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  McReader's Digest - March 2024  
The Alternatives

Caoilinn Hughes - Riverhead Books
Format: Book

The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties - all single, all with PhDs - they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from...

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Begin Again

Helly Acton - Avon
Format: Book

Have you ever wanted to change the past and discover the result of choices not taken? Now, in this brilliantly fun novel of what-ifs, missed chances, and new beginnings, Frankie McKenzie discovers what starting over might bring ...

Despite living firmly in her comfort zone, Frankie...

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Better by Far

Hazel Hayes - Dutton
Format: Book

Following a breakup, Kate and Finn decide to keep sharing their house until the lease runs out in twelve weeks’ time, alternating week by week so that they are occupying the same space but never at the same time.
 
Practically, the plan makes sense, but coming...

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A Calamity of Souls

David Baldacci - Grand Central Publishing
Format: Book

Jack Lee is a white lawyer from Freeman County, Virginia, who has never done anything to push back against racism, until he decides to represent Jerome Washington, a Black man charged with brutally killing an elderly and wealthy white couple. Doubting his decision, Lee fears that his legal...

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Days of Wonder

Caroline Leavitt - Algonquin Books
Format: Book

As a teenager, for a moment, Ella Fitchburg found love - yearning, breathless love - that consumed both her and her boyfriend, Jude, as they wandered the streets of New York City together. But her life was unexpectedly upended when she was accused of trying to murder Jude's father,...

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The Evolution of Annabel Craig

Lisa Grunwald - Random House
Format: Book

I had never questioned a miracle, witnessed a gunfight, or seen a dead body. . . . I had thought I knew exactly what I wanted and what I didn't. Before the summer was over, all that and much more would change.

Annabel Hayes - born, baptized, and orphaned in the sleepy conservative...

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Extinction

Douglas Preston - Forge
Format: Book

Erebus Resort, occupying a magnificent, hundred-thousand acre valley deep in the Colorado Rockies, offers guests the experience of viewing woolly mammoths, Irish Elk, and giant ground sloths in their native habitat, brought back from extinction through the magic of genetic manipulation....

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The Familiar

Leigh Bardugo - Flatiron Books
Format: Book

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little...

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Feline Fatale

Rita Mae Brown - Bantam
Format: Book

Spring flowers may be about to bloom in Crozet, Virginia, but Harry is thinking about snow. Her dear friend Ned Tucker is in the House of Delegates, advocating for a bill to improve road clearing during bad weather, and Harry and Ned’s wife, Susan, have gone down to the statehouse...

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The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers

Samuel Burr - Doubleday
Format: Book

An extraordinary, gloriously uplifting novel about the power of friendship and the puzzling ties that bind us.

Clayton Stumper might be in his twenties, but he dresses like your grandpa and fusses like your aunt. Abandoned at birth on the steps of the Fellowship of Puzzlemakers,...

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Funny Story

Emily Henry - Berkley Publishing Group
Format: Book

Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized...

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Garment of Praise

Linda Byler - Good Books
Format: Book

Susan has been in Wyoming long enough to feel at home, but instead she finds herself still struggling to adapt to the dusty landscape, the different customs, and life so far from family. She knows she should be appreciating the big, beautiful log home that Isaac built, but sometimes...

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Happy Medium

Sarah Adler - Berkley Publishing Group
Format: Book

Fake spirit medium Gretchen Acorn is happy to help when her best (read: wealthiest) client hires her to investigate the unexplained phenomena preventing the sale of her bridge partner's struggling goat farm. Gretchen may be a fraud, but she'd like to think she's a beneficent one....

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The House of Broken Bricks

Fiona Williams - Henry Holt and Co.
Format: Book

Every marriage has its seasons...It's autumn when we meet Tess, but her relationship with Richard is in a deep, cold winter. A winter so harsh, their union may never see the bright light of spring.

Tess is a Londoner whose relationship with Richard transports her from a Jamaican...

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The Husbands

Holly Gramazio - Doubleday
Format: Book

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There's only one problem - she's not married. She's never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos...

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I Cheerfully Refuse

Leif Enger - Atlantic Monthly Press
Format: Book

Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors,...

