For my Friday Finds, here are 5 new releases that are whetting my appetite for reading in October:

The Death Cure – James Dashner (Maze Runner #3)

Released: October 11, 2011
Thomas knows that Wicked can’t be trusted, but they say the time for lies is over, that they’ve collected all they can from the Trials and now must rely on the Gladers, with full memories restored, to help them with their ultimate mission. It’s up to the Gladers to complete the blueprint for the cure to the Flare with a final voluntary test.

What Wicked doesn’t know is that something’s happened that no Trial or Variable could have foreseen. Thomas has remembered far more than they think. And he knows that he can’t believe a word of what Wicked says.

The time for lies is over. But the truth is more dangerous than Thomas could ever imagine.

Will anyone survive the Death Cure?

I was a fan of the first book in this series, The Maze Runner. I haven’t read the second yet, but I’m sure I’ll eventually be reading the third.

Bad Moon – Todd Ritter

Released: October 11, 2011
On the same night that Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, ten-year-old Charlie Olmstead jumped on his bike to see if there was some way he could get a better look. It was the last anyone ever saw of him. After Perry Hollow Police Chief Jim Campbell found Charlie’s bike caught in the water above Sunset Falls, he assumed the worst. Everyone did—except Charlie’s mother.

Years later, Eric Olmstead—now a famous author and Charlie’s younger brother—has come back to Perry Hollow to bury his mother and fulfill her last request: Find Charlie. To do so, he goes to the current police chief, his former sweetheart, Kat Campbell, who happens to be Jim Campbell’s daughter. Together they soon discover that Eric’s mother was convinced Charlie was kidnapped, and that finding him—whether he was dead or alive—was her secret obsession. While she never succeeded, she did uncover clues that suggested he wasn’t the only boy across Pennsylvania to vanish into thin air during that time.

The haunting story of a boy missing for forty years, and of a small town that found lies easier to believe than the truth, explodes into the present in Bad Moon, Todd Ritter’s excellent follow-up to his acclaimed debut.

I haven’t read this author before, but this looks interesting!

Nanjing Requiem – Ha Jin

Released: October 18, 2011
The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing.

In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie Vautrin—an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College—decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day, to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims. Even when order and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save.

With extraordinarily evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation. In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of a woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to be no match for the maelstrom of history.

At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction at its most resonant.

I’ve had Ha Jin’s War Trash on my bookshelf for a while, and this seems like an appropriate companion to it.

A Study in Sherlock – ed. Laurie R. King & Leslie Klinger

Released: October 25, 2011
BESTSELLING AUTHORS GO HOLMES—IN AN IRRESISTIBLE NEW COLLECTION edited by award-winning Sherlockians Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger

Neil Gaiman. Laura Lippman. Lee Child. These are just three of eighteen superstar authors who provide fascinating, thrilling, and utterly original perspectives on Sherlock Holmes in this one-of-a-kind book. These modern masters place the sleuth in suspenseful new situations, create characters who solve Holmesian mysteries, contemplate Holmes in his later years, fill gaps in the Sherlock Holmes Canon, and reveal their own personal obsessions with the Great Detective.

Thomas Perry, for example, has Dr. Watson tell his tale, in a virtuoso work of alternate history that finds President McKinley approaching the sleuth with a disturbing request; Lee Child sends an FBI agent to investigate a crime near today’s Baker Street—only to get a twenty-first-century shock; Jacqueline Winspear spins a story of a plucky boy inspired by the detective to make his own deductions; and graphic artist Colin Cotterill portrays his struggle to complete this assignment in his hilarious “The Mysterious Case of the Unwritten Short Story.”*

In perfect tribute comes this delicious collection of twisty, clever, and enthralling studies of a timeless icon.

A tribute to Sherlock Holmes. Are you kidding me? Who wouldn’t want this?

Zero Day – David Baldacci

Released: October 31, 2011
From David Baldacci-the modern master of the thriller and #1 worldwide bestselling novelist-comes a new hero: a lone Army Special Agent taking on the toughest crimes facing the nation.

And Zero Day is where it all begins….

