New Edelweiss E-galleys (7/17/23)

Hello e-galley readers! Check out some of the exciting e-galleys that were recently added to Edelweiss for your downloading pleasure:

ASSISTANT TO THE VILLAIN by Hannah Nicole Maehrer
9781649375803 | 8/29/23

With ailing family to support, Evie Sage’s employment status isn’t just important, it’s vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn’s most infamous Villain results in a job offer—naturally, she says yes. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop a teeny crush on your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably hot boss. Don’t find evil so attractive, Evie.

But just when she’s getting used to severed heads suspended from the ceiling and the odd squish of an errant eyeball beneath her heel, Evie suspects this dungeon has a huge rat…and not just the literal kind. Because something rotten is growing in the kingdom of Rennedawn, and someone wants to take the Villain—and his entire nefarious empire—out.

Now Evie must not only resist drooling over her boss but also figure out exactly who is sabotaging his work…and ensure he makes them pay.

After all, a good job is hard to find.

DOPPELGANGER: A TRIP INTO THE MIRROR WORLD by Naomi Klein
9780374610326 | 9/12/23

What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Soon enough, she began to see her double as part of a larger story: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

In DOPPELGANGER, Klein turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. Combining comic memoir with cobweb-clearing analysis, this book charts a path beyond the despair of the “mirror world” we inhabit today. DOPPELGANGER is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us have come to think and feel—and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

PRIMA FACIE by Suzie Miller
9781250292209 | 1/30/24

Tessa Ensler loves the law. The game of wit required to succeed as a barrister feeds her unlike anything else, and she’s damn good at it. A scrappy girl who landed at Cambridge on full scholarship, she has worked tirelessly to make a name for herself in London’s elite chambers. Her masterful line of questioning in the courtroom has netted Tessa win after win, including freeing men accused of rape and sexual assault. As controversial as it is, this is her job – it’s just about the facts and who can game the system.

Working late one night, Tessa falls into a casual relationship with a coworker, also an attorney, who comes from an elite, wealthy family. This lighthearted affair serves as a break from the long hours Tessa works, and she begins to wonder if perhaps there is a future for the two of them.

But one evening after drinking, they both end up in her bed, and after a brief but fitful sleep, Tessa gets sick in the bathroom. That’s when she begins to feel hands on her back. She’s ill and not entirely aware of what’s happening, but suddenly she finds herself in a position countless women have. And she’s faced with a gut-wrenching, career-changing decision: does she take the stand to testify about her rape, with the full awareness that the system has not been built to protect the victim? Does she become a witness in her own courtroom?

LONE WOLF by Gregg Hurwitz
9781250871732 | 2/13/24

Once a black book government assassin known as Orphan X, Evan Smoak left the program, went deep underground, and reinvented himself as someone who will go anywhere, and risk everything to help the truly desperate who have nowhere else to turn. Since then, Evan has fought international crime syndicates and drug cartels, faced down the most powerful men in the world and even brought down a President. Struggling with an unexpected personal crisis, Evan goes back to the very basics of his mission–and this time, the truly desperate is a little girl who wants him to find her missing dog.

Not his usual mission, and not one Evan embraces with enthusiasm, but this unlikely, tiny job quickly explodes into his biggest mission yet. One that finds him battered between twisted AI technocrat billionaires, a mysterious female assassin who seems a mirror of himself, and personal stakes so gut-wrenching he can scarcely make sense of them.

Evan’s mission pushes him to his limit–he must find and take down the assassin known only as the Wolf, before she succeeds in completing her mission and killing the people who can identify her–a teenaged daughter of her last target, and Evan himself. Matched skill for skill, instinct for instinct, Evan must outwit an opponent who will literally stop at nothing if he is to survive.

THE RUMOR GAME by Thomas Mullen
9781250842770 | 2/27/24

June, 1943. Wartime tensions are running high, and an atmosphere of distrust and unease is dividing friends and neighbors. The two protagonists of Thomas Mullen’s gripping historical thriller find themselves at the center of a dangerous tinderbox, trying to douse the sparks before flames engulf the city.

Reporter Anne Lemire writes the Rumor Clinic, a newspaper column that disproves the many harmful rumors floating around town, some of them spread by Axis actors and others just gossip mixed with fear and ignorance. She’s getting tired of chasing rumors about Rosie Riveters’ safety on the job, or whether the Nazis have poisoned lobsters off the coast of Maine. She wants to write about something bigger.

Special Agent Devon Mulvey, one of the few Catholics at the FBI, spends his weekdays preventing sabotage in the war industries and his Sundays spying on clerics with divided loyalties—and he spends his evenings wooing the many lonely women whose husbands are off at war.