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I've Got My Mind Set on Brew

Stephanie Jayne - Alcove Press
Format: Book

Kat Malone is left cash-strapped after a job loss and a bad breakup (pro tip: never offer to pay living expenses for a freeloading poetry major) when she discovers a surprising new career path: craft beer brewer.

When the brewpub is sold, the new owner places his light-on-experience...

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The Last Word

Elly Griffiths - Mariner Books
Format: Book

Natalka and Edwin are perfect if improbable partners in a detective agency. At eighty-four, Edwin regularly claims that he's the oldest detective in England. He is a master at surveillance, deploying his age as a cloak of invisibility. Natalka, Ukrainian-born and more than fifty...

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The Limits

Nell Freudenberger - Knopf
Format: Book

From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia's imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen's luxury...

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Lost Birds

Anne Hillerman - HarperCollins
Format: Book

Joe Leaphorn may be long retired from the Navajo Tribal Police, but his detective skills are still sharp, honed by his work as a private detective. His experience will be essential to solve a compelling new case: finding the birth parents of a woman who was raised by a bilagáana...

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Mania

Lionel Shriver - HarperCollins
Format: Book

In an alternative 2011, the Mental Parity movement takes hold. Americans now embrace the sacred, universal truth that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. Because everyone is equally smart, discrimination against purportedly dumb people is 'the last great civil...

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Miss Morgan's Book Brigade

Janet Skeslien Charles - Atria Books
Format: Book

1918: As the Great War rages, Jessie Carson takes a leave of absence from the New York Public Library to work for the American Committee for Devastated France. Founded by millionaire Anne Morgan, this group of international women help rebuild devastated French communities just miles...

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Missing White Woman

Kellye Garrett - Mulholland Books
Format: Book

The truth is never skin deep.

It was supposed to be a romantic getaway weekend in New York City. Breanna's new boyfriend, Ty, took care of everything - the train tickets, the dinner reservations, the rented four-story luxury rowhouse in Jersey City with a beautiful view of the Manhattan...

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A Murder Most French

Colleen Cambridge - Kensington
Format: Book

The City of Light is surging back to life in the wake of war, and its citizens are seizing every opportunity to raise a glass or share a delicious meal. But as American ex-pat Tabitha Knight and chef-in-training Julia Child discover, celebrations can quickly go awry when someone has murder...

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My Favorite Terrible Thing

Madeleine Henry - Little A
Format: Book

Detective Nina Travers is so good at her job that she blends in like a benevolent Tom Ripley. She can be anyone. She can be no one. Nina wants to be someone. Her new case will finally get her noticed.

Bestselling author Claire Ross has disappeared from the Hamptons on her wedding...

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The Night in Question

Susan Fletcher - Union Square & Co.
Format: Book

Florrie Butterfield - eighty-seven, one-legged, and of cheerful disposition - believes there can't be any more adventures or surprises in life to experience. Yet one midsummer's evening, there's an accident at Babbington Hall - the adult residence where she lives - so shocking...

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Nothing Without Me

Helen Monks Takhar - Random House
Format: Book

Fame is a deadly game. . . .

April Eden is about to have the night of her life. After years struggling uphill as a female director, her debut movie The Vanished Woman is up for a major British film award, placing her firmly on Hollywood's radar. Her leading lady, Essie Lay - a fragile...

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Only and Forever

Chloe Liese - Berkley Publishing Group
Format: Book

Viggo Bergman, hopeless romantic, is thoroughly weary of waiting for his happily ever after. But between opening a romance bookstore, running a romance book club, coaching kids' soccer, and adopting a household of pets - just maybe, he's overcommitted himself? - Viggo's chaotic...

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Only the Brave

Danielle Steel - Dell
Format: Book

Sophia Alexander, the beautiful daughter of a famous surgeon in Berlin, has had to grow up faster than most young women. When her mother falls ill, Sophia must take charge of her younger sister, Theresa, and look after her father and the household, while also volunteering at his hospital...

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Patchwork Quilt Murder

Leslie Meier - Kensington Cozies
Format: Book

When a community center opens in town, many embrace it as a space where locals of all ages can gather and create. Others view it as a waste of taxpayer dollars. The director, Darleen Busby-Platt, is no less controversial. Intense and showy, Darleen has huge plans for her new role. But Lucy...

