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List: New Fiction in February 2025
Back After This
Podcast producer Cecily Foster reluctantly agrees to host a show documenting her dating life under the guidance of an influencer coach and must reconcile her growing feelings for a kind photographer with her coach's conflicting advice.
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Battle Mountain
The campaign of destruction that Axel Soledad and Dallas Cates wreaked on Nate Romanowski and Joe Pickett left both men in tatters, especially Nate, who lost almost everything. Wondering if the civilized life left him vulnerable to attack, Nate dropped off the grid with his falcons in tow to prepare for vengeance. When Joe gets a call from the governor asking for help finding his son-in-law, who has gone missing in the Sierra Madre range, he enlists the help of a local, a rookie game warden named Susan Kany. As Nate and fellow falconer Geronimo Jones circle closer to their prey, his and Joe's paths are about to collide...at Battle Mountain.
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Black Woods, Blue Sky
A struggling single mother in Alaska, Birdie, finds solace and love in the reclusive Arthur and his remote wilderness life, but as she embraces this idyllic escape, she uncovers his dark secret and the unforgiving nature of the wild.
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Blood Ties
By all accounts, Carl and Roy Opgard are doing quite well for themselves. Or at least they're doing as well as can be expected in a small town like Os. Carl manages the area's swanky and successful spa and hotel, while Roy runs a nearby gas station and harbors grand plans to build it out into an entire amusement park complete with a roller coaster. But when news breaks about a new highway to be built nearby, bypassing Os and leaving the town cut-off and isolated, it's clear that something has to be done... even if the methods are bound to be dirty. Fortunately, Carl and Roy have experience with just that kind of work. Meanwhile, the town sheriff has gotten his hands on new technology that will enable him to take a deeper look at a slate of unsolved murders from years past - including that of his own father. And just as the sheriff reopens his investigation, the death toll begins to climb. It's like Roy says about his roller coaster: "Once it's rolling, it's too late to get off." Blood Ties is a tense, compulsively readable tour de force about loyalty, family ties, and love that is as destructive as it is powerful.
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Bonded in Death
Lieutenant Eve Dallas is frustrated by the case of Giovanni Rossi. Decades ago, during the Urban Wars of the 2020s, he was part of a small, secret organization called The Twelve. Responding to an urgent summons from an old compatriot, he landed in New York and eased into a waiting car. And died within minutes—no identifiable weapon, zero results on facial recognition. In desperation, she turns to Summerset—a fiercely loyal, if somewhat grouchy, major-domo from Dublin and fellow member of the Twelve. It's not a part of his past he likes to revisit. But now he must—because a cryptic message from the killer boasts that Rossi isn't the first of the Twelve to have died.
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Close Your Eyes and Count to 10
Charismatic daredevil and extreme adventurer Maverick Dillan invites you to the ultimate game of hide-and-seek. But as the players gather on Falcao Island, the event quickly spirals into a chilling test of survival. A storm rages as a deadly threat stalks the contestants, turning the challenge into something far more sinister than the social media stunt it was intended to be. Enter Adele, a single mother with a fierce determination to protect her children at all costs. In a ruthless battle for survival where the stakes are higher than ever, the blurry line between the virtual and the real proves that the only person we can trust is ourselves.
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Deep End
A competitive diver and an ace swimmer jump into forbidden waters in this steamy college romance from the New York Times bestselling author of The Love Hypothesis. Scarlett Vandermeer is swimming upstream. A junior at Stanford and a student-athlete who specializes in platform diving, Scarlett prefers to keep her head down, concentrating on getting into med school and on recovering from the injury that almost ended her career. She has no time for relationships-at least, that's what she tells herself. Swim captain, world champion, all-around aquatics golden boy, Lukas Blomqvist thrives on discipline. It's how he wins gold medals and breaks records: complete focus, with every stroke. On the surface, Lukas and Scarlett have nothing in common. Until a well-guarded secret slips out, and everything changes. So they start an arrangement. And as the pressure leading to the Olympics heats up, so does their relationship. It was supposed to be just a temporary, mutually satisfying fling. But when staying away from Lukas becomes impossible, Scarlett realizes that her heart might be treading into dangerous water.
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A Dragon of Black Glass
Nyx and her allies race against time to unearth an ancient weapon buried beneath a sun-scorched desert while facing enemies, growing madness and an impending war in the third novel of the series following The Cradle of Ice.
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Famous Last Words
After months of maternity leave, today Camilla will drop her infant daughter off at daycare for the first time and return to her job as a literary agent. But, when she wakes, her husband Luke isn’t there, and in his place is a cryptic note. Then it starts. Breaking news: there's a hostage situation developing in London. The police arrive, and tell her Luke is involved. But he isn't a hostage. Her husband - doting father, eternal optimist - is the gunman. What she does next is crucial. Because only she knows what the note he left behind that morning says. Famous Last Words is the story of a crime, a marriage, and more secrets than Camilla ever could have imagined.
