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New Adult Fiction Authors T - Z |
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Newest items are displayed first. Click on a title for more information or to place a hold. |
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The Butcher Legacy: A Dr. Wren Muller Novel
by Alaina Urquhart
Two months after the life-altering events of The Butcher Game, Wren is back in the place she knows best: the New Orleans morgue. She buries herself in routine, surrounded by both familiar and new company, John Leroux and Maya Rodriguez, trying to convince herself that normalcy
can be rebuilt. But in the weeks leading up to Halloween, shadows
begin to move again as young girls vanish in both cities where Jeremy Rose once ran rampant. Hundreds of miles away, the pastor to a close-knit congregation in Massachusetts, Philip Trudeau, is back behind the pulpit. But beneath his practiced composure lies something sinister--gruesome secrets and a hunger that did not die when Jeremy was caged. With Jeremy behind bars and Philip suddenly nowhere to be found, Wren and Leroux must mobilize, and this twisted triangle clashes at every turn. The Butcher Legacy is a relentless, page-turning descent into the dark.
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The Seekers of Deer Creek
by Thao Thai
Aside from the fact they are sisters, Vivi and Calla Nguyn have little in common. Vivi, the eldest, lives an orderly and predictable life. She
works as an art conservator at a museum in Chicago, carefully preserving pieces of the past, all the while refusing to examine her own dark history. Calla leads a much bolder, if occasionally reckless, existence. She's an accomplished artist with a flair for the dramatic, charming and intriguing everyone she meets. She's also a recovering addict, constantly causing Vivi to worry. Months after the two fall out in the wake of their father's death, Calla appears on the steps of the museum with a sketch and a letter she found in their father's
belongings. The sketch is an exact copy of Blue Mirror, a striking
painting by a Vietnamese painter named K.P. L . In the letter, L writes about a mysterious lost work of art. Calla is convinced it is meant for their family, and that it was their father's deathbed wish for her and Vivi to find it together. Intrigued yet reluctant to follow her capricious sister, Vivi must decide whether she's willing to face or shut the door to the past. From the ghostly Wisconsin woods to a glittering estate in the French countryside to a sprawling ancestral home teetering on the edge of a ravine in Viet Nam, The Seekers of Deer Creek is a story of sisters, art, and the irresistible gravity of the past--how it endures across time and generations, always present even when buried.
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Fabulous Bodies
by Chuck Tingle
Poppy Stringer was born to be a star. An aspiring fashion influencer by day, Poppy moonlights as a grave robber to make ends meet, wheeling and dealing dead bodies across Palm Springs. When her hero, the flamboyant, piano-slamming rockstar Eddie Michaels, unexpectedly dies, Poppy gets a call to retrieve his body from the medical examiner's office for a lucrative sum. It could be the last job she'll ever need--if
everything goes to plan. But the night's delivery quickly veers off course when Eddie wakes up. Now Poppy must fight for her life if she hopes to survive this blood-soaked joyride of carnage and extravagant entertainment.
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The Calamities
by Chuck Wendig
Mourning Mayne knows he'll one day bear the duty of managing his family's vast empire of wealth and power. But the feckless Mourning
has always struggled to accept this legacy of cruelty, domination, and exploitation . . . and something even darker. Because the Maynes are
no ordinary family: Hidden in our world are the fiends--half-human,
half-demon, and possessed of a dark magic born from buying human souls--and the Maynes are one of the oldest and most influential
fiendish families. But when Mourning's estranged father, the formidable and terrifying Hadrian Mayne, demands that Mourning return to the
fold, he has to decide whether to accept his legacy and embrace his
role in the family or to forge his own destiny, and with it, change the course of the world. Because along the way home, he will meet Key, a black-market seller of human souls, and Quinn, an artist who may hold the dark truth behind the fate of the fiends. Alone, they have all struggled with the darkness of their natures . . . but together, they
might find a path out of the shadows. Book One of The Fiends.
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Daggermouth
by H. M. Wolfe
The first thing you'll learn in New Found Haven is that mercy doesn't exist. The second thing is that, from the highest glass atrium in the Heart to the windowless slums of the Boundary, the Veyra are always watching. The last lesson is the hardest, but you must remember it:
Love outside of your ring is a death sentence. The city is carved into rings of privilege and poverty, ruled by the masked elite who will do whatever it takes to hold onto power. Obedience is demanded.
