Summer is quickly approaching, and with the season comes summer reading time!
Fill your bedside table with these new books for adults, recommended by your Diane Bondi, a librarian at the Merrick Library.
Come Home by Lisa Scottoline
Lisa Scottoline knows how to write a thrilling mystery. Pediatrician Jill Farrow lives an ordinary suburban life with her 13-year-old daughter, supportive fiancé, and golden retriever until a midnight visitor turns her idyllic life upside down. Jill's ex-stepdaughter, Abby, arrives with the news that Jill's ex-husband, William, is dead and she suspects foul play. Despite distaste for her ex and a three-year estrangement from her two stepdaughters, Jill begins investigating William's death to help Abby obtain closure. Fueled by her strong maternal instincts, Abby's quest for the truth propels her into a dangerous cat-and-mouse chase that risks her closest relationships and threatens her life. Come Home reads like with the breakneck pacing of a thriller while also exploring the definition of motherhood – Do you ever stop being a mother? Can you ever have an ex-child? What are the limits of love and family?
Defending Jacob by William Landay
Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts County for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: His fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.
Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent and Andy believes him. Andy must. He's his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own — between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he's tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.
Award-winning author Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis — a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control.
Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake by Anna Quindlen
From childhood memories to manic motherhood to middle age, Quindlen uses the events of her own life to illuminate our own. Along with the downsides of age, she says, can come wisdom, a perspective on life that makes it satisfying and even joyful. Candid, funny, moving, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is filled with the sharp insights and revealing observations that have long confirmed Quindlen's status as America's laureate of real life.
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising 25 year old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future. Elegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to come. A love letter to a great American city at the end of the Depression, readers will quickly fall under its spell of crisp writing, sparkling atmosphere and breathtaking revelations, as Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy.
