Upcoming Book Releases I'm Excited For (December 2024 Edition)
Happy almost-December! I cannot believe we’re already here, and frankly, most of the people that I’ve talked to recently are saying the same thing. Time seems to go faster and faster every year! And while I used to wish for time to hurry up and get me to Christmas as a child, I’m now wishing it would slow down bit so that I can live in my favorite season a bit longer.
For now, I’m making the most of it. I’ve been focused on reading Christmas fiction and I can honestly say that I am loving it. I feel much more Christmassy coming into December than I have in the past. I highly recommend it if you struggle with slowing down and embracing the season. If you’re interested in seeing what books I’ve put together for my Christmas “hopefuls”, you can check it out here.
Speaking of December–and books–the last month of the year is bringing us some pretty great books that I can’t wait to read. You can check them out below, and hey, if you also have people asking you for a Christmas list that you can’t seem to put together (or need to add more to), one or more of these books might be great additions!
Sweet Vidalia by Lisa Sandlin
Publishing December 3
by Little, Brown and Company
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] She made herself see Robert with the kids, telling stories of crafty, talking rabbits and determined turtles, his face bright with meanings, with silliness. Made herself see the two of them laughing together in bed, they had done that. That was true. Through the years, they’d had happiness and closeness. They had.As Eliza sits at her husband’s funeral, still stunned by the suddenness of his death, she discovers a lie that turns her life upside down. But Eliza has a core of resourceful steel that does not let her down and an innate emotional generosity that she struggles to cling to when faced with an almost overwhelming sense of bitterness.What emerges is a profoundly compelling portrait of a woman worn down by life to a gem stone quality of endurance and beauty. Love, loss and family secrets can overwhelm us at any point in our lives, but Eliza refuses to give in…
Genres: Historical Fiction
Rental House by Weike Wang
Publishing December 3
by Riverhead Books
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] Keru and Nate first meet in college, brought together by a joke at a Halloween party (would a “great white” costume mean dressing like a shark or a privileged Ivy League student?) and marrying a few years later. Misfits in their own families, they find in each other a feeling of home. Keru is the only child of strict, well-educated Chinese immigrant parents who hold her to impossible standards even as an adult (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father). Nate is from a rural, white, working class family that has never trusted his intellectual ambitions or – now – the citizenship status of his “foreign” wife. Nevertheless, some years into their marriage, Keru and Nate find themselves incorporating their families into two carefully planned vacations. The results are disastrous and revealing. First in a cozy beach house on Cape Cod, and later in a luxury bungalow in the Catskills, the couple is forced to confront the hidden truths at the core of their relationship. Alongside their giant sheepdog Mantou, Keru and Nate navigate visits from in-laws, a sibling, and surprising new friends, all while trying to determine if they have what it takes to make themselves and each other happy. How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) are needed to make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what does it take to shepherd everyone back together?
Genres: Literary Fiction, Family, Realistic Fiction
Trouble Island by Sharon Short
Publishing December 3
by Minotaur Books
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] Many miles from anywhere in the middle of Lake Erie, Trouble Island serves as a stop-off for gangsters as they run between America and Canada. The remote isle is also the permanent home to two women: Aurelia Escalante, who serves as a maid to Rosita, lady of the mansion and wife to the notorious prohibition gangster, Eddie McGee. In the freezing winter of 1932, the women anticipate the arrival of Eddie and his strange coterie: his right-hand man, a doctor, a cousin, a famous actor, and a rival gangster who Rosita believes murdered their only son.
Aurelia wants nothing more than to escape Trouble Island, but she is hiding a secret of her own. She is in fact not a maid, but a gangster’s wife in hiding, as she runs from the murder she committed five years ago. Her friend Rosita took her in under this guise, but it has become clear that Rosita wants to keep Aurelia right where she is.
Shortly after the group of criminals, celebrities, and scoundrels arrive, Rosita suddenly disappears. Aurelia plans her getaway, going to the shore to retrieve her box of hidden treasures, but instead finds Rosita’s body in the water. Someone has made sure Aurelia was the one to find her. An ice storm makes unexpected landfall, cutting Trouble Island off from both mainlands, and with more than one murderer among them.
