Reader's Place: December 2019
Darkness and light
As we prepare again for the darkest time of the year, here is some fiction to shed light, or shade, as the case may be.
Dark tribute, by Iris Johansen, 2019.
Despite her tragic childhood, violin prodigy Cara Delaney has finally found peace in her career as a professional musician and stability in her relationship with her guardians, forensic sculptor Eve Duncan and ex-Navy SEAL Joe Quinn. Suddenly, she is kidnapped by a mysterious man from her grandfather's past, setting off a violent chain of events that puts everyone Cara loves in danger.
The dying of the light: a novel, by Robert Goolrick, 2018.
Diana Cooke, coming of age just after World War I and forced into a marriage of convenience to save her family's estate, sacrifices everything, including love, to become the wife of a man she cannot abide, until fate intervenes.
The darkness: a thriller, by Ragnar Jónasson, 2018.
The body of a young Russian woman washes up on an Icelandic shore. After a cursory investigation, the death is declared a suicide and the case is quietly closed. Over a year later Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police is forced into early retirement at 64. But before she leaves she is given two weeks to solve a single cold case of her choice. She knows which one: the Russian woman whose hope for asylum ended on the dark, cold shore of an unfamiliar country.
Light from other stars: a novel, by Erika Swyler, 2019.
Decades after her grieving father, a laid-off NASA scientist, triggers chaotic changes in his pursuit of life-extending technology, an astronaut confronts dangerous family secrets to stop a world-threatening crisis.
Dark Site
Dark site: a Sam Dryden novel, by Patrick Lee, 2019.
Former Special Forces operative Sam Dryden is the target of an unsuccessful attempted abduction, and learns that another person, a woman named Danica Ellis, is also being targeted. Dryden arrives just in time to save Danica, but neither of them recognize the other, or have any idea why they are being targeted. The only clue is a heavily redacted, official-looking document given to Danica by her stepfather before he was killed. Dryden immediately recognizes it as a "scrub file:" a record of what a subject knew before their memories were chemically destroyed.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau