Maybe you received a book store gift card over the holiday season and you’re looking for ideas on how to spend it?
Read on, to learn about some exciting titles that will show up in stores and on library shelves in the next month, including a true crime investigation and, first up, the latest twistathon from British novelist Alice Feeney.
“Beautiful Ugly,” Alice Feeney
Truth be told, Feeney’s thrillers have not all been home runs but this one gets her back on the things-men-and-women-do-to-each-other track where her best work lives. A man is on the phone with his wife while she’s driving. He hears her stop and get out of the car and then doesn’t see or hear from her for a year, during which she’s declared a missing person. Still grieving, he visits a remote Scottish island and discovers a woman who looks exactly like his wife. Expect brisk writing and twists aplenty in the latest from the author of “I Know Who You Are” and “His & Hers” and, to the extent that we believe cover blurbs, note that mystery writer Harlan Coben is already claiming this is Feeney’s “best book yet.” Jan. 14
“The Life of Herod the Great,” Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is one of the great works of the 20th century and, although she died in 1960, her estate keeps releasing new material. (Her “Barracoon” is either one of the finest books of the 1920s, when she worked on it, or of 2018, when it was finally published.) This unfinished novel about the biblical king argues that we’ve had it all wrong: Herod was not a cartoony villain but a great leader of Judea, one of the few who was determined to better the lives of his subjects rather than his own. Although Harlem Renaissance leader Hurston set aside “Herod” in the 1950s, this edition of the never-before-published work includes letters written by her that should help readers figure out where she intended the story to go. Also included is an essay about Hurston’s writing, which once seemed very much of its time but has proved to be for all time. Jan. 28