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The Silent Second

Adam Phillips

Chuck Restic has achieved the American dream: a successful career with a large corporation, his own home, the best health care insurance and retirement package... but he's crumbling inside. Twenty years in Human Resources have pushed him into an existential crisis. He realizes there is so little value in what he does all day, and it is only when he embarks on a mission to find a missing employee from his firm that he truly starts to feel alive again.

This is Chuck's first step toward moonlighting as a private detective ― a job in which he turns out to excel. Constantly balancing the inane demands of his office and the excitement of his new "job," he finally finds what he's been missing. By applying his HR skills and wit to his new passion for detective work, Chuck unravels a web of crooked real estate deals and three murders, staving off a fourth: his own.

The first in the Chuck Restic mystery series, The Silent Second began life as the novel Smile Now, Cry Later, a self-publishing success story that led to a series commitment from publisher Prospect Park Books. Thoroughly re-edited, improved, re-designed, and re-titled, this smart, witty crime novel introduces an engaging (if sometimes bitter) private eye for the corporate era.

Farewell Transmission

Will McGrath

In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and heartbreaking, intimate and galvanizing, these essays venture from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and meet Elvis in rural Canada. We encounter diamond miners and professional wrestlers, night watchmen and righteous ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture.

This is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and ghost stories and obscure passions. Whether he’s unraveling the fraught history of a noose in Namibia or wandering the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, McGrath is on an excavation into landscapes rarely seen. Like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, these essays pulse with electric prose and vivid characters, seeking out the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet.

In Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives we encounter every day, and to the hidden worlds that exist within our own.

Everything Lost is Found Again

Will McGrath

Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who―with sweetest face―drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.

Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country and Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Will McGrath’s Everything Lost Is Found Again is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.

Cold Country

Russell Rowland

Montana, 1968: The small town of Paradise Valley is ripped open when popular rancher and notorious bachelor Tom Butcher is found murdered one morning, beaten to death by a baseball bat. Suspicion among the tight-knit community immediately falls on the outsider, Carl Logan, who recently moved in with his family and his troubled son Roger. What Carl doesn't realize is that there are plenty of people in Paradise Valley who have reason to kill Tom Butcher.

Complications arise when the investigating officers discover that Tom Butcher had a secret―a secret he kept even from Junior Kirby, a lifelong rancher and Butcher’s best friend. As accusations fly and secrets are revealed one after another, the people of Paradise Valley learn how deeply Tom Butcher was embedded in their lives, and that they may not have known him at all.

With familiar mastery, Russell Rowland, the author of In Open Spaces and Fifty-Six Counties, returns to rural Montana to explore a small town torn apart by secrets and suspicions, and how the tenuous bonds of friendship struggle to hold against the differences that would sever us.

Call it Horses

Jessie van Eerden

Set in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women—niece, aunt, and stowaway—and an improbable road trip.

Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan—with a hound in tow—set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they’ve known.

 rankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave’s dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived.

With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth—and herself—the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.  

Between Tides

Angel Khoury

A captivating historical novel set on Cape Cod and North Carolina's Outer Banks, perfect for fans of Where the Crawdads Sing and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

1890s, Cape Cod: Between tides, a man deserts his wife and his post as keeper of the Chatham Beach Lifesaving Station to start a new family far to the south, at Cape Hatteras.

1940s: His daughter, en route to serve in World War II with the Red Cross, travels to Cape Cod where she meets his first wife, Blythe, reanimating a life she had long buried: memories of her courtship, her bitter losses, and her husband's slow-motion vanishing. Set on two wild seascapes, Cape Cod and North Carolina's Outer Banks, Between Tides is a lyrical novel for fans of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marilynne Robinson-a story of two women stitching together a family ripped at the seams and discovering that even through absence, love's presence is everlasting.

As You Were

David Tromblay

A hypnotic, brutal, and unstoppable coming-of-age story echoing from within the aftershocks set off by the American Indian boarding schools of generations past, fanned by the flames of nearly fifteen years of service in the Armed Forces, exposing a series of inescapable prisons and the invisible scars of attempted erasure.

When he learns his father is dying, David Tromblay ponders what will become of the monster’s legacy and picks up a pen to set the story straight.

