Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben. One of my favourite authors, so I feel lucky to have got this as a review copy via NetGalley. Due for publication on March 24th.

Description

If your husband was murdered,
And you were a witness,
How do you explain it when he appears on your nanny cam?
You thought you trusted him.
Now you can’t even trust yourself.

 

Everything Love Is by Claire King. I was really taken by the description for this and was able to download a review copy via NetGalley. Publication is not due until 28th July.

Description

What I want is something that makes me feel alive. Joy, passion, despair, something to remember or something to regret. I want to have my breath taken away. Baptiste Molino has devoted his life to other people’s happiness. Moored on his houseboat on the edge of Toulouse, he helps his clients navigate the waters of contentment, remaining careful never to make waves of his own. Baptiste is more concerned with his past than his future: particularly the mysterious circumstances of his birth and the identity of his birth mother. But Sophie, the young waitress in his local bar, believes it is time for Baptiste to rediscover passion and leads him into the world on his doorstep he has long tried to avoid. However, it is Baptiste’s new client who may end up being the one to change his perspective. Elegant and enigmatic, Amandine Rousseau is fast becoming a puzzle he longs to solve. As tensions rise on the streets of the city, Baptiste’s determination to avoid both the highs and lows of love begins to waver. And when his mother’s legacy finally reveals itself, he finds himself torn between pursuing his own happiness and safeguarding that of the one he loves.

 

The House at the End of Hope Street by Menna Van Praag. I keep coming across books by this author, which all stand out because of their distinctive covers. The story line for this intrigued me and despite it’s magical other worldliness which is not something I usually go for I was tempted by it being a Kindle Daily Deal at 99p.

Description

Distraught that her academic career has stalled, Alba is walking through her hometown of Cambridge, England, when she finds herself in front of a house she’s never seen before, 11 Hope Street. A beautiful older woman named Peggy greets her and invites her to stay, on the house’s usual conditions: she has ninety-nine nights to turn her life around. With nothing left to lose, Alba takes a chance and moves in.She soon discovers that this is no ordinary house. Past residents have included George Eliot and Beatrix Potter, who, after receiving the assistance they needed, hung around to help newcomers-literally, in talking portraits on the wall. As she escapes into this new world, Alba begins a journey that will heal her wounds-and maybe even save her life.Filled with a colorful and unforgettable cast of literary figures, The House at the End of Hope Street is a charming, whimsical novel of hope and feminine wisdom that is sure to appeal to fans of Jasper Fforde and especially Sarah Addison Allen.

 

The Theseus Paradox by David Videcette. I’ve been reading lots of good things about this book and it has excellent reviews. A great bargain at 99p for Kindle.

Description

July 2005: in the midst of Operation Theseus, the largest police investigation that the UK has ever known, Detective Inspector Jake Flannagan begins to ask difficult questions that lead to the mysterious disappearance of his girlfriend and his sudden suspension from the Metropolitan Police.

• Who masterminded London’s summer of terror?

• Why can’t Flannagan make headway in the sprawling investigation?

• Is Jake’s absent girlfriend really who she claims to be?

While hunting for the answers to the most complex case in British history, one man will uncover the greatest criminal deception of our time.

 

The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith. No 2 in the Cormoron Strike series. A charity shop bargain for 20p.

Description

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days—as he has done before—and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.

But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine’s disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives—meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.

When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered before.

 

Beyond Nab End by William Woodruff. I read the Road to Nab End many years ago so was happy to pick this up for 10p in my favourite charity shop.

Description

The second volume of Woodruff’s memoirs starts with him having arrived in Poplar in the early 1930s. On spec he turns up at a steel foundry and luckily gets a job. His digs are with an old couple in Bow where he has to share a single bed (head to toe) with their mentally retarded son.
Life in the foundry is grim but William is indomitable. For recreation one day he cycles (then in the days before inflatable tyres) to Berkhamstead to try and track down an old girlfriend. She’s not there and he has to return in a snowstorm – it takes him eight hours to get back to Poplar and then he has to get up three hours later to work at the foundry.
Eventually he decides to ‘get some leernin’ and his first white collar job starts for the water board in … Brettenham House! He continues to pursue his studies, finally winning a place at Ruskin College, Oxford. How the ex-steel worker became an Oxford academic – and William’s concluding description of returning from the war to meet the son he’s never seen – is deeply moving.

 

Runaway by Peter May. Having recently read Coffin Road by this author, I snapped this up for 20p

Description

In 1965, five teenage friends fled Glasgow for London to pursue their dream of musical stardom. Yet before year’s end three returned, and returned damaged.

In 2015, a brutal murder forces those three men, now in their sixties, to journey back to London and finally confront the dark truth they have run from for five decades.

Runaway is a crime novel covering fifty years of friendships solidified and severed, dreams shared and shattered and passions lit and extinguished; set against the backdrop of two unique and contrasting cities at two unique and contrasting periods of recent history.

 

Finally a pictorial round-up of Kindle freebies downloaded this week.