Other Years
Previous Picks: 2010
Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit $24.00
New York, NY: MP Publishing (2010)
List of Contributors: Barb Johnson; Brad Watson; Cassandra King; Clay Risen; Connie May Fowler; Daniel Wallace; George Singleton; Howard Bahr; Janis Owens; John Grisham; Joshilyn Jackson; Larry Brown; Matthew Teague; Michelle Richmond; Pat Conroy; Rick Bragg; Silas House; Steve Yarbrough.; Suzanne Hudson; Tim Gautreaux; Tom Franklin; William Gay; Winston Groom.
The Confession $28.95
New York, NY: Doubleday (2010)
In 1998, in the small East Texas city of Sloan, Travis Boyette abducted, raped, and strangled a popular high school cheerleader. He buried her body so that it would never be found, then watched in amazement as police and prosecutors arrested and convicted Donté Drumm, a local football star, and marched him off to death row.
Now nine years have passed. Travis has just been paroled in Kansas for a different crime; Donté is four days away from his execution. Travis suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. For the first time in his miserable life, he decides to do what’s right and confess. But how can a guilty man convince lawyers, judges, and politicians that they’re about to execute an innocent man?
The Fall of the House of Zeus $25.99
New York, NY: Crown. (2010)
Traces the rise and fall of billionaire lawyer Dickie Scruggs, documenting how he made his fortune through class-action lawsuits directed at the tobacco and asbestos industries before his conviction for conspiring to bribe a Mississippi state judge.
Lemuria has been giving you exclusive sneak peaks into Wilkie's narrative account of the Dickie Scruggs debacle and politics in Mississippi over the past 40 years.
Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter $50.00
New York, NY: William Morrow (2010) As new in dust jacket.
“Long after the other 75 novels of suspense you’ve read this year merge in your memory, you’ll vividly recall this novel. Franklin has written not just a thriller of the first order, but a very fine novel, indeed.”
— Richard Russo
The Edgar Award-winning author returns with his most accomplished and resonant novel so far—an atmospheric drama set in rural Mississippi. In the late 1970s, Larry Ott and Silas "32" Jones were boyhood pals. Their worlds were as different as night and day: Larry, the child of lower-middle-class white parents, and Silas, the son of a poor, single black mother.
Yet for a few months the boys stepped outside of their circumstances and shared a special bond. But then tragedy struck: Larry took a girl on a date to a drive-in movie, and she was never heard from again. She was never found and Larry never confessed, but all eyes rested on him as the culprit. The incident shook the county—and perhaps Silas most of all. His friendship with Larry was broken, and then Silas left town.
More than twenty years have passed. Larry, a mechanic, lives a solitary existence, never able to rise above the whispers of suspicion. Silas has returned as a constable. He and Larry have no reason to cross paths until another girl disappears and Larry is blamed again. And now the two men who once called each other friend are forced to confront the past they've buried and ignored for decades.
Citrus County $75.00
San Francisco, CA: McSweeney Books (2010)
There shouldn't be a Citrus County. Teenage romance should be difficult, but not this difficult. Boys like Toby should cause trouble but not this much. The moon should glow gently over children safe in their beds. Uncles in their rockers should be kind....
Mr. Peanut $40.00
New York, NY: Knopf (2010)
David Pepin has loved his wife since the moment they met, and after thirteen years of marriage he still can't imagine living without her--yet he obsessively contemplates her demise. Soon she "is "dead, and he's both deeply distraught and the prime suspect.
The officers investigating her death are intimately familiar with conjugal enigmas. Detective Ward Hastroll was happily, complacently married until his wife became inexplicably, voluntarily, and militantly bedridden. And Detective Sam Sheppard is especially sensitive to marital guilt, having decades before been convicted and then declared innocent of his wife's brutal murder.
When Pepin is linked to a hit man, the ambiguity enfolding this case begins to resemble the Escher drawings that inspire the computer games he designs for a living. These complex, interlocking dramas brilliantly explore the twinned impulses of love and hate, murder and marriage, each endlessly recycling into the other.
Mesmerizing, hugely poignant, astonishing in its reach, Mr. Peanut is a police procedural of the soul and a first novel of the highest order.
61 Hours $28.00
New York, NY: Delacorte (2010)
Jack Reacher is back.
The countdown has begun. Get ready for the most exciting 61 hours of your life. #1 "New York Times" bestselling author Lee Child's latest thriller is a ticking time bomb of suspense that builds electric tension on every page.
Sixty-one hours. Not a minute to spare.
A tour bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she's going to live long enough to testify, she'll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.
Reacher's original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything. The secrets are deadlier and his enemies are stronger than he could have guessed--but so is the woman whose life he'll risk his own to save.
In 61 Hours, Lee Child has written a showdown thriller with an explosive ending that readers will talk about for a long time to come.
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War $100.00
New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press (2010)
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line.
It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.
Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world--both its horrors and its thrills--and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
The Surrendered $26.95
New York, NY: Riverhead (2010)
The bestselling, award-winning writer of "Native Speaker, A Gesture Life," and "Aloft" returns with his biggest, most ambitious novel yet: a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime.
With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with "The Surrendered," Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant, haunting, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch.
June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together.
As Lee unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another. Combining the complex themes of identity and belonging of "Native Speaker" and "A Gesture Life" with the broad range, energy, and pure storytelling gifts of Aloft, Chang-rae Lee has delivered his most ambitious, exciting, and unforgettable work yet. It is a mesmerizing novel, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting.
The Swan Thieves $26.99
New York, NY: Little & Brown (2010)
Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love. The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
Safe from the Neighbors $25.95
New York, NY: Knopf (2010)
When a long-lost friend suddenly returns to Luke May's hometown of Loring, Mississippi, where years ago her family had been consumed by an act of spectacular violence, Luke begins to realize that his connection with her runs deeper than he ever imagined.
Bloodroot $50.00
New York: Knopf (2010)
Very fine in dust jacket.
Named for a flower whose blood-red sap possesses the power both to heal and poison, Bloodroot is a stunning fiction debut about the legacies--of magic and madness, faith and secrets, passion and loss--that haunt one family across the generations, from the Great Depression to today.
The novel is told in a kaleidoscope of seamlessly woven voices and centers around an incendiary romance that consumes everyone in its path: Myra Lamb, a wild young girl with mysterious, haint blue eyes who grows up on remote Bloodroot Mountain; her grandmother Byrdie Lamb, who protects Myra fiercely and passes down "the touch" that bewitches people and animals alike; the neighbor boy who longs for Myra yet is destined never to have her; the twin children Myra is forced to abandon but who never forget their mothers deep love; and John Odom, the man who tries to tame Myra and meets with shocking, violent disaster. Against the backdrop of a beautiful but often unforgiving country, these lives come together--only to be torn apart--as a dark, riveting mystery unfolds.
With grace and unflinching verisimilitude, Amy Greene brings her native Appalachia--and the faith and fury of its people--to rich and vivid life. Here is a spellbinding tour de force that announces a dazzlingly fresh, natural-born storyteller in our midst.