Another month, another crop of new books by bestselling authors. One even has TWO books coming out this month (bet you can’t guess which bestselling author that is!), so if you’re a fan of the hottest authors or you just want to be au courant with the books everybody will be reading, come to The Field Library and take a look at our November bestsellers.
Mary Higgins Clark seems to have been writing forever, but she keeps coming up with winners. Her latest book, Every Breath You Take, is the fourth book in her Under Suspicion series (if you want to catch up, we have all the preceding volumes here at the Field), and in this one, Laurie Moran, the protagonist of the series, is using her television program to solve a cold case involving a wealthy woman who was pushed to her death from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art three years earlier. The case was never solved, though the widow’s young boyfriend was the most likely suspect then, and now. But as Laurie digs deeper into the case, with help from her father’s Police Department connection, she begins to see that there are many more people who might have been guilty, including people in her own inner circle. Who should she trust? How far should she go before she finds her own life in danger?
Jack Reacher, the hero of Lee Child’s bestselling series, returns in November in The Midnight Line. He’s not looking for trouble, or for anything in particular, when he gets out of a bus at a comfort stop in Wisconsin and sees a West Point ring in a pawn shop. Reacher knows what it takes to earn that ring, especially for a female cadet, and it doesn’t make sense to him that the owner would have pawned it. Being Jack Reacher, he decides to find the owner of the ring and make sure she’s okay, and of course the trail is much more complicated than Reacher could have anticipated, throwing him in the path of bikers, cops, muscle, and crooks, leading him to the middle of nowhere in Wyoming, and a vast criminal enterprise that only someone like Reacher could break.
You could hardly think of someone less like Jack Reacher than Stephanie Plum, the inept bounty hunter protagonist of Janet Evanovich’s bestselling series. However, her ridiculous lack of sense and ability make her books a lot of fun, and the latest, Hardcore Twenty-Four, is another example. Can you imagine Jack Reacher getting stuck babysitting someone’s boa constrictor? Well, that’s just the start of what Stephanie gets herself into: she can’t bring in professional grave robber Simon Diggery (an almost Dickensian name, by the way) until she promises to babysit his boa, Ethel, a job for which she is entirely unqualified. Then headless bodies start showing up, as does Diesel, a hot guy who doesn’t take no for an answer in his professional or personal life, and Stephanie has more problems than she knows how to deal with (and for those who are longtime fans of the series, one of those problems includes the question of Grandma Mazur’s new online boyfriend; any subplots having to do with Grandma Mazur are, of course, worth reading all by themselves).
David Baldacci brings back his top assassins, Will Robie and Jessica Reel, in his new book, End Game, for nonstop action. Will and Jessica have handled a lot of tough situations as they’ve acted in secret on behalf of the U.S. Government, killing people who represent unique threats to the U.S. They have always been able to rely on their handler, code named Blue Man, to keep them safe and have their backs. But now, after a rare vacation, Blue Man has disappeared and no one can get in contact with him. Will and Jessica assume the worst and spring into action, tracking him to his last known location, a small town in the wilds of Colorado which has become a magnet for crime, drugs and far-right militia groups. But as Will and Jessica discover, there’s a deeper and more sinister threat lurking in this small town, a threat not just to Blue Man and to them, but to all of America as well, and they’re outgunned against an adversary with home court advantage. Will they be able to get Blue Man back? Will they get out with their own lives?
Danielle Steel is becoming more prolific as time goes on. Her last book, Fairytale, came out in October, and this month she’s got Past Perfect. a very different kind of book, a ghost story, a time travel story, an unclassifiable novel about what happens when the past and present collide. The book begins with a modern family, Sibyl and Blake Gregory and their three children, Andrew, Caroline and Charlie, moving from New York to a beautiful old mansion in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco. The fact that the house is surprisingly inexpensive for its size and location doesn’t give them any pause (obviously they haven’t been watching the right movies), but when an earthquake shakes up the house the first night they move in, they meet the people who lived there a hundred years before, the Butterfield family, all of whom are long dead. In the days to come, the two families meet up with each other more and more often, sharing meals, memories, and time (as I said, a strange kind of book and hard to categorize). Is the past actually perfect? Of course not, but it can teach the present a great deal, as the Gregory family comes to learn.
Did you guess which bestselling author has two books coming out this month? If you said James Patterson, you’re right! The first to arrive is Count to Ten, which is in the Private series, and is set in India, specifically in Delhi. After the events in Mumbai (related in Private India: City on Fire, earlier in this series), Santosh has resigned as head of the Private Agency for India, but the head of the global agency wants him back very badly, and persuades him somehow to take on the founding of a new office in Delhi. Santosh has enough to do just fighting his own demons, but a case arises to make things worse. Barrels full of dissolved human remains have been found in the basement of a house in a fashionable part of Delhi, and, in case that wasn’t harrowing enough, the house belongs to the state government, which is suppressing all public information about the scene and the remains. Just what Santosh needs in a new city when he’s still shaky after the devastation in Mumbai.
Later in the month, Patterson brings back his longest-standing character, Alex Cross in the latest in the only series for which he doesn’t have a co-writer credited. The newest entry is called The People vs. Alex Cross, and for the first time Alex is on the wrong side of the law, charged with murder after gunning down followers of his nemesis Gary Soneji (whom we met back in the very first book in the series, Along Came a Spider). Alex knows it was in self-defense, but he’s being made into the poster child for trigger-happy cops. Suspended from the police and fighting for his professional life, the last thing Alex should be doing is investigating another serial killer, but when his long time partner, John Sampson, brings him a video that might be connected to the disappearances of a number of young women and asks for his help, Alex can’t say no, and so while he himself is on trial, he’s attempting to solve a series of violent crimes and prevent more. With the natural suspense of a murder trial running through the book, added to the hunting down of a serial killer, Patterson is at the top of his game, and you can find his new bestsellers right here at the Field.
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