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Harlem Rhapsody
In 1919, Jessie Redmon Fauset is named literary editor of The Crisis -the first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine. But she is also having a secret affair with the magazine's founder, W. E. B. Du Bois. Despite rumors of their liaison, Jessie is determined to prove herself. The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there. When her first novel is released to great acclaim, it’s clear that Jessie is at the heart of a renaissance in Black music, theater, and the arts. She has shaped a generation of literary legends, but as she strives to preserve her legacy, she’ll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.
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Isola
Inspired by a real 16th-century heroine, an orphaned and betrayed young woman, Marguerite, is marooned on a desolate island with her lover, where she must confront nature's harshness and her own strength in a desperate fight for survival.
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A Killing Cold
A woman invited to her wealthy fiance's family retreat realizes they are hiding a terrible secret - and that she's been there before, by the author of What Lies in the Woods and No One Can Know.
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Last Twilight in Paris
Louise is still adjusting to her postwar role as a housewife when she discovers a necklace at a thrift shop. She is certain she has seen the necklace before, when working with the Red Cross in Nazi-occupied Europe, and that it holds the key to the death of her friend Franny during the war. Following clues to Paris, Louise discovers the dark history of Levitan - a department store that served as a Nazi prison. Louise races to find the connection between the necklace, the department store, and Franny’s death, but nothing is as it seems. Inspired by the true story of Levitan, this unforgettable story is about sacrifice, resistance and the power of love to transcend in even the darkest hours.
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Midnight Black
The Gray Man, aka assassin Court Gentry, must face miles of frozen wasteland and the Russian police state to free his lover, ex-spy Zoya Zakharova, from Penal Colony IK22.
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Nemesis
In the latest explosive novel in this New York Times bestselling series, Evan Smoak, having shaped his life with a rigid set of rules, finds himself at odds with his oldest friend in the world, where principles are in conflict with honor-and everyone is the loser. At one time, Evan Smoak was a highly successful black ops assassin known as Orphan X, dedicated to a rigid set of operational rules. Now, even after breaking with the government program, going deep underground, and remaking his life, Smoak is dedicated to his assassin's Ten Commandments. But for the first time, those principles have put him on a collision course with the man who might be his best friend in the world, Tommy Stojack. Stojack, a gifted gunsmith who has created much of Evan's own weapons and combat gear, has apparently crossed one of Evan's sharply delineated lines. When Evan decides to go to his workshop and have it out with Tommy, Evan finds himself under attack by a group attempting to ambush and kill him. But, with all his training and skills, Evan is extremely hard to kill-and the dispute explodes into open warfare between him and Tommy. Now Evan has no choice, in his mind, than to track down and face down his only friend. In the meantime, Tommy is honoring an old promise to an Army friend and goes to help his dead friend's son. In a depressed rural area, with conflicts flaring up, that son is partially responsible for the death of an innocent. And while Tommy is trying to keep him, and his friends, alive, Evan arrives, with vengeance in mind. The scary thing? Evan isn't even the most dangerous threat to arrive on the scene.
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Open Season
Psychologist Alex Delaware and Homicide Detective Milo Sturgis race against time to find a twisted killer.
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Queens of Crime
In 1930 London, the Queens of Crime, a secret society of renowned women writers led by Dorothy L. Sayers investigates the murder of nurse May Daniels, found strangled in a park, and must navigate a web of intrigue and danger as they challenge societal norms.
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Robert B. Parker's Buried Secrets
Another thriller featuring small-town Paradise police chief Jesse Stone.
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Show Don't Tell
In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she's as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned. In "The Patron Saints of Middle Age," a woman visits two friends she hasn't seen since her divorce. In "A for Alone," a married middle-aged artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can't spend time alone without lusting after each other. And in "Lost but Not Forgotten," Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel, Prep, a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school. Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld's stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.
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Three Days in June
Gail Baines is long divorced from her husband, Max, and not especially close to her grown daughter, Debbie. Today is the day before Debbie's wedding. To start, Gail loses her job-or quits, depending who you ask. Then, Max arrives unannounced on Gail's doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay and without even a suit in which to walk their daughter down the aisle. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband-to-be. It will not only throw the wedding itself into question but also send Gail back into her past and how her own relationship fell apart. Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer at the height of her powers.
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We all Live Here
Lila Kennedy juggles a broken marriage, rebellious daughters, a crumbling house, and an elderly stepfather when her estranged father unexpectedly shows up after thirty-five years, forcing her to confront unresolved feelings and discover unexpected lessons about love and family amidst her chaotic life.
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