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.
This year, nothing about Christmas is going to plan in bestselling author Sarah Morgan’s irresistibly feel-good novel full of friendship, love and festive chaos!As the snowstorm of the century bears down on New England, reclusive author Mabel Miller is preparing to spend yet another Christmas alone with her cats. While everyone else is making merry, she’ll be avoiding the whole painful holiday. No decorations. No tree. No traces of Christmas. That is, until the weather intervenes and sends not one but two cars spinning into the stone wall surrounding her isolated cottage. Now she has a house full of strangers when the last thing she wanted was company for Christmas.
Yet Mabel’s unexpected guests—a family with two young children expecting Santa to drop gifts down the chimney, and two work colleagues who clearly have a history—are determined to make the best of the situation. As her attempts to protect her privacy are thwarted by the two little ones who are charmingly oblivious to her boundaries, soon Mabel is making cocoa and cookies for the first time in years, and allowing them into her library, a place that contains so many of her secrets.
Mabel has her reasons for keeping her truths so deeply hidden. But this Christmas, if Mabel is brave enough to share, she might finally be able to rewrite the past and find a festive happy-ever-after – for her new friends, but also herself.
Perfect for readers who love:
⚈ Feel‑good women’s fiction
⚈ Cozy cottage setting at Christmas
⚈ Books about books
⚈ Stories of friendship, love, and new beginnings.
Thanks to Carla @ Carla Loves to Read for featuring this in her Stacking the Shelves post. Scheduled for release in October, it’s an audio review hopeful.
In the latest in this USA Today bestselling series, Nevada sheriff Porter Beck receives an anonymous riddle leading him to a body hidden for decades, leading Beck and his team in a chase to unravel riddles that will help them uncover and stop a long-time serial killer.
Porter Beck is the sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada, a vast expanse of desert and mountains best known to the outside world for the top-secret installation called Area 51. Just down the highway sits a weathered mailbox where UFO believers leave messages for aliens. But this time, the message is for Beck.
It’s a riddle. And when Beck and his team decipher it, the answer leads them to the shrinking waters of Lake Mead and an oil drum chained to the bottom. Inside are the remains of someone missing for more than fifty years, someone tied to Beck by a thread of DNA stretching deep into his own past.
Enter Jett Lowell, a pint-sized but fearless FBI profiler who believes Beck’s riddle is connected to one she received seventeen years earlier, shortly before the disappearance of someone close to her.
Convinced they are hunting a serial killer, Beck and Jett follow a trail of riddles from the deserts of Nevada to the mountains of Arizona, and finally to the red rock wilderness of Utah, racing to uncover a chain of murders spanning generations before the killer unleashes a final, horrendous act decades in the making.
I accepted an invitation from the publisher for the ebook and am waiting for the audiobook. Scheduled for release in November, it’s an audio review hopeful.
The multimillion copy bestselling author Adele Parks delivers a chilling psychological thriller in which a waitress with a tragic past enters a new world of privilege and love—until cracks begin to appear and long-buried secrets threaten to shatter everything. Perfect for fans of Lisa Jewell and Alice Feeney.Be afraid. Someone’s watching.
At fifteen, Amy witnessed her father brutally murder his secret lover. Her testimony sealed her father’s fate. With him in prison, Amy and her mother must rebuild their lives in the shadow of a notorious crime.
Years later, Oliver Harrington walks into the restaurant where Amy works. Just like Amy, Oliver has a past he’d rather forget. Amy is drawn to him at a profound level; they feel a connection, an understanding…
This seems a lot like love, but does it hide something darker – an obsession that could lead Amy into a web of deception and violence she thought she’d escaped? As the truth looms ever closer, Amy must confront a harsh reality: where there is love, there is often betrayal.
Thanks to Jodie @ That Happy Reader for featuring this in her Can’t Wait Wednesday post. Scheduled for release in December, it’s a library audiobook hopeful.
From the bestselling author of Everything Inside comes a vivid, timely story, moving from Haiti to Brooklyn to Miami, of a woman whose sense of self and family are called into question when she gets caught in a random act of violence one sunny Florida day.
“Is home the place where we are born? Or is it the place where we die?” These questions haunt Magnolia, a successful Haitian American real estate agent in Miami, after she hears the terrifying sounds of gunfire while shopping for her daughter’s first-ever cellphone; she takes shelter in a restaurant called Oasis, cowering with fellow shoppers and diners, each praying to their respective gods.
Once she’s safely home, Magnolia hides the fact that she was at the mall shooting from everyone close to her. But given her life back, she begins to see it all clearly, and as if for the first time—what the extraordinary bond she has with her teenage daughter, Zoë, really means to her, and what Zoë may feel in return; what the nearly broken relationship she has with her partner, Harrison, has cost her, despite his love for her and their daughter; why her mentally troubled mother—whose unraveling patterns Magnolia worries she’s spiraling toward herself—might be so ghost-haunted; what the source of her father’s pain, and his reason for seeking solace in the arms of a mistress, really is. As Magnolia struggles through the labyrinth of her past, she must also come to terms with the losses sustained that traumatic day, losses that we all bear witness to all too often in our troubling times.
Can love, can family protect us from harm? Does optimism or fear win out in one’s heart, one’s soul? Which side will win out for Magnolia—and where does she really belong? Pulled between these questions, and her beloved, high-stakes choices and worlds—Miami or Haiti, single or married, mortal or ghost, before or after—Magnolia is one of the most compelling characters that Danticat has ever created—a narrator who is “yon pati koukouy, part firefly”: shimmering, flitting between choices, drawn to the light yet emitting their own.
Taking its title for the Creole word for collective mourning, Dèy is a profoundly warm and moving novel about the importance of sharing grief and leave-taking, but also of the ties of family—takeout dinners around a table, fresh dirt on a plant’s roots in the garden, swimming together in the azure seas. As Magnolia questions whether all has not yet been lost, Dèycelebrates the complexity of life in a brave and striking novel that is one of Danticat’s most powerful and deeply affecting works yet, told with a signature “unfaltering voice and evocative beauty” (The Boston Globe).
Blue Mood Café 