We checked in with several independent booksellers, librarians, publishers, and other local literati to learn about the most exciting new books coming out for the rest of the year:
"The Wild Life: A Joe the Bouncer Novel"
is by David Gordon, who lives here in the city. It's the fourth entry in the Joe the Bouncer series; the first one came out in 2018. With a series like this, it's sort of reminiscent of what Lee Childs has done with Jack Reacher, it's all based on how compelling of a main character we have. Joe Brody, the main character in this series, he's Harvard-educated and kicked out, he has a military background, he's suffering from PTSD, he turned to drugs and alcohol.
Readers can pick this one up on its own. Writers that do have long-running series, or series-based characters that they keep writing entries for, the best ones understand that people may walk into a bookshop like ours, get to the shelf where they're located, and see that there are all sorts of books featuring this character. So you can always just take one and enjoy it out of order and have a really good yarn. But there are rewards for those readers who do start at the first one..
You have a man named Mario and his wife, and they have a daughter, and she's just been diagnosed with leukemia. And I swear this isn't a spoiler, but early on in the book, in an effort to try to save her and get her the medicine she needs, they essentially go broke. And his wife leaves him and so Mario takes a job as a hitman. It's kind of [like] "Breaking Bad" or "Ozark," [someone] getting involved with people involved with drugs that are very dangerous.
Starting last year, The Mysterious Bookshop has put together a collection of what our series editor Otto Penzler and then a guest editor deems the best mystery stories written over the course of that year. We put the first one out last year and this year, we're putting out "with guest editor Sara Paretsky, who is of course the famed author of the V.I. Warshawski novels, and alongside Otto Penzler she has pulled together incredible stories for this collection.