Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Joy Jordan-Lake’s Echoes of Us, which is out October 8th 2024.

In the midst of World War II, a Tennessee farm boy, a Jewish Cambridge student, and a German POW forge a connection that endures—against all odds.

But now everything that Will Dobbins, Dov Silverberg, and Hans Hessler fought for is at risk as their descendants clash for control of the corporation they founded together. In an attempt to remake its tattered corporate image, the firm hires event planner Hadley Jacks and her sister Kitzie to organize a reunion for the families on St. Simons Island, Georgia, the place that changed all three men’s lives forever.

As Hadley and her sister delve into the friends’ past, they uncover the life of the courageous young woman who links them all together…and the old wounds that could tear everything apart.

Told in dual timelines spanning World War II and the present, Echoes of Us follows the ripple effects of war, the bonds that outlast it, and the hope that ultimately carries us forward.

Chapter 1
Hans Hessler

APRIL 7, 1942

OFF THE COAST OF ST. SIMONS ISLAND, GEORGIA

At twilight, the U-boat rises to just below the surface, its periscope spearing up through the waves. Its view of the shore is good. Startling, even. A splay of lights from what might be a grand hotel blink cheerily back at the chief engineer.

“Mein Gott,” he mutters.

The hotel’s glow, golden and shimmering on the water, strikes him as what the Americans must be like themselves: bright and shiny and confident, still fresh to this war. Cocky, even, in all their New World, never-tested assumptions. They must be so different from him and this crew, who are bearded now, with boils and blemishes erupting over their boyish faces. They scrabble like rats for decent food. They stink, too, from long weeks without baths.

How untouched by deprivation these Americans still are, how not yet warped by horror. He feels resentment rise like bile in his throat, burning and sour.

Verdammt, Hans thinks, though even a full ocean away from his mother, he does not curse aloud. Why do they have to be such easy prey, these Americans?

Peering into the periscope should be the commander’s job—and even now he rests one hand on the ocular box like he’s laying claim to his territory. As the chief engineer, Hans has been invited—commanded, actually—to look, which could mean the commander is wary. Maybe beneath all his glinting medals, he’s reliving his mistake with the Portuguese tanker, a neutral ship he mistook for an Allied vessel and torpedoed to shards.

“You see . . . what, precisely?” the commander demands from behind.

His voice has gone husky. Dehydration, no doubt—they never have enough drinking water inside this cigarette lighter of a ship. But maybe fear too.

“Can the Americans,” Hans wonders aloud, “really be this stupid? The lights on the shore, they’re blazing.”

His voice, too, is hoarse. He’s been trapped in this straitjacket of steel himself for weeks now—he does not let himself count how many.

But the commander makes no response. Hans’s speech is snarled over with a rough rural Bavarian accent from the south of his country, one that a sophisticated German from the north very well might not understand—or acknowledge if he did. Either way, the commander merely clenches his jaw, his hands clasped behind his back.

Hans takes one last look at the stretch of water and the glowing island beyond.

These ridiculous people, he thinks, drinking their port, surrounded by palms. Do they not know that in New York City, also blazing with light, this very sub only a few weeks ago hunted prey? Like now, it was the light that allowed the kill. These too-happy, too-shiny people can’t possibly know just how close Death is stalking.

Their ignorance—their innocence too—is about to be shattered. Snuffed out. Ruined. As war does. As war has already done to Hans.

He is homesick. He is frightened. Above all, he must never appear to be either of these.

Closing his eyes, he pictures the farm back home in Bavaria: its green shutters sturdy, its window boxes brimming with red geraniums, the spruces and fir towering above its steeply pitched roof. For a moment, he forgets the commander standing at his elbow and Death coiled around the ocular box, waiting.

Now he forces his eyes open again, presses his forehead to the cold steel.

Before he can stop himself, before he can pretend nothing new is passing the scope, Hans gasps.

Chapter 2
Hadley Jacks

APRIL 7, 2022

OFF THE COAST OF ST. SIMONS ISLAND

The word tragedy—I’m sure that’s what he just said—spins me around at the rail of the yacht, and I suck in my breath. The wind whips my hair into my face. “Here, did you say? How long ago?”

Nothing about this place feels tragic—the ocean swelling and sparkling around us at twilight, the island off to our port with its palms and live oaks, its pastel cottages hemming a golden beach, a line of red tiled roofs and blue beach umbrellas suggesting a posh resort.

The captain’s face is fixed ahead, his jaw and shoulders squared, rigid even. As if speaking isn’t technically allowed in his role.

Patience has never been one of my virtues, but I manage to wait, focusing on the yacht’s bow two stories below where we stand on the flybridge. The Atlantic defers to us, parting in shimmering blue fans on each side.

This, I think, must be what it’s like to have power and influence—and apparently, money to burn.

As if reading my thoughts, the captain swings his head back toward our host, who sits a few yards away—his back almost preternaturally straight, his gray suit impeccably tailored and pressed—above a teak deck no doubt custom crafted for lolling about. I’ve worked for his type before: the sort of man who’s become his own monument to wealth, so much of too much that it’s turned him to stone.

