Mystery and crime novels have always been my favorite genre. I love the suspense and intrigue, the intricate storylines, and the clever plot twists. In middle school, while my friends were reading more age-appropriate books, I was reading The Godfather and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. Is it any wonder then that Siena Ricci, the main character of my debut novel Gullible, is a shrewd and cunning female con artist? I had so much fun developing Siena’s story arc and creating the criminal world she inhabits that I decided to continue her narrative in a sequel, with plans for a third novel to round out the trilogy.
I’ll devour any novel by Grisham, and I love that he took a departure from his standard legal thrillers to pen a story about the theft of rare books and the man suspected of selling them on the black market.
The hook is Mercer Mann, the young novelist who’s not only suffering from writer’s block but she’s also just been canned from her job. How can Mercer possibly turn down the mysterious woman who offers her a hefty fee to work undercover and infiltrate Bruce Cable’s illegal operation?
Grisham’s flawless storytelling had me looking at the world through Mercer Mann’s eyes and pondering what choice I would have made if I were in her shoes.
***The Sunday Times 'Thriller of the Month', Mail on Sunday 'Thriller of the Week' and Sun 'Best for Mystery-Lovers'***
Someone is about to make a killing
The most daring and devastating heist in literary history targets a high security vault located deep beneath Princeton University.
Valued at $25 million (though some would say priceless) the five manuscripts of F Scott Fitzgerald's only novels are amongst the most valuable in the world. After an initial flurry of arrests, both they and the ruthless gang of thieves who took them have vanished without trace.
I love being by the water. Most of my vacations are spent at tropical destinations. There’s something pretty amazing about reading a book at the water’s edge, near a palm tree, with the breeze and the salty smell of the wonderful warm air as pelicans swoop across the surface.
I love being in the Everglades of South Florida. I love the crazy characters and their wild pursuits of making money. There are a lot of 70s musical references and nostalgia for the reader.
One could really believe this may be based on true events because, after all, it’s Florida.
Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times bestselling author and actual Florida Man Dave Barry returns with a Florida caper full of oddballs and more twists and turns than a snake slithering away from a gator.
Jesse Braddock is trapped in a tiny cabin deep in the Everglades with her infant daughter and her ex-boyfriend, a wannabe reality TV star who turned out to be a lot prettier on the outside than on the inside. Broke and desperate for a way out, Jesse stumbles across a long-lost treasure, which could solve all her problems—if she can figure out how to keep it.…
I read widely and in many genres, so coming up with a thematic list was a difficult task. However, in working on my forthcoming novel Dead Ends, in which a quiet neighborhood descends into paranoia and insanity driven by fear, politics, and technology, I sought out novels that engaged with conspiratorial thinking and violence. I admire writers who don’t hold back and fully engage with their characters and material, particularly if it means going to dark, imaginative and strange places in their work. Please keep an eye out for Dead Ends, coming from Flame Tree Press in 2023.
David James Keaton’s newest novel is funny and brutal. After police inform Dave that the body of his wife was found in a guitar case, he does the exact opposite of what any normal individual would do; he goes on a road trip seeking answers. Guided only by his fantasies, paranoia, and coincidences, Dave and some stragglers he picks up along the way traverse a mysterious American landscape peppered with rumors of invisible prisons, insane theories, and violence. Keaton’s work and narrative pace alternate between brilliant and infuriating but, by the end, you’ve gone on a journey that feels as mysteriously connected and deep as the rivers that supposedly flow through the center of the Earth in this enigmatic, brilliant, bat-shit story.
“A CULT CLASSIC WAITING ON ITS CULT.”
—William Boyle, author of City of Margins
Recently fired from his job, Dave sets out on a manic, misguided quest for answers up the food chain of law enforcement corruption and down the increasingly bizarre Florida coastline. Battling cops, biker gangs, backwoods Bigfoot hunters, and getting tangled in tourist traps (both figurative and literal), he eventually stumbles onto a conspiracy involving body cameras, love locks, and a grand psychological experiment which may reveal the revolving doors and invisible walls of the nation’s prison system.
I have lived in Florida since 1969, attended public school here, and received my Master’s degree from a state college. My husband, Bob Randall, a photographer and an entrepreneur, and I have written six nonfiction books about Florida. An Ocklawaha River Odyssey is our favorite. Kayaking the 56 miles of winding waterways became less of a research expedition and more of a spiritual journey as the ancient river cast its spell on us. From wildlife, including manatees and monkeys, to wild orchids and pickerelweed, the Ocklawaha provides more than exercise and recreation; it also touches your soul. I hope my writing and Bob’s photography provide that experience for our readers.
