Leave no Trace

Fascinating novel by Mindy Mejia. Ten years ago, Lucas Blackthorne and his father trekked into the Boundary Waters wilderness; and didn't come out. They were presumed dead. Until... a decade later, mostly mute and prone to violence, Lucas walks out. He is put in a psychiatric hospital. Maya Stark, assistant language therapist, is charged with making a connection. She has secrets of her own, and abandonment issues. She's drawn closer to Lucas, and will risk all to reunite him with his father.

In the Kingdom of Ice

The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette by Hampton Sides. I'd never heard of this particular polar expedition, which was apparently a big deal in it's day. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the wealthy and eccentric owner of The New York Herald, had recently captured the world's attention by dispatching his reporter, Stanley, to find Dr. Livingstone in Africa. (Never mind that Livingstone wasn't actually lost - he sold tons of papers!) Now Bennett wanted to recreate that sensation on an even grander scale. He funded an official U.S. Naval expedition to reach the North Pole, choosing as its leader a young officer named George Washington De Long, who had gained fame for a rescue operation off the coast of Greenland.

July 8, 1879, De Long and 32 men on the USS Jeanette set sail from San Francisco. North of the Bering Strait they were trapped in pack ice, where they remained for two years when the hull was breached, sinking the Jeanette to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The men found themselves marooned on the ice cap a thousand miles north of Siberia with three open boats and only the barest of supplies. Thus began their march across the frozen sea. Facing various hardships, the expedition battled madness and starvation as they struggled for the Siberian coast.

After the Crash

A mystery by Michael Bussi. December 23,1980, a night flight bound for Paris crashes in the Swiss Alps, killing all but one of the 169 passengers. The only survivor is a three-month-old girl thrown from the plane before fire consumed it. The problem? Two infants were on board. Is the "Miracle Child of Mont Terri" Emilie Vitral, whose grandparents sell snacks from a caravan on the beaches of northern France or is she Lyse-Rose de Carville, whose grandparents are in the oil business, wealthy, powerful, and dangerous.

18 years later, a private detective given the task of solving the mystery of the girl known as "Lylie" is on the verge of giving up and committing suicide when he sees a secret in plain view. Will he live to tell it? And Lylie, a lovely young university student, gives a secret notebook to Marc, the young man who loves her, and disappears. After Marc reads the notebook, he frantically searches for Lylie. But he is not the only one searching for her.

This one had a twist I didn't see coming at all. A thrilling read.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

By David Lagercrantz, continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, translated from Swedish by George Golding. Lisbeth Salander is back. She has hacked into some delicate, government computers. The journalist Blomkvist gets a call from a source late one night claiming to have information vital to the USA. He needs a scoop; Salander has her own agenda. Together, they go against a web of governments, cybercriminals, and spies. The price could be death.

Final Girls

A thriller by Riley Sager. When Quincy Carpenter was in college she got away for a weekend with several friends in the Pennsylvania mountains. While there, a stranger with a knife changed her life forever. He massacred her friends, leaving her with wounds running into the arms of a State Trooper in the area to search for an escapee from the asylum nearby. The escapee was quickly dispatched, and Quincy was left with a gaping hole in her memories. She was also now a member of a club she never wanted to join - girls who had survived a massacre. The media dubs them Final Girls. There are three: Lisa, Sam, and now Quincy. Fast forward ten years. Quincy seems to have gotten control of her life; her boyfriend Jeff lives with her, she has a baking blog, Coop, the State Trooper, keeps tabs on her. Then Lisa is found in her bathtub with her wrists slit and Sam blows into town to stay with Quincy and turn her life upside down. What really happened the night her friends died?