Featuring: Joe Abercrombie, Taylor Anderson, RJ Barker, Karen Cleveland, Ben Coes, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Amal El-Mohtar, Shamini Flint, Alexander Freed, Max Gladstone, Steven Goldstein, Thomas Harris, Scott Johnston, Joanna Kavenna, Mark Lawrence, Fonda Lee, Sarah Lotz, Dale Lucas, Ed McDonald, Emily Nussbaum, Dana Schwartz, L.C. Shaw, Sherri Smith, Anna Smith Spark, Charles Soule
A new novel by Sarah Lotz! Unfortunately, it’s still pretty far away: Missing Person is due out in April 2019… Nevertheless, I spotted it in the Mulholland Books catalogue, and decided to feature it on the site. It is also due out in the UK, to be published by Hodder in March 2019.
Reclusive Irish bookseller Shaun Ryan has always believed that his older brother, Teddy, died in a car accident. It’s only on his mother’s deathbed that he learns the truth: Teddy, who was gay, fled the Catholic, deeply conservative County Wicklow for New York decades earlier. Shaun finds no sign of him in New York or anywhere else–until he comes across the unsolved murder of a John Doe whose description matches Teddy’s.
Desperate for information, Shaun tracks down Chris Guzman, a woman who runs a website dedicated to matching missing persons cases with unidentified bodies. Through Chris’s site, a group of online cold case fanatics connect Teddy with the notorious “Boy in the Dress” murder, believed to be one of many committed by a serial killer targeting gay men.
But who are these cold case fanatics, and how do they know so much about a case that left the police and the FBI stumped? With investigators, amateurs, and one sadistic killer on a collision course, Missing Person is Sarah Lotz at her most thrilling and terrifying.
Sarah Lotz is the author of a number of superb novels, including The Three (on sale in the UK at the time of writing), Day Four and The White Road. Lotz’s novels are published in the UK by Hodder.
Also on CR: Interview with Sarah Lotz (2014); Reviews of The Three and Day Four
Featuring: David Annandale, Neal Asher, J.D. Barker, Giacomo Bevilacqua, Edward Carlson, Don Carpenter, Jonathan Dee, William C. Dietz, Omar El Akkad, Michael R. Fletcher, L.R. Fredericks, L.J. Goulding, David Grann, Richard Kadrey, Paul Kearney, Jardine Libaire, Leena Likitalo, Sarah Lotz, Melissa Scrivner Love, Robbie MacNiven, Graham McNeill, Sarah Menkedick, Peter Newman, Tom Perotta, Ivy Pochoda, Ben Sanders, John Scalzi, Anna Stephens, David Swinson, Marcus Thompson II, Karen Tidbek, C.L. Werner, Timothy Zahn
Mulholland Books is one of my favourite publishers, releasing a whole range of excellent thrillers and fiction. Here are a few upcoming novels I’m looking forward to — I’m sure there are more, but these are the only ones I could find information about.
Featuring: Kathleen Kent, Richard Lange, Sarah Lotz, Stuart Prebble, Matthew Quirk, Scott Reardon, David Swinson, Felicia Yap
This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be putting up this week(end), featuring upcoming books I’m really interested in reading. I wanted to try to keep things focused on the first few months of 2017, but some publishers have released information pretty far in advance, so I’ll include later novels, too. The books featured are also not the only novels from the publisher that I’m interested in, so these are not definitive lists. Just ones that have grabbed my attention most at the time of writing.
First up, let’s take a look at just a few coming up from Hodder…
Featuring: Jaroslav Kalfař, Sarah Lotz, Nnedi Okorafor, Benjamin Percy
A fast-paced, slow-burn thriller
They thought they were safe…
A global outbreak of a virus sends society spinning out of control. But a small group of people have been preparing for a day like this. Grabbing only the essentials, they head to The Sanctum, a luxury self-sustaining underground survival facility where they’ll shut themselves away and wait for the apocalypse to pass.
All the residents have their own motivations for buying into the development. A mix of personalities, they are strangers separated by class and belief, all of them hiding secrets. They have only one thing in common: they will do anything to survive.
The doors close, locked and secured with a combination that only one man knows. It’s the safest place they could be. Nothing could go wrong. They’re ready for anything…
But when a body is discovered, they realize that the greatest threat to their survival may be trapped in The Sanctum with them.
