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Barbara and The Poisoned Pen Staff

To read and/or download the April Booknews, click here

Events, Nonfiction, First Novels, British Books, Global Novels, The Cozy Corner, our new Classics Revisited, Trade and Mass Market Paperback Picks, New Books, Southwestern Stuff, Mass Market Fiction, and History/Mystery

To see our April Staff Picks, please click here 

For April releases

Unsigned Hardcovers: click here

Signed Hardcovers, click here

Trade Paperbacks, click here

Mass Market Paperbacks, click here

Our book clubs are for buyers, not for discussion groups. The idea is to give members of each club something new and wonderful to reach each month.

To see our January -April Picks, please click here

then check out each club for what it offers and the new Picks

To join a book club, email sales@poisonedpen.com

Note: until Easter Monday is over in New York I can't confirm which title will be our March Thriller Club Pick.

THURSDAY APRIL 18 7:00 PM

Stuart Woods signs Unintended Consequences (Putnam $27)

Enjoy a male fantasy: rich men and their toys (wine, cars, restaurants, gorgeous women, billionaires), and a smooth plot featuring a drugged Stone Barrington who has no idea how he got to a hospital room inside the American Embassy in Paris, and no memory of the last four days. Reading this is like eating chocolates or sipping something delicious-take your pick. Woods really amuses himself and thus you. Terrific fun, sort of my secret vice reading this.

If you missed Stone's January outing, Collateral Damage (Putnam $27), pick it up too.

FRIDAY APRIL 19 6:15 PM

Ridley Pearson signs The Kingdom Keepers VI Dark Passage (Disney $18) Ages 12+

Pearson is bringing his laptop loaded with visuals for you to watch.

The Overtakers are rocking the boat on the Disney Cruise Line! The five Kingdom Keepers and their core friends have uncovered a startling truth: Maleficent and the Overtakers (Disney villains) are plotting a catastrophic event that could have repercussions far beyond the world of Disney. 

Pearson returns June 13 with a new thriller, second in his splendid Rutherfurd Risk series and set in Amsterdam: Choke Point ($26.95). Start with the first entry, Risk Agent ($9.99). 

FRIDAY APRIL 19 7:00 PM

Philip Kerr signs A Man Without Breath (Putnam $27)

We are delighted to learn that Britain's Kerr is traveling with photos which become part of his program!  TGIF. We'll add snacks and prizes. Better than a night at the movies, no?

"Reports have been circulating of a mass grave hidden in a wood near Smolensk. The grave's whereabouts are uncertain until, deep in the Katyn Forest, a wolf digs up some human remains. "Set in the spring of 1943, Kerr's captivating ninth Bernie Gunther novel (after 2011's Prague Fatale) takes Gunther-now attached to the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau-from Berlin to Smolensk.... Josef Goebbels, seeking a propaganda coup after Germany's Stalingrad defeat, is keen to pin the atrocity [slaughter of Poles] on the Soviets. The tormented honest cop also gets on the trail of a killer targeting German soldiers, even as he finds himself in an anomalous moral position ('a situation in which you can have an army corporal hanged for the rape and murder of a Russian peasant girl in one village that's only a few miles from another village where an SS special action group has just murdered 25,000 men, women and children'). Kerr makes everything look easy, from blending history with a clever and intricate whodunit plot to powerful descriptions of cruelty."-- Publishers Weekly

Kerr introduced us to Gunther in his Berlin Noir trilogy and with every new chapter, informs and thrills us more. Think Alan Furst and Joseph Kanon but with a series character, Bernie.

Patrick says, "Kerr's Bernie Gunther novels are modern classics: impeccably researched and elegantly written. A Man Without Breath may be his finest effort yet." The New York Times reviews this book on Sunday April 21.