When Anne’s story about Nazi propaganda being handed out by local businesses intersects with Devon’s investigation into the death of an immigrant factory worker, the two are led down a dangerous trail of espionage, organized crime, and domestic fascism—one that implicates their own tangled pasts and threatens to expose a larger pattern of conspiracy than either of them could have imagined.

With incredible attention to detail, vibrant historical atmosphere, and a riveting mystery that illuminates still-timely issues about disinformation, power, and influence in a society plagued by division, Thomas Mullen delivers another powerful thriller.

SISTERS UNDER THE RISING SUN by Heather Morris
9781250320551 | 10/24/23

On February 14, 1942, the Vyner Brooke, a merchant ship carrying a desperate group of expats fleeing Singapore as it became clear that it would soon fall to the Japanese, was sunk by Japanese dive bombers. Nesta James was one of 65 Australian nurses on board; Norah and John Chambers among 150 civilians and military personnel.

Though many of the passengers drowned straight away, Nesta and Norah miraculously survive and reach the beaches of Bangka Island, then controlled by the Japanese. They are immediately taken as prisoners of war, and separated from the men.

For nearly four years, Norah and Nesta fought for survival as their fellow prisoners, friends, and comrades died. Moved from one camp to another, they finally settled in the notorious Camp Palembang, deep in the jungle of Sumatra. There, women and children battled disease, starvation, and unthinkable brutality meted out by the Japanese soldiers: less than half of the inmates in their camp lived to see the Japanese defeated. Yet these women found, in themselves and in each other, an extraordinary courage and resourcefulness.

This is a story of sisterhood: the unbreakable bonds women forge in the face of adversity. At the heart of SISTERS UNDER THE RISING SUN is the story of how the second world war was fought and won by women the world over, in different ways, as much as it was by men.

LOVE, NATURALLY by Sophie Sullivan
9781250875839 | 1/16/24

Presley Ayers is not the woman you bring on a camping trip. An accomplished concierge at an exclusive hotel in Great Falls, MI, she knows more about the top ten places for champagne and caviar than she does about the best hiking boots to go stomping around near Lake Michigan. But when she surprises her boyfriend of eight months with a vacation to the Get Lost Lodge and he dumps her instead, Presley decides to rough it solo and take the trip herself.

When Beckett Keller helps the gorgeous woman off the rickety boat and onto Lodge territory, it’s clear she’s made a mistake. She doesn’t like hiking, fishing, or nature in general, so why did she go on this trip?—but he’s got other things on his mind. A crumbling lodge, and his own plans and dreams that are forever deferred—so he doesn’t have time for Ms. Fish-Out-of-Water. But neither Beckett or Presley can help that inexplicable draw they feel towards each other. He’s all rough stubble and plaid shirts, while she’s all high heels and brand-name athleisurewear.

But you know what they say about opposites.

BLOOM by Helen Hardt
9781649373021 | 8/22/23

#1 New York Times bestselling author Helen Hardt brings readers back inside the Black Rose Underground with a new stand-alone romance. Experienced Dom, known only as The Phantom, will show our recently heartbroken heroine just how thrilling it can be to let someone else be in control…

THE PORCELAIN MAKER by Sarah Freethy
9781250289346 | 11/7/23

Germany, 1929: Under the dazzling lights of Berlin, two people are drawn together: Max, a Jewish architect, and Bettina, a beautiful and celebrated German avant-garde artist. But their bright beginning is soon dimmed by the rising threat of Nazism. In time, Max is arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau where only his talent at making exquisite porcelain figures stands between him and death. Everything Bettina has done up until now has been meticulously planned to try to save Max. She would rather die than live another moment without him—but can one moment last a lifetime?

America, 1993. Bettina’s daughter Clara embarks on a journey to trace her roots and discover the identity of her father, a secret her mother has kept from her for reasons she’s never understood. As Clara starts piecing the puzzle together, we are transported back in time, where life is lived on a razor’s edge, and deception and death lurk around every corner.

YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY by Sasha Vasilyuk
9781639731534 | 4/23/24

Yefim Shulman, husband, father, grandfather, and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow finds an old letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession letter reveals what he’d hidden from all who knew him.

YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY moves between Yefim’s struggles as a Ukrainian Jew in Hitler’s Germany, his years concealing from the Soviet authorities and his family the choices he made to survive the war, and the effect his cover-up had on the lives of his wife, Nina, and two children in Donbas, Ukraine, between WWII and the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

From Germany prison camps and forced labor system to the Soviet culture of pride and paranoia, Sasha Vasilyuk grapples with the crushing weight of history on one family, and what grace they find in the course of their survival.