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Agent Zero (An Agent Zero Spy Thriller—Book #1) (affiliate link)
Kent Steele, 38, a brilliant professor of European History at Columbia University, lives a quiet life in a New York suburb with his two teenage daughters. All that changes when late one night he gets a knock on his door and is abducted by three terrorists—and finds himself flown across the ocean to be interrogated in a basement in Paris.
They are convinced that Kent is the most lethal spy the CIA has ever known.
He is convinced they have the wrong man.
Do they?
With a conspiracy around him, adversaries as smart as he is, and an assassin on his tail, the wild game of cat and mouse leads Kent on a perilous road—one that may lead back to Langley—and to a shocking discovery of his own identity.
Dead Wrong: A Cozy Mystery (Agatha’s Amish B&B Book 1) (affiliate link)
Who killed Russell Dixon?
When Agatha Lapp’s brother and sister-in-law are tragically killed in a buggy accident, Agatha relocates to the new Amish community in Hunt Texas, nestled in the Texas Hill Country. She’s there to make a success of her brother’s dream–an Amish B&B. Agatha is friendly, efficient, and capable. She’s also a fifty-five year old widow who has learned to be independent. When she discovers Russell Dixon’s lifeless body in Cabin 3, she runs next door where retired detective Tony Vargas lives. The police determine that her guest died of natural causes, but as Agatha and Tony put together the events of the previous two days they become convinced that the police are Dead Wrong.
The Boat Man (A Reed & Billie Novel Book 1) (affiliate link)
Detective Reed Mattox, just three months removed from the death of his partner, has turned invisibility into an art form.
Switching to the K-9, taking over the graveyard shift, moving to a farmhouse miles outside of Columbus, his every move has become predicated on putting as much distance between himself and the outside world as possible.
That distance is shattered though when bodies begin turning up in The Bottoms, the poverty-stricken section of town he is assigned to patrol. Grisly, horrific scenes start to pop up in the middle of the night and the overburdened precinct has no choice but to put Reed on it.
Cape Cod Cozies: Ivy Bloom Mysteries Books 1-3 (affiliate link)
Haggard Hawk (Nathan Hawk Book 1) (affiliate link)
The local police warn Hawk against interfering in their inquiry, but he can’t help himself and pretty soon he’s back where he belongs – catching a killer.
Year of the Nurse: A 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir (affiliate link)
On April 25th, 2021 at 10:55 in the morning I messaged my chat group of girlfriends from where I work as a nurse on an ICU floor: “Nothing like feeling strongly suicidal at a job where you’re supposed to be keeping people alive,” and then tweeted that my “mental health wasn’t great” and deleted the Twitter app off of my phone because I didn’t want to “overshare.”
That I felt like dying.
That I would’ve rather died than still be at work.
I am not alone.
In 2020 there were roughly four million nurses in America. Only 2.7 million U.S. soldiers fought in the Vietnam War. Those soldiers who came back from Vietnam having witnessed atrocities—and in some cases, participated in them—were changed forever.
Dismantled: A Novel (affiliate link)
When Henry, Tess, Winnie, and Suz form the Compassionate Dismantlers in college, the first rule of their manifesto is, “To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart.” But their penchant for acts of meaningful vandalism and elaborate, often dangerous pranks results in Suz’s death in the woods of Vermont—a tragedy the surviving Dismantlers decide to cover up.
Nearly a decade later, Henry and Tess are desperate to forget, but their guilt isn’t ready to let them go. When a mysterious Dismantler-style postcard drives a past prank victim to suicide, it sets off a chain of terrifying events that threatens to tear apart their world and engulf their inquisitive nine-year-old daughter, Emma. Is there someone who wants to reveal their secrets? Or is it possible Suz has found a way to enact revenge?
Monster: My True Story (affiliate link)
Once Upon a Car: The Fall and Resurrection of America’s Big Three Automakers–GM, Ford, and Chrysler (affiliate link)
Meddling and Murder: An Aunty Lee Mystery (affiliate link)
Aunty Lee is on the case!
There is nothing Rosie ‘Aunty’ Lee, amateur sleuth and proprietor of Singapore’s best-loved restaurant, loves more than solving other people’s problems. So when Beth Kwuan, an ambitious businesswoman, tells Aunty Lee her maid has disappeared, Aunty Lee is happy to let her own maid, Nina, help.
Only as the weeks go by, little clues make Aunty Lee worry. And as she digs into what is really going on behind the closed doors of Beth’s grand house, she starts to wonder—did Beth’s maid just run away, or did she meet a darker fate?
Now the race is on for Aunty Lee to get to the bottom of the mystery…and save Nina before it’s too late!
Little Gods: A Novel (affiliate link)
On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time.
When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country.
Reunion: A Novel (affiliate link)
Keira Johnston, a 50-year-old mother of two grown sons, believes she lives a good Christian life without secrets — until she discovers a life-jarring fact her late mother kept hidden all her life. Kiera was born out of wedlock, and the man she had always known as her father had adopted her as an infant.
Meanwhile, Keira’s beloved 17-year-old niece, Kirsten, has just discovered an unwanted pregnancy. Her boyfriend, Jose, is bound for college and Kirsten does not know what to do. As the family comes together for a reunion, Keira and Kirsten struggle with their fractured pasts and jumbled present. Will truth and honesty be the catalysts that allow the entire family to find peace?
Holding Space: On Loving, Dying, and Letting Go (affiliate link)
As a hospital chaplain, Amy Wright Glenn has been present with those suffering from suicide, trauma, disease, and unforeseen accidents and has been witness to the intense grief and powerful insights that so often accompany loss. She weaves together memoir, philosophical inquiry, and cutting-edge research on death/dying to chronicle how we, as individuals and as a culture, handle everything from grief to mortality.
Glenn is also a professional birth doula with a deep and committed mindfulness practice who has thought deeply about the significance of human love and loss. She asks us to embrace the task of being present with what is—through courageous and mindful expressions of compassionate presence—and helps us to accept the fact of our own mortality on a visceral and emotional level, not simply as an intellectual abstraction.
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 2Page 2