Saturdays at the Café

Saturdays at the Café is a weekly feature hosted here to talk about and discuss the books I’ve discovered during the past week, added to my shelf and am excited about reading. They may be new/scheduled releases I’ve seen on NetGalley, at the library, or from publishers or they may be older titles my friends have reviewed and shared on Goodreads or blogs.

 

---

Henry North is a down-on-his-luck cybersecurity expert from New Orleans. Adam Zhang is the cofounder of one of Austin’s most successful venture capitalist firms. These two men didn’t know each other. They had never met. Yet they died together, violently, in a place neither had any business being.

When Henry doesn’t return from a business trip, his wife, Kirsten, panics—and then gets an anonymous phone call: “Your husband is dead in Austin.”

Flora Zhang knew her husband was keeping secrets. She suspected an affair, but she had decided she could forgive him for his weakness—until her husband ended up dead. And with no explanation for her husband’s murder, the police begin to suspect her.

Together, these two widows will face a powerful foe determined to write a false narrative about the murders. In doing so, neither Flora nor Kirsten will remain the women the world thought they were.

This showed up at my library and though I’ve never read this author before I was drawn by the description and several of my Goodreads friends gave it favorable reviews.

---

Faye Adelheim is living a delicious lie. She is wealthy beyond imagination, she is the chairman of her self-made global cosmetics brand, and her ex-husband, the monster who killed her beloved daughter, Julienne, is living out the remainder of his days behind bars.

But unbeknownst to journalists, police officers, and investors, and even the lovers she occasionally invites to her bed, Faye has a secret: Her daughter is, in fact, alive and well and so is her mother, the woman Faye’s father was sentenced for allegedly killing years ago.

Together, three generations of women have survived in hiding from the men who sought to destroy them. But unfortunately for Faye, cages are meant to be opened, pillow talk can lead to betrayal, and secrets always end in tears.

I have the first book in this series and didn’t know the second was released until it showed up at my library.

---

The vampire Wulfe is missing. Since he’s deadly, possibly insane, and his current idea of “fun” is stalking Mercy, some may see it as no great loss. But when he disappears, the Tri-Cities pack is blamed. The mistress of the vampire seethe informs Mercy that the pack must produce Wulfe to prove their innocence, or the loose alliance between the local vampires and werewolves is over.

So Mercy goes out to find her stalker—and discovers more than just Wulfe have disappeared. Someone is taking people from locked rooms, from the aisles of stores, and even from crowded parties. And these are not just ordinary people but supernatural beings. Until Wulfe vanished, all of them were powerless loners, many of whom quietly moved to the Tri-Cities in the hope that the safety promised by Mercy and Adam’s pack would extend to them as well.

Who is taking them? As Mercy investigates, she learns of the legend of the Harvester, who travels by less-trodden paths and reaps the souls that are ripe with a great black scythe. . . .

I love the Mercy Thompson urban fantasy series but have fallen behind. This isn’t scheduled for release until March and I should be caught up by then. I’m thrilled that my library has it set up so I can get in the queue now for the audiobook.

---

No one even knew they were together. Now one of them is dead.

56 Days Ago
Ciara and Oliver meet in a supermarket queue in Dublin the same week Covid-19 reaches Irish shores.

35 Days Ago
When lockdown threatens to keep them apart, Oliver suggests they move in together. Ciara sees a unique opportunity for a relationship to flourish without the scrutiny of family and friends. Oliver sees a chance to hide who – and what – he really is.

Today
Detectives arrive at Oliver’s apartment to discover a decomposing body inside.

Can they determine what really happened, or has lockdown created an opportunity for someone to commit the perfect crime?

Crime by the Book

The author won me over with The Nothing Man so I’m all in with this new book scheduled for release in August. It’s a library audiobook hopeful.

---

 

Can one man’s crowded, messy life fill another man’s empty heart?

Raising a family was always Adam Mills’ dream, although solo parenting and moving back to tiny Garnet Run certainly were not. After a messy breakup, Adam is doing his best to give his young daughter the life she deserves—including accepting help from their new, reclusive neighbor to fulfill her Christmas wish.

Though the little house may not have “the most lights ever,” the Mills home begins to brighten as handsome Wes Mobray spends more time there and slowly sheds his protective layers. But when the eye-catching house ends up in the news, Wes has to make a choice: hide from the darkness of his unusual past or embrace the light of a future—and a family—with Adam.

This is the third book in the Garnet Run series, an audio review hopeful. I’m up to date and love this author’s writing.

---

In horror movies, the final girls are the ones left standing when the credits roll. They made it through the worst night of their lives…but what happens after?

Like his best-selling novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, Grady Hendrix’s latest is a fast-paced, frightening, and wickedly humorous thriller. From chain saws to summer camp slayers, The Final Girl Support Group pays tribute to and slyly subverts our most popular horror films – movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream.

Lynette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre. For more than a decade, she’s been meeting with five other final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, working to put their lives back together. Then one woman misses a meeting, and their worst fears are realized – someone knows about the group and is determined to rip their lives apart again, piece by piece.

