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A Babe Stern Mystery
by Peter Lewis
Paperback: 320 pages; Publisher: Counterpoint (August 1, 2010); Language: English; ISBN-10: 1582435480; ISBN-13: 978-1582435480
You can buy Dead in the Dregs: A Babe Stern Mystery at Amazon
Prominent wine critic Richard Wilson makes a living elevating and destroying winemakers’ reputations with the stroke of his pen. When he disappears after a tasting at Napa Valley’s Norton Winery, his sister Janie looks to her ex-husband Babe Stern for help. But when Wilson’s body is found floating in a vat at Norton, Stern’s search turns into a hunt for the killer. Working with the Napa Valley police, Stern quickly finds a string of suspects, all with one thing in common: their desire to get revenge for the reviews that shattered their wines and livelihoods. But as the police work to quickly clear the case, those same suspects have a string of alibis and the trail begins to fade.
Stern digs further into the circumstances of Wilson’s death and finds himself following his only lead, to Burgundy, France. In cellars and tasting rooms from Beaune to Nuits-Saint-Georges, Stern tracks the troubled son of a family of vignerons, one of the few people in the winery the night Wilson died. But the wine families of the Côte d’Or are secretive and entangled, and the further Stern goes to discover the truth, the more he becomes the ultimate target. In a stunning debut mystery packed with revenge and murder, Stern’s only choice is to find the truth.
EXCERPT
They brought the harvest in early that year in Napa, and with it, Richard Wilson’s body. A perfect flowering, a mild spring dotted with just the right amount of rain, and a hot, dry summer had ripened the fruit to twenty-eight brix by late August. Wilson’s selection, on the other hand, had nothing to do with how sweet he was.
The bar was always dead that time of year. The whole world, it seemed, was out picking. I dreaded going to work, but I dragged my ass down the mountain and opened the place. I did the books from the night before and swept up. A few customers wandered in, guys too old to stoop in a vineyard for ten hours straight in ninety-degree heat. By three o’clock, we had done a staggering twelve dollars and sixty-three cents.
I’ll never forget that day. It was the first time I had seen Wilson in more than a decade and it was the last day I would see him alive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Lewis is a successful restaurateur and restaurant industry consultant. He has been a contributing editor for Virtuoso Travel & Life, for which he wrote the column “Wine Country Notebook.” His work has also appeared in Pacific Northwest and Arcade. Dead in the Dregs is his first novel. He lives in Seattle.
Tags: best new novel, best novel, crime, Dead in the Dregs, detective, good fiction, good novel, good reading, mystery, Napa Valley, Peter Lewis, recommended novel, sleuth, wine
By Lauren Belfer
ISBN: 9780061252518; ISBN10: 0061252514; Imprint: Harper ; On Sale: 6/15/2010; Format: Hardcover; Trimsize: 6 1/8 x 9; Pages: 544; $25.99; Ages: 18 and Up
You can buy A Fierce Radiance at Amazon
From the New York Times bestselling author of City of Light comes a compelling, richly detailed tale of passion and intrigue set in New York City during the tumultuous early days of World War II.
Claire Shipley is a single mother haunted by the death of her young daughter and by her divorce years ago. She is also an ambitious photojournalist, and in the anxious days after Pearl Harbor, the talented Life magazine reporter finds herself on top of one of the nation’s most important stories. In the bustling labs of New York City’s renowned Rockefeller Institute, some of the country’s brightest doctors and researchers are racing to find a cure that will save the lives of thousands of wounded American soldiers and countless others—a miraculous new drug they call penicillin. Little does Claire suspect how much the story will change her own life when the work leads to an intriguing romance.
Though Claire has always managed to keep herself separate from the subjects she covers, this story touches her deeply, stirring memories of her daughter’s sudden illness and death—a loss that might have been prevented by this new “miracle drug.” And there is James Stanton, the shy and brilliant physician who coordinates the institute’s top secret research for the military. Drawn to this dedicated, attractive man and his work, Claire unexpectedly finds herself falling in love. But Claire isn’t the only one interested in the secret development of this medicine. Her long-estranged father, Edward Rutherford, a self-made millionaire, understands just how profitable a new drug like penicillin could be. When a researcher at the institute dies under suspicious circumstances, the stakes become starkly clear: a murder has been committed to obtain these lucrative new drugs. With lives and a new love hanging in the balance, Claire will put herself at the center of danger to find a killer—no matter what price she may have to pay.
Lauren Belfer dazzled readers with her debut novel, City of Light, a New York Timesnotable book of the year. In this highly anticipated follow-up, she deftly captures the uncertainty and spirit, the dreams and hopes, of a nation at war. A sweeping tale of love and betrayal, intrigue and idealism, A Fierce Radiance is an ambitious and deeply engaging novel from an author of immense talent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lauren Belfer was born in Rochester, New York, and grew up in Buffalo, where she attended the Buffalo Seminary. At Swarthmore College, she majored in Medieval Studies. After graduating, she worked as a file clerk at an art gallery, a paralegal, an assistant photo editor at a newspaper, a fact checker at magazines, and as a researcher and associate producer on documentary films. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University.
