Fox Lake District Library: Hot Titles

Publishers Weekly An unlikely bond develops between NYPD detective Kat Donovan and 19-year-old Brandon Phelps in this page-turning, stomach-churning standalone from bestseller Coben (Six Years). While exploring a dating site called YouAreJustMyType.com, Kat discovers the photo of Jeff Raynes, her ex-fiance, who dumped her 18 years earlier. Brandon's widowed mother, Dana Phelps, has also met someone from that site and is now missing. Several puzzles emerge. What happened to Jeff? What is happening to Dana? What is the real story behind the murder of Kat's cop father, Henry Donovan, years before? Who is Titus Monroe, the man pulling the strings on the dating site? Coben orchestrates his story perfectly as Kat begins to sense the magnitude of horror at work and Titus becomes aware of her investigation. Once again, Coben has brilliantly used a current trend, in this case Internet dating, to create a can't-put-it-down thriller. Agent: Lisa Erbach Vance, Aaron Priest Literary Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal NYPD detective Kat Donovan has learned to live without a romantic partner. She doesn't even miss it, since it's been over 20 years since she really cared about someone. Besides, she loves her job and that's more than a lot of people have, right? But when her well-meaning best friend Stacy buys her a year's subscription to an online dating service, adding, "Who knows, you might meet Mr. Right," Kat decides to give it a shot. At first it seems like just another profile like so many of the other profiles on the dating site, but she can't stop staring at the picture. The man in the bears an uncanny resemblance to her high school sweetheart, Jeff-the only man to whom she ever gave her heart. Then a young man asks Kat to help him find his missing mother, who was also a member of the dating site. Worse, the woman may also have a link to Jeff. Things start to spiral out of control as Kat struggles to connect the dots and solve a mystery that has hit entirely too close to home. Verdict Coben (Hold Tight; Live Wire), the best-selling master of suspense, has written another twisty ripped-from-the-headlines page-turning stand-alone that could be his best yet. This one will be flying off your shelves; order multiple copies. [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/13.]-Cynthia Price, Francis Marion Univ. Lib., Florence, SC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Publishers Weekly

Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

Publishers Weekly A horrific crime-the torture murders of Patrick Brooks, his wife, son, daughter, and three dogs at their palatial lakeside home in Wayzata, Minn.-propels bestseller Sandford's solid 22nd novel featuring Lucas Davenport of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (after 2011's Buried Prey). That DEA officials believe the killings to be the work of Los Criminales del Norte brings Mexican detective David Rivera and assistant Ana Martinez to the Twin Cities area, though Brooks's Spanish-language company, Sunnie Software, which peddled its product in Mexico, appears to have been an unlikely money laundry. Since the author makes it clear who the bad guys are early on, the slow revelation of what they've done and how they've done it gives the story its kick. Meanwhile, Lucas, after a couple of meth addicts rob him at an ATM, turns for help to series regular Virgil Flowers, who gets surprising results. Once again, Sandford smoothly blends action and suspense with a soupcon of humor. Author tour. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Book list Wayzata, Minnesota, is not the place where one would expect an entire family husband, wife, kids, even the dogs to be tortured and murdered. To Lucas Davenport, of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, it looks a lot like the carnage wrought by vengeful Mexican drug gangs. But this family obviously was not in the drug trade. So why? The trail takes Davenport to a Minneapolis bank, where credit cards were being used to launder Mexican cartel money. But the credit-card account is empty. Someone has ripped off the cartel, and the drug lords intend to butcher people until someone tells them where the money is. The twenty-fourth Prey novel is the usual Sandford mix of tight plotting, gallows humor, and explosive action. This one has a twist, though, which reveals a creeping weakness in Davenport's analytic skills. A white-knuckle page-turner. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Last May, Stephen King said, If you haven't read Sandford, you have been missing one of the great summer-read novelists of all time. A nice jump start for a new publicity campaign.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2010 Booklist