SATURDAY APRIL 20 Southwestern Mystery 2:00 PM

Christine Barber signs When the Devil Doesn't Show (St Martins $25) Santa Fe cop Gil Montoya

During a chilly November evening when Santa Fe is celebrating Las Posadas, an outdoor folk play of the Nativity, a house fire flares. Inside, firefighters find the two homeowners duct-taped to chairs, and an unidentified third corpse. The search for his ID will lead Detective Gil Montoya to nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory. A DNA test reveals that the unknown victim is a native of Northern New Mexico, but Montoya has reason to believe that his ties to the infamous nuclear testing facility hold the solution to this puzzle.  And when a second house fire reveals more bodies, Montoya is determined to find out the answer at any cost. Love Santa Fe as a setting for mysteries --and a lot of authors live there whom I get to see in the summer. The fire scenes in this book are drawn with immediacy and frankly, terrifying.

Barber is the author of First Mystery Club Pick The Replacement Child, which won the first Tony Hillerman Prize and was named a New York Times Notable Crime Novel, and The Bone Fire, which won a New Mexico Book Award.

Becky Masterman signs Rage Against the Dying (St Martins $25) Tucson FBI Agent Brigid Quinn A First Mystery Pick

The NY Times reviews a First Mystery Club Pick:

"'No one likes a woman who knows how to kill with her bare hands.' Brigid Quinn, the unconventional heroine of Masterman's first novel, learned that lesson in her former career as an undercover FBI agent. Nowadays, if anyone should ask, Brigid will say she investigated copyright infringements, since she's a fanatic about guarding her secrets from the new husband she adores. Although Brigid is determined to enjoy her early retirement in laid-back Tucson ('which everyone told me was a lovely place but that felt a lot like Siberia, only hot'), it's just her bad luck to attract a killer rapist who claims 'older broads' as his specialty. Still in fighting shape at 59, Brigid is one old broad who is tough to kill. So tough she accidentally kills this creep. Unfortunately, in her panic to cover up the deed, she alerts another maniac cruising the old Route 66, which for serial killers is 'kind of like the Appalachian Trail, only paved.' Brigid wears her age well, and she makes it work for her too. She knows people would like to think that as they get older ' all women must get suddenly serene, their anger draining away with their estrogen.' Some do, some don't. So, take her or leave her, this is Brigid Quinn, raging."

SUNDAY APRIL 20 2:00 PM

Laura Tohe signs Code Talker Stories (Rio Nuevo $15)

From Patrick, your host. "On these pages, the Navajo Code Talkers speak, in English and Navajo, about past and present, Laura Tohe, daughter of a Code Talker (and award-winning poet, fiction writer, essayist and librettist), interviewed many of the remaining Code Talkers, some of whom have since passed on. The Navajo language helped win World War II, and it lives on in this book, as the Code Talkers remember the war and reflect on the aftermath and the legacy they will leave behind. The veterans, able to speak to a daughter of one of their own in English and Navajo, truly shared from their hearts. They not only provided more battlefield details, but they also reveal how their war experiences affected themselves and the Navajo generations that followed."

To which he adds, "Laura Tohe is a national treasure, and this beautifully conceived and written project is an indispensable addition to American history."

John LeCarré,, aka David John Moore Cornwell, age 81, publishes a new novel in May. 

You can order LeCarré, John. A Delicate Truth Signed (Viking UK $42) or Unsigned, A Delicate Truth (Viking $29).

But meanwhile book critic Dwight Garner publishes a fabulous essay called  "John LeCarré Has Not Mellowed with Age" which I cannot recommend highly enough as a treat to read. Photos, too.

Please click here to read. It's several pages long. Six, actually. And it ends thus:

He'd begun another novel, though all he would say about it is that it's loosely based on one of Joseph Conrad's stories, one he'd like to translate into espionage terms. He is abiding, he told me, by the message on a large framed poster, given to him by his children, that he has hung on an office wall. It reads: "Keep Calm and Le Carré On."  

Second, awhile back Publishers Weekly, a major publishing industry news and review media, published an essay called "What Did We Learn from Our Great American Novel Poll?"

To read it, please click here. Fascinating stuff.