Though his face shows no expression, he’s listening to my sister, who is laughing and lifting her glass of chardonnay. Because Kitzie could find kinship and connection with an eel.

“Eighty years ago today exactly. That is, from tonight.”

The voice jolts me back to attention, though it takes me an instant to realize it’s the captain answering my question.

“And yeah. Right here,” he adds. But that’s all, as if he’s now used up his daily quota of words.

With his eyes covered by Ray-Bans, his jaw rigid, his feet planted, with tanned forearms and hands unmoving on the ship’s wheel, I’d swear he wasn’t real—just some heavily themed restaurant’s mannequin of a sea captain—if some of the sun-bleached hair poking out from under his cap didn’t lift just a bit in the breeze or the muscles under his polo didn’t tense. Now and then, too, his jaw, scruffy with blond stubble, shifts side to side. He’s younger than I first thought.

“What sort of tragedy?” I ask, glancing back toward the yacht’s owner.

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Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Joy Jordan-Lake’s A Bend of Light, which releases on September 6th 2022.

Five years after the war, Amie Stilwell, a photo interpreter for an Allied unit in England, returns to her hometown in Maine. Jobless and discouraged but stubbornly resourceful, she’s starting over in the same coastal village where her life once went so wrong. Waiting for her is Shibby Travis, the surrogate mother with whom Amie never lost touch. But the unexpected also awaits…

A silent, abandoned boy is found with a note from a stranger pleading that he be watched over. Amie and Shibby take him in, but the mysteries multiply when a Boston socialite is found dead in Amie’s barn and an old friend, believed to be a casualty of war, suddenly reappears.

Trained to see what others cannot, to scan for clues, and to expose enemies, Amie uses her skills to protect a child, solve a crime, and find the motive behind a veteran’s masquerade. But through the hazy filter of a town’s secrets, Amie must also confront her own painful past.

 For all her dread in coming back to this place, this rockbound, sea-pounded village, she’d forgotten how much she’d once loved it.

Edging the long blue nose of her roadster close to the harbor, Amie Stilwell rolled down her window to listen. After all her training during the war to focus only on what she could see—down to the splinter of a detail—she’d forgotten how much this place’s pull on her involved sound.

The bell buoys were tolling, their low tones rolling over the water. A loon called his three notes of longing—the I’m here, here, where are you? Waves splashed and fizzed and sucked at the boulders on the shoreline.

…A maroon car purred past, its paint so new it glowed against the wet road. The driver, his fedora pulled low and scarf wrapped high, appeared to be paying little attention.

…Up ahead, a streetlamp caught the glint of the hood ornament on the car. A silver B tilted forward as if poised for flight, a wing on either side. The vehicle’s body swept back in perfect, undulating proportions, all in that deep, glowing maroon.

But the Bentley only rolled forward a scant few more feet. Then stopped. Directly on top of the tracks.

Its broad headlamps flicked off, even as the train sounded its horn again. Louder this time. Closer.

With growing horror, Amie watched the driver—the brim of the man’s fedora just visible—tilt his head back. Not like someone desperately trying to wrench a car out of a stuck gear. Not like someone preparing to leap from a stalled vehicle.

But, rather, like someone waiting. Stoically. Shoulders hunched up. Braced.

Amie felt her lungs contract in panic.

Good God, the man is braced for impact.

Surely he wouldn’t knowingly . . .

From behind a line of white-balconied inns, a flash of steel. The train approaching. At top speed. Its whistle sounded again, tracks vibrating, its long, sleek body rushing toward them.

It was going to flatten the Bentley and its driver.

Her heart was hammering in her ears.

“Move,” she murmured aloud. “Dear God—move!”

The train’s brakes shrieked as its engineer must’ve caught sight of the car—but too late. Much too late to stop.

And still the car did not budge. The silhouette of the man sat still as death.

Move . . . Move . . . Move!

Gripping the steering wheel with her left hand, she lunged with her right for her dog’s collar. Her foot stomped the accelerator flat to the floor. The roadster hesitated, tires spitting wet leaves.

But only for an instant. Now, its tires finding asphalt, it shot forward. Straight for the rear of the Bentley.

Amie felt her own shoulders hunch to her ears as the roadster’s engine and the train’s screaming brakes and thundering wheels all roared in her head.

Straining, Amie kept the accelerator pressed flat to the floor.

As she herself braced for impact.

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Read on to discover our picks and tell us in the comments below if you have or will be reading one!

Artemis by Andy Weir | Goodreads

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. Smuggling helps when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But it’s just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit riskier than the first.

Bonfire by Krysten Ritter | Goodreads

Ten years ago Abby Williams left her small town and now works as an environmental lawyer in Chicago, but a new case takes her back home. Tasked with investigating Optimal Plastics, the town’s most high-profile company and economic heart, she discovers connections to Barrens’ biggest scandal from more than a decade ago involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her closest friends—just before Kaycee disappeared for good. As Abby tries to find out what really happened, she unearths a ritual called “The Game,” which will threaten the reputations, and lives, of the community and risk exposing a darkness that may consume her.

