Phantom in the Night
by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Published 2008 by Pocket Books

Paperback, English. ISBN: 9781416503576

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Jacket Notes:

"New York Times"-bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon teams up with Diana Love Snell in this second romantic suspense novel featuring the sexy agents from the BAD Agency. Pocket Books

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 04/28/2008

All hell breaks loose in this over-the-top romantic thriller from bestseller Kenyon (BAD Attitude) and Love (aka Dianna Love Snell, Worth Every Risk). Terri Mitchell, a beautiful blonde agent with the Bureau of American Defense (aka BAD), saw her last partner killed while pursuing Anton Marseaux, a New Orleans gangster. A mysterious U.S. operative goes MIA while on a government mission and resurfaces two years later to help Terri with her investigation. But is he Jamie Drake, a newly released jailbird, or the phantom of Jamie's brother, Nathan, found murdered while working as a mole within Marseaux's organization? Whoever he is, he's hot, really buff-and he wants to protect Terri and make love to her until her toes curl. Da Vinci Code-derivative components tweaked with a bioterrorism twist add extra punch. (June)

The Legacy of Anger
by Sara Hylton
Published 2008 by Severn House Publishers

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780727866387

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Jacket Notes:

As personal assistant to successful banker Richard Lorival, Margaret Gates is the envy of her colleagues, in this novel set in the 1950s. When Richard's wife dies in a tragic accident, the relationship between Richard and Margaret is put to the test.

The 351 Books of Irma Acuri
by David Bajo
Published 2008 by Viking Books

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780670019298

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Jacket Notes:

Bajo's mind-expanding novel is an amazing, beautiful story of Philip Mazryk's quixotic search for the Siren of all Sirens. These characters live within a puzzle that's inside a maze (George Singleton, author of "Novel" and "The Half-Mammals of Dixie").

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 04/14/2008

Volumes by Borges, Cervantes, Sebald and others serve as clues and almost as characters in Bajo's intriguing debut, a love story wrapped in a bibliomaniacal whodunit with a hall-of-mirrors bow on top. The books belonged to Irma Arcuri, a bookbinder, writer and the lifelong object of preternatural math whiz Philip Masryk's desire. After Philip learns that Irma has supposedly killed herself and bequeathed her library to him, he quits his job to explore Irma's books and discover any messages that might be left in them for him. With the help of Lucia, a beautiful woman uncannily familiar to Philip, he discovers that Irma has not only rebound the books but also changed their texts; a new story is added to Borges's Ficciones and buried in Don Quixote are notes from Irma. As he follows Irma's long-cold trail from Philadelphia to Barcelona and Seville, Philip finds traces of Irma everywhere, but few clues that point to a resolution. Though Bajo's plotting can be elliptical and the denouement doesn't quite sing, the narrative's intelligence and passion transcend its metafictional ambiguities. (June)

A Foreign Affair
by Caro Peacock
Published 2008 by Avon a

Paperback, English. ISBN: 9780061445897

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Jacket Notes:

Asked by her government to pose as a governess, Liberty Lane moves in with one of England's most powerful and influential families. What she discovers could rock the very foundations of the monarchy--and lead to the assassination of the newly crowned, 18-year-old Queen Victoria.

The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld
by Dan Elish
Published 2008 by St. Martin's Press

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9780312339456

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Jacket Notes:

Justin Hearnfeld is a young man just out of college who has taken a job as a high school teacher. In this hilarious and heartfelt coming of age novel, Justin takes his lumps one after another on his way to discovering who he is and the true meaning of love.

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 10/01/2007

From the author of Nine Wives comes this amusing tale of an insecure college grad who wants nothing more than to drop a few pounds, write the great American novel and lose his virginity. Raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Justin Hearnfeld is plagued by his lackluster track record with the opposite sex. After landing a job teaching English at the Clarke School for Boys, his abhorrent former high school, Justin becomes obsessed with striking yet unattainable co-worker Beverly Kinney. But his friend and fellow teacher David Grinstein, persuades him to instead try for Sadie Black, a teacher at Clarke's sister school. To add to the complication, Justin's pious ex-girlfriend, Abigail Wilson, comes back into his life with a newfound enthusiasm for sex. Enmeshed in an awkward and slightly unbelievable love triangle, Justin has to contend with the many uproarious obstacles standing between his virginal self and sex. Elish's lighthearted romp will strike a chord with the early 20s set. (Apr.)

Some Assembly Required
by Lynn Kiele Bonasia
Published 2008 by Touchstone Books

Paperback, English. ISBN: 9781416550594

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Jacket Notes:

A quirky and winning debut novel, "Some Assembly Required" follows a love-scorned technical writer who throws away her instruction manuals to start life over in a Cape Cod town.