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Pay Dirt

Sara Paretsky - William Morrow & Company
Format: Book

V .I. Warshawski is famous for her cool under fire, her intelligence, her humor, her unflinching courage, and her love of good coffee. But even the strongest people sometimes need a break to recharge, so her friends send her to Kansas for a weekend of college basketball where Angela,...

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Pinquickle's Folly

R. A. Salvatore - S&S/Saga Press
Format: Book

The first adventure in the Buccaneers trilogy begins in the free sea outside of the control of the usurping Xoconai empire, where the dwarven powrie pirates and merchants sail. But the golden-skinned Xoconai have begun to encroach upon these waters behind the rapacious attacks of the frigate...

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Real Americans

Rachel Khong - Knopf
Format: Book

 An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

Real Americans begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern...

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The Reaper Follows

Heather Graham - MIRA
Format: Book

Death comes for everyone.

Deep in the Florida Everglades, the body of a woman is discovered in pieces, presumably ravaged by an alligator. Upon closer inspection, it's determined no animal could make such perfectly precise cuts. Only a blade could do that. Wielded by a human....

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A Revolver to Carry at Night

Monika Zgustova - Other Press
Format: Book

A captivating, nuanced portrait of the life of Véra Nabokov, who dedicated herself to advancing her husband's writing career, playing a vital role in the creation of his greatest works.

Véra Nabokov (1902-1991) was in many ways the epitome of the wife of a great...

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Safe and Sound

Laura McHugh - Random House
Format: Book

In a town no one ever leaves, there are only so many places to hide.

As kids, Amelia and Kylee were found unharmed in their upstairs bedroom the night their teenage cousin Grace, who was babysitting them, vanished from the farmhouse in Beaumont, Missouri, leaving only a smear...

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The Sicilian Inheritance

Jo Piazza - E. P. Dutton
Format: Book

From bestselling author and award-winning journalist Jo Piazza, comes a transporting novel rooted in the author's own family history about a long-awaited trip to Sicily, a disputed inheritance, and a family secret that some will kill to protect . . .

Sara Marsala barely knows...

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The Sleepwalkers

Scarlett Thomas - Simon & Schuster
Format: Book

Still reeling from the chaos of their wedding, Evelyn and Richard arrive on a tiny Greek island for their honeymoon. It's the end of the season and a storm is imminent. Determined to make the best of it, they check into the sun-soaked doors of the Villa Rosa. Already feeling insecure...

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The Songbird of Hope Hill

Kim Vogel Sawyer - WaterBrook
Format: Book

Driven by survival to a life at a house of ill repute, Birdie Clarkson now longs only for escape. So when Reverend Isaiah Overly and his son, Ephraim, appear and offer a better life, she jumps at the chance. Ignoring the furious raging of the madam, Birdie climbs into the back of the preacher's...

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Toxic Prey

John Sandford - G.P. Putnam's Sons
Format: Book

Gaia is dying.

That, at least, is what Dr. Lionel Scott believes. A renowned expert in tropical and infectious diseases, Scott has witnessed the devastating impact of illness and turmoil at critical scale. Society as it exists is untenable, and the direct link to Earth’s...

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Truly, Madly, Deeply

Alexandria Bellefleur - Avon
Format: Book

As a bestselling romance novelist, everyone thinks Truly Livingston is an expert on happily-ever-afters. She's even signed on to record a podcast sharing relationship advice. Little do they know she feels like an imposter - her parents just announced they're separating, she caught...

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An Unfinished Murder

Jude Deveraux - MIRA
Format: Book

 Sara Medlar may be retired as a bestselling author, but her career as an amateur detective is facing one final mystery - and it's a killer.

Retired romance novelist Sara Medlar has been comfortably sharing her large home with her niece Kate and her "honorary grandson"...

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Village Weavers

Myriam JA Chancy - Tin House Books
Format: Book

In 1940s' Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi become fast childhood friends, despite being on opposite ends of the social and economic ladder. As young girls, they build their unlikely friendship -- until a deathbed revelation ripples through their families and tears them apart. After...

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You Know What You Did

K. T. Nguyen - E. P. Dutton
Format: Book

Annie "Anh Le" Shaw grew up poor, but seems to have it all now: a dream career, a stunning home, and a devoted husband and daughter. When Annie's mother, a Vietnam War refugee, dies suddenly one night, Annie's carefully curated life begins to unravel. Her obsessive-compulsive...

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