Wendy Is Recomemnding:

Lauren Clay has returned from a tour of duty in Iraq just in time to spend the holidays with her family. Before she enlisted, Lauren, a classically trained singer, and her brother Danny, a bright young boy obsessed with Arctic exploration, made the most of their modest circumstances, escaping into their imaginations and forming an indestructible bond. Joining the army allowed Lauren to continue to provide for her family, but it came at a great cost.

When she arrives home unexpectedly, it's clear to everyone in their rural New York town that something is wrong. But her father is so happy to have her home that he ignores her odd behavior and the repeated phone calls from an army psychologist. He wants to give Lauren time and space to acclimate to civilian life.

Things seem better when Lauren offers to take Danny on a trip to visit their mother upstate. Instead, she guides them into the glacial woods of Canada on a quest to visit the Jeanne d'Arc basin, the site of an oil field that has become her strange obsession. As they set up camp in an abandoned hunting lodge, Lauren believes she's teaching Danny survival skills for the day when she's no longer able to take care of him.

But where does she think she's going, and what happened to her in Iraq that set her on this path?

From a writer whom The New York Times Book Review says, "writes with a restraint that makes poetry of pain," Be Safe I Love You is a novel about war and homecoming, love and duty, and an impassioned look at the effects of war on women --as soldiers and caregivers, both at home and on the front lines.

An affecting and hope-filled posthumous collection of essays and stories from the talented young Yale graduate whose title essay captured the world's attention in 2012 and turned her into an icon for her generation.

Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated "magna cum laude" from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash.

As her family, friends, and classmates, deep in grief, joined to create a memorial service for Marina, her deeply moving last essay for The Yale Daily News, "The Opposite of Loneliness," went viral, receiving more than 1.4 million hits.
Even though she was just twenty-two when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. Her short story "Cold Pastoral" was published by NewYorker.com just months after her death.

The Opposite of Loneliness is an assemblage of Marina's essays and stories, which, like The Last Lecture, articulate the universal struggle that all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be, and how we can harness our talents to impact the world.

The triumphant success of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" compels fledgling poet Frances Osgood to meet her literary idol, a mysterious, complicated man who soon has her under his seductive spell in an all-consuming affair. And when Edgar's frail young wife breaks into their idyll to befriend her rival, Frances fears that deceiving Mrs. Poe may be as impossible as cheating death itself. . . .

From Philippa Gregory, the #1 New York Times bestselling author behind the Starz original series, "The White Queen"--the latest book in the Cousins' War series tells the passionate tale of Elizabeth of York, daughter of the White Queen.

The White Princess is the gripping story of Elizabeth of York, a princess from birth, who is caught between loyalties in fifteenth-century England. The novel opens as news of the battle of Bosworth spreads, determining not only which royal house has triumphed, Tudor or York, but also which of two suitors she will have to marry: her lover Richard III, or his rival, Henry Tudor.

So it happens that Henry VII snatches the crown of England from the mud of Bosworth Field, locking his marriage with Elizabeth forever. Now, she must marry not only her enemy, but her lover's murderer and the pretender to the throne. She is forced to create a new royal family with him and his ambitious mother: Margaret Beaufort, the Red Queen. But while the new monarchy can win, it cannot hold power in an England that remembers the House of York with love.

The new king's greatest fear is that somewhere, outside England, a prince from the House of York is waiting to invade and reclaim the throne. When a young man who would be king leads his army and invades England, Elizabeth must decide whether to recognize him as her brother and a claimant to the throne, or deny him in favor of the husband she is coming to love...

In this suspenseful novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark, a Manhattan ER doctor is brazenly murdered in front of his young son in a city playground. Five years later, his killer is still at large.

Meanwhile his widow, Laurie Moran, is now an award-winning TV producer. Still haunted by her husband's murder, she has been raising their son alone. Laurie and her TV crew have just received the green light to produce a new cold case series. Revisiting unsolved crimes one at a time, she and her TV crew will gather a victim's friends and family, who have lived under suspicion of guilt for many years. By getting paid to reenact the crime on TV, each will have the chance to clear their name unless, of course, someone is guilty The first case centers on the murder of a wealthy Westchester matron, who was killed overnight while her college-aged daughter and her three best friends were having a sleepover following their celebratory graduation party. Now grown, the four women reunite to re-create the scene of the crime.
 

From the reigning Queen of Suspense comes a fascinating mystery that once again demonstrates a true mastery of the craft that has made her books international bestsellers. Fast-paced, exciting, and expertly plotted, I've Got You Under My Skin is Mary Higgins Clark at her best.