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 03/31/2008

After her relationship sours, Rose Nowak heads to the small town of Nauset on Cape Cod in this enjoyable debut novel. She quickly finds her place in the community and lands a job as a reporter for the local independent weekly. Among the new people Rose meets is Noel, a 22-year-old autistic savant whose talent for painting inspires Rose to write a story that gets picked up by USA Today. When boozy Simon Beadle reads about his nephew in a Florida hospital while recovering from a maritime accident, he becomes determined to get sober, return to Nauset and build a relationship with Noel. As the town prepares for its tricentennial, Rose and Simon grow close and the truth about several town secrets are exposed. Bonasia's portrait of a waterfront community's triumphs and squabbles is as endearing as it is convincing. (July)

Prescription for a Superior Existence
by Josh Emmons
Published 2008 by Scribner Book Company

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9781416561057

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Jacket Notes:

Against a backdrop of environmental catastrophe and post-millennial tension, this compelling new novel chronicles the seductive power of religious cults, and follows one ordinary, flawed man, who must choose between submission and love.

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 02/11/2008

The title of this book by second-time novelist Josh Emmons (The Loss of Leon Meed) is taken from the fictitious (but perhaps Scientology-inspired) cult around which much of the ideas and action spin. The PASE handbook, written by creepy messiah Montgomery Shoal, combines pseudo-science, self-help and religious fervor, while advocating abstention from sex and addictive substances. The novel's protagonist, Jack Smith, works in finance and has a penchant for painkillers, alcohol, junk food and pornography. An indiscreet after-hours visit to a strip club paid for by a company credit card leads to an ultimatum from his boss: become a "Paser" or be fired. At the same time, Jack finds himself repeatedly running into Mary Shoal, the daughter of the PASE founder. His dalliance with her results in his kidnapping and "re-education" at the hands of the PASE organization. Jack's resistance is gradually replaced with acceptance, but the blithe PASE way of life is darkened by apocalyptic predictions, forcing Jack to question his conversion. Emmons's yarn is engaging, but he can't seem to decide whether PASE is a force for good or evil in Pasers' lives, and the book fails to fully consider the ramifications of the issues it raises. (June)

Late Nights on Air
by Elizabeth Hay
Published 2008 by Counterpoint LLC

Hardcover, English. ISBN: 9781582434087

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Jacket Notes:

The eagerly anticipated novel from the bestselling author of A Student of Weather and Garbo Laughs.

Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in the Canadian North. There, in Yellowknife, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is both a surprise and even more than he imagined.

Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric, utterly loveable characters, all transplants from elsewhere, who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. One summer, on a canoe trip four of them make into the Arctic wilderness (following in the steps of the legendary Englishman John Hornby, who, along with his small party, starved to death in the barrens in 1927), they find the balance of love shifting, much as the balance of power in the North is being changed by the proposed Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline, which threatens to displace Native people from their land.

Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this new novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose, laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is Hay's most seductive and accomplished novel yet, and is already garnering interest abroad.

"On the shortest night of the year, a golden evening without end, Dido climbed the wooden stepsto Pilot's Monument on top of the great Rock that formed the heart of old Yellowknife. In the Netherlands the light was long and gradual too, but more meadowy, more watery, or else hazier, depending on where you were. . . . Here, it was subarctic desert, virtually unpopulated, and the light was uniformly clear.

On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father's voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he'd made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the Rock -- houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barber shop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations."

--"From Late Nights On Air"

REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 02/18/2008

After being fired from his latest television job, a disgraced Harry Boyd returns to his radio roots in the northern Canadian town of Yellowknife as the manager of a station no one listens to, and finds himself at the center of the station's unlikely social scene. New anchor Dido Paris, both renowned and mocked for her Dutch accent, fled an affair with her husband's father, only to be torn between Harry and another man. Wild child Gwen came to learn radio production, but under Harry's tutelage finds herself the guardian of the late-night shift. And lonely Eleanor wonders if it's time to move south just as she meets an unlikely suitor. While the station members wait for Yellowknife to get its first television station and the crew embarks on a life-changing canoe expedition, the city is divided over a proposal to build a pipeline that would cut across Native lands, bringing modernization and a flood of workers, equipment and money into sacred territory. Hay's crystalline prose, keen details and sharp dialogue sculpt the isolated, hardy residents of Yellowknife, who provide a convincing backdrop as the main cast tromps through the existential woods. (Apr.)