“S.L. Grey” is the critically-acclaimed writing partnership between Sarah Lotz and Louis Greenberg. I haven’t read their previous novel, The Mall, which received rave reviews. This latest novel is a (perhaps oxymoronically) fast-paced slow-burn thriller. A relatively slim novel (under 300 pages), after the cast are gathered at the Sanctum, things quickly spiral out of control, and all hell breaks loose. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Under Ground, but I knew from past experience with Lotz’s writing that it would at least be very good. I wasn’t disappointed — this is a gripping, briskly-paced novel of psychological suspense and the fragility of social norms. Continue reading
The superb sequel to The Three
Four planes. Three survivors. One message. It seemed like the end of the world… but it wasn’t. This, however, just might be.
The trip of their dreams becomes the holiday of their nightmares…
Four days into a five day singles cruise on the Gulf of Mexico, the ageing ship Beautiful Dreamer stops dead in the water. With no electricity and no cellular signals, the passengers and crew have no way to call for help. But everyone is certain that rescue teams will come looking for them soon. All they have to do is wait.
That is, until the toilets stop working and the food begins to run out. When the body of a woman is discovered in her cabin the passengers start to panic. There’s a murderer on board the Beautiful Dreamer… and maybe something worse.
The Three was easily one of my favourite books of last year. Day Four is the highly-anticipated follow-up, and I’m happy to report that it does not disappoint. Lotz has easily become one of my favourite authors. Continue reading
Sarah Lotz’s The Three was easily one of my favourite novels of 2014 — it worked on every level for me: it was tense, brilliantly written, addictive. I was therefore quite surprised that I managed to miss any news of Lotz’s next novel (and sequel to The Three), Day Four, until I spotted this post on Draumr Kopa. Naturally, I had to share the info as soon as I spotted it.
Four days into a five day singles cruise on the Gulf of Mexico, the ageing ship Beautiful Dreamer stops dead in the water. With no electricity and no cellular signals, the passengers and crew have no way to call for help. But everyone is certain that rescue teams will come looking for them soon. All they have to do is wait.
That is, until the toilets stop working and the food begins to run out. When the body of a woman is discovered in her cabin the passengers start to panic. There’s a murderer on board the Beautiful Dreamer… and maybe something worse.
Day Four is due to be published by Hodder in the UK on May 21st, 2015. I can’t wait to read it!
At the end of the year, sharing lists of gift suggestions is always popular. This year, Hodderscape has produced this handy graphic to help you decide which of their books you should get yourself (or friends and the book-lovers in your lives). They shared it on their Facebook page, from whence I have shamelessly lifted it:
A great selection on here, too. I’ve only read three of the books on there — Straight Razor Cure, Lagoon and The Three (all three are excellent) — but all of the others are on my Must Read list. Here are links to the publisher’s pages for the books in the graphic:
Scott K. Brown, TimeBomb
Pierce Brown, Red Rising
Stark Holbrook, Nunslinger
Stephen King, Revival
Rebecca Levene, Smiler’s Fair
Sarah Lotz, The Three
Daniel Polansky, Straight Razor Cure
David Ramirez, The Forever Watch
Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Tad Williams, The Dirty Streets of Heaven
An interesting new Post-Zomebie-Apocalypse Series
Welcome to the Deadlands, where life is a lottery.
Since the apocalypse, Cape Town’s suburbs have become zombie-infested Deadlands. Human survivors are protected from the living dead by sinister, shrouded figures – the Guardians. In return, five teenagers are “chosen” and handed over to them for a mysterious purpose: this year, Lele de la Fontein’s name is picked.
But Lele will not stick around and face whatever shady fate the Guardians have in store for her. She escapes, willing to take her chances in the Deadlands.
Alone, exiled and unable to return home, she runs into a misfit gang of renegade teens: Saint, a tough Batswana girl; Ginger, a wise-cracking Brit; and handsome Ash, a former child soldier. Under their tutelage, Lele learns how to seriously destroy zombies and together they uncover the corruption endemic in Cape Town, and come to learn the sickening truth about the Guardians …
I first heard about the mother-daughter writing team Lily Herne at World Fantasy Con 2013 in Brighton. I was walking along the signing corridor and Jared of Pornokitsch pulled me aside and introduced me to them. Since then, I have read The Three by Sarah Lotz (the mother of the duo), which I think will most likely be one of my Top 5 reads of 2014. Then, despite having a signed copy of Deadlands, I spotted the first two books in the series on sale for Kindle. I snapped them both up, and started reading Deadlands right away. And, I must say, I really enjoyed it. Continue reading
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