The River of No Return

River of No ReturnTitle: The River of No Return

Author: Bee Ridgway. This is her first novel.

Genre: Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Romance

Readers: Editor Kristina, retiree Nancy and stay-at-home moms A Military Mommy, Colleen B. and Shawna.

Summary: “You are now a member of the Guild. There is no return.” Two hundred years after he was about to die on a Napoleonic battlefield, Nick Falcott, soldier and aristocrat, wakes up in a hospital bed in modern London. The Guild, an entity that controls time travel, showers him with life’s advantages. But Nick yearns for home and for one brown-eyed girl, lost now down the centuries. Then the Guild asks him to break its own rule. It needs Nick to go back to 1815 to fight the Guild’s enemies and to find something called the Talisman.

In 1815, Julia Percy mourns the death of her beloved grandfather, an earl who could play with time. On his deathbed he whispers in her ear: “Pretend!” Pretend what? When Nick returns home as if from the dead, older than he should be and battle scarred, Julia begins to suspect that her very life depends upon the secrets Grandfather never told her. Soon enough Julia and Nick are caught up in an adventure that stretches up and down the river of time. As their knowledge of the Guild and their feelings for each other grow, the fate of the future itself is hanging in the balance.

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Accelerated

Book: Accelerated

Author: Bronwen Hruska. She spent years as a journalist and is now the publisher at Soho Press. This is her first novel.

Genre: Thiller, Commercial Fiction

Reviewers: Editor Kristina, teacher madriscoll, higher ed administrator Renee and stay-at-home moms Krysta and Sarah L.

Publisher Summary:

Every afternoon Sean Benning picks up his son, Toby, on the marble steps that lead into the prestigious Bradley School. Everything at Bradley is accelerated: 3rd graders read at the 6th grade level, they have labs and facilities to rival most universities, and the chess champions are the bullies. A single dad and struggling artist, Sean sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the power-soccer-mom cliques and ladies-who-lunch that congregate on the steps every afternoon. But at least Toby is thriving and getting the best education money can buy. Or is he?

When Sean starts getting pressure from the school to put Toby on medication for ADD, something smells fishy, and it isn’t the caviar that was served at last week’s PTA meeting. Toby’s “issues” in school seem, to Sean, to be nothing more than normal behavior for an eight-year-old boy. But maybe Sean just isn’t seeing things clearly, which has been harder and harder to do since Toby’s new teacher, Jess, started at Bradley. And the school has Toby’s best interests at heart, right? But what happens when the pressure to not just keep up, but to exceed, takes hold? When things take a tragic turn, Sean realizes that the price of this accelerated life is higher than he could have ever imagined.

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Blood Line

Book: Blood Line: An Anna Travis Novel

Author: Lynda LaPlante, author of the Prime Suspect novels

Genre: Mystery, Thriller

Reviewers:  Prosecutor Rochelle, editor Kristina, project manager Andrea, day care teacher EMarie and attorney Elizabeth H.

Publisher Summary:

Still reeling from the death of her fiancé, Detective Anna Travis has thrown herself into her new role as the chief inspector for London’s murder squad. When Scotland Yard’s missing persons bureau is unable to locate the son of a court employee, the superintendent—James Langton, Anna’s former lover turned sometimes friend—urges her to take on the suspicious assignment.

But is this new investigation purely a missing persons case—or a full-blown murder inquiry? An ominous pool of blood with no locatable victim leads Anna on a desperate hunt for a man who has disappeared without a trace. With no body, and increasing pressure to make an arrest, Anna becomes obsessed with the smallest details of the case. Now, one man has vanished, a killer may be loose on the streets, and, as Langton looks on, Anna Travis may be losing control of the investigation—and of herself.

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The Other

BookThe Other  (This is a re-release of the novel, originally written in 1971.)

Author: Thomas Tryon, former actor. Author of other novels including Lady and Night Magic, mostly out-of-print. New Afterword by Dan Chaon.

Genre: Horror, Literary Fiction.

Reviewers: Administrator Cyn, bookseller Pam, writer & editor Kristina, stay-at-home mom Shawna  and prosecutor Rochelle.

Publisher Summary: Holland and Niles Perry are identical thirteen-year-old twins. They are close, close enough, almost, to read each other’s thoughts, but they couldn’t be more different. Holland is bold and mischievous, a bad influence, while Niles is kind and eager to please, the sort of boy who makes parents proud. The Perrys live in the bucolic New England town their family settled centuries ago, and as it happens, the extended clan has gathered at its ancestral farm this summer to mourn the death of the twins’ father in a most unfortunate accident. Mrs. Perry still hasn’t recovered from the shock of her husband’s gruesome end and stays sequestered in her room, leaving her sons to roam free. As the summer goes on, though, and Holland’s pranks become increasingly sinister, Niles finds he can no longer make excuses for his brother’s actions.

Thomas Tryon’s best-selling novel about a homegrown monster is an eerie examination of the darkness that dwells within everyone. It is a landmark of psychological horror that is a worthy descendent of the books of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shirley Jackson, and Patricia Highsmith.

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