December 2020

Joel C. Rosenberg's second J.B. Collins thriller picks up seconds after the Amman peace-summit massacre that ended The Third Target: the King of Jordan is wounded, the leaders of Israel and Palestine are critically hurt, and the President of the United States is missing and presumed captured by ISIS. New York Times correspondent J.B. Collins, the only Western journalist on the ground when the wave hit, spends the next four hundred and sixty pages helping the Jordanians, the Mossad, and the Secret Service try to find Harrison Taylor before Abu Khalif puts him on camera with a sword.

Liane Moriarty's 2014 novel about three mothers at a Sydney kindergarten - Madeline, Celeste, and Jane - whose first school year together is structured around the countdown to a Trivia Night that ends with somebody dead on the pavement, and around the much smaller and much larger lies the rest of the parent community has been telling itself the whole time. Domestic-suspense with actual satire and an actual position on what it is taking on.

Julian Barnes' Man Booker Prize-winning novel about Tony Webster, a retired Londoner who receives an unexpected bequest from the mother of a long-ago girlfriend and is forced to revisit the friendship, the breakup, and the suicide he thought he understood. A 163-page meditation on memory, documentation, and the way the stories we tell about ourselves quietly do us the favor of leaving things out.