St. Martin’s Press

At 26, Cricket has little to show for her life: she’s a college dropout stuck in a dead-end job, with few meaningful relationships. She long since turned her back on her small, Adirondack hometown, but on a whim, she tells her older sister she’ll move back to care for their father, Arthur, whose memory loss has made independent living impossible. Her sister—the “sensible one”—is poised to take a job abroad and planned to place Arthur in memory care.

Arthur, once merely affable, now spins stories more vivid and compelling than ever. Rather than dismiss his uncanny premonitions, Cricket allows him the grace to offer advice to anyone who asks. Soon, Arthur is known as “the Oracle,” drawing visitors from far and wide for consultations. When one guest—Cricket’s on-again, off-again boss—tries to monetize these sessions, Cricket and Arthur’s friends push back. As Arthur’s gift breathes new life into the sleepy forest town, Cricket reckons with her own role in an accident that drove her away from the lake.

The novel is charming and often funny, but what sets it apart is how it invites readers, through Cricket’s curiosity, to reconsider Alzheimer’s in unexpected ways. When so much is lost, can something wonderful still remain?

Berkley

Lottie Jones is a seventy-five-year-old woman living a quiet life in an Oregon cottage. She enjoys playing bingo at church, gossiping with friends and spending time with her son and grandchildren—she’s content with her life. But she’s living under an assumed name and a big secret: Lottie is a retired serial killer who was suspected of killing three people decades ago. Her name was splashed across tabloids, and she became a local pariah, but she was never arrested or convicted. She successfully sued the city for damaging her reputation, then took her substantial payout, changed her identity and started over.

Lottie’s quiet life is disrupted when investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up at her door, hoping to produce a documentary that sets the record straight about those unsolved murders. Lottie does not want a show done about her—so she decides the only solution is to kill Plum. What ensues is a dark comedy of an older killer trying to get away with murder in a modern world with technology and forensics that she didn’t have to contend with decades ago. Will she get away with it—and should she?