In sharp and unflinching prose, he recounts his childhood bouncing between his father, who wrestles with anger, alcoholism, and a traumatic brain injury; his grandmother, who survived Indian boarding schools but mistook the corporal punishment she endured for proper child-rearing; and his mother, a part-time waitress, dancer, and locksmith, who hides from David’s father in church basements and the folded-down back seat of her car until winter forces her to abandon her son on his grandmother’s doorstep.

For twelve years, he is beaten, burned, humiliated, locked in closets, lied to, molested, seen and not heard, until his talent for brutal violence meets and exceeds his father’s, granting him an escape.

Years later, David confronts the compounded traumas of his childhood, searching for the domino that fell and forced his family into the cycle of brutality and denial of their own identity. 

Mistakenly Married

Victorine Lieske

It was only a business arrangement. She wasn’t supposed to fall in love.

When her online boyfriend stands Penny up at the altar, she ends up marrying the wrong man. Oops. But Harrison needs to be married to get his inheritance so they concoct a crazy plan.

Too bad her heart races every time he’s around.

Harrison just needs to prove to his stepmother that he’s married. But things don’t go as planned. And Penny breathes life into his world.

He finds himself wishing their fake marriage were real. Some mistakes were meant to happen.

Reluctantly Married

Victorine Lieske

Megan Holloway can’t stand her local morning show co-host, Adam Warner, even though he’s a total hunk. He goads her on-air until she says things she regrets. But since ratings increase each time they have an on-air fight, the producer encourages his behavior.

When a relationship specialist comes onto the show purporting that Adam has hidden feelings for her, she reluctantly agrees to go out with him—on camera. What starts out as one date turns into a viral dating show with Megan and Adam alternating between locking lips and knocking heads.

As Megan fights her growing attraction to Adam, their popularity increases and ABC takes notice, offering them their own program. Not a morning show like Megan is hoping, but a dating show in which she and Adam must marry at the end. With the promise of a hundred thousand dollars and the possibility of scoring what she really wants, her own national program, she signs on.

What she doesn't know is that Adam has fallen in love with her, and his objective is to get her to do the same.

Accidentally Married

Victorine Lieske

Madison Nichols, aspiring actress, is floundering. Her rent is due and she needs a job. Desperately. After getting a tip about an open position, she rushes to Jameson Technologies and meets CEO Jared Jameson. Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding, she is put in the awkward position of pretending to be his girlfriend. Not the job she was applying for. And when she finds out Jared lied to her to get what he wanted, she decides to get back at him. In front of his family.

Jared is stunned when Madison announces they are getting married. She pushed her revenge too far. How can he tell them it’s all a lie? And when his sick aunt asks them to be married before she dies, Madison comes up with a hair-brained plan to hire an actor and stage a fake wedding.

What they both don’t know is Jared’s father has found out about the fake wedding. And he’s got his own hair-brained plan.

The Dark Door

Lisa Unger

A horror writer’s death leaves his daughter haunted by voices in this short story by the New York Times–bestselling author of Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six.

Pip Duke’s life has descended into chaos following the death of her father, a bestselling horror writer. She now hears voices all the time, saying troubling things like: Your father’s friends and family are after his money, or you should inherit everything. The voices also say she killed her dad, and the police are after her.

To silence these disturbing thoughts, Pip checks herself into an inpatient therapy center. However, the place is far from calming. She can’t trust the staff, and the voices in her head continue to say terrible things. There are those who want you released—only so they can continue to profit off your father’s name. A different voice says some wish to claim her inheritance by getting her declared insane.

If Pip hopes to ever know peace again, she must explore the depths of her psyche, sort through her memories, and unravel the secret that will be her key to freedom.

The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2022

Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky selects the twenty best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Michael Connelly, Jo Nesbo, Joyce Carol Oates, Colson Whitehead, and more!

Under the auspices of New York City’s legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, international bestseller and MWA Grandmaster Sara Paretsky has selected the twenty most puzzling, most thrilling, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.

Includes stories by:

• Doug Allyn
• Colin Barrett
• Jerome Charyn
• Michael Connelly
• Susan Frith
• Tom Larsen
• Sean Marciniak
• Stefon Mears
• Kieth Lee Morris
• Gwen Mullins
• Jo Nesbo
• Joyce Carol Oates
• Annie Reed
• Kristen Kathryn Rusch
• Anna Scotti
• Ginny Swart
• Ellen Tremiti
• Joseph S. Walker
• Colson Whitehead
• Michael Wiley

Plus a bonus vintage story from the annals of mystery fiction, written over a century in the past.