In My Mailbox Monday

Letters to Juliet Capulet

In September Mailbox Monday is sponsored by BermudaOnion. In My Mailbox is sponsored by The Story Siren.  These are the places where we brag about share the books that arrived in our mailboxes each week.  As always, I also try to find a mailbox that is somehow associated with what I'm reading right now.  I'm currently reading Interred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell, which has a plot associated with Shakespeare.  I couldn't find an appropriate mailbox, but I did find a picture of modern-day letters addressed to Juliet in Verona (yes, that Juliet).  Apparently she has a house, a balcony, a mailbox, and volunteers who answer letters to her, most of which ask for advice in matters of love.  Pretty cool, huh?

Here's what came for me this week - both from the publisher:

The False Friend by Myla Goldberg.  Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One after­noon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened. The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both. Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contra­dicts Celia’s version of the past. 

Moonlight Mile by Dennis Lehane.  Amanda McCready was four years old when she vanished from a Boston neighborhood twelve years ago. Desperate pleas for help from the child's aunt led investigators Kenzie and Gennaro to take on the case. The pair risked everything to find the young girl—only to orchestrate her return to a neglectful mother and a broken home.  Now Amanda is sixteen—and gone again. A stellar student, brilliant but aloof, she seemed destined to escape her upbringing. Yet Amanda's aunt is once more knocking on Patrick Kenzie's door, fearing the worst for the little girl who has blossomed into a striking, clever young woman—a woman who hasn't been seen in weeks.  Haunted by their consciences, Kenzie and Gennaro revisit the case that troubled them the most. Their search leads them into a world of identity thieves, methamphetamine dealers, a mentally unstable crime boss and his equally demented wife, a priceless, thousand-year-old cross, and a happily homicidal Russian gangster. It's a world in which motives and allegiances constantly shift and mistakes are fatal.  In their desperate fight to confront the past and find Amanda McCready, Kenzie and Gennaro will be forced to question if it's possible to do the wrong thing and still be right or to do the right thing and still be wrong. As they face an evil that goes beyond broken families and broken dreams, they discover that the sins of yesterday don't always stay buried and the crimes of today could end their lives.