Bethanne Patrick
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Megan Abbott's new novel follows two women with a troubled past who meet again, working in the lab of a powerful scientist. It's a slow-burning story whose final explosion is a true surprise.
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Jim Crace's superb new novel is a trickster — it seems to be a bittersweet tale of late-life love, but then it becomes a meditation on gentrification and the toll poverty can take on human beings.
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The latest installment of the Hogarth Shakespeare series sees crime novelist Nesbo taking on the Scottish Play in an adaptation that comes alive the farther he strays from Shakespeare's original.
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Christine Mangan's new novel, set in Morocco in the 1950s, centers on the sinister tension between two ex-friends — but the dusty, detailed Moroccan scenery sometimes gets in the way of the story.
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Nina Sadowsky's day job is high-level Hollywood producer, and it shows in the cinematic drive of her new thriller. But the book's nonstop action leaves little time for details of place and character.
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With The Pictures, British author Guy Bolton kicks off a mystery series set in classic-era Hollywood. He's clearly done his research on 1930s America, but sometimes all that detail obscures the story.
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French novelist Delphine De Vigan follows up her tell-all 2012 memoir with a creepy tale of a blocked novelist — also named Delphine — who falls under the sway of an elegant, menacing ghostwriter.
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Elizabeth Kostova's deep love for her adopted homeland grounds this story of a young American woman in Sofia, who finds a mysterious urn full of ashes and has to piece together the lives behind it.
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Dan Chaon's latest novel suggests that even people who seem kind can lead you down dangerous paths, whether they realize it or not.
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Martin Cruz Smith's new World War II thriller follows a Venetian fisherman who saves a Jewish girl from pursuing Nazis — a predictable scenario, but one that surprisingly never goes stale.