Rebellion is crushed. Greyson Serel has spent his life caught between two worlds. Publicly, he's the flawless heir to the presidency. Privately, he's entangled in secrets that could topple the regime. But when he's forced into a political marriage meant to bind him tighter to the government's brutal laws, he finds himself shackled to a bride as lethal as she is unwilling. Shadera Kael is a mercenary raised to kill, not to wed. Yet when her bullet misses its mark, survival leaves her tied to the very man she was sent to eliminate. Trapped inside the corrupt heart of the city, she becomes both prisoner and wife, her every step watched, her every move tested. Their union is no love story--it's a battlefield. As secrets come to light and betrayals fester within the walls of power, Greyson and Shadera must decide between annihilating each other or burning the city to the ground together. In a world where passion has consequences and loyalty is paid for in blood, their forced bond may be the spark that ignites a revolution. Or the fire that consumes them both.
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Etna
by Paul Yoon
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home--to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there. Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss? This is a novel about
the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.
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Green City Wars
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Philip Marlowe meets Redwall in this superior adult noir tale, where all the characters are animals, fighting for survival in the city underneath the humans. In the solar cities of the future, the humans relax in the
sun and the animals work in the shadows. Genetically engineered Little Helpers, serving humanity--unseen, unheard. Meet Skotch. Raccoon,
PI--yours for a few buttons as long as the job isn't too illegal, whatever that means. A mouse has gone missing. Normally this wouldn't raise
any hackles, nor any alarms, but this mouse has something that everyone seems to want, though nobody appears particularly eager to say what that something is. The fee is good--perhaps too good.
Certainly not something Skotch can easily turn down. If only Skotch
can work out where the mouse is hiding, what he's hiding, and why his secrets are upsetting a lot of animals caught up in the Green City wars.
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Honey
by Imani Thompson
She just wants to know what justice feels like. Yrsa is bored: bored with her PhD program, her entitled students, and the never-ending pages of racial violence and feminist theory she has to read. But most of all,
she's bored with the men in her life--especially the bad ones. And then, one sunny afternoon, she accidentally kills one. Suddenly a problematic professor is dead, and Yrsa, well--she's no longer bored. Emboldened, she starts to chase the high, and soon no misbehaving sexist man
within commuting distance is safe. Finally Yrsa's academic research
feels useful. But how long can killing in the name of feminist and racial solidarity justify her actions? And how long until her actions--and buried family secrets--come back to unravel her?
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Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep
by Paul Tremblay
Meet Julia Flang, a twenty-something former semi-professional gamer, living with her retired uncle, and working two jobs she doesn't like. Out of the blue, her estranged mother, a CFO for one of the world's largest tech companies, offers her a temp job with a payday Julia can't refuse. One sham interview later, she's offered the job: to chaperone a man in
a vegetative state--one with proprietary AI implanted in his head--from California to the East Coast. To sum up in Julia's own words: You want me to remote control this dead dude across the country. In a word, yes. But he's not dead dead. Meet a middle-aged man who wakes within a disorienting hellscape filled with monstrous grotesqueries. Worse than the fluid, morphing reality in which he's trapped, he has no memory of who he is. He certainly doesn't remember getting the rabbit tattoo on
his arm. He only knows that he must find a certain person. Who? He can't remember. Using a cell phone modeled after a video game controller, Julia fumblingly navigates the man she calls Bernie from the company campus and onto planes and through one of the largest airports in America. All the while, the man endures an ever-changing
and worsening nightmare that offers clues as to who he was--and who he must track down. And as their two lives intertwine, Julia and Bernie become unlikely allies and fugitives on a collision course with reality.
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Everything to the Sea
by Alicia Upano
Home for one final summer, Jane is working and saving cash for her senior year of college before she leaves her island town behind forever. At first, she doesn't remember Kenji, but he quickly becomes someone she can't forget: square jaw, a dimple in his cheek. A Hilo boy. To Kenji, she's Janie, nose perpetually buried in her old high school sketchbooks. Jane tells herself it's only a fling--one perfect, carefree summer, on her way to achieving her dream of becoming an architect and moving to the continent. Then a tsunami sweeps their families out to sea, and their
all-consuming affair breaks with the weight of grief, pulling them in
opposite directions. Kenji remains in Hawai'i, bound by duty to rebuild their hometown. Jane, shattered by the loss, follows her best friend to California. For seven years, an ocean lies between them, until Jane and Kenji meet on another coast.