But the thing about final girls is that no matter how bad the odds, how dark the night, how sharp the knife, they will never, ever give up.

I have a shaky relationship with the horror genre so I’ve danced around adding this book, despite it’s teasing description. But the review by Kelly @ From Belgium with Love pushed me over the line, especially after the audiobook showed up at my library.

---

Viktor Orlov had a longstanding appointment with death. Once Russia’s richest man, he now resides in splendid exile in London, where he has waged a tireless crusade against the authoritarian kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. His mansion in Chelsea’s exclusive Cheyne Walk is one of the most heavily protected private dwellings in London. Yet somehow, on a rainy summer evening, in the midst of a global pandemic, Russia’s vengeful president finally manages to cross Orlov’s name off his kill list.

Before him was the receiver from his landline telephone, a half-drunk glass of red wine, and a stack of documents….

The documents are contaminated with a deadly nerve agent. The Metropolitan Police determine that they were delivered to Orlov’s home by one of his employees, a prominent investigative reporter from the anti-Kremlin Moskovskaya Gazeta. And when the reporter slips from London hours after the killing, MI6 concludes she is a Moscow Center assassin who has cunningly penetrated Orlov’s formidable defenses.

But Gabriel Allon, who owes his very life to Viktor Orlov, believes his friends in British intelligence are dangerously mistaken. His desperate search for the truth will take him from London to Amsterdam and eventually to Geneva, where a private intelligence service controlled by a childhood friend of the Russian president is using KGB-style “active measures” to undermine the West from within. Known as the Haydn Group, the unit is plotting an unspeakable act of violence that will plunge an already divided America into chaos and leave Russia unchallenged. Only Gabriel Allon, with the help of a brilliant young woman employed by the world’s dirtiest bank, can stop it.

Elegant and sophisticated, provocative and daring, The Cellist explores one of the preeminent threats facing the West today – the corrupting influence of dirty money wielded by a revanchist and reckless Russia. It is at once a novel of hope and a stark warning about the fragile state of democracy. And it proves once again why Daniel Silva is regarded as his generation’s finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.

I’m so far behind in this series but I vow to catch up. The audiobook also showed up at my library. 

---

He’s the love of her life…
Rock climbing saved Megs Hall. The sport gave her an emotional escape from her abusive stepfather when she was a teen and turned her into a living legend. It also brought her together with the one man who truly understood her. Elite climber Mitch Ahearn believed in her and her abilities at a time when other male climbers just wanted to get into her pants. Somehow, Mitch broke through her armor, helping the shattered girl inside to heal. He became her first and only lover and her best friend. Together, they made history and set the climbing world—and the bedsheets—on fire.

She’s his only chance at survival…
Forty-eight years later, Megs and Mitch live in tiny Scarlet Springs, Colo. They’ve left professional climbing behind and now put their time and energy into running the Rocky Mountain Search & Rescue Team, using their vertical expertise to save lives. But when their hard-earned climbing vacation ends in tragedy, they find themselves far from home and in desperate need of rescue, with Mitch’s life hanging by a thread. Megs must use all her experience and training to save him.

Will their love be only a memory?
With Mitch gravely injured, Megs finds herself reliving the past, reading the private journals he kept of their adventures together. It’s a bittersweet trip down memory lane, one that reveals Mitch’s innermost thoughts and his deep and abiding love for her. But will they have the chance to make more memories together and live out their happy ending—or have they come to the end of the trail?

Clare is not only one of my auto read authors but an auto buy. She’s self published for the last few years and I’ll buy anything she writes. If you read romantic suspense, you should definitely read/listen to her backlist.

---

Mark Antonelli, a failed young writer looking down the barrel at thirty, is planning a cross-country road trip. He buys a beat-up old tour bus. He hires a young army vet to drive it. He puts out an ad for others to join him along the way. But this will be a road trip like no other: His passengers are all fellow disheartened souls who have decided that this will be their final journey—upon arrival in San Francisco, they will find a cliff with an amazing view of the ocean at sunset, hit the gas, and drive out of this world.

The unlikely companions include a young woman with a chronic pain sensory disorder and another who was relentlessly bullied at school for her size; a bipolar, party-loving neo-hippie; a gentle coder with a literal hole in his heart and blue skin; and a poet dreaming of a better world beyond this one. We get to know them through access to their texts, emails, voicemails, and the daily journal entries they write as the price of admission for this trip.

By turns tragic, funny, quirky, charming, and deeply moving, Together We Will Go explores the decisions that brings these characters together, and the relationships that grow between them, with some discovering love and affection for the first time. But as they cross state lines and complications to the initial plan arise, it becomes clear that this is a novel as much about the will to live as the choice to end it. The final, unforgettable moments as they hurtle toward the decisions awaiting them will be remembered for a lifetime.

A NetGalley email put this book on my radar so I pounced when the audiobook showed up at my library. It also has a full cast narration!

---

What books did YOU add to your shelves this week?