Mailbox Monday, August 6, 2018

So as part of my birthday gift to myself, I signed up for two new-to-me book subscription services! I got three books in from those, I also received my BOTM selection. So without further ado, here’s what made it into my mailbox this past week:

I’ll start first with my BOTM selection:

Twenty-six-year-old Cat Kinsella overcame a troubled childhood to become a detective constable with the Metropolitan Police Force, but she’s never been able to banish the ghosts of her past or reconcile with her estranged father. Work provides a refuge from her family dysfunction, but she relies on a caustic wit to hide her vulnerability from her colleagues.

When a mysterious phone call links a recent strangling victim to Maryanne Doyle, a teenage girl who went missing in Ireland eighteen years earlier, the news is discomforting for Cat. Though she was only a child when her family met Maryanne on a family vacation, right before she vanished, Cat knew that her charming but dissolute father wasn’t telling the truth when he denied knowing anything about the girl’s disappearance. Did he do something to Maryanne all those years ago? Could he have something to do with her current case?

Determined to close the two cases, Cat rushes headlong into the investigation, crossing ethical lines and trampling professional codes. But the deeper she digs, the darker her secrets she may uncover…

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Ok, so first I will start with my Page 1 Books subscription box! They have many different genre choices (I went with “For the Sleuth”) and offer 3, 6 or 12 month subscriptions (I chose 3 months). What’s great is that you fill out a little survey (be sure to include your Goodreads TBR link!) and then they take your answers and personally pick out a book to send you based on your reading tastes. I specifically asked for books that are lesser known standalones. Even better is that if they send you a book you already own, have already read, or just don’t like it … they’ll immediately send you a new one to “make it right.” So when I opened this one I was super excited! It looks really good!!

In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya must now endure the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country’s paranoia about Russian spies. With the arrival of visiting writer and fellow Russian emigre Leo Orlov – whose books Zoya has privately obsessed over for years – her luck seems poised to change, but the relationship that forms between them will put Zoya, Leo, and his calculating wife, Vera, all at risk.

Grappling with class distinctions, national allegiance, and ethical fidelity – not to mention the powerful magnetism of sex – Invitation to a Bonfire investigates how one’s identity is formed, irrevocably, through a series of momentary decisions, including how to survive, who to love, and whether to pay the complicated price of happiness.

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And finally, I also received my first bookcase.club subscription box! They also have different genre options (I selected Thrill Seeker) and offer 3, 6 or 12 month  options (I went with 3 months). I received two books from them:

Winter’s chill has descended on Stockholm as police arrive at the scene of a shocking murder. An unidentified woman lies beheaded in a posh suburban home – a brutal crime made all the more disturbing by its uncanny resemblance to an unsolved killing ten years earlier. But this time there’s a suspect: the charismatic and controversial chain-store CEO Jesper Orre, who owns the home but is nowhere to be found.

To homicide detectives, Peter Lindgren and Manfred Olsson, nothing about the suave, high-profile businessman – including a playboy reputation and rumors of financial misdeeds – suggests he conceals the dark heart and twisted mind of a cold-blooded killer. In search of a motive, Lindgren and Olson turn to the brilliant criminal profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schon. Once a valued police asset, now marooned in unhappy retirement and a crumbling marriage, she’s eager to exercise her keen skills again – and offer the detectives a window into the secret soul of Jesper Orre.

But they’re not the only ones searching. Two months before, Emma Bohman, a young clerk at Orre’s company chanced to meet the charming chief executive, and romance swiftly bloomed. Almost as quickly as the passionate affair ignited, it was over when Orre inexplicably disappeared. One staggering misfortune after another followed, leaving Emma certain that her runaway lover was to blame and transforming her confusion and heartbreak into anger.

Now, pursuing the same mysterious man for different reasons, Emma and the police are destined to cross paths in a chilling dance of obsession, vengeance, madness, and love gone hellishly wrong.

Twenty years after the Srebrenica massacre that claimed the life of his friend and colleague, Eric Petrosian is back in Sarajevo at the American embassy, and the specter of war once again looms over the Balkans. The Bosnian Serb leader, who had for a time been seeking a stable peace, has returned to his nationalist roots and is threatening to pull Bosnia apart in a bloody struggle for control … and behind him a shadowy mafia figure is pulling the strings.

Stuck between an upright politician seeking to make her name by brokering peace in the region and an old CIA contact – and former lover – who begs for his help locating some sensitive information, Eric is dragged deeper into the maelstrom. What he uncovers is a plot of blackmail and ruthless ambitions, and he’s faced with an impossible choice: to take the path of expedience or to risk his life for what’s right.

Rich with bone-chilling tension and penetrating insight, The Wolf of Sarajevo is another masterwork of suspense from an author who’s been in the trenches of international diplomacy for over a quarter century.