Her debut novel, City of Light, was a New York Times bestseller, as well as a #1 Book Sense pick, a Barnes& Noble Discover Award nominee, a New York Times Notable Book, a Library Journal Best Book, and a Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. City of Light was a bestseller in Great Britain and has been translated into seven languages. She is also the author of the novel A Fierce Radiance.
Belfer’s fiction has also been published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and Henfield Prize Stories. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere.
Lauren Belfer lives in New York City.
Tags: a fierce radiance, author Lauren Belfer, good novel, good reading, new novel, new release, recommended novel
by Val McDermid
ISBN: 9780061688997; ISBN10: 0061688991; Imprint: Harper Paperbacks ; On Sale: 6/15/2010; Format: Trade PB; Trimsize: 5 5/16 x 8; Pages: 368; $14.99; Ages: 18 and Up
You can buy A Darker Domain at Amazon
Past and present intertwine in this brilliant exploration of loyalty and greed from bestselling mistress of suspense Val McDermid.
Fife, Scotland, 1984. Mick Prentice abandons his family at the height of a politically charged national miners’ strike to join the strikebreakers down south. Despised and disowned by friends and relatives, he is not reported missing until twenty-three years later.
Fife, Scotland, 1985. Kidnapped heiress Catriona Maclennan Grant is killed and her baby son vanishes when the ransom payoff goes horribly wrong. In 2008, a tourist in Tuscany stumbles upon dramatic new evidence that reopens the investigation.
Already immersed in the Prentice affair, Detective Karen Pirie, newly appointed head of the Cold Case Review Team, wants to make her mark with this second unsolved 1980s mystery. But two decades’ worth of secrets are leading Pirie into a dark domain of violence and betrayal—a place darker than any she has previously entered.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
“I grew up in Kirkcaldy on the East Coast of Scotland, a small town famous for producing linoleum and for being the birthplace of the economist Adam Smith. It was at the heart of the Fife coalfield, and I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents in the mining village of East Wemyss.
“To everyone’s amazement, including mine, I was accepted to read English at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford—at 17, one of the youngest undergraduates they’d ever taken on, and the first from a Scottish state school.
“I survived the culture shock of arriving in a place where no one understood a word I said, and seized every experience I could get my hands on.
“I had always wanted to write, ever since I realized that real people actually produced all those books in the library. But everyone told me that it was impossible to make a living from writing, that I needed to have a proper job. I knew I wasn’t the sort of person who would be suited to a proper, nine-to-five job with a neat hierarchical career structure, so I became a journalist.
“I spent two years training in Devon, winning a clutch of awards, including Trainee Journalist of the Year; then for 14 years I worked on national newspapers in Glasgow and Manchester, ending up as Northern Bureau Chief of a national Sunday tabloid—a title that sounds far grander than the reality, I should confess.
“Meanwhile, I was attempting to become a writer. I wrote my first attempt at a novel when I was working in Devon. The best thing I can say about it was that I actually finished it. It was a typical 21-year-old’s novel—full of tortured human relationships, love, hate, grief, and angst, not to mention the meaning of life. It was, naturally enough, rejected by every publishing house in London. But an actor friend who read it thought it would make a good play. So, I turned it into a script and showed it to the director of the Plymouth Theatre Company. And he decided it would fit perfectly in a season he had planned of new plays by new writers. So there I was, at 23, a performed playwright. It wasn’t what I had intended, but I was happy with it. I later adapted the play, Like A Happy Ending, for BBC radio. And I was commissioned to write another play, this time for a touring company in Lincolnshire and Humberside.
“But I didn’t have the practical skills to make a success of writing drama, and the agent I had then didn’t do anything to help me acquire them. In fact, he fired me because I didn’t make him enough money. (Who’s got the last laugh now?) So, I decided to turn my hand to writing a crime novel, because I’d always enjoyed reading the genre, and I’d been very excited by the New Wave of American women crime writers, who made me wonder if I could write something similar with a U.K. setting.
“I started writing Report for Murder in 1984, and it was published by The Women’s Press in 1987. The rest is history…I finally gave up the day job in April 1991, and I’ve been making my living by writing ever since. I was the crime reviewer for the Manchester Evening News for four years, and I still review regularly for various national newspapers. I also write occasional journalism and broadcast regularly on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.
“I divide my time between South Manchester and Northumberland, and have a son and three cats.”
Tags: A Darker Domain, author Val McDermid, best new novel, crime novel, good novels, mystery novel, recommended novel
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