Title:  The Rain Watcher

Author:  Tatiana De Rosnay

Linden Malegarde has come home to Paris from the United States.  It has been years since the whole family was all together.  Now the Malegarde family is gathering for the seventieth birthday of Linden’s father, Paul.

The members of the Melegarde family ae on edge, holding their breath, afraid one wrong move will shatter their delicate harmony.  Paul, the quiet patriarch, and internationally renowned arborist obsessed with his trees and little else, has always had an uneasy relationship with his son.  Lauren, his American wife, is determined that the weekend celebration will be a success.  Tilia, Linden’s blunt older sister, projects an air of false fulfillment.  And Linden himself, the youngest, uncomfortable in his own skin, never quite at home no matter where he lives–an American in France and a Frenchmen in the United States–still fears that, despite his hard-won success as a celebrated photographer, he will always be a disappointment to his parents.

Their hidden fears and secrets slowly unravel as the City of Light undergoes a stunning natural disaster and the Seine bursts its banks and floods the city.  All members of the family will have to fight to keep their unity against tragic circumstances.  In this profound and intense novel of love and redemption,  de Rosnay demonstrates all he writer’s skills not only as an incredible storyteller bur also as a soul seeker.

Title:  Fruit of the Drunken Tree

Author:  Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogota, but the threats of kidnapping, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.

When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in maid from the city’s guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to befriend the aloof teenager.  But Petrona’s mysterious behavior conceals a powerful yearning.  She is a young woman crumbling under the burden of providing for her family as the riptide of first love pulls her in the opposite direction.  As both girls’ families scramble to maintain stability amid the rapidly escalating conflict, Petrona and Chula find themselves entangled in a web of secrecy that will force them both to choose between sacrifice and betrayal.

Inspired by the author’s own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree portrays two very different but inextricably linked coming-of-age stories.  In lush prose, Rojas Contreras has written a powerful testament fo the impossible choices women and girls are often forced to make in the face of violence and to the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.

Title:  Whistle in the Dark

Author:  Emma Healey

Jen and Hugh Maddox have just survived every parent’s worst nightmare.

Relieved but still terrified, they sit by the hospital bedside of their fifteen-year-old daughter, Lana, who was found bloodied bruised, and disoriented after going missing for four days during a mother-daughter vacation in the country.

Lana won’t tell anyone what happened, and the police think the case is closed.  But Jen can[t leave it alone.  Lana is distant, hostile, and acting strangely; she stops going to school and always sleeps with the light on.

Jen is sure the answer lies in those four missing days.  Lana seems equally sure she’ll never speak of it.  Terrified of losing her all over again,  Jen has to do something.  But jhow do you rescue someone who has already been found?

Asking how well you can know even those closest to you, Whistle in the Dark is masterfully drawn, thought-provoking, and psychologically complex tale that affirms Emma Healey’s status as a writer at the top of her game.

Title: A Casualty of War

Author: Charles Todd

Though the Great War is nearing its end–Armentieres is back in Allied hands, Cambrai has fallen to the Canadians, Turkey is collapsing, and the Germans are on the retreat–the fighting rages on. Like the battered and weary soldiers she tends, Bess Crawford yearns for an end to the bloodshed taking a devastating toll on everyone, including her fellow doctors and nurses.

Waiting for her transport north, Bess meets Captain Alan Travis, and Englishman whose branch of the family made its fortune on the Caribbean island of Barbados. Their brief, pleasant conversation is a respite from the carnage ahead as they return to duty.

Then, at the beginning of November, Bess unexpectedly encounters Captain Travis again. Brought into her forward aid station bloodied and disoriented from a head wound, the Captain insists that the man who shot him was an English officer–a distant cousin named James Travis–and asks for Bess’s help finding him. Bess’s inquires about Lieutenant Travis turn up nothing, forcing her to believe that a concussion must have clouded the wounded man’s mind.

Days later, fate brings her and the Captain together a third time when he is severely wounded. Again Captain Travis accuses James of shooting him, denouncing him as a killer. But Bess learns that James couldn’t possibly have shot his cousin–which brings Alan Travis’s sanity into question. Bess has seen the impact of war on too many exhausted men whose grasp of reality slipped into nightmare. The hospital is dealing with an angry, tormented patient. Yet Bess remembers an able, clearheaded officer.

As the war comes to a bloody end, Bess is given leave, and in an English clinic for brain injuries, she discovers a suicidal Captain Travis strapped to his bed. Horrified by his condition, she and Sergeant Major Simon Brandon travel to James Travis’s home in Suffolk to learn more about the baffling relationship between these two cousins. Her search for the truth about Alan Travis will lead this smart, capable, and compassionate young women into unexpected danger, and bring her face-to-face with the visible and invisible wounds of war that not even the much-longed-for peace can heal.

Title: The lying Game

Author: Ruth Wre

On a cool June morning, a woman is walking her dog in the idyllic coastal millage of Salten, along a tidal estuary known as the Reach. Before she can stop him, the dog charges into the water to retrieve what first appears to be a wayward stick, but to her horror, turns out to be something much more sinister.

The next morning three women in and around London–Fatima, Thea, and Isa–receive the text they had always hoped would never come from the fourth in their formerly inseparable clique, Kate, that says only “I need you.”

The four girls were best friends at Salten, a second-rate boarding school set near the cliffs of the English Channel. Each different in their own way, the four became inseparable and were notorious for playing the Lying Game, telling lies at every turn to both follow boarders and faculty. But their little game had consequences, and as the four converge in present-day Salten, they realize their shared past was not as safely buried as they had once hoped.

Armospheric, twisty, and with just the right amount of chill to keep you wrong-footed, The Lying Game is told in Ruth Ware’s signature suspenseful style, lending itself to becoming another unputdownable thriller from the Agatha Christie of our time.