In My Mailbox – November 15, 2009

This is my first “In My Mailbox” meme here at Crazy-for-Books.  This is a weekly meme, started by the Story Siren where we highlight books that we’ve received in the last week!  So, here’s what I got!

I received this ARC as part of Barnes & Noble’s Sneak Peek Book Club program.  I’ll be participating in a discussion on BN.com starting December 7.

Publication Date:  February 2, 2010

Description from BN:
When psychic matchmaker Lucy Valentine is hired by a new client, she’s shocked to find he has a skeleton in his past–literally.

Poppy Done to Death by Charlaine Harris
Book 8 in the Aurora Teagarden Mystery Series

Book Description from Amazon:
Smalltown southern librarian and amateur sleuth Aurora Teagarden confronts an extremely personal murder On the way to a lunch meeting of her local book discussion group, the Uppity Women, smalltown librarian Aurora ‘Roe’ Teagarden is shocked and dismayed to find her sister-in-law Poppy lying bloody and dead on the floor of her home. When the local police detective (who is also Roe’s former boy-friend) gets involved in the investigation, Roe isn’t sure what to expect. As the two team up to catch the killer, will they be able to put their complicated past relations behind them in the interest of ridding the town of a vicious murderer? Longtime readers and new fans alike will delight in Roe’s exploits as she employs her impeccable knowledge of smalltown politics and enchanting Southern charm to solve the crime in this won-derful new installment in Charlaine Harris’s terrific cozy series.

No Second Chance by Harlan Coben

I am a new reader to Coben, but I have heard wonderful things, so I’ve been gathering his books however I can!  I received 3 books this past week as part of a Box-O-Books trade at PaperbackSwap.

Book Description from Amazon:
When the first bullet hit my chest, I thought of my daughter… 

Dr. Marc Seidman has been shot twice, his wife has been murdered, and his six-month-old daughter has been kidnapped. When he gets the ransom note-he knows he has only one chance to get this right. But there is nowhere he can turn and no one he can trust.

Just One Look by Harlan Coben

Book Description from Amazon:
An ordinary snapshot causes a mother’s world to unravel in an instant. After picking up her two young children from school, Grace Lawson looks through a newly developed set of photographs. She finds an odd one in the pack: a mysterious picture from perhaps twenty years ago, showing four strangers she can’t identify. But there is one face she recognizes—that of her husband, from before she knew him.

When her husband sees the photo that night, he leaves their home and drives off without explanation. She doesn’t know where he’s going, or why he’s leaving. Or if he’s ever coming back. Nor does she realize how dangerous the search for him will be. Because there are others interested in both her husband’s past and that photo, including Eric Wu: a fierce, silent killer who will not be stopped from finding his quarry, no matter who or what stands in his way.

Her world turned upside-down, filled with doubts about her herself and marriage, Grace must confront the dark corners of her own tragic past she struggles to learn the truth, find her husband, and save her family. 

The Woods by Harlan Coben

Book Description from Amazon:
Twenty years ago, four teenagers at summer camp walked into the woods at night. Two were found murdered, and the others were never seen again. Four families had their lives changed forever. Now, two decades later, they are about to change again.  

For Paul Copeland, the county prosecutor of Essex, New Jersey, mourning
the loss of his sister has only recently begun to subside. Cope, as he is known, is now dealing with raising his six- year-old daughter as a single father after his wife has died of cancer. Balancing family life and a rapidly ascending career as a prosecutor distracts him from his past traumas, but only for so long. When a homicide victim is found with evidence linking him to Cope, the well-buried secrets of the prosecutor’s family are threatened.

Is this homicide victim one of the campers who disappeared with his sister? Could his sister be alive? Cope has to confront so much he left behind that summer twenty years ago: his first love, Lucy; his mother, who abandoned the family; and the secrets that his Russian parents might have been hiding even from their own children. Cope must decide what is better left hidden in the dark and what truths can be brought to the light. 

Dismantled:  A Novel by Jennifer McMahon

I’ve been really looking forward to reading this one.  I really liked McMahon’s previous novel, Promise Not to Tell and I have her other novel, Island of Lost Girls in my TBR.

Book Description from Amazon:
Dismantlement = Freedom

Henry, Tess, Winnie, and Suz banded together in college to form a group they called the Compassionate Dismantlers. Following the first rule of their manifesto—”To understand the nature of a thing, it must be taken apart”—these daring misfits spend the summer after graduation in a remote cabin in the Vermont woods committing acts of meaningful vandalism and plotting elaborate, often dangerous, pranks. But everything changes when one particularly twisted experiment ends in Suz’s death and the others decide to cover it up.

Nearly a decade later, Henry and Tess are living just an hour’s drive from the old cabin. Each is desperate to move on from the summer of the Dismantlers, but their guilt isn’t ready to let them go. When a victim of their past pranks commits suicide—apparently triggered by a mysterious Dismantler-style postcard—it sets off a chain of eerie events that threatens to engulf Henry, Tess, and their inquisitive nine-year-old daughter, Emma.

Is there someone who wants to reveal their secrets? Is it possible that Suz did not really die—or has she somehow found a way back to seek revenge?

Full of white-knuckle tension with deeply human characters caught in circumstances beyond their control, Jennifer McMahon’s gripping story and spine-tingling plot prove that she is a master at weaving the fear of the supernatural with the stark realities of life. 

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