Paradise Girls

Sandy Gingras's Paradise Girls features a broken engagement. A ruined vacation in paradise. One adorable little girl. The perfect recipe for the chance of a lifetime... 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...

A highly infectious and incurable virus spreads worldwide. Seventeen-year-old Kerryl Shaw and her family live on a remote farm and think they will be safe, but the plague advances. Despite deaths around them, the Shaws survive. However, this changes when a stranger arrives, and it soon becomes apparent he has brought the infection to their door. One by one the family succumbs, leaving Kerryl alone. Kerryl is sure it’s only a matter of time before she, too, dies. She decides to record what she thinks will be her final days in a diary. She realises that it will never be read, so she imagines a reader and calls him Adam. As loneliness and isolation affect the balance of her mind, Adam ceases to be an imaginary character and becomes real to her. Communications break down and services fail. Unexplained events build fear and menace: Kerryl hears her name called in the night; she’s attacked by stray animals; she’s molested when she visits the town; she sees a stranger outside her house, who vanishes when she tries to make contact; objects appear and disappear. The climax comes when she finds a text message on her phone. Who is texting her? How? She thinks it can only be Adam, because by now there is no one else left. Another text invites her to a rendezvous at the Bride Stones, a beauty spot popular with lovers, and she leaves for what she is sure will be a meeting with Adam...

Elegant, brutal, and profound—this magnificent debut captures the grit and glory of modern Hawai'i with breathtaking force and accuracy. In a stunning collection that announces the arrival of an incredible talent, Kristiana Kahakauwila travels the islands of Hawai'i, making the fabled place her own. Exploring the deep tensions between local and tourist, tradition and expectation, façade and authentic self, This Is Paradise provides an unforgettable portrait of life as it’s truly being lived on Maui, Oahu, Kaua'i and the Big Island. In the gut-punch of “Wanle,” a beautiful and tough young woman wants nothing more than to follow in her father’s footsteps as a legendary cockfighter. With striking versatility, the title story employs a chorus of voices—the women of Waikiki—to tell the tale of a young tourist drawn to the darker side of the city’s nightlife. “The Old Paniolo Way” limns the difficult nature of legacy and inheritance when a patriarch tries to settle the affairs of his farm before his death. Exquisitely written and bursting with sharply observed detail, Kahakauwila’s stories remind us of the powerful desire to belong, to put down roots, and to have a place to call home.

Tess returns home to bury her father but what she finds buried in his attic makes her question everything she thought she knew about the mild-mannered trucker… PARADISE HILL, WASHINGTON The seemingly idyllic mountain town harbors a dark secret: four young girls have disappeared over a forty-year period. With no crime scenes, no leads and no suspects, the cases have gone cold. Until today. The remains of one missing girl are discovered in a burned-out cabin at a remote campsite, reopening the case and suggesting the worst may be true – a ruthless child killer is operating in Washington State. TESS MCCLINTOCK Crime reporter and amateur cyber-sleuth Tess is obsessed with the cold cases of missing girls in Washington State. As she works to settle her father's estate, she's shaken to her core when she uncovers evidence pointing to his involvement. FBI SPECIAL AGENT MICHAEL CARTER On leave after solving a particularly heartbreaking case of child abduction and murder for the FBI's Violent Crimes Against Children Task Force, Michael is back in Paradise Hill to recover and visit with family. Despite doctor's orders to stay clear of police work, Michael's drawn back in when Tess asks for his help understanding the secrets found in her father's attic. A RUTHLESS CHILD KILLER Having escaped justice for decades, he's bored and deliberately stirs the pot, revealing the body of one of the dead girls. Despite the fact he's hiding in plain sight, no one suspects that he's really a wolf and not the sheep he pretends to be. He sees Tess and Michael's involvement in the case as a challenge and views Tess as a temptation he can't resist. AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR OLD COLD CASE For Tess and Michael, the cases are personal: Tess's best friend in public school, Lisa Tate, was one of the missing girls from Paradise Hill. Michael was babysitting the night little Lisa vanished. The guilt they harbor over their role in her disappearance drives them both. Desperate for answers, Tess and Michael join forces to track a killer and uncover the secrets Tess finds in her father's attic. Will the answers bring Tess peace or shatter her? THE GIRL FROM PARADISE HILL is Book One in the McClintock-Carter Crime Thriller Series. THE GIRL WHO CRIED TOO MUCH is Book Two in the McClintock-Carter Crime Thriller Trilogy. THE ONLY GIRL LEFT ALIVE is Book Three, the conclusion to the series.

A genre-warping, time-travelling horror novel-slash-feminist manifesto for fans of Clarice Lispector and Jeanette Winterson. Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her work, things start stirring themselves up. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic. Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of queer feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art. "Strange and lyrical. Hval’s writing is surreal and rich with the grotesque banalities of human existence." —Publishers Weekly "The themes of alienation, queerness, and the unsettling nature of desire align Hval with modern mainstays like Chris Kraus, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Maggie Nelson." —Pitchfork