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.

Secrets. Lies. Explosions. The truth is about to turn deadly.

When a teenager is killed at a remote doomsday prepper compound outside Beaufort, South Carolina, attorney Dean Lincoln finds himself defending a young man the law is eager to condemn. The evidence looks overwhelming. The victim’s family is powerful. And someone is willing to use bombs, threats, and fear to keep the truth hidden.

As Lincoln digs into a secretive survivalist community and a justice system warped by influence and corruption, the danger creeps closer to home, putting his wife and infant daughter at risk.

Suddenly Lincoln is fighting on two one legal, one deeply personal. As the case barrels toward trial, he realizes the truth won’t just decide the verdict—it could decide who survives.
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I accepted this for audio review, the next book in the series.

She can still feel the cold ground beneath her, but the light is dimming now, the sound fading. With her last breath, she whispers the name of the woman she hoped would save her: ‘Kim Stone.’

Chelsea Taylor’s fall looked like an accident. But hours before she died at the bottom of the unforgiving concrete steps, she came to the police station desperate to talk to Detective Kim Stone.

Kim has no idea who this woman was, what she wanted, or why she called for Kim in her last moments alive. But she doesn’t believe her death is innocent. And when she realises Chelsea left behind a baby girl who will never know her mother, she makes a vow: she might not have been able to save Chelsea’s life, but she will bring her justice.

Then another man falls to his death and now Kim is sure: this is murder. She and the team dig into the victims’ pasts and uncover a shocking link. They were both patients at Rayburn: a quiet clinic, deep in the countryside, surrounded by trees and flowers, which treats people with serious personality disorders.

Kim rushes to the clinic to interrogate the staff. Everyone seems only too happy to talk. But do the doctors really help people as much as they claim? And why does one of the patients seem scared of her? Is this peaceful place hiding a killer?

Kim is convinced that Rayburn holds the answer to why Chelsea urgently sought her out. But is her own traumatic past blinding her? Or is she hunting the most terrifying murderer of all – someone who will never, ever stop…

A completely unputdownable, twisty crime thriller that will have you racing through the pages. Perfect for fans of Val McDermid, Robert Dugoni and JM Dalgliesh.

I learned about this next book in the series from Fantastic Fiction. Scheduled for release in November, I’ll be using an Audible credit (Audible edition not yet available).

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Nine Americans in Paris. Seven intertwined love stories. One City of Light.

Love Actually meets The Notebook in a tale of love, loss, and finding your way home, all set over the course of one life-changing week in Paris.

Julia Glover has brought her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Piper, to Paris for the first time—but they know it will also be their last trip here together. Julia is dying, and as the mother and daughter desperately try to make memories together as the clock ticks down, the world opens up around them. Piper meets a cute French waiter, who might just understand her better than anyone she’s ever met, and Julia meets a man at a dive bar and struggles with how to tell him the truth about her future.

Rock star Jackson Quick’s glory days are behind him. He had a handful of hit songs thirty years ago, but he hasn’t toured in a decade. This week, he’ll launch his reunion tour in Paris, the city where it all began. But he wants more out of life than being defined by fame. When he meets a woman who finally sees him for who he is at his core, the ground shifts beneath his feet.

Henry McGee has been writing hit songs for decades—including Jackson Quick’s biggest hit, City of Light. But his secret is that every love song he’s ever written is for a woman named Celeste, whom he loved a lifetime ago, when they were both teenagers in Paris during World War II. He has spent eighty years believing she died—but when a letter arrives telling him the opposite, he’s on the first flight to France. Can he break through the haze of her dementia, using the songs he’s written all these years, to remind her of who they once were to each other—and to tell her he came back for her?

Henry’s granddaughter, Melody, has just discovered that her husband of twenty years, Gilles, a French cosmetics executive, is having an affair. When she confronts him, he tearfully apologizes and begs her to forgive him. But can she? And, perhaps even more importantly, does she want to? Or is there a different kind of life out there for her if she chooses to be alone?

These intertwining stories—plus several others—unfold over a few breathtaking spring days, as an unforgettable group of Americans in Paris must find their way to their own versions of happily ever after in the City of Light.

I foolishly gave this a pass when it was offered for audio review. Finally caved and added the audiobook to my library wishlist after umpteen friends raved about it.

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From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner ColsonWhitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy

1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife, Elizabeth, a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime Pepper is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence – Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to Sugar Hill, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.

I own the first two books and the audiobook is on my library wishlist.

What books did YOU add to your shelves this week?