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Featured Guide

Louise Penny, author of The Grey Wolf

Relentless phone calls interrupt the peace of a warm August morning in Three Pines. Someone has managed to track down Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, as he sits with his wife in their back garden. Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning. That's only the first in a sequence of strange events that begin THE GREY WOLF. A missing coat, an intruder alarm, a note for Gamache reading "this might interest you," a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list --- and then a murder. All propel Chief Inspector Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching.

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Sharon Virts, author of The Grays of Truth

In Reconstruction-era Baltimore, members of the city’s elite keep turning up dead. When Jane Gray Wharton’s husband, Ned, dies unexpectedly while overnighting at his brother’s home, Jane has no reason to question the circumstances of his death. But on a visit to the same house a few weeks later, both Jane and her daughter fall gravely ill, and Jane begins to suspect foul play. Though a trained chemist and former nurse, Jane is haunted by a history of delusion, loss and institutionalization.

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Lauren Ling Brown, author of Society of Lies

Maya has returned to Princeton for her college reunion. This visit is special because Maya also will be attending the graduation of her little sister, Naomi. But what should have been a dream weekend becomes Maya’s worst nightmare when she receives the news that Naomi is dead. The police are calling it an accident, but Maya suspects that there is more to the story than they are letting on. As Maya pieces together what happened in the months leading up to her sister’s death, she begins to realize how much Naomi hid from her. Despite Maya’s warnings, Naomi had joined Sterling Club, the most exclusive social club on campus --- the same one Maya belonged to. And if she had to guess, Naomi was likely tapped for the secret society within it. The more Maya uncovers, the more terrified she becomes that Naomi’s decision to follow in her footsteps might have been what got her killed.

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Danielle Trussoni, author of The Puzzle Box

It is the Year of the Wood Dragon, and the ingenious Mike Brink has been invited to Tokyo, Japan, to open the legendary Dragon Box. The box was constructed during one of Japan’s most tumultuous periods, when the samurai class was disbanded and the shogun lost power. In this moment of crisis, Emperor Meiji locked a priceless Imperial secret in the Dragon Box. Only two people knew how to open the box --- Meiji and the box’s sadistic constructor --- and both died without telling a soul what was inside or how to open it. Every 12 years since then, in the Year of the Dragon, the Imperial family holds a clandestine contest to open the box. Every puzzle master who has attempted to open it has died in the process. But Brink is not just any puzzle master. He may be the only person alive who can crack it.

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Sally Rooney, author of Intermezzo

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his 30s. In the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women --- his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a 22-year-old competitive chess player. In the early weeks of his bereavement, he meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude --- a period of desire, despair and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

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Lynda Cohen Loigman, author of The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern

On the cusp of turning 80, newly retired pharmacist Augusta Stern is adrift. When she relocates to Rallentando Springs, an active senior community in southern Florida, she unexpectedly crosses paths with Irving Rivkin, the delivery boy from her father’s old pharmacy --- and the man who broke her heart 60 years earlier. Augusta is still haunted by the mistakes of her past. What happened all those years ago, and how did her plan involving her Great Aunt Esther’s most potent elixir go so spectacularly wrong? Did Irving ever truly love her, or was he simply playing a part? And can Augusta reclaim the magic of her youth before it’s too late?

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Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of The Sequel

Anna Williams-Bonner has taken care of business. That is to say, she’s taken care of her husband, bestselling novelist Jacob Finch Bonner, and laid to rest those anonymous accusations of plagiarism that so tormented him. Now she is living the contented life of a literary widow, enjoying her husband’s royalty checks in perpetuity. But for the second time in her life, a work of fiction intercedes, and this time it’s her own debut novel, The Afterword. When Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should no longer exist. Someone out there knows far too much: about her late brother, her late husband, and just possibly...Anna herself. What does this person want, and what are they prepared to do?

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Louis Bayard, author of The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts

In September 1892, Oscar Wilde and his family have retreated to the idyllic Norfolk countryside for a holiday. His wife, Constance, has every reason to be happy: two beautiful sons, her own work as an advocate for feminist causes, and a delightfully charming and affectionate husband and father to her children, who also happens to be the most sought-after author in England. But with the arrival of an unexpected houseguest, the aristocratic young poet Lord Alfred Douglas, Constance gradually --- and then all at once --- comes to see that her husband’s heart is elsewhere and that the growing intensity between the two men threatens the whole foundation of their lives.

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Rumaan Alam, author of Entitlement

Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?

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Tami Hoag, author of Bad Liar

A murder victim dumped at the dead end of a lonely country road is not the way sheriff’s detective Nick Fourcade wants to start his week. His only lead takes him to the family of a hometown hero suddenly gone missing. Marc Mercier left his home for a weekend hunting trip and hasn’t been seen since. Meanwhile, sheriff’s detective Annie Broussard begins her first day back on the job after suffering a brutal attack by taking on the case of B’Lynn Fontenot, a mother desperate to find her grown son, a recovering drug addict. Robbie Fontenot has been missing for eight days, but the local police have no interest in the case. As Annie searches for Robbie, and Nick investigates Marc’s disappearance, it quickly becomes apparent that nothing is as it seems in the lives of either man.

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