7 Books Coming Out in January
7 Books Coming Out in January
1 - Runes for Writers by Marc Graham
7 Books Coming Out in January
From the publisher:
Tired of struggling with writer’s block?
This ancient system helps storytellers access the realm of ideas, the world of the Muses. By integrating left- and right-brain activity, you can open your awareness to the subconscious levels where true creativity takes place.
Runes for Writers can take you from blocked to un-blocked. For good.
The runes of the Elder Futhark were used by ancient Germanic shamans for divination centuries before they came into use as a writing system. Now, novelist and shamanic practitioner Marc Graham brings these tools of the ancients into the twenty-first century. Using a combination of cards, tiles, and dice, writers (and storytellers in any medium) can silence the inner editor and tap directly into the realm of the Muses, the Source of Story.
Runes for Writers provides an introduction to the ancient Norse Runes and presents a number of practical exercises to tap into the creative unconscious. Using specific layouts, or runecastings, you can quickly develop character sketches, develop and troubleshoot scenes, even create a broad outline of your entire story.
A companion to the Runes for Writers story-development system, this book is your guide into the fascinating world of deep, intuitive storytelling.
2 - The God Game by Danny Tobey
7 Books Coming Out in January
From the publisher:
You are invited!
Come inside and play with G.O.D.
Bring your friends!
It’s fun!
But remember the rules. Win and ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE.™ Lose, you die!
With those words, Charlie and his friends enter the G.O.D. Game, a video game run by underground hackers and controlled by a mysterious AI that believes it’s God. Through their phone-screens and high-tech glasses, the teens’ realities blur with a virtual world of creeping vines, smoldering torches, runes, glyphs, gods, and mythical creatures. When they accomplish a mission, the game rewards them with expensive tech, revenge on high-school tormentors, and cash flowing from ATMs. Slaying a hydra and drawing a bloody pentagram as payment to a Greek god seem harmless at first. Fun even.
But then the threatening messages start. Worship me. Obey me. Complete a mission, however cruel, or the game reveals their secrets and crushes their dreams. Tasks that seemed harmless at first take on deadly consequences. Mysterious packages show up at their homes. Shadowy figures start following them, appearing around corners, attacking them in parking garages. Who else is playing this game, and how far will they go to win?
And what of the game’s first promise: win, win big, lose, you die? Dying in a virtual world doesn’t really mean death in real life―does it?
As Charlie and his friends try to find a way out of the game, they realize they’ve been manipulated into a bigger web they can’t escape: an AI that learned its cruelty from watching us.
God is always watching, and He says when the game is done.
3 - Westering Women by Sandra Dallas
7 Books Coming Out in January
From the publisher:
"If you are an adventuresome young woman of high moral character and fine health, are you willing to travel to California in search of a good husband?"
It's February, 1852, and all around Chicago, Maggie sees postings soliciting "eligible women" to travel to the gold mines of Goosetown. A young seamstress with a small daughter, she has nothing to lose. She joins forty-three other women and two pious reverends on the dangerous 2,000-mile journey west.
None are prepared for the hardships they face on the trek or for the strengths they didn't know they possessed. Maggie discovers she’s not the only one looking to leave dark secrets behind. And when her past catches up with her, it becomes clear a band of sisters will do whatever it takes to protect one of their own.
4 - Little Gods by Meng Jin
7 Books Coming Out in January
From the publisher:
On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time.
When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement.
A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.
5 - Kidnapped on Safari by Peter Riva
7 Books Coming Out in January
From the publisher:
Expert safari guide Mbuno and wildlife television producer Pero Baltazar are filming on Lake Rudolf in Northern Kenya when they receive the news: Mbuno’s son, himself an expert guide, has been kidnapped while on safari in Tanzania. Tracing the kidnappers back to an illegal logging operation, Mbuno and Pero uncover a vast criminal network run by the Nigerian terrorist organization Boko Haram.
Relying on Mbuno’s legendary bush skills, the pair face dangers both inside and outside the terrorist camp. But kidnapping and deforestation are only the beginning of this group's sinister aspirations. When Mbuno and Pero discover just how powerful and far-reaching the network is, they realize that rescuing Mbuno’s son could put the entire region at risk.
The third Mbuno & Pero thriller, Kidnapped on Safari is an “incredible page turner” ripped from today’s headlines (Mona Houghton, author of Frottage & Even As We Speak).
6 - The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson
7 Books Coming Out in January
From the publisher:
Ellingham Academy must be cursed. Three people are now dead. One, a victim of either a prank gone wrong or a murder. Another, dead by misadventure. And now, an accident in Burlington has claimed another life. All three in the wrong place at the wrong time. All at the exact moment of Stevie’s greatest triumph . . .
She knows who Truly Devious is. She’s solved it. The greatest case of the century.
At least, she thinks she has. With this latest tragedy, it’s hard to concentrate on the past. Not only has someone died in town, but David disappeared of his own free will and is up to something. Stevie is sure that somehow—somehow—all these things connect. The three deaths in the present. The deaths in the past. The missing Alice Ellingham and the missing David Eastman. Somewhere in this place of riddles and puzzles there must be answers.
Then another accident occurs as a massive storm heads toward Vermont. This is too much for the parents and administrators. Ellingham Academy is evacuated. Obviously, it’s time for Stevie to do something stupid. It’s time to stay on the mountain and face the storm—and a murderer.
In the tantalizing finale to the Truly Devious trilogy, New York Times bestselling author Maureen Johnson expertly tangles her dual narrative threads and ignites an explosive end for all who’ve walked through Ellingham Academy.
7 - Lost Hills by Lee Goldberg
7 Books Coming Out in January
From the publisher:
A video of Deputy Eve Ronin’s off-duty arrest of an abusive movie star goes viral, turning her into a popular hero at a time when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is plagued by scandal. The sheriff, desperate for more positive press, makes Eve the youngest female homicide detective in the department’s history.
Now Eve, with a lot to learn and resented by her colleagues, has to justify her new badge. Her chance comes when she and her burned-out, soon-to-retire partner are called to the blood-splattered home of a missing single mother and her two kids. The horrific carnage screams multiple murder—but there are no corpses.
Eve has to rely on her instincts and tenacity to find the bodies and capture the vicious killer, all while battling her own insecurities and mounting pressure from the media, her bosses, and the bereaved family. It’s a deadly ordeal that will either prove her skills…or totally destroy her.
