Hello audiobook listeners! Check out some of the exciting audio excerpts from some of our July titles for your listening pleasure, and make sure to follow Macmillan Audio on SoundCloud to stay up to date with all the latest audio excerpts.
ACTS OF VIOLET by Margarita Montimore | 9781250854636 | available now
Nearly a decade ago, iconic magician Violet Volk performed her greatest trick yet: vanishing mid-act. Though she hasn’t been seen since, her hold on the public hasn’t wavered. While Violet sought out the spotlight, her sister Sasha, ever the responsible one, took over their mother’s salon and built a quiet life for her daughter, Quinn. But Sasha can never seem to escape her sister’s orbit or her memories of their unresolved, tumultuous relationship. Then there’s Cameron Frank, determined to finally get his big break hosting a podcast devoted to all things Violet though keeping his job hinges on an exclusive interview with Sasha, the last person who wants to talk to him.
As the ten-year anniversary approaches, the podcast picks up steam, and Cameron’s pursuit of Sasha becomes increasingly intrusive. He isn’t the only one wondering what secrets she might be keeping: Quinn, loyal to the aunt she always idolized, is doing her own investigating. Meanwhile, Sasha begins to experience an unsettling series of sleepwalking episodes and coincidences, which all lead back to Violet. Pushed to her emotional limits, Sasha must finally confront the most painful truths about her sister, and herself, even at the risk of losing everything.
Alternating between Sasha’s narration and Cameron’s podcast transcripts, interspersed with documents that offer a tantalizing peek at Violet herself, ACTS OF VIOLET is an utterly original, propulsive story of fame, deception, and forgiveness that will make you believe in magic.
HOLY CHOW by David Rosenfelt | 9781250852113 | available now
In the latest Andy Carpenter mystery from bestselling author David Rosenfelt, beloved characters both human and canine are back on the case with plenty of the author’s trademark wit and humor.
Retired lawyer Andy Carpenter’s true calling has always been running the Tara Foundation. The dog rescue organization places hundreds of dogs in new homes every year. So many dogs and so many homes that Andy can’t even do the math. But there’s one dog and one owner Andy will always remember.
About a year ago, Rachel Morehouse came to the foundation looking for a companion. In her seventies and recently widowed, Rachel wanted a senior dog that also needed someone. Andy took a liking to her, Rachel took a liking to Tessie, an older Chow mix, and the rest is history.
That is, until Rachel calls Andy begging for a favor: If Rachel dies, will Andy take care of Tessie if her son cannot? Andy agrees, no questions asked. Within a week, Rachel has been murdered, and Andy is called upon to retrieve Tessie. Rachel’s son can’t do it he’s been arrested for his mother’s murder.
As Tessie settles in with Andy’s golden retriever, Tara, Andy learns more about the woman he so greatly admired and the businesses she ran. Holy Chow, was this woman impressive. Andy can’t help but take the case.
PARADISE GIRLS by Sandy Gingras | 9781250855251 | available now
It’s Christmas time, and Mary Valley is in a funk. She’s a writer for home magazines, but she’s lost touch with what home means. Her life seems meaningless. The last house she wrote about was a gazillion-dollar mansion with a moat! Plus, she’s estranged from her daughter, CC, and granddaughter, Larkin, and mired in a dead-end relationship with her boss.
Daniel is a man adrift since his son Timmy was killed in Afghanistan. He’s living on a houseboat in Florida with Timmy’s three-legged dog, Tripod, and taking tourists out on fishing charters. But his life is on the edge. He’s painting his houseboat black, and he can’t stop thinking about “getting lost at sea.”
When Mary’s boss tells her he’s spending Christmas with his ex, she books a trip with her family to The Low Key Inn, a hotel on the edge of the Everglades. But things go wrong from the get-go. CC bails out of the vacation, and Mary is stuck with an unhappy Larkin. The hotel is dated and down-on-its-luck, and perhaps its owner is a witch. Then Mary meets Daniel, casts a hook into his head and wrecks his boat.
This is the story of how wounded people can help each other heal, how lost people can help each other find their way home. How life can become a love story…
THE HIDDEN ONE by Linda Castillo | 9781250852090 | available now
Over a decade ago, beloved Amish bishop Ananias Stoltzfus disappeared without a trace. The mystery of what happened to the kind old man has troubled his community for years. When skeletal remains showing evidence of foul play are unearthed and linked to the bishop, his disappearance becomes even more sinister.