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Yellow Pine
by Claire Vaye Watkins
In her homestead deep in the Mojave, Rose has found a way to live "on the other side of the portal," with an intentionality that's brought her hard-won peace and freedom. She's navigating single parenthood, and she's found a community out at Yellow Pine, where a group of spirited misfits have mounted a stand against the green energy gold rush Rose
is certain will destroy her beloved desert. When she accepts an overture from Miles, an old flame, their passion proves as intense - and unsteady - as ever. But even as their rekindled romance flickers, it fuels a deeper, more consuming drive in Rose: to birth not only another child but a fuller, more intact way of being in the face of rapacious consumerism, industrialization, and misanthropy. Enlisting her on-again-off-again lover, her fellow activists, and her oddball neighbors, she embarks upon an unorthodox scheme to recover from her rugged individualism, embrace love in all its pain and grace, and come home to the divine. As furious, bawdy, searching, and searingly original as ever, in Yellow Pine Watkins blazes a trail toward a radically reimagined vision of a good life in a ravaged time.
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Returns and Exchanges
by Kayla Rae Whitaker
It's December 24, 1979, just before closing at Baker-Taylor's discount department store, and Fran (nee Baker) is surveying her domain. Her husband, Fred, is charming customers in the front of the store, while last-minute shoppers in the toy aisle are fighting over the lone
remaining Atari. The older Taylor kids are on register, while the younger ones' chaos is contained to the stockroom. All is right in the world as the new decade approaches. With four healthy children and financial
stability their own parents could have only dreamed of, Fred and Fran are the picture of the American Dream--rags to riches--with a successful chain of family-owned stores built on years of hard work and long hours. Underneath the surface, however, the business is changing at a breakneck pace, and each member of the family is struggling to keep
up. Money is transforming Fred, and the extremes he will go to in order to fit in with the slicked-back high society crowd of Lexington, Kentucky, are embarrassing, if not downright dangerous. Josiah, the oldest son, wants nothing to do with the family business; Sam is seeing things that might not really be there; and Benny and Birdie are growing up with a fraction of the parenting that their older brothers had. Meanwhile, Fran, her family's stable core, is falling for Wendy, a cashier at Baker-Taylor's, risking everything along the way. While trying to maintain the facade of
a perfect success story, Fred and Fran learn that in matters of love and money, once it's gone, it's gone--no returns, no exchanges.
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Cool Machine
by Colson Whitehead
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall
Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. When the banks won't give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind. 1983. To some, Carney's friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he's feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he's plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you're uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence--Pepper is a native speaker. 1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability
to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie's death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie's son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he's spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right. With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below.
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When You Loved Me
by Beatriz Williams
Local history insists that a legendary pirate buried his treasure somewhere beneath Windward, the decayed Cooper estate on Winthrop Island, but Lucy Cooper never trusted the fable that broke her family apart. When a widowed Lucy returns with her young daughter to grieve her estranged father, she discovers catastrophe: The property is mired
in debt she can't repay, and Ben Ressler has unexpectedly turned up on her doorstep. Thirteen summers ago, the teenaged Lucy never meant to fall in love with Ben, a Dartmouth football star vacationing nearby at the Peabody estate and the object of an all-consuming crush by Laura Peabody, Lucy's best friend. Those few weeks were the best and worst
of Lucy's life, dooming her friendship with Laura. Now, after a fatal accident ended his dazzling NFL career, Ben has returned to live quietly in the Peabodys' caretaker lodge. He's also the last person who saw Lucy's father alive. As Lucy reconstructs her father's troubling final
days, she uncovers his research on the frozen winter of 1717, when a desperately wounded pirate sought refuge on Winthrop Island with an enigmatic healer. To Lucy, this history points the way to a different kind of treasure: how to heal from the fractures of the past and earn a second chance at love. But just as Lucy's long-buried emotions sear to the surface, a shocking turn of events reveals that someone else on the island will do whatever it takes to claim the fabled plunder.
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Seek Immediate Shelter
by Vincent Yu
On an otherwise unremarkable morning, the residents of a small town
in Massachusetts all receive the same alert: BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. Confronted with the options of fight or flight, planning or panicking, the people of Beckitt are stripped to their basest instincts and revealed as their truest selves. Russ squeezes his family into the bathtub, leaving his own survival in question; Nina sends an unforgivable text to her daughter; Milly confesses her unrequited love; and David hits the gas, speeding away from his wife and child. Then the second message
comes in: FALSE ALARM. PLEASE DISREGARD. ALL CLEAR. First comes relief, then comes the reckoning, as each person is forced to face the unforeseen aftermath of decisions they thought might be their last. Vincent Yu's searing debut follows this eclectic cast of characters over a period of many years, suggesting that the conflicts the missile exacerbated were simmering under the surface long before, and
proving the ripple effects of the false alarm will be felt for years to
come. What choices would you make if you thought your life were on
the line? And if you survive, can you ever redeem yourself?
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