The Night Language by David Rocklin | Goodreads

Prince Alamayou of Abyssinia is taken from his home to the court of Queen Victoria, a world he knows nothing about. With him is Philip Layard, a young apprentice to one of the doctors on the battlefield, who becomes Alamayou’s guardian, only friend, and eventually, the love of his life. When Parliament accuses Alamayou of murder, he is sentenced to return to Abyssinia, where he will be executed. His only hope comes from the very thing that cannot be uttered: the unexpected and forbidden love between Alamayou and Philip.

Jade City by Fonda Lee | Goodreads

Magical jade is the lifeblood of the island of Kekon with the Green Bone warriors, including the Kaul family, using it to enhance their abilities and defend the island from foreign invasion. A new generation of Kauls vies for control of Kekon’s bustling capital city and they care about nothing but protecting their own. When a powerful new drug emerges that lets anyone—even foreigners—wield jade, causing the Kauls and the rival Ayt family to erupt into violence. The outcome will determine the fate of all Green Bones and of Kekon itself.

American Drifter by Heather Graham and Chad Michael Murray | Goodreads

River Roulet, a young US Army veteran struggles to shake the horrors of his past, as the memories remain. In Rio de Janeiro, it seems he is pulling his life together at last when he meets the enchanting Natal, an impassioned journalist who lives with the gangster that rules Rio. They two flee together into the interior of Brazil, where they are pursued by the drug lord, Tio Amato, and his men. River is forced to kill one of those men, the chase becomes even deadlier and the Brazilian government jumps on their trail as well.

Renegades by Marissa Meyer | Goodreads

The Renegades are a syndicate of prodigies—humans with extraordinary abilities—who emerged from the ruins of a crumbled society and established peace and order where chaos reigned. As champions of justice, they are a symbol of hope and courage…except to the villains they once overthrew. Nova has a reason to hate the Renegades, and she is on a mission for vengeance. Closing in on her target, she meets Adrian, a Renegade boy who believes in justice—and in Nova. But Nova’s allegiance is to a villain who has the power to end them both.

Murder In The Lincoln White House by C.M. Gleason | Goodreads

At the inaugural ball, Lincoln’s entourage is on their guard, but trouble comes nonetheless when a man is found stabbed to death. Lincoln dispatches Quinn, his assistant and jack-of-all-trades, instead of Allan Pinkerton, the head of security, to discreetly investigate. New to Washington, he must navigate through high society, political personages, and a city preparing for war in order to solve the crime. He finds unexpected allies in Sophie Gates, a female journalist and Dr. Hilton, a free man of color. With their help, he must make haste to solve the murder if he is to protect the president he’s pledged to serve.

This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada | Goodreads

Catarina Agatta is a hacker. In her world, people are implanted with technology to recode their DNA, allowing them to change their bodies in any way they want. Her father is a legendary geneticist who may be the last hope for defeating a plague but he was kidnapped by a shadowy organisation called Cartaxus, leaving Cat to survive the last two years on her own. When Cole, a Cartaxus soldier arrives with news he has been killed with a message he managed to create a vaccine, and Cole needs Cat’s help to release it.

The Overneath by Peter S. Beagle | Goodreads

An odd couple patrols a county full of mythological beasts and ornery locals. A familiar youngster from the world of The Last Unicorn is gifted in magic but terrible at spell-casting. A seemingly incorruptible judge meets his match in a mysterious thief who steals his heart. Two old friends discover that the Overneath goes anywhere, including locations better left unvisited.

The Magic Misfits by Neil Patrick Harris | Goodreads

When street magician Carter runs away, he never expects to find friends and magic in a sleepy New England town. But like any good trick, things change instantly as greedy B.B. Bosso and his crew of crooked carnies arrive to steal anything and everything they can get their sticky fingers on. After a fateful encounter with the local purveyor of illusion, Dante Vernon, Carter teams up with five other like-minded kids. Together, using both teamwork and magic, they’ll set out to save the town of Mineral Wells from Bosso’s villainous clutches.

A Tangled Mercy by Joy Jordan-Lake | Goodreads

After the sudden death of her troubled mother, struggling Harvard grad student Kate Drayton flees to Charleston, South Carolina, the place where her parents met. Convinced it holds the key to understanding her family, she’s determined to unearth information on a failed 1822 slave revolt—the subject of her mother’s own research. Nearly two centuries earlier, Tom Russell grappled with a terrible choice: arm the uprising or keep his own neck out of the noose and protect the woman he loves. Kate’s attempts to discover what drove her mother’s obsession with Charleston’s history are derailed by a horrific massacre in the very same landmark church.

The Story of Arthur Truluv by Elizabeth Berg | Goodreads

Arthur, a widow, meets Maddy, a troubled teenage girl who is avoiding school by hiding out at the cemetery, where Arthur goes every day for lunch to have imaginary conversations with his late wife, and think about the lives of others. The two strike up a friendship that draws them out of isolation. Maddy gives Arthur the name Truluv, for his loving and positive responses to every outrageous thing she says or does. With Arthur’s nosy neighbor Lucille, they create a loving and unconventional family, proving that life’s most precious moments are sweeter when shared.

Find more November releases here!

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