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Oprah's Book Club

We Were the Mulvaneys

by Joyce Carol Oates

Publishers Weekly Elegiac and urgent in tone, Oates's wrenching 26th novel (after Zombie) is a profound and darkly realistic chronicle of one family's hubristic heyday and its fall from grace. The wealthy, socially elite Mulvaneys live on historic High Point Farm, near the small upstate town of Mt. Ephraim, N.Y. Before the act of violence that forever destroys it, an idyllic incandescence bathes life on the farm. Hard-working and proud, Michael Mulvaney owns a successful roofing company. His wife, Corinne, who makes a halfhearted attempt at running an antique business, adores her husband and four children, feeling "privileged by God." Narrator Judd looks up to his older brothers, athletic Mike Jr. ("Mule") and intellectual Patrick ("Pinch"), and his sister, radiant Marianne, a popular cheerleader who is 17 in 1976 when she is raped by a classmate after a prom. Though the incident is hushed up, everyone in the family becomes a casualty. Guilty and shamed by his reaction to his daughter's defilement, Mike Sr. can't bear to look at Marianne, and she is banished from her home, sent to live with a distant relative. The family begins to disintegrate. Mike loses his business and, later, the homestead. The boys and Corinne register their frustration and sadness in different, destructive ways. Valiant, tainted Marianne runs from love and commitment. More than a decade later, there is a surprising denouement, in which Oates accommodates a guardedly optimistic vision of the future. Each family member is complexly rendered and seen against the background of social and cultural conditioning. As with much of Oates's work, the prose is sometimes prolix, but the very rush of narrative, in which flashbacks capture the same urgency of tone as the present, gives this moving tale its emotional power. 75,000 first printing; author tour. (Sept.)

Library Journal Everyone knows the Mulvaneys: Dad the successful businessman, Mike the football star, Marianne the cheerleader, Patrick the brain, Judd the runt, and Mom dedicated to running the family. But after what sometime narrator Judd calls the events of Valentine's Day 1976, this ideal family falls apart and is not reunited until 1993. Oates's (Will You Always Love Me, LJ 2/1/96) 26th novel explores this disintegration with an eye to the nature of changing relationships and recovering from the fractures that occur. Through vivid imagery of a calm upstate New York landscape that any moment can be transformed by a blinding blizzard into a near-death experience, Oates demonstrates how faith and hope can help us endure. At another level, the process of becoming the Mulvaneys again investigates the philosophical and spiritual aspects of a family's survival and restoration. Highly recommended.?Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, NY

Library Journal Oates limns a dysfunctional family.

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Abraham Lincoln Book Award Nominees

Hold tight

by Harlan Coben

Book list *Starred Review* The average person visiting an electronics store may be excited, confused, or bored. It takes a suspense master like Coben to realize the full pernicious potential, to extrapolate the eerie endgames, hidden in contemporary electronics. In thriller after thriller, Coben, who has a clutch of awards including the Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony, casts a variety of electronic gadgets as prime plot movers and shakers. His genius is to make the seemingly mundane terrifying. In his latest, computer spyware, text messages, and cell phones deliver a series of well-timed shocks to the family he focuses on and to the reader. Coben begins with a harrowing scene in which a woman is forced from a bar and brutally murdered. Cut to a seemingly unrelated scenario parents installing a program on their son's computer that can monitor his every keystroke. Throughout, Coben juxtaposes a serial killer's spree with a domestic drama centering on the ways that a friend's suicide has affected the son, his parents, and the entire neighborhood. A single message ( Just stay quiet and all safe ) shakes up the parents, who are soon spiked with terror as their son vanishes. Coben enhances the narration with shifting points of view and through the cryptic messages that follow the son's disappearance. He also brings the spate of serial killings closer and closer to the family. Fascinating.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2008 Booklist

Library Journal Coben (The Final Detail) continues to dominate the thriller genre in this latest examination of suburbia. Mike and Tia Baye's son Adam delivers typically teen angst to his befuddled family. As a precaution, Mike and Tia invest in a spyware program that will report every keystroke on Adam's personal computer so they can track his movements. The results terrify them, and then Adam disappears. Life moves forward, and the questions become complex: How far would you go to protect your family? How well do you know your children? Coben tackles the troubles not only of the Bayes but also of other families, creating a strikingly realistic X-ray of an entire neighborhood. A fast and exhilarating roller-coaster ride that you don't want to end, but hold on tight. Then take the time to hug your kids. A mandatory purchase. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/08.]--Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly Parents will find this compulsive page-turner from Edgar-winner Coben (The Woods) particularly unnerving. A sadistic killer is at play in suburban Glen Rock, N.J., outside New York City, but somehow he's less frightening than the more mundane problems that send ordinary lives into chaos. How do you weigh a child's privacy against a parent's right to know? How do you differentiate normal teenage rebelliousness from out-of-control behavior? When and how do you intervene if suicidal signs appear? Other issues include single parenting; career versus family; marital honesty; and how much information you should share with a child at what age. Coben plucks each of these strings like a virtuoso as Mike and Tia Baye try to deal with the increasing withdrawal of their 16-year-old son, Adam, after a friend's suicide. A pair of brutal, seemingly senseless killings, punctuate the unfolding domestic troubles that ratchet up the tension and engulf the Baye family, their friends and neighbors in a web of increasing tragedy. The "this could be me" factor lends poignancy to the thrills and chills. (Apr.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

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