January New Releases

January 12th

Waiting for the Night Song

Julie Carrick Dalton

A startling and timely debut, Julie Carrick Dalton's Waiting for the Night Song is a moving, brilliant novel about friendships forged in childhood magic and ruptured by the high price of secrets that leave you forever changed.

Harboring a dark secret, forestry researcher, Cadie Kessler returns home following a message from an old friend. Together they must face their joint secret that ended their friendship. With this she must decide on what is worth defending, sacrificing, and holding dear. Turmoil follows her throughout the book in different forms; wildfire, drought, foreclosures, and much more. 

More About the Author

Where to Buy:

Barnes and Noble

Powell’s

The Last Garden In England

Julia Kelly

Taking place through three different sets in time. The story follows five women and their journeys in preserving, protecting, and nurturing the famous gardens at the famed Highbury House Estate. 

Present Day follows Emma Lovett, who nurtures and gives life to run down gardens. Her personal idol is the creator of these esteemed gardens, Venetia Smith. While doing so, she discovers the hidden secrets of the past. 

1907 finds the creator Venetia Smith, a garden designer to the members of high society and industrialists. All of whom are looking to outwardly show off their wealth at their country houses. While working on the Highbury Estate, she meets people who change her life forever.

1944 introduces Beth Pedley, a land girl who arrives at a farm outside the town that houses the Highbury Estate. While trying to find a place where she belongs and can call home. The Cook at the Estate, Stella Adderton, wants to leave to pursue her own career. While the mistress of Highbury Estate Diana Symonds, desperately trying to hold onto old world ideals, is made to face her home becoming a convalescent home for injured soldiers. The three are thrown and bound together by secrets, which can only be kept for so long.

More About The Author

Where to Buy:

Barnes and Noble

Powell’s

Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

Andrea Pitzer

Andrea Pitzer tells of the explorer William Barents’ three greatest expeditions in vivid detail. While enhancing the tales with first hand knowledge from her own adventures, and giving insights into the history of this amazing navigator. 

More About the Author

Where to Buy:

Barnes and Noble

Powell’s

The Perfect Guests

Emma Rous

The USA Today bestselling author of The Au Pair returns with another delicious, twisty novel--about a grand estate with many secrets, an orphan caught in a web of lies, and a young woman playing a sinister game.

Taking place in two different years with one central location, Ravens Hall. A rambling isolated manor in the East Anglian fens. In 1988 taken to stay at the Hall by her aunt, Beth Soames befriends the daughter of a family who lives there. Quickly becoming one of them and finding a place, everything seems perfect until they ask her help during a “harmless” game.

Sadie Langton, in 2019, is an aspiring actress who lands a well-paying job. Given instructions, clothing, and role outlines that seems like a murder mystery dinner. The location is no other than Ravens Hall. Fire damage from previous years adds to the already eerie feeling Sadie has, as more guests come to the hall. Something seems off and it becomes even darker when the realization hits...the host is unseen and playing games with them. 

More About the Author

Where to Buy:

Barnes and Noble

Powell’s

January 26th

If I Disappear 

Eliza Jane Brazier

When her favorite true crime podcast host goes missing, an adrift young woman plunges headfirst into the wild backcountry of Northern California and her own dangerous obsession

    Sera, an avid and lover of true crime podcasts, feels like they are preparing her for something bigger. When her favorite podcaster, Rachel, goes missing. Sera takes it upon herself to follow the clues and find her herself. The clues take her to an isolated ranch outside Rachel’s hometown when things begin to feel off. Rachel isn’t the first woman to go missing..

More About the Author

Where to Buy:

Barnes and Noble

Powell’s

The Merciless by Danielle Vega

The Merciless by Danielle Vega

Goodreads Blurb:

Forgive us, Father, for we have sinned

Brooklyn Stevens sits in a pool of her own blood, tied up and gagged. No one outside of these dank basement walls knows she’s here. No one can hear her scream.

Sofia Flores knows she shouldn’t have gotten involved. When she befriended Riley, Grace, and Alexis on her first day at school, she admired them, with their perfect hair and their good-girl ways. They said they wanted to save Brooklyn. They wanted to help her. Sofia didn’t realize they believed Brooklyn was possessed.

Now, Riley and the girls are performing an exorcism on Brooklyn—but their idea of an exorcism is closer to torture than salvation. All Sofia wants is to get out of this house. But there is no way out. Sofia can’t go against the other girls . . . unless she wants to be next. . . .

In this chilling debut, Danielle Vega delivers blood-curdling suspense and terror on every page. By the shockingly twisted end, readers will be faced with the most haunting question of all: Is there evil in all of us?

My thoughts: This book to me is a mix of Mean Girls with some elements of the movie the Craft. I read this book quickly, you can read in one sitting. The story and writing isn’t the greatest but it you are looking to read something quick to pass the time I would recommend this book. The Merciless if book 1 in this trilogy, I haven’t had the opportunity to read the other two but I am interested to see who the story has evolved since book 1 so I might continue with the series.

Asylum by Madeleine Roux

Asylum by Madeleine Roux

Goodreads Blurb: Asylum is a thrilling and creepy photo-novel perfect for fans of the New York Times bestseller Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children.

For sixteen-year-old Dan Crawford, New Hampshire College Prep is more than a summer program—it's a lifeline. An outcast at his high school, Dan is excited to finally make some friends in his last summer before college. But when he arrives at the program, Dan learns that his dorm for the summer used to be a sanatorium, more commonly known as an asylum. And not just any asylum—a last resort for the criminally insane.

As Dan and his new friends, Abby and Jordan, explore the hidden recesses of their creepy summer home, they soon discover it's no coincidence that the three of them ended up here. Because the asylum holds the key to a terrifying past. And there are some secrets that refuse to stay buried.

Featuring found photos of unsettling history and real abandoned asylums and filled with chilling mystery and page-turning suspense, Madeleine Roux's teen debut, Asylum, is a horror story that treads the line between genius and insanity.

My thoughts: It’s creepy, it’s in an old Asylum, and if you like Riggs’s Peculiar Children READ THIS BOOK. I love the mystery behind it all, why are the three characters there, how are they all connected. I found it to be a quick read and it’s not something you need to focus hard to follow. I would recommend this book if you are going on a short trip or trying to get out of a reading slump. This book one in the trilogy with some novellas in the middle. You don’t have to read the novellas, they just give you some extra background which you could find interesting.