John Puller is a combat veteran and the best military investigator in the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigative Division. His father was an Army fighting legend, and his brother is serving a life sentence for treason in a federal military prison. Puller has an indomitable spirit and an unstoppable drive to find the truth.

Now, Puller is called out on a case in a remote, rural area in West Virginia coal country far from any military outpost. Someone has stumbled onto a brutal crime scene, a family slaughtered. The local homicide detective, a headstrong woman with personal demons of her own, joins forces with Puller in the investigation. As Puller digs through deception after deception, he realizes that absolutely nothing he’s seen in this small town, and no one in it, are what they seem. Facing a potential conspiracy that reaches far beyond the hills of West Virginia, he is one man on the hunt for justice against an overwhelming force.

A new series from David Baldacci? Why, thank you very much!

Friday Finds is hosted by Should Be Reading!

My Friday Find is Carla Buckley’s The Things That Keep Us Here. I found out about this from the ever-wonderful mimi smartypants. The back of the book reads:

How far would you go to protect your family?

Ann Brooks never thought she’d have to answer that question. Then she found her limits tested by a crisis no one could prevent. Now, as her neighborhood descends into panic, she must make tough choices to protect everyone she loves from a threat she cannot even see. In this chillingly urgent novel, Carla Buckley confronts us with the terrifying decisions we are forced to make when ordinary life changes overnight.

A year ago, Ann and Peter Brooks were just another unhappily married couple trying–and failing–to keep their relationship together while they raised two young daughters. Now the world around them is about to be shaken as Peter, a university researcher, comes to a startling realization: A virulent pandemic has made the terrible leap across the ocean to America’s heartland.

And it is killing fifty out of every hundred people it touches.

As their town goes into lockdown, Peter is forced to return home–with his beautiful graduate assistant. But the Brookses’ safe suburban world is no longer the refuge it once was. Food grows scarce, and neighbor turns against neighbor in grocery stores and at gas pumps. And then a winter storm strikes, and the community is left huddling in the dark.

Trapped inside the house she once called home, Ann Brooks must make life-or-death decisions in an environment where opening a door to a neighbor could threaten all the things she holds dear.

Carla Buckley’s poignant debut raises important questions to which there are no easy answers, in an emotionally riveting tale of one family facing unimaginable stress.

Doesn’t that sound great?  It’s also well-reviewed. Have any of you read it?

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should be Reading.

A book that I’m really looking forward to sinking my teeth into is Ken Follett’s new epic, Fall of Giants.  It’ll be released at the end of September, and is the first book in a new trilogy that spans the 20th century. The back of the book reads:

Follett takes you to a time long past with brio and razor-sharp storytelling. An epic tale in which you will lose yourself."
-The Denver Post on World Without End

Ken Follett’s World Without End was a global phenomenon, a work of grand historical sweep, beloved by millions of readers and acclaimed by critics as "well-researched, beautifully detailed [with] a terrifically compelling plot" (The Washington Post) and "wonderful history wrapped around a gripping story" (St. Louis Post- Dispatch)

Fall of Giants is his magnificent new historical epic. The first novel in The Century Trilogy, it follows the fates of five interrelated families-American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh-as they move through the world-shaking dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage.

Thirteen-year-old Billy Williams enters a man’s world in the Welsh mining pits…Gus Dewar, an American law student rejected in love, finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House…two orphaned Russian brothers, Grigori and Lev Peshkov, embark on radically different paths half a world apart when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution…Billy’s sister, Ethel, a housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts, takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German embassy in London…

These characters and many others find their lives inextricably entangled as, in a saga of unfolding drama and intriguing complexity, Fall of Giants moves seamlessly from Washington to St. Petersburg, from the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty. As always with Ken Follett, the historical background is brilliantly researched and rendered, the action fast-moving, the characters rich in nuance and emotion. It is destined to be a new classic.

In future volumes of The Century Trilogy, subsequent generations of the same families will travel through the great events of the rest of the twentieth century, changing themselves-and the century itself. With passion and the hand of a master, Follett brings us into a world we thought we knew, but now will never seem the same again.

