The Couple Next Door

Shari Lapeana

Pamela Dorman Books

Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately focuses on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story. Inside the curtained house, an unsettling account of what actually happened unfolds. Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something. Both Anne and Marco soon discover that the other is keeping secrets, secrets they've kept for years. What follows is the nerve-racking unraveling of a family a chilling tale of deception, duplicity, and unfaithfulness that will keep you breathless until the final shocking twist.

The Dollhouse

Fiona Davis

Dutton Books

Fiona Davis's stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City's glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where in the 1950's a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side-by-side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon's glitzy past. When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance. Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed.

The One Man

Andrew Gross 

Minotaur Books

Poland. 1944. Alfred Mendl and his family are brought on a crowded train to a Nazi concentration camp after being caught trying to flee Paris with forged papers. His family is torn away from him on arrival, his life's work burned before his eyes. To the guards, he is just another prisoner, but in fact Mendl a renowned physicist holds knowledge that only two people in the world possess. And the other is already at work for the Nazi war machine. Four thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, Intelligence lieutenant Nathan Blum routinely decodes messages from occupied Poland. Having escaped the Krakow ghetto as a teenager after the Nazis executed his family, Nathan longs to do more for his new country in the war. But never did he expect the proposal he receives from Wild Bill Donovan, head of the OSS: to sneak into the most guarded place on earth, a living hell, on a mission to find and escape with one man, the one man the Allies believe can ensure them victory in the war.

I'm Still Here

Claelie Avit

Grand Central Publishing

Elsa has been in a coma for five months. With all hope of reviving her gone, her family and doctors are having to face the devastating fact that it might be time to turn off her life support... They don't realise that in the past few weeks Elsa has regained partial consciousness; she knows where she is and can hear everyone talking around her bed, but she has no way of telling them she's there. Thibault is in the same hospital visiting his brother, a drunk driver responsible for the deaths of two teenage girls. Thibault's emotions are in turmoil and, needing a retreat, he finds his way into Elsa's room. Seeing her lying there so peacefully, he finds it hard to believe she is not just sleeping. Thibault begins to visit Elsa regularly. As he learns more about her through her family and friends, he begins to realise that he is developing feelings for her. And when he talks to her, he can't help feeling that she can hear his every word... For Elsa, his visits are like a breath of fresh air. Here is finally someone who speaks to her as if she is a real life person. Who makes her laugh. And who gives her something to fight for... And so begins a love story that might just save both their lives...

The Outside Lands

Hannah Kohler

St. Martin's Press

San Francisco, 1968: Jeannie and Kip are lost and half-orphaned, their mother dead under mysterious circumstances, and their father - a decorated WWII veteran - consumed by guilt and losing sight of his teenage children. Kip, a dreamer and swaggerer prone to small-time trouble, enlists to fight in Vietnam; Jeannie finds a seemingly safe haven in early marriage and motherhood. But when Kip is accused of a terrible military crime, Jeannie is seduced - sexually, emotionally, politically - into joining an ambiguous anti-war organization. As Jeannie attempts to save her brother, her search for the truth leads her into two dangerous relationships, with a troubled young woman, and a grievously-wounded veteran, that might threaten her marriage, her child, and perhaps her life. An emotionally wrenching and morally complex novel," The Outside Lands "is Hannah Kohler's powerful, confident debut.

Behold the Dreamers

Imbolo Mbue

Random House

A compulsively readable debut novel about marriage, immigration, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream the unforgettable story of a young Cameroonian couple making a new life in New York just as the Great Recession upends the economy. Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty and Jende is eager to please. Clark's wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future. However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers facades. When the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Jongas are desperate to keep Jende's job even as their marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.

The Huntress: The Adventures, Escapades, and Triumphs of Alicia Patterson: Aviatrix, Sportswoman, Journalist, Publisher

Alice Arlen & Michael J. Arlen

Pantheon Books

The fascinating biography of the maverick newspaperwoman and intrepid adventurer, which follows her exceptional exploits through the first half of the twentieth century, from her troublemaking days as the middle child of complicated parents to her successes as publisher of the Pulitzer Prize winning "Newsday." The authors take us into the lost WASP world of Alicia Patterson: her larger-than-life father scion of the Patterson-Medill Chicago publishing dynasty and her traditional mother, her childhood of foreign caretakers, travel, and boarding schools. Married off at twenty-three to a friend of her father's, Alicia spent little time at home during the brief marriage, instead earned a transport pilot's license (only the tenth woman in the country to do so), hunted big game in Indochina and India; and began to write for her father's newspaper "The Daily News." Her second father-orchestrated marriage failed, but her last, to someone of her own choosing, Harry Guggenheim, resulted in the founding of "Newsday "in 1940. As she guided the paper through investigative exposes and international and liberal political coverage, her influence on the national stage grew along with the newspaper's reputation and circulation: winning a Pulitzer in 1954 and putting her on the cover of "Time." Over the years admirers ranged from the Maharajah of Baroda to Adlai Stevenson. Here is the story of the spirited and formidable young woman who became a preeminent figure of the golden era of print newspapers.

The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis

Elizabeth Letts

Ballantine Books

In the chaotic last days of the war a small troop of battle-weary American soldiers captures a German spy and makes an astonishing find his briefcase is empty but for photos of beautiful white horses that have been stolen and kept on a secret farm behind enemy lines. Hitler has stockpiled the world's finest purebreds in order to breed the perfect military machine an equine master race. But with the starving Russian army closing in, the animals are in imminent danger of being slaughtered for food. With only hours to spare, one of the Army's last great cavalrymen, American colonel Hank Reed, makes a bold decision with General George Patton's blessing to mount a covert rescue operation. Racing against time, Reed's small but determined force of soldiers, aided by several turncoat Germans, steals across enemy lines in a last-ditch effort to save the horses. Pulling together this multistranded story, Elizabeth Letts introduces us to an unforgettable cast of characters: Alois Podhajsky, director of the famed Spanish Riding School of Vienna, a former Olympic medalist who is forced to flee the bomb-ravaged Austrian capital with his entire stable in tow; Gustav Rau, Hitler's imperious chief of horse breeding, a proponent of eugenics who dreams of genetically engineering the perfect warhorse for Germany; and Tom Stewart, a senator's son who makes a daring moonlight ride on a white stallion to secure the farm's surrender.