I love this book because I learned so much about the quality and quantity of water in Florida. Because of this book and the knowledge I gained, I was able to publicly refute a former senator’s op-ed extolling the benefit of holding tanks for water underground, which, as Barnett explains, causes arsenic infiltration.
The quality of Florida’s water has been a serious concern since 2007 when the book was published and continues to be today.
Part investigative journalism, part environmental history, Mirage reveals how the eastern half of the nation-historically so wet that early settlers predicted it would never even need irrigation-has squandered so much of its abundant freshwater that it now faces shortages and conflicts once unique to the arid West.
Florida's parched swamps and supersized residential developments set the stage in the first book to call attention to the steady disappearance of freshwater in the American East, from water-diversion threats in the Great Lakes to tapped-out freshwater aquifers along the Atlantic seaboard.
Told through a colorful cast of characters including Walt Disney, Jeb…
In addition to writing novels, I’m a humanities editor for Oxford University Press. So, I’m interested in the political and theological implications of non-human intelligence. I wonder how people would react to such a revelation. Some would be fascinated by this radical new perspective. Others would be horrified at what they perceive as a transgression against nature. I’m also drawn to this topic because I still vividly recall the entertainment of my youth, which regularly featured anthropomorphic animals. Sometimes they’re just cool or funny. But on occasion—like withThe Secret of NIMH—they raise profound questions of identity and rebellion, even for an audience that is too young to understand.
A childless couple adopts a chimpanzee named Looee, and you already know from reading that sentence that it will lead to trouble and heartbreak. After a few pages, I didn’t care. In McAdam’s skilled hands, the inevitable sadness doesn’t matter, because the delicately handled point of view perfectly captures a doomed creature trapped between two opposing identities. In contrast, we also meet Podo, an alpha chimp at a research facility seeking to test the intelligence of primates. Podo is fully ape, but he is turning into something more. Their paths soon join, taking them deeper into a gray area between human and animal that I had never seen rendered on the page so vividly before.
Walt and Judy's happiness has been blighted by their childlessness; although their marriage seems blissful, Judy feels increasingly empty and Walt longs to make her happy again. So one day he brings home Looee - a baby chimpanzee. Looee, exuberant and demanding, immediately fills the gap in Walt and Judy's life, and they come to love him as their own son. Like any child, Looee is affectionate and quick to learn, generous and engaging. But he is also a deeply unpredictable animal, and one night their unique family life is changed forever. At the Girdish Institute, chimpanzees have been studied…
I am an award winning author who loves a good romance. I love when two unlikely people meet under challenging circumstance. Bringing these two characters together has been the basis of all fourteen of my books. Home For The Holidays took a series of short stories and blended two of my favorite events finding love and the holidays.
In this holiday romance presented by Georgia Beers, Mackenzie Campbell is planning the perfect holiday wedding. Everything is on track until her fiancé dumps her. Shattered and confused she decides to go on her honeymoon. She enlists her best friend Allison to go along with her. Shedding the cold weather, they head to Florida. Kenzie doesn’t realize that the adventure is about to begin.
Mackenzie Campbell has no idea her life is about to fall apart. She’s bright and attractive with a good job, a comfortable home and an impending Christmas wedding she’s been planning for months. So when her girlfriend bails less than two weeks before the nuptials, Kenzie’s picture perfect Christmas world begins to crumble around her.
Determined to hold on to at least some shred of her dignity, Kenzie snags her best friend, Allison, and flees the cold of the Northeast to take the honeymoon anyway. The Rainbow’s Edge is an enormous LGBT resort in Southern Florida, and its atmosphere of…
Writing is part of living for me, and I see that same spirit in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s prose, which was created during her solitary time in a beach cottage on Captiva Island on Florida’s Gulf Coast.
The first week is solitude and collapse, emptying out of the stress and thoughts of the city.
Then, in the second week, she slowly returns to life and lies in wait. One must not rush or dig for inspiration. The sea, she says, will bring it.
This book is a simple meditation on being in touch with a place and its gifts. She writes only about being at the sea, of moon shells and whelks, of an oyster bed and an Argonauta. They are metaphors and lead into discussions of the role of women. It is magical. And 50 years since she first wrote it, Lindbergh’s words are still fresh and musical. They still…
'Quietly powerful and a great help. Glorious' Emma Thompson
'Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.'
