Netgalley Picks of the Week | 20th August

Hello everyone! Here is my latest Netgalley picks blog post.

It’s a new list of exciting and interesting sounding books, including one written by a fellow blogger; Ronnie Turner!

Keep reading to find Netgalley’s best uploads over the past (few) weeks – a few new interesting books to add to your TBR’s this week!

{CLICK ON THE PICTURES TO BE TAKEN TO THE NETGALLEY PAGE}

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Title: Lies Between Us

Author: Ronnie Turner

Synopsis: Three people, leading very different lives, are about to be brought together – with devastating consequences . . .

John has a perfect life, until the day his daughter goes missing.

Maisie cares for her patients, but hides her own traumatic past.

Miller should be an innocent child, but is obsessed with something he can’t have.

They all have something in common, though none of them know it – and the truth won’t stay hidden for long . . .

Genre: mystery & thriller

Publisher: HQ Digital

Publishing: 01 Oct 2018

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Title: American Heroin

Author: Melissa Scrivner Love

Synopsis: The unforgettable protagonist of Lola returns in a gritty, high-octane thriller about a brilliant woman who will stop at nothing to protect her growing drug empire, even if she has to go to war with a rival cartel…or her own family

It took sacrifice, pain, and more than a few dead bodies, but Lola has clawed her way to the top of her South Central Los Angels neighborhood. Her gang has grown beyond a few trusted soldiers into a full-fledged empire, and the influx of cash has opened up a world that she has never known–one where her daughter can attend a good school, where her mother can live in safety, and where Lola can finally dream of a better life. But with great opportunity comes great risk, and as Lola ascends the heirarchy of the city’s underworld she attracts the attention of a dangerous new cartel who see her as their greatest obstacle to dominance. Soon Lola finds herself sucked into a deadly all-out drug war that threatens to destroy everything she’s built.

But even as Lola readies to go to war, she learns that the greatest threat may not be a rival drug lord, but a danger far closer to home: her own brother.

Genre: mystery & thrillers

Publisher: Crown Publishing

Publishing: 19 Feb 2019

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Title: The Perfect Liar

Author: Thomas Christopher Greene

Synopsis: Susannah, a young widow and single mother, has remarried well: to Max, a charismatic artist and popular speaker whose career took her and her fifteen-year-old son out of New York City and to a quiet Vermont university town. Strong-willed and attractive, Susannah expects that her life is perfectly in place again. Then one quiet morning she finds a note on her door: I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.

Max dismisses the note as a prank. But days after a neighborhood couple comes to dinner, the husband mysteriously dies in a tragic accident while on a run with Max. Soon thereafter, a second note appears on their door: DID YOU GET AWAY WITH IT?

Both Susannah and Max are keeping secrets from the world and from each other —secrets that could destroy their family and everything they have built.

Genre: mystery & thrillers

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Publishing: 15 Jan 2019

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Title: The Flower Girls

Author: Alice Clark-Platts

Synopsis: The Flower Girls. Laurel and Primrose.

One convicted of murder, the other given a new identity.

Now, nineteen years later, another child has gone missing.

And The Flower Girls are about to hit the headlines all over again…

Genre: mystery & thrillers, general fiction

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ)

Publishing: 24 Jan 2019

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Title: The Classroom

Author: A. L. Bird

Synopsis: Letting go of your daughter for the first time isn’t easy…

After years of IVF, Kirsten White is a devoted mum to Harriet – and she can’t believe the time has come to send her little girl off to school. But Harriet has now turned five, and she can’t stay Kirsten’s baby forever. It might be hard, but it’s time to entrust her daughter’s care to her new teacher.

… the classroom is the one place she should be safe.

Miriam Robertson has been waiting for the perfect little girl to walk into her class. She’s very picky… but when Harriet walks in, Miriam knows: this is the child she’s been waiting for.

Harriet knows not to speak to strangers. But her lovely new teacher isn’t a stranger at all. In fact, she’s her new best friend. And you can always trust your friends… can’t you?

Genre: mystery & thrillers, women’s fiction

Publisher: HQ Digital

Publishing: 16 Sep 2018

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Title: The Lonely Witness

Author: William Boyle

Synopsis: Amy was once a party girl, but now she lives a lonely life. Helping the house-bound to receive communion in the Gravesend neighbourhood of Brooklyn, she knows the community well.

When a local woman goes missing, Amy senses something isn’t right.

Tailing the woman’s suspicious son, she winds her way through Brooklyn’s streets. But before she can act, he is dead.

Captivated by the crime she’s witnessed and the murderer himself, Amy doesn’t call the cops. Instead, she collects the weapon from the sidewalk and soon finds herself on the trail of a killer.

Genre: mystery & thrillers

Publisher: No Exit Press

Publishing: 25 Oct 2018

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Title: Too Far

Author: Jason Starr

Synopsis: One night. One date. What have you got to lose?

Jack Harper isn’t a bad man, but he’s stuck in a loveless marriage with a mediocre job just trying to keep sober. The only good thing in his life is his son. When an old college friend introduces him to a new extramarital dating website, he tentatively reaches out to find a distraction from his misery. But when he goes to meet up with his steamy online date, he quickly realises it was a dire choice.

Soon, Jack finds himself desperately trying to prove his innocence for crimes he did not commit, and the life he once had – unhappy as it was – is nothing but a dream. Now, he’s living his worst nightmare. . .

