WickedGirl's Book Notes

A touching story about a grieving mother, a teenage runaway, and an eccentric clairvoyant who brings them together in a small Colorado mountain town. A gentle tale about loss, healing, and the bonds between mothers and children.

Tana French's 2007 Edgar-winning debut and the first book of the Dublin Murder Squad series: in 1984, a twelve-year-old boy named Adam Ryan walked out of the woods outside Knocknaree, near Dublin, with the blood of his two missing friends in his shoes and no memory of what had happened to them; twenty years later, the man he has become - Detective Rob Ryan, the same boy under a different name and with an English boarding-school accent - is assigned, with his partner and best friend Detective Cassie Maddox, to investigate the murder of a twelve-year-old ballet student named Katy Devlin whose body has been found on the stone altar of an archaeological dig in the same woods, and the case is the long return of a memory Rob has spent two decades not having.

The sixteenth Gabriel Allon novel: when an ISIS bomb in the Marais kills the Israeli intelligence officer Gabriel Allon's longtime friend Hannah Weinberg at a Paris conference on antisemitism, Allon - already on the cusp of taking over the Office, the Israeli intelligence service he has spent his life serving in the field - is pulled into a French-and-Jordanian counterterrorism operation against a shadowy ISIS architect called Saladin, who is recruiting young European women into a network of suicide bombers, and recruits Natalie Mizrahi, a French-born physician now practicing in Israel, to take a new identity as a Palestinian refugee and infiltrate the caliphate from the inside.

The first book in the epic A Song of Ice and Fire series, introducing the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros through the eyes of the Stark family as they navigate political intrigue, ancient threats, and the deadly game of thrones where you win or you die.

Catherine Steadman's 2018 debut psychological thriller opens with London documentary filmmaker Erin Roberts digging a grave alone in the woods, then flashes back to the Bora Bora honeymoon - already trimmed from three weeks to two after her banker husband Mark lost his job - where a sealed duffle bag the couple pulls from the water turns out to contain a great deal more than they were prepared to be in possession of.

A collection of eight brilliant science fiction short stories that explore the nature of consciousness, free will, language, and what it means to be human. Includes "Story of Your Life," the basis for the film Arrival.