Genres: Historical Fiction, Thriller, Mystery
The Close-Up by Pip Drysdale
Publishing December 3
by Gallery Books
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] When Zoe Ann Weiss moves to Los Angeles to pursue her dream of becoming a writer, her whole future is wide open. But then Zach, the bartender and aspiring actor she’s falling for, ghosts her. Her debut novel, a thriller, fails. And she has writer’s block worse than ever before. Now, three years later, Zach is famous and Zoe is… not.
She’s facing her thirtieth birthday, a dead-end job at a flower shop, and a demanding agent, terrified she’ll never get her life back on track. But when she goes to make a flower delivery and Zach is at the address, it’s like no time has passed at all. They start casually dating in secret, her writer’s block disappears, and Zoe begins to Zach inspired her first novel, so why can’t he inspire her second? But then the inevitable happens and photos are leaked, landing Zoe in the press. Her first novel goes viral, and now everyone seems to know her name. Except the problem with everyone knowing your name is that everyone knows your name—including the mysterious stalker obsessed with Zach. A stalker who begins reenacting violent events from Zoe’s book, step by step, against her…
Genres: Suspense, Thriller, Mystery, Romance
The Peculiar Garden of Harriet Hunt by Chelsea Iversen
Publishing December 3
by Sourcebooks Landmark
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] Since her father’s disappearance, Harriet Hunt has been completely alone. Her only company is the garden she cares for meticulously—a wild place full of twisting ivy, thorny roses, and more magic and miracles than bees buzzing. But being alone as a woman in the world means she is vulnerable, and when suspicion for her father’s disappearance falls on her, she marries to protect herself. But her new husband might be worse than her father, and she soon realizes she’s integral to a dark plot created by the men around her. To free herself and discover the truth, she must learn to channel the power of her strange, magical garden.
Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Magical Realism
Untethered by Angela Jackson-Brown
Publishing December 3
by Harper Muse
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] In the small college town of Troy, Alabama, amidst the backdrop of 1967, Katia Daniels lives a life steeped in responsibility. At the Pike County Group Home for Negro Boys, she pours her heart into nurturing the young lives under her care, harboring a longing for children of her own. Katia’s romantic entanglement with an older man brings comfort but also stirs questions about the path she’s chosen.
The weight of her family’s history bears down on her; a twin brother is missing in action in the heart of the Vietnam War. Having lost her father to cancer, Katia took up the mantle of caretaker, ensuring her mother and brothers were looked after. Her sense of duty extends to the boys at the group home, creating a web of obligations that stretches her emotional bandwidth thin.
When Seth Tolbert, a familiar face from her high school days, reenters Katia’s life, he brings with him a breeze of nostalgia and a reminder of a time when her dreams felt less tethered. As their friendship rekindles, Katia grapples with the idea of making choices for herself, even as the ticking of her biological clock grows louder.
Genres: Historical Fiction, War, Romance
The Cure for Women: Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Challenge to Victorian Medicine that Changed Women’s Lives Forever by Lydia Reeder
Publishing December 3
by St. Martin’s Press
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] After Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school, more women demanded a chance to study medicine. Barred entrance to universities like Harvard, women built their own first-rate medical schools and hospitals. Their success spurred a chilling backlash from elite, white male physicians who were obsessed with eugenics and the propagation of the white race. Distorting Darwin’s evolution theory, these haughty physicians proclaimed in bestselling books that women should never be allowed to attend college or enter a profession because their menstrual cycles made them perpetually sick. Motherhood was their constitution and duty.
Into the midst of this turmoil marched tiny, dynamic Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of New York publisher George Palmer Putnam and the first woman to be accepted into the world-renowned Sorbonne medical school in Paris. As one of the best-educated doctors in the world, she returned to New York for the fight of her life. Aided by other prominent women physicians and suffragists, Jacobi conducted the first-ever data-backed, scientific research on women’s reproductive biology. The results of her studies shook the foundations of medical science and higher education.
Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, History
Raised by a Serial Killer: Discovering the Truth About My Father by April Balascio
Publishing December 3
by Gallery Books
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] One evening in 2009, April Balascio was searching online, as she had been every night, for unsolved murders in the towns her family had lived growing up, when she stumbled across the latest investigations into the “Sweetheart Murders” cold case. All at once, the buried memories of her father’s dark history were awakened, and she knew she had to take action. She picked up the phone to call a detective and the rest is infamous true crime history. In her unflinching memoir, Balascio bravely reveals an astonishing tale of a lifetime of manipulation, unexplained upheavals, and silent fear. Some part of her had always known what her father was capable of, but the full truth of how she came to these revelations is as riveting as it is quietly terrifying.