Family drama, war, and the fight for equality.  What more can a historical fiction lover want?

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should be Reading.

Here is Part III of my Spring Friday Finds! (see here for Part I) (see here for Part II)

Some of these books don’t have full synopses out and about yet, so I’m posting the covers for those at the end.

April (cont.)

A River in the Sky by Elizabeth Peters

Archaeologist-sleuth Amelia Peabody leaves her beloved Egypt and travels to Palestine for the 19th installment of the series.

Imperfect Birds by Anne Lamott

Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She’s intelligent-she aced AP physics; athletic-a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion; and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. The family’s move to Landsdale, with stepfather James in tow, hadn’t been as bumpy as Elizabeth feared.

But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth’s hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed. Slowly and against their will, Elizabeth and James are forced to confront the fact that Rosie has been lying to them-and that her deceptions will have profound consequences.

This is Anne Lamott’s most honest and heartrending novel yet, exploring our human quest for connection and salvation as it reveals the traps that can befall all of us.

In the Shadow of the Cypress by Thomas Steinbeck

John Steinbeck’s son weaves a tale of Chinese immigrants in California at the turn of the 20th century.

Men and Dogs by Katie Crouch

When Hannah Legare was 11, her father went on a fishing trip in the Charleston harbor and never came back. And while most of the town and her family accepted Buzz’s disappearance, Hannah remained steadfastly convinced of his imminent return.

Twenty years later Hannah’s new life in San Francisco is unraveling. Her marriage is on the rocks, her business is bankrupt. After a disastrous attempt to win back her husband, she ends up back at her mother’s home to "rest up", where she is once again sucked into the mystery of her missing father. Suspecting that those closest are keeping secrets–including Palmer, her emotionally closed, well-mannered brother and Warren, the beautiful boyfriend she left behind–Hannah sets out on an uproarious, dangerous quest that will test the whole family’s concepts of loyalty and faith.

Deliver Us From Evil by David Baldacci

(no cover available)

In South America a wealthy ninety-six year old man reads a book late into the night. Within an hour, he is dead, the secrets of his past starkly revealed. Six months later, in Provence, Shaw – the shadowy operative from The Whole Truth – witnesses the murder of a mysterious man, his body left lifeless at the bottom of a pool. Shaw barely escapes the incident himself; and with a new partner in tow, begins to realise that there has to be another organization at work that rivals his own in secrecy …Meanwhile, half a world away, journalist Katie James is working on a story of international importance. But shortly after meeting with a potential inside source she is smuggled unconscious onto an aeroplane, headed to an undisclosed destination. In the days to come, Katie and Shaw will be reunited in a deadly dual of nerve and wits against a surprising, secretive enemy and lead around the world at a breakneck pace. Filled with the breathtaking plot turns and remarkable characters that only David Baldacci can deliver, this is the most explosive thriller of the year.

So what books are you excited about this spring?

Here is Part II of my Spring Friday Finds! (see here for Part I)

March

So Much For That by Lionel Shriver

Shep Knacker has long saved for “The Afterlife”: an idyllic retirement on a tropical island in the Third World where his nest egg can last forever. Traffic jams on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will be replaced with “talking, thinking, seeing, and being”—and enough sleep. When he sold his home repair business for a cool $1 million, his dream finally seemed within reach. Yet Glynis, his wife of twenty-six years, has concocted endless excuses why it’s never the right time to go. Sick of working as a peon for the company he founded, Shep announces that he’s leaving for what they’ve always tagged “The Afterlife,” with or without her.

Just returned from a doctor’s appointment, Glynis has some news of her own: Shep can’t go anywhere because she desperately needs his health insurance. It rapidly becomes clear that this “health insurance company from hell” only partially covers the staggering bills for her treatments, and Shep’s nest egg for The Afterlife soon cracks under the strain.

So Much for That follows the profound transformation of a marriage, for which grave illness proves an unexpected opportunity for tenderness, renewed intimacy, and dry humor, while also pressing the question: How much is one life worth?

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

London: the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on reality TV and genetically altered pot; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.

With daring skill and savage humor, A Week in December explores the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life; as the novel moves to its gripping climax, its characters are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they—and we all—inhabit.

