French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating For Pleasure is not just another diet book, but a set of guidelines for better eating and living. Whereas diets treat food as a battleground, author Mireille Guiliano treats them as desires to be sated in moderate amounts. Guiliano promotes sensible pleasures: throwing out the scale and using the “zipper test.” If you eat a chocolate croissant at breakfast, eat a vegtable-based meal at lunch and pass on the dinner rolls at dinner, or take an extra walk in the afternoon. Guiliano includes a number of recipes that ehance weightloss, including leek soup and chocolate mousse, that read more like a luxurious French cook book than an American diet one. The book also includes guidelines and tricks that aren’t just for the short-term, but rather for a sustainable lifetime.

Read a review of the book here.

After fifty New York Times best-selling novels, Sandra Brown is back with Long Time Coming, where Law Kincaid, a world-famous astronaut with devastatingly handsome good looks once more appears to throw a wrench into Marnie Hibbs’s life. Seventeen years before, Marnie had been just as in love with Kincaid, but understood that she could never get too close to the ladies’ man. Only now, after being anonymously tipped off that he has a son he never knew, Law is curious and tracks down Marnie’s address as directed by his anonymous informant. Marnie denies being the guilty party, but when Law encounters a boy who is the splitting-image of his younger self, it’s like a suckpunch. What’s more, Law learns that Marnie isn’t even the boy’s biological mother. Both tension and undeniable attraction grows, Marnie is forced to reveal a secret she had been keeping for too long, risking losing the boy she loves and the man she desires.

The Finishing School is Michele Martinez’s second novel featuring feisty Federal prosecutor Melanie Vargas, freshly separated from her philandering husband and caring for her one-year-old daughter single-handedly. Melanie receives a middle-of-the night summons to a posh Park Avenue penthouse where two teenage girls, students at an exclusive Manhattan Finishing School, are found dead from heroin overdose, while another girl believed to have been with them, has gone missing. One of the girls was Whitney Seward, step-daughter to a wealthy and powerful U.S. Senator candidate, so the pressure is on Melanie by her ambitious, politically-scheming boss to solve the case quickly. But what Melanie uncovers goes far beyond a simple cut-and-dry case, involving sordid secrets, affairs, extortion, kidnapping, a handsome FBI Agent Melanie almost fell into bed with on a previous assignment, and a killer who has no intention of getting caught.

“C.S.I. has nothing on Michele Martinez. Brutally honest and addictive! THE FINISHING SCHOOL is a powerful novel that hits the mark.”
– Jennifer Vido

Best-selling author Barbara Taylor Bradford puts a conclusion of the Harte family in her latest novel Just Rewards, an epic, multi-generational story that first began with A Woman of Substance. After 25 years of passion, revenge, envy, and ambition, four women are now at a crossroads. Linnet O’Neill, Emma Harte’s great-granddaughter, dreams of bringing the Harte’s British department store into its former glory, but finds herself alone at the helm. Tesse Fairly, fresh off her divorce, is looking for a new start, which might mean rivaling her sister Linnet for control of the family business. India Standish’s plans for the perfect summer wedding in Ireland come to a halt when her fiance’s daughter comes to stay with them … along with unstable his ex-girlfriend. The Harte’s American cousin Evan Hughes unwittingly brings an enemy into the women’s midst when his sister Angharad takes a liking to Jonathan Ainsley, the Harte family’s deadliest enemy.

Odd Thomas, the man gifted with the ability to see and communicate with the dead, first introduced to readers in Dean Koontz’s 2003 novel of the same name, is back in Forever Odd, where the ghost of his best friend’s father, Dr. Wilbur Jessup, summons Odd to the Jessup home to discover Dr. Jessup’s body and his friend Danny, afflicted by brittle bones, nowhere to be found. Odd uses his gifts to trace the psychic trails left behind to find his endangered friend, but ends up becoming the prey himself when the beautiful and evil Datura wants to use Odd for his supernatural abilities and then kill him.

After the death of their patriarch, Stella Mortland and her three charismatic daughters, Julia, Finn, and Maisie, move into a medieval abbey at the beginning of the summer of 1967. Stella, still grieving for her late husband, hires a starving artist by the name of Lucas Feld to paint a portrait of her three daughters. What transpires is an idyllic summer where the sisters, their childhood friend Daniel Nunn and his pre-med friend Nick Marlow, and Lucas embark on passionate summer entanglements rife with many affairs of the heart. Julia is considering running away to London, Finn is entangled in trysts with all three boys, and 13-year-old Maisie is haunted by her imaginings of her father and the nuns who no longer live in the alley. The result is a painting that beautifully captures the mystery, romance, and heartbreak of the sisters while the summer ends in devastating tragedy. Fast forward to 1991 where Lucas has become a famous artist whose breakthrough painting, “TheSisters Mortland,” is soon to show at a retrospective exhibit, but Daniel, not middle-aged and fully embroiled in all the mid-life crises it entails, is still obsessed with the events of that fateful summer.