Invited to read by the publishers on NetGalley, ARCs
The World's Greatest Detective
Description: A brilliant Boomer detective and her ambitious Gen Z assistant try to get along in this delightful feel-good mystery.
Olivia Blunt is thrilled to be hired as assistant to the nationally renowned investigator Aubrey Merritt. She longs to become a valued contributor to the great detective’s work, but Merritt is a difficult, exacting boss, and the learning curve is steeper than she expected.
After weeks of boring computer work, Olivia is finally invited to join Merritt on an important case. On the night of her sixty-fifth birthday party, Victoria Summersworth somehow fell over her balcony railing to her death on the rocky shore of Vermont’s Lake Champlain. She was a happy woman—rich, beloved, in love, and matriarch of the preeminent Summersworth family. The police ruled her death a suicide, but Victoria’s daughter Haley thinks it was murder.
Merritt and Olivia soon discover that the Summersworth family is complicated web of lies, ambitions, and resentments. As the list of suspects grows, Olivia makes one apparent mistake after another. When she blunders into a truly dangerous situation, she realizes Merritt might be right: she might be in over her head with this whole detective thing…or she might be unravelling a mystery even bigger than the one they started with.
Nothing has ever gone right for Riki. She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido, where she worked at a nursing home, for a better life in Tokyo. But as a temp in the big city she has no job security, and barely scrapes by. She eats the same old discount boiled egg for lunch every day, sometimes for dinner, too. Many of her peers have to take on a side hustle just to make ends meet. So when her friend discovers an agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation, both leap at the chance for an interview.
Meanwhile, former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years. After trying what feels like every available option, it seems futile—until Motoi dives deep into his research and learns that, while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan, there is a company that’s found a loophole.
Before long, everyone has an opinion on the matter: from Yuko’s sex-obsessed, asexual best friend, to Motoi’s controlling prima ballerina mother, and even the affable sex-worker-slash-therapist that Riki has been to a couple of times, after she accepted a down payment to be a surrogate.
Acutely funny and addictively page-turning, Swallows pulls at the seams of society, reassessing our understanding of motherhood, self-worth, bodily autonomy, and class. What does it mean to be “in control”? And can money really buy happiness?
Description: Matilde Clausen, 9, vanishes from a crowded playground in the middle of Copenhagen, triggering a frantic search across the city. When a link emerges to the disappearance of Lea Høgh, aged 10, six years ago, DI Henrik Jungersen is thrown back into the nightmare that almost finished his career.
Desperate for redemption, but barred from reopening the old case, Henrik turns to his estranged lover, Dagbladet chief crime reporter Jensen, for help. As the investigation reaches deep into Denmark’s underworld, how will Henrik, Jensen and her teenage apprentice Gustav manage to escape the darkness that threatens to engulf them, in time to solve the mystery? What really happened to Lea? And where on earth is Matilde?
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