The Devil’s Star by Jo Nesbo

A young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star — a pentagram, the devil’s star.

Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work.

A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands, and the five-pointed devil’s star is key to solving the riddle.

The Sheen on the Silk by Anne Perry

New York Times bestselling novelist Anne Perry, the undisputed Queen of Victorian mysteries and the author of an acclaimed series set during World War I, now broadens her canvas with her first major stand-alone book—an epic historical novel set in thirteenth-century Constantinople, where a woman must live a lie in her quest to uncover the truth.

Arriving in the ancient Byzantine city in the year 1273, Anna Zarides has only one mission: to prove the innocence of her twin brother, Justinian, who has been exiled to the desert for conspiring to kill Bessarion, a nobleman.

Disguising herself as a eunuch named Anastasius, Anna moves freely about in society, using her skills as a physician to manoeuver close to the key players involved in her brother’s fate. With her medical practice thriving, Anna crosses paths with Zoe Chrysaphes, a devious noblewoman with her own hidden agenda, and Giuiliano Dandolo, a ship’s captain conflicted not only by his mixed Venetian-Byzantine heritage but by his growing feelings for Anastasius.

Trying to clear her brother’s name, Anna learns more about Justinian’s life and reputation—including his peculiar ties to Bessarion’s beautiful widow and his possible role in a plot to overthrow the emperor. This leaves Anna with more questions than answer, and time is running out. For an even greater threat lies on the horizon: Another Crusade to capture the Holy Land is brewing, and leaders in Rome and Venice have set their sights on Constantinople for what is sure to be a brutal invasion. Anna’s discoveries draw her inextricably closer to the dangers of the emperor’streacherous court—where it seems that no one is exactly who he or she appears to be.

Caught by Harlan Coben

Wendy is a reporter on a mission: She’s chasing down the lowest of the low-sexual predators-and exposing them on national television. Her big break comes when she nails a child advocate who works with abused and underserved children. She’s there, cameras rolling, when the cops cuff him and the guy realizes his life is well and truly over.

Three months later, the perp is off the grid, missing and presumed dead after the father of a victim claims to have killed him. Wendy, proud to have taken the man down in front of a shocked television audience, has moved on to the story of a missing girl, Erin, in a nearby suburb. The whole country is obsessed with finding this child, and Wendy should be well on her way to journalistic superstardom.

Then is all comes unhinged: Wendy gets a phone call that changes everything. A group of local fathers, out of work and not above vigilante justice, begins to take matters into their own hands
on Erin’s behalf. Secrets long-buried rise to the surface and Wendy begins to wonder if her assumptions that fateful night three months ago were based on solid investigative journalism-or if she has unwittingly been part of a grand manipulation aiming to destroy and innocent man.

April

The Mapping of Love & Death by Jacqueline Winspear

Maisie Dobbs is retained by an American couple to find a nurse whose love letters were discovered among their dead son’s belongings.

to be continued…

This is the first time I’ve participated in the Friday Finds meme.  There’s been a distinct lack of posts around here since the start of the new year because I still have my nose stuck in Shogun. (I’m thisclose to finishing! Maybe this weekend)  Then my reading rate will return to normal.

So anyway, I look forward every quarter to seeing USA Today’s Book Calendar. I like how you can easily browse through books being released in the next four months, and a quick little summary of each. It used to look a little snazzier, but we can’t have everything I spent a chunk of time yesterday clicking through, and found a lot of books to add to my wishlist.  There’s *so* many, I’m going to spread it out over three Fridays.

January

Not My Daughter by Barbara Delinsky

A pregnancy pact between three teenaged girls puts their mothers’ love to the ultimate test in this explosive new novel from Barbara Delinsky, “a first-rate storyteller who creates characters as familiar as your neighbors.” (Boston Globe)

When Susan Tate’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Lily, announces she is pregnant, Susan is stunned. A single mother, she has struggled to do everything right. She sees the pregnancy as an unimaginable tragedy for both Lily and herself.