Unhappy with the local investigation, Amish elders arrive in Painters Mill and ask chief of police Kate Burkholder for help. Realizing she has a personal connection to the crime, Kate travels to Pennsylvania’s Kishacoquillas Valley, an isolated area where the Amish culture differs dramatically from the traditions in which she was raised. Kate learns that Stoltzfus was charismatic and highly respected, but she soon begins to hear other things, too: that there was something ‘off’ about the bishop. He sometimes seemed unfamiliar with the local culture, and kept quiet about his past. Did this kindly old man have something to hide?
Someone doesn’t want Kate asking those questions. But even after being accosted and threatened in the dead of night, Kate refuses to back down. When an Amish woman with ties to the bishop turns up dead, the investigation reaches a boiling point. There’s a killer in the Valley who will stop at nothing to keep the past buried. Will they get to Kate before she can expose the truth? Will the bishop’s secrets remain hidden forever?
OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE by Tamour Soomro | 9781250856609 | available now
At age sixteen, Fahad hopes to spend the summer with his mother in London. His father, Rafik, has other plans: hauling his son to Abad, the family’s rural estate in upcountry, Pakistan. Rafik wants to toughen up his sensitive boy, to teach him about power, duty, family to make him a man. He enlists Ali, a local teenager, in this project, hoping his presence will prove instructive.
Instead, over the course of one hot, indolent season, attraction blooms between the two boys, and Fahad finds himself seduced by the wildness of the land and its inhabitants: the people, who revere and revile his father in turn; cousin Mousey, who lives alone with a man he calls manager; and, most of all, Ali, who threatens to unearth all that is hidden.
Decades later, Fahad is living abroad when he receives a call from his mother summoning him home. His return will force him to face the past. Taymour Soomro’s OTHER NAMES FOR LOVE is a tale of masculinity, inheritance, and desire set against the backdrop of a country’s troubled history, told with uncommon urgency and beauty.
ALL THE DIRTY SECRETS by Aggie Blum Thompson | 9781250856135 | available now
One warm summer night twenty-five years ago, Liza Gold and her friends celebrated their high school graduation with a party on the beach. It should have been the best night of their lives, only one of them never came back out of the ocean.
The tragedy haunted Liza Gold for years. Now, Liza is a recently-divorced, working mom struggling to connect with her standoffish teenager daughter, Zoe, when history repeats itself. Another young woman has drowned at Beach Week, and this time the victim is Zoe’s secret best friend.
Liza begins to suspect that the two deaths are somehow related, which causes her to face hard truths and take an unflinching look at the people she’s called her closest friends for the past two decades. She must discover what really happened to both women before it’s too late.
Set in the upscale DC private school scene, where silence can easily be bought, ALL THE DIRTY SECRETS asks how far you would go to protect your status and your family, and if some secrets should ever be revealed.
PERIL AT THE EXPOSITION by Nev March | 9781250858580 | available now
1893: Newlyweds Captain Jim Agnihotri and Diana Framji are settling into their new home in Boston, Massachusetts, having fled the strict social rules of British Bombay. It’s a different life than what they left behind, but theirs is no ordinary marriage: Jim, now a detective at the Dupree Agency, is teaching Diana the art of deduction he’s learned from his idol, Sherlock Holmes.
Everyone is talking about the preparations for the World’s Fair in Chicago: the grandeur, the speculation, the trickery. Captain Jim will experience it first-hand: he’s being sent to Chicago to investigate the murder of a man named Thomas Grewe. As Jim probes the underbelly of Chicago’s docks, warehouses, and taverns, he discovers deep social unrest and some deadly ambitions.
When Jim goes missing, young Diana must venture to Chicago’s treacherous streets to learn what happened. But who can she trust, when a single misstep could mean disaster?
Award-winning author Nev March mesmerized readers with her Edgar finalist debut, MURDER IN OLD BOMBAY. Now, in PERIL AT THE EXPOSITION, she wields her craft against the glittering landscape of the Gilded Age with spectacular results.
THINGS WE DO IN THE DARK by Jennifer Hillier | 9781250837097 | available now
When Paris Peralta is arrested in her own bathroom covered in blood, holding a straight razor, her celebrity husband dead in the bathtub behind her she knows she’ll be charged with murder. But as bad as this looks, it’s not what worries her the most. With the unwanted media attention now surrounding her, it’s only a matter of time before someone from her long hidden past recognizes her and destroys the new life she’s worked so hard to build, along with any chance of a future.
Twenty-five years earlier, Ruby Reyes, known as the Ice Queen, was convicted of a similar murder in a trial that riveted Canada in the early nineties. Reyes knows who Paris really is, and when she’s unexpectedly released from prison, she threatens to expose all of Paris’s secrets. Left with no other choice, Paris must finally confront the dark past she escaped, once and for all.
Because the only thing worse than a murder charge are two murder charges.