I have returned to looking through boxes of uncatalogued books, mostly purchased at the Planned Parenthood Book Sale, in 2018 or 2019. I am pretty sure the books I found this week are books from the 2019 sale. Only purchased about 6 months ago, yet still I am surprised by some of them.
Echoes from the Dead by Johan Theorin
I have been interested in this book for years but never went out of my way to find a copy. It was originally published in 2007 in Sweden, but published in English translation in 2008. Publishers Weekly calls it a "deeply disturbing debut" but reviews I have read are very positive. It takes place on the Baltic island of Öland and is book 1 in the Öland quartet. The subject is the disappearance of a five-year-old boy 20 years previously.
Dark Fire by C. J. Sansum
This is the second book in the Matthew Shardlake series, published in 2004. The first book is Dissolution, in which Shardlake is a lawyer helping Thomas Cromwell to close down the monasteries in England. Shardlake is sent to investigate the murder of a royal commissioner living in one of the monasteries. The history of this time (1537) is very interesting. In the past I had not read much historical fiction set before the 1900s. Dark Fire is set in 1540 and I am not sure where it takes Shardlake but I liked the first one so I expecting this one to be very good too.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
This is Carson McCuller's first novel, published in 1940 when she was just twenty-three, and it is on my classics list. I don't know much about it and I prefer to leave it that way until I read it.
The Witch Elm by Tana French
I had completely forgotten that I had bought this book at the sale. It is French's first standalone novel, published in 2018, after publishing six books in the Dublin Murder Squad series. I have read four books in that series and liked them all, and I had planned to hold off on this one until I read the last two in the series. But I found The Trespasser (book 6 in the series) and The Witch Elm at the book sale but not The Secret Place (book 5). So I may break down and read this book sooner than planned.