Genres: True Crime, Memoir, Nonfiction
Bellevue by Robin Cook
Publishing December 3
by G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] Twenty-four-year-old Michael “Mitt” Fuller starts his surgical residency with great anticipation at the nearly 300-year-old, iconic Bellevue Hospital, following in the footsteps of four previous, celebrated Fuller generations. The pressure is on for this newly minted doctor, and to his advantage he’s always had a secret sixth sense, a sensitivity to the nonphysical which gradually plays a progressive role, especially as one patient after another assigned to his care begin to die from mysterious causes. At first he thinks it is just the ‘luck of the draw’, but as the numbers mount, he’s forced to think otherwise. As he struggles to find out why these people are dying while simultaneously having to deal with the unreasonable demands of being first-year resident, things rapidly spiral out of control.
Between fatigue, stress, and nerves, it’s no wonder that these first few days and nights of his surgical residency are tough ones. What is surprising, though, are the visions that begin to plague Mitt – visions of a little girl in a blood-stained dress, hearing bloodcurdling screams in the distance, and worse. As bodies mount and Mitt’s stress level rises, he finds himself drawn into the secrets of the abandoned Bellevue Psychopathic Hospital building, which to his astonishment still exists, defying demolition a few doors north of the modern Bellevue Hospital high-rise. Forcing an unauthorized entry into this storied but scary structure, Mitt discovers he’s more closely tied to the sins of the past than he ever thought possible.
Genres: Thriller, Horror, Medical
The Good Bride by Jen Marie Wiggins
Publishing December 10
by Crooked Lane Books
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] One year after a devastating hurricane, bride-to-be Ruth Bancroft is marrying her perfect groom in a quaint fishing village on the Gulf Coast. The weekend is carefully curated, with the displays of pomp and social media magic meant to promote an area still struggling to rebuild as well as bring Ruth’s estranged family back together.
Yet as good intentions often go, this road to wed is hell and paved in complications. With tensions rising between the family and the bridal party, long-buried secrets come to light, and accusations start flying. Things officially spiral out of control when the oceanfront rehearsal dinner is rocked by a series of gunshots, and a high-profile guest goes missing. As the investigation gets underway, it turns out that everyone has something to hide.
Genres: Thriller, Suspense
What the Wife Knew by Darby Kane
Publishing December 10
by William Morrow Paperbacks
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] Dr. Richmond Dougherty is a renowned pediatric surgeon, an infamous tragedy survivor, and a national hero. He’s also very dead—thanks to a fall down the stairs. His neighbors angrily point a finger at the newest Ms. Dougherty, Addison. The sudden marriage to the mysterious young woman only lasted ninety-seven days, and he’d had two suspicious “accidents” during that time. Now Addison is a very rich widow.
As law enforcement starts to circle in on Addison and people in town become increasingly hostile, sides are chosen with Kathryn, Richmond’s high school sweetheart, wife number one, and the mother of his children, leading the fray. Despite rising tensions, Addison is even more driven to forge ahead on the path she charted years ago…
Determined at all costs to unravel Richmond’s legacy, she soon becomes a target—with a shocking note left on her bedroom You will pay. But it will take a lot more than faceless threats to stop Addison. Her plan to marry Richmond then ruin him may have been derailed by his unexpected death, but she’s not done with him yet.
Genres: Psychological Thriller, Suspense
Where the Creek Bends by Linda Lael Miller
Publishing December 31
by Canary Street Press
Description: [excerpt from Goodreads] Madison Bettencourt has always wanted to be part of a bustling family. When she was growing up, it was just her and Coralee, the grandmother who cared for her. And now that Coralee needs her, there’s nowhere else Madison would rather be. But as Madison rattles around the massive family home, she remembers living there as a child and meeting a girl named Bliss. Irreverent with eyes that had seen too much at her tender age, Bliss was Madison’s first friend. They’d lost touch when Bliss suddenly stopped coming around, and Madison is determined to find her. For the more time she spends at her grandmother’s home, the more alive the past feels. How can Madison embrace her future if she can’t unravel the past?
Liam McKettrick could be her future. A single dad trying to repair his relationship with his two kids, he has his hands full. But the more time they spend together, the more Madison imagines the family she’s always dreamed of with Liam and his kids. She was only supposed to be in town for a short while, but she can’t deny the lure of the place where the creek bends.
Genres: Time Travel
