectives of Molly, Barbara, and Sandy, Kimberly McCreight’s taut and profoundly moving novel unwinds the tangled truth about the baby’s death revealing that these three women have far more in common than they realized. That the very worst crimes are committed against those we love. And that—sooner or later—the past catches up to all of us.
Every Fifteen Minutes by Lisa Scottoline (by April 14):
Dr. Eric Parrish is the Chief of the Psychiatric Unit at Havemeyer General Hospital outside of Philadelphia. Recently separated from his wife Alice, he is doing his best as a single Dad to his seven-year-old daughter Hannah. His work seems to be going better than his home life, however. His unit at the hospital has just been named number two in the country and Eric has a devoted staff of doctors and nurses who are as caring as Eric is. But when he takes on a new patient, Eric’s entire world begins to crumble.
Seventeen-year-old Max has a terminally ill grandmother and is having trouble handling it. That, plus his OCD and violent thoughts about a girl he likes makes Eric a high risk patient. Max can’t turn off the mental rituals he needs to perform every fifteen minutes that keep him calm. With the pressure mounting, Max just might reach the breaking point. When the girl is found murdered, Max is nowhere to be found. Worried about Max, Eric goes looking for him and puts himself in danger of being seen as a “person of interest” himself. Next, one of his own staff turns on him in a trumped up charge of sexual harassment. Is this chaos all random? Or is someone systematically trying to destroy Eric’s life? Lisa Scottoline’s visceral thriller brings you into the grip of a true sociopath and shows you how, in the quest to survive such ruthlessness, every minute counts.
Stay tuned for the second half of this post, books published the last half of April!