Holidaying by the sea, and taking inspiration from the shells she finds on the seashore, Anne Morrow Lindbergh meditates on youth and age, love and marriage, peace, solitude and contentment. First published in 1955 and an instant bestseller, Gift from the Sea's insights - into aspects of the modern world that threaten to overwhelm us, the complications of technology, the ever multiplying commitments that take us from our families - are as relevant today as they ever were,…
Hi! We are writers currently living in Los Angeles after 18 years in New York. We wrote Margot Mertzafter reading American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Online Lives of Teenagersby Nancy Jo Sales. It was the first time we heard of boys cultivating and curating non-consensual nude pics, effectively treating them like Pokemon cards. It was infuriating, especially when we realized there are no federal laws to protect victims of revenge porn at the time. So it became a focus of our work. We love a main character who’s angry but also funny, and desperately seeking change.
This is a YA novel told from the perspectives of two very different strong women. It’s part coming-of-age, part coming-of-action as they learn the best ways to affect change in their communities and how to voice their frustrations with the patriarchy. And we loved how it dealt with these issues in a nuanced and complex way that didn’t offer easy answers.
A timely story of two teenagers who discover the power of friendship, feminism, and standing up for what you believe in, no matter where you come from. A collaboration between two gifted authors writing from alternating perspectives, this compelling novel shines with authenticity, courage, and humor.
Malena Rosario is starting to believe that catastrophes come in threes. First, Hurricane María destroyed her home, taking her unbreakable spirit with it. Second, she and her mother are now stuck in Florida, which is nothing like her beloved Puerto Rico. And third, when she goes to school bra-less after a bad sunburn and…
Like most people, I find the history of sex and everything associated with it fascinating! It’s often been difficult to document and interpret the complexities about heterosexuality, gender identity, and same-sex desire as well as women’s reproductive health which is intimately (although not exclusively of course) linked to sex. We are in a golden age of fantastic work on so many aspects of the history of sex. Apart from the intrinsic interest of these books, I think they provide such an important context for our very lively and often very intense contemporary legal, political, and cultural debates over sex in all its forms.
Move over New York and Providence, Julio Capó illuminates in this dazzling book about queer life in Miami before World War II how an important early twentieth-century gay community emerged at the intersection of tourism, migration, and trade around the Caribbean. He not only provides a fascinating account of gay Miami but uses that community to tell a wider story about the history of the region.
Poised on the edge of the United States and at the center of a wider Caribbean world, today's Miami is marketed as an international tourist hub that embraces gender and sexual difference. As Julio Capo Jr. shows in this fascinating history, Miami's transnational connections reveal that the city has been a queer borderland for over a century. In chronicling Miami's queer past from its 1896 founding through World War II, Capo shows the multifaceted ways gender and sexual renegades made the city their own.
Drawing from a multilingual archive, Capo unearths the forgotten history of ""fairyland,"" a marketing term crafted…
Having been born in Fiji and lived in Cyprus, Austria, and Nigeria, I have always had a strong sense of wanderlust and a keen eye for my surroundings – both natural and man-made. I’ve always been open to "what might happen next," which makes sense as to why I became a professional storyteller – an actor, writer, and director. I am thrilled by not knowing what lies ahead, and I’ve always felt there is possible adventure at every turn in life, which is why I am so fond of the evocative and thrilling books I have listed.
Moving between the steamy heat of Florida and the urban cool of London, this was the most provocative whodunit I’ve ever read. Such an exquisite game of cat and mouse that I felt like I was the protagonist in the book, not the holidaying couples who meet around a pool and become first friends, then adversaries, as they are drawn into a slow-burn murder investigation.
The telling of the story from each of the couple’s point of view when they host their dinner parties back in London is such a clever device—there are so many red herrings and, oh, such trickery!!
In this 'chilling story that keeps you guessing to the last page', three couples who befriend each other on holiday may be hiding sinister secrets from each other (Daily Express)
Three couples meet around the pool on their Florida holiday and become fast friends. But on their last night, their perfect holiday takes a tragic twist: the teenage daughter of another holidaymaker goes missing, and her body is later found floating in the mangroves.
When the shocked couples return home, they remain in contact, and over the course of three increasingly fraught dinner parties they come to know one another…
