WickedGirl's Book Notes

When food poisoning strikes an entire wedding party, the only two people who can use the honeymoon trip are the bride's sister and the groom's brother - who can't stand each other.

An NYPD veteran who lost a child during a hostage negotiation retreats to Morningstar Lake with his German Shepherd Quincy and his saxophone; a widow named Kristin McCarthy borrows her friend Marsha's Catskills cottage and brings her eleven-year-old daughter Ashley, a recent rape survivor who has stopped being able to be in her own house - and the music carries across the water in Linda Barrett's first Flying Solo novel.

In the summer of 2009, recent college graduate Lindsey takes a nanny job for an influential Martha's Vineyard family and becomes close to their nearly-fifteen-year-old daughter Georgie - until a night by the lighthouse breaks the friendship and locks both women into a ten-year silence about what happened, in Julia Spiro's debut novel about class, complicity, and why people who survive things don't always speak.

Music therapist Kendra Michaels - blind for the first twenty years of her life, now sighted with the unnerving observational reflexes those twenty years built - is pulled out of the consulting work she's tried to leave behind by Adam Lynch, a former FBI agent known as the Puppetmaster, who arrives with a San Diego serial-stabbing case and the leverage that Kendra's ex-lover, FBI agent Jeff Stedler, has gone missing while investigating it.

Wedding photographer Libby McKenzie - newly home to Virginia after a divorce, multiple miscarriages, and her father's death - takes a job photographing a wedding at the Woodmont estate in the Blue Ridge Mountains, becomes drawn to its honeysuckle-overgrown greenhouse, and pulls a thread that runs back through the estate's owner Elaine, a 1940s teen named Sadie, and the closed adoption Libby has carried questions about her whole life.

Kate Atkinson's contribution to Amazon's Out of Line collection follows Pamela - newly retired teacher, thoroughly divorced, mother to a thirty-year-old son who has refused to leave the house, devotee of the exclamation mark as a coping mechanism - through a stretch of disastrous online dating and into the tub for a bath that ends with the discovery that she is, somehow, post-menopausally and inexplicably, pregnant.