Books You May Have Missed 2021: Adult Fiction

"July 1973. The Glasgow drug trade is booming and Bobby March, homegrown rock hero, has overdosed in a downtown hotel. Alice Kelly is thirteen years old, alone, and missing. Harry McCoy is quietly asked to find his boss's niece, who's fallen in with a dodgy crowd and hasn't been seen for days. McCoy has a hunch that there's a connection between all three events, but nobody's interested in hunches: the clock is running, the papers are out for blood,...

A catastrophic wildfire scorches the Santa Monica Mountains, exposing the charred remains of a woman who disappeared years ago. The investigation is assigned to Eve Ronin, the youngest homicide detective in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a position that forces her to prove herself again and again. This time, though, she has much more to prove. Bones don’t lie, and these have a horrific story to tell. Eve tirelessly digs into the...

"May and Otto Barnes have a perfect life: she an engineer, he a freelance artist, new friends in a new town, and a bright, 8 year-old boy. But their world is shattered when their son is wounded in a school shooting and his best friend killed, and, while Liam fights for life, hoaxers begin to harass Otto, trying to force him to admit the shooting never happened. Desperate to stop them, Otto tries to track down the lead hoaxer, a mysterious, hard to...

Hurricane Anna: a superstorm made up of two Category 5 hurricanes coming together to wreak unprecedented havoc along the eastern seaboard. When the superstorm hits, the correctional officers at Ravenhill flee open all the cell doors and leave the inmates to fend for themselves as the floodwaters rise. But Jack Constantine, an ex-cop serving ten years for killing one of his wife's murderers, isn't going to just lay down and die. Not when his wife's...

"During a snowy Cleveland February, newlyweds Muneer and Saeedah are starting their lives in America and expecting their first child. But Muneer harbors a secret: the word divorce has begun whispering itself in his ear. Soon, their marriage will end, and Muneer will return to Saudi Arabia, while Saeedah remains in Cleveland with their daughter, Hanadi. The more time she shares with her daughter, the more Saeedah wants to keep her close, and before...

"Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë thought their detecting days were behind them, but a terrifying new discovery draws them into a devlish new mystery. Haworth Parsonage, February 1846: It's been six months since the case of the vanished bride, and the Brontë sisters- Anne, Emily, and Charlotte-have received a steady dribble of inquiries made to Bell Brothers and Company solicitors, but nothing to really thrill them. Having found a publisher for...

"A novel about cowardice and courage in the face of repression, from a powerful new voice of French-African literature. The imaginary country of Sumal is a happy place, until, that is, it's taken hostage by a fundamentalist jihadist organization called The Brotherhood. The populace quickly becomes locked in a climate of violence, falling under the control of the militias as they impose silence, terror and the most rigid moral laws. Prohibitions and...

Based on the podcast of the same name and set in the fictional city of Fairhaven, follow the human Morgan as she grows her occasional recreational killing of Imps into a full-time job within her employer's new gig economy called Huntr, taking on monsters, Brush-turned citizens and all manner of mutants from the surrounding alien wilderness known as the Brush.

In Burning Girls and Other Stories, Veronica Schanoes crosses borders and genres with stories of fierce women at the margins of society burning their way toward the center. This debut collection introduces readers to a fantasist in the vein of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, with a voice all her own. Emma Goldman―yes, that Emma Goldman―takes tea with the Baba Yaga and truths unfold inside of exquisitely crafted lies. In "Among the Thorns," a young...

Hospitals are supposed to be places of healing. But in the coronary care unit at one of Copenhagen’s leading medical centers, a nurse fills a syringe with an overdose of heart medication and stealthily enters the room of an older male patient. Six days earlier, a paperboy on his route in central Copenhagen stumbles upon a macabre find: the naked body of a dead woman, lying in a fountain with arms marked with small incisions. Cause of death? Exsanguination—the...