River Readers

A smart and revealing political memoir from a rising star of the Democratic Party.

"In life and in politics, the most important work is often that which happens outside the wire."

Going "outside the wire" -- military lingo for leaving the safety of a base -- has taught Jason Kander to take risks and make change rather than settling for the easy option. After you've volunteered to put your life on the line with and for your fellow Americans in Afghanistan, cynical politics and empty posturing back home just feel like an insult.

The past comes back to haunt Finn McQuaid, who is brought up short by what seems the reappearance of his former lover, Layla, who vanished 12 years earlier. After being cleared of Layla's murder, Finn gradually became close to her older sister, Ellen, and they were recently engaged. Then the appearance of a set of Russian dolls significant to only Layla, Ellen, and Finn suggest that Layla may be alive and nearby.

Forsythe's intense and disquieting debut reckons with grief, senseless violence, compassion, and adolescent alienation centered on the 1999 Columbine High School massacre. Her speakers include the victims, the shooters (who speak directly through excerpts from their journals), a teenage girl living halfway across the country, and an adult reflecting on that teenage girl's experience. Forsythe details her settings, such as the bedroom of one of the shooters, in a chilling and reverential manner. "You dream under/ a poster of Jenny McCarthy," she writes.

*Starred Review* Like a chameleon, noir adapts to its landscape and climate, finding in either sun or rain the climatological ingredients necessary to generate a mood of oppression, foreboding, and inevitability. So it is in Mangan's hypnotic debut, set in 1950s Tangier, where a deadly, Hitchcockian pas de deux plays out under an unrelenting, Camus-like African sun. Alice, a fragile Englishwoman, has landed in Tangier after a sudden marriage to one of those British gentlemen whose pedigree masks his idler essence.

*Starred Review* What fresh hell can this be? author Dorothy Parker once acidly asked. Fourteen-year-old Colin has the answer: his life. Blaming himself for his father's death, the boy is obsessed with self-hatred and the desire to be punished. Reading his late father's cryptic, enigmatic journals, he fittingly comes across a tantalizing entry called Things I've Learned in Hell.

*Starred Review* Simon's pretty sure no one will be upset when he comes out as gay. Though he lives in Georgia and kids at his high school can be cruel, his friends and family are all very accepting. But announcing that he likes guys is still a huge transformation. That's why he is so spooked when classmate Martin stumbles on secret, flirty e-mails Simon has been sending to Blue, a mysterious boy at his school, and gently threatens to reveal his secret.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

"They call themselves the May Mothers--a group of new moms whose babies were born in the same month. Twice a week, they get together in Brooklyn's Prospect Park for some much-needed adult time. When the women go out for drinks at the hip neighborhood bar, they are looking for a fun break from their daily routine. But on this hot Fourth of July night, something goes terrifyingly wrong: one of the babies is taken from his crib. Winnie, a single mom, was reluctant to leave six-week-old Midas with a babysitter, but her fellow May Mothers insisted everything would be fine. Now he is missing.

At first blush, the premise of Lim's dystopian novel is a familiar one: a deadly flu pandemic sweeps across the world in the early 1980s. But the solution is inventive: people whose loved ones are sick can sign up to travel to the future and work as bonded servants for a company called TimeRaiser in exchange for the cure (also from the future) for their loved ones. This is Polly's only recourse when her boyfriend, Frank, falls ill in 1981. Polly signs up to travel to 1993, planning to reunite with Frank when she does.

For readers of Gillian Flynn and Tana French comes one of the decade's most anticipated debuts, to be published in thirty-six languages around the world and already in development as a major film from Fox: a twisty, powerful Hitchcockian thriller about an agoraphobic woman who believes she witnessed a crime in a neighboring house.

It isn't paranoia if it's really happening . . .

Married for just over a year, Roy and Celestial are still navigating their new dynamic as husband and wife. Then their lives are forever altered when they travel to Roy's small Louisiana hometown for a visit, and Roy is falsely accused of a harrowing crime and sentenced to 12 years in prison. The strain on their relationship is intense during Roy's incarceration, especially once Celestial's career takes off while he struggles with loss and feelings of abandonment. Nearly halfway through Roy's sentence, his conviction is vacated.

Newly engaged Avery Stafford leaves her job as a federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., to go back home to South Carolina, where she is being groomed to succeed her ailing father, a U.S. senator. At a meet-and-greet at a nursing home, she encounters May, a woman who seems to have some link with Avery's Grandma Judy, now suffering from dementia. The reader learns early on that May was once Rill Foss, one of five siblings snatched from their shanty home on the Mississippi and taken to the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children's Home Society.

Uneasy lies the head of the person who is the President of the United States. This thriller, copenned by former president Clinton ("42") and best-selling author Patterson, opens with President Duncan preparing for an impeachment hearing. He has been accused of preventing the death of known terrorist Suliman Cindoruk, who is still on the loose. But unbeknownst to his congressional accusers, Duncan needs to keep Cindoruk alive because of a cyberterrorism threat known as Dark Ages.