Then comes word of two more pregnancies among high school juniors who happen to be Lily’s best friends-and the town turns to talk of a pact. As fingers start pointing, the most ardent criticism is directed at Susan. As principal of the high school, she has always been held up as a role model of hard work and core values. Now her detractors accuse her of being a lax mother, perhaps not worthy of the job of shepherding impressionable students. As Susan struggles with the implications of her daughter’s pregnancy, her job, financial independence, and long-fought-for dreams are all at risk.

The emotional ties between mothers and daughters are stretched to breaking in this emotionally wrenching story of love and forgiveness. Once again, Barbara Delinsky has given us a powerful novel, one that asks a central question: What does it take to be a good mother?

February

Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian 

From the bestselling author of The Double Bind, Midwives, and Skeletons at the Feast comes a novel of shattered faith, intimate secrets, and the delicate nature of sacrifice.

"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about . . . angels.

Heather survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents’ murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen – who flees the pulpit to be with Heather and see if there is anything to be salvaged from the spiritual wreckage around him. But then the State’s Attorney begins to suspect that Alice’s husband may not have killed himself. . .and finds out that Alice had secrets only her minister knew.

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair.

When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. There’s little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self- discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. From Chitra Divakaruni, author of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story to date. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival-and about the reasons to survive.

Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes a powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past.

Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard: the other followed a dream and traveled the world to become a famous photojournalist. But when their beloved father fails ill, Meredith and Nina find themselves together again, standing alongside their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters. As children, the only connection between them was the Russian fairy tale Anya sometimes told the girls at night. On his deathbed, their father extracts a promise from the women in his life: the fairy tale will be told one last time – and all the way to the end. Thus begins an unexpected journey into the truth of Anya’s life in war-torn Leningrad, more than five decades ago. Alternating between the past and present, Meredith and Nina will finally hear the singular, harrowing story of their mother’s life, and what they learn is a secret so terrible and terrifying that it will shake the very foundation of their family and change who they believ
e they are.

House Rules by Jodi Picoult

Jacob Hunt is a teenage boy with Asperger’s syndrome. He’s hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, and like many kids with AS, Jacob has a special focus on one subject — in his case, forensic analysis. He’s always showing up at crime scenes, thanks to the police scanner he keeps in his room, and telling the cops what they need to do…and he’s usually right. But then his town is rocked by a terrible murder and, for a change, the police come to Jacob with questions. All of the hallmark behaviors of Asperger’s — not looking someone in the eye, stimulatory tics and twitches, flat affect — can look a lot like guilt to law enforcement personnel. Suddenly, Jacob and his family, who only want to fit in, feel the spotlight shining directly on them. For his mother, Emma, it’s a brutal reminder of the intolerance and misunderstanding that always threaten her family. For his brother, Theo, it’s another indication of why nothing is normal because of Jacob. And over this small family the soul-searing question looms: Did Jacob commit murder?

Emotionally powerful from beginning to end, House Rules looks at what it means to be different in our society, how autism affects a family, and how our legal system works well for people who communicate a certain way — and fails those who don’t.

The Heights by Peter Hedges

Tim Welch is a popular history teacher at the Montague Academy, an exclusive private school in Brooklyn Heights. As he says, "I was an odd-looking, gawky kid but I like to think my rocky start forced me to develop empathy, kindness, and a tendency to be enthusiastic. All of this, I’m now convinced, helped in my quest to be worthy of Kate Oliver." Now, Kate is not inherently ordinary. But she aspires to be. She stays home with their two young sons in a modest apartment trying desperately to become the parent she never had. They are seemingly the last middle-class family in the Heights, whose world is turned upside down by Anna Brody, the new neighbor who moves into the most expensive brownstone in Brooklyn, sending the local society into a tailspin.

Anna is not only beautiful and wealthy; she’s also mysterious. And for reasons Kate doesn’t quite understand, even as all the Range Rover- driving moms jockey for invitations into Anna’s circle, Anna sets her sights on Kate and Tim and brings them into her world.

Like Tom Perrotta, Peter Hedges has a keen eye for the surprising truths of daily life. The Heights is at once light of touch and packed with emotion and depth of character.

To be continued…