Genre: mystery & thrillers

Publisher: No Exit Press

Publishing: 22 Nov 2018

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Title: Avian

Author: Emma Pullar

Synopsis: CENTRAL IS LOSING ITS GRIP ON THE CITIZENS OF GALE CITY.

Megan Skyla, who refused to play by Central’s rules and become a surrogate for her masters, has thrown the city into chaos. Corrupting those around her, she and her friends are forced into hiding – hunted by Central, the evil rulers of Gale City. Skyla’s desperate attempts to keep everyone alive ends when they’re kidnapped by feuding gangs.

Skyla cuts a deal and then betrays both gangs. Now there is nowhere left to run. It’s the desert or die. Her best friend, Crow, thinks she still wants to find a way to cure the Morbian masters of their obesity and finish what she started.

But Skyla has other plans. She’s sure there are settlements in the desert, there must be something out there … and there is. Something terrible.

Skyla is about to find out there’s more than one way to bring about change but one truth remains … Central must be destroyed in order to ensure her survival. There is no other way.

Genre: mystery & thrillers

Publisher: Bloodhound Books

Publishing: 04 Sep 2018

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Title: Dracul

Author: Dacre Stoker & J. D. Barker

Synopsis: It is 1868, and a 22-year-old Bram Stoker has locked himself inside an abbey’s tower to face off against a vile and ungodly beast. He is armed with mirrors and crucifixes and holy water and a gun – and is kept company by a bottle of plum brandy. His fervent prayer is that he will survive this one night – a night that will prove to be the longest of his life. Desperate to leave a record of what he has witnessed, the young man scribbles out the events that brought him to this point – and tells an extraordinary tale of childhood illness, a mysterious nanny, and stories once thought to be fables now proven true.

Genre: general fiction, sci-fi & fantasy

Publisher: Random House UK, Transworld Publishers

Publishing: 18 Oct 2018

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Title: The Heavens

Author: Sandra Newman

Synopsis: New York, late summer, 2000. A party in a spacious Manhattan apartment, hosted by a wealthy young activist. Dozens of idealistic twenty-somethings have impassioned conversations over takeout dumplings and champagne. The evening shines with the heady optimism of a progressive new millennium. A young man, Ben, meets a young woman, Kate—and they begin to fall in love.
From their first meeting, Ben knows Kate is unworldly and fanciful, so at first he isn’t that concerned when she tells him about the recurring dream she’s had since childhood. In the dream, she’s transported to the past, where she lives a second life as Emilia, the mistress of a nobleman in Elizabethan England.

But for Kate, the dream becomes increasingly real and compelling until it threatens to overwhelm her life. And soon she’s waking from it to find the world changed—pictures on her wall she doesn’t recognize, new buildings in the neighborhood that have sprung up overnight. As she tries to make sense of what’s happening, Ben worries the woman he’s fallen in love with is losing her grip on reality.

Genre: general fiction

Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Publishing: 22 Feb 2019

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Title: Looker

Author: Laura Sims

Synopsis: I’ve never crossed their little fenced-in garden, of course. I stand on the sidewalk in front of the fern-and-ivy-filled planter that hangs from the fence—placed there as a sort of screen, I’m sure—and have a direct line of view into the kitchen at night. I’m grateful they’ve never thought to install blinds. That’s how confident they are. No one would dare stand in front of our house and watch us, they think. And they’re probably right: except for me.

In this taut and thrilling debut, an unraveling woman, unhappily childless and recently separated, becomes fixated on her neighbor—the beautiful, famous actress. The unnamed narrator can’t help noticing with wry irony that, though she and the actress live just a few doors apart, they are separated by a chasm of professional success and personal fulfillment. The actress, a celebrity with her face on the side of every bus, shares a gleaming brownstone with her handsome husband and their three adorable children, while the narrator, working in a dead-end job, lives in a run-down, three-story walk-up with her ex-husband’s cat.

When an interaction with the actress at the annual block party takes a disastrous turn, what began as an innocent preoccupation spirals quickly, and lethally, into a frightening and irretrievable madness. Darkly witty and searingly sharp, Looker is enormously entertaining—part tightly coiled Hitchcockian thriller and part send-up of life in the Instagram-ready city. Driven by a fresh and fearlessly original voice, this slender novel packs a powerful punch.

Genre: general fiction

Publisher: Scribner

Publishing: 15 Jan 2019

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Title: Miracle Submarine

Author: Angie Kim

Synopsis: My husband asked me to lie. Not a big lie. He probably didn’t even consider it a lie, and neither did I, at first . . .

In rural Virginia, Young and Pak Yoo run an experimental medical treatment device known as the Miracle Submarine—a pressurized oxygen chamber that patients enter for therapeutic “dives” with the hopes of curing issues like autism or infertility. But when the Miracle Submarine mysteriously explodes, killing two people, a dramatic murder trial upends the Yoos’ small community.

Who or what caused the explosion? Was it the mother of one of the patients, who claimed to be sick that day but was smoking down by the creek? Or was it Young and Pak themselves, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college? The ensuing trial uncovers unimaginable secrets from that night—trysts in the woods, mysterious notes, child-abuse charges—as well as tense rivalries and alliances among a group of people driven to extraordinary degrees of desperation and sacrifice.

Genre: general fiction

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Publishing: 16 Apr 2019

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So that’s it for this week! There was a good mix of mystery and general/literary fiction to pick from this week!

Anyway, have you requested any of these books, or now plan to? I’d love to hear your thoughts