It’s hard to believe we’re already talking about April book releases. Even though we haven’t had a bad winter, I’m ready for spring and spring books. Let’s talk about forthcoming books.

Paris is still the setting of Cara Black’s latest book, Three Hours in Paris, but it’s not an Aimee Leduc Investigation. Instead, it is a historical novel. “In June of 1940, when Paris fell to the Nazis, Hitler spent a total of three hours in the City of Light – abruptly leaving, never to return. To this day, no one knows why.” Black introduces Kate Rees, a young American markswoman, recruited for one assignment: assassinate the Fuhrer. When she misses her mark and the plan unravels, Kate is on the run for her life – all the time with the suspicion that the whole operation was a set-up. (Release date is April 7.)

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the bestselling author of She’s Not There, a New York Times opinion columnist, and human rights activist. In Good Boy, she explores what should be the simplest topic in the world but never is: finding and giving love. The memoir is her account of a remarkable story: showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman – accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. (Release date is April 21.)

Marcia Clark’s new Samantha Brinkman novel, Final Judgment, takes the defense attorney into her new lover’s past. Niko is an ambitious and globally famous entrepreneur. She’s putting her faith in him. She has to. He’s her latest client, a suspect in the murder of an investor whose shady dealings turned Niko’s good life upside down. Fighting for him is now her job. To do it, she must risk everything on a man who could make all her worst fears come true. (Release date is April 21.)

Christina Dalcher, author of Vox, returns with Master Class. It’s a disturbing new future where every child’s potential is regularly determined by a standardized measurement, their quotient (Q). Score high enough, and they attend a top-tier school, and have a golden future. But, score too low, and it’s off to a federal boarding school, and there are limited prospects. Elena Fairchild is a teacher at one of the state’s elite schools. When her own nine-year-old daughter flunks a test, she’s immediately forced to move to a federal institution hundreds of miles away. Elena thought she understood the system because she’s a teacher. Now, her perspective has changed. She just wants her daughter back. And, she’ll do the unthinkable to make it happen. (Release date is April 21.)

Was your family one of those that took road trips when you were a child? In He Started It, Samantha Downing sends three siblings on a trip like no other. Beth, Portia, and Eddie Morgan haven’t all been together in years. But when their wealthy grandfather dies and leaves a cryptic final message, the siblings and their respective partners must come together for a cross-country road trip to fulfill his final wish and secure their inheritance. But time with your family can be tough. It is for everyone. It’s even harder when you’re all keeping secrets and trying to forget a memory, a missing person, an act of revenge, the man in the black truck who won’t stop following your car – and especially when at least one of you is a killer and there’s a body in the trunk. (Release date is April 28.)

The cover copy couldn’t be any more enticing than the writing for Brooke Fossey’s novel, The Big Finish. Duffy Sinclair is only trying to stay out of trouble and stay in his residence at the idyllic Centennial assisted living home. After waiting the first eighty-eight years of his life, he refuses to end up in the roach -infested nursing home down the road. So he relies on his straitlaced best friend, Carl, to keep him on the straight-and-narrow. But when Carl’s granddaughter Josie climbs through their bedroom window with booze on her breath and a black eye, Duffy’s faced with trouble. Before he knows it, he’s running a covert operation that includes hitchhiking and barhopping. Yet, Duffy’s all in thanks to an unlikely friendship that becomes fast family. And, he finally has a chance to leave a legacy. (Release date is April 14.)

You Deserve Each Other is a romantic comedy, a debut novel by Sarah Hogle. Naomi Westfield has the perfect fiance, Nicholas Rose. Their lavish wedding is three months away. But, Naomi is miserable, and utterly sick of Nicholas. She wants out, but there’s a catch: whoever ends the engagement will have to foot the nonrefundable wedding bill. When Naomi discovers that Nicholas, too, has been pretending to be happy, the two of them go head-to-head in a battle of pranks, sabotage, and emotional warfare. There’s one problem. Now that they have nothing to lose, they’re finally being themselves and having fun. (Release date is April 7.)

In Gill Hornby’s novel, Miss Austen, she reimagines the life of the most important person in Jane Austen’s life, her sister, Cassandra. For the two decades after her sister’s death, Cassandra Austen has spent her time visiting friends and relatives while working to protect her sister’s reputation. Now in her sixties, she goes to stay with the family of her long-dead fiance, in search of a a trove of her sister’s letters. When she finds the letters, she has to confront the Jane’s past as well as secrets about Cassandra herself. (Release date is April 7.)

The Book of Longings is the latest novel by Sue Monk Kidd, author of the bestseller, The Secret Life of Bees. It’s the story of Ana, a young woman in the first century who defies expectations for women, engages in scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about silenced women. When she meets the eight-year-old Jesus, they’re drawn to each others spiritual and philosophical ideas. Once they’re married, they live in Nazareth with Jesus’ brothers and his mother, Mary. And, then, her impetuous streak forces her to flee to Alexandria before Jesus’ ministry begins. (Release date is April 21.)

I’m eager to read Conor Knighton’s nonfiction account, Leave Only Footprints. It’s the memoir of his year spent traveling across the United States, “My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Eery National Park”. He shares how his journey through these natural wonders ended up changing his view on everything from God and love to politics and technology. (Release date is April 7.)

Inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Kristin Miller’s In Her Shadow is the story of a pregnant young woman who becomes obsessed with the disappearance of her lover’s wife. Once his secretary Colleen is now pregnant with Michael’s baby. When he brings her to his opulent estate, Ravenwood, she is abruptly thrust into a life of luxury she’s never known. But, the house is filled with the memory of Michael’s wife, Joanne, who left months ago. The staff is hostile, and there are entire wings she’s not allowed to enter. When bones are unearthed in the grove across the street, Michael falls under suspicion. Now, Colleen discovers she may be headed for the same fate as Joanne. (Release date is April 21.)

I hope Beth Morrey’s novel, The Love Story of Missy Carmichael, lives up to the hype because the synopsis captured my heart. The world has changed around Missy Carmichael. At seventy-nine, she’s estranged from her daughter, her son and only grandson live across the world in Australia, and her great love is gone. She spends her days reliving her past. The last thing she expects if for two perfect strangers and one spirited dog to break through her prickly exterior and show Missy how much love she still has to give. (Release date is April 7.)

Phaedra Patrick, the author of The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper, brings us The Secrets of Love Story Bridge. Mitchell Fisher hates all things romance. Only his daughter, Poppy, knows he’s still grieving the loss of her mother. He relishes his job cutting the padlocks that couples fasten to the famous “love story” bridge. Everything changes the day he rescues a woman who falls from the bridge. But, then she disappears, and he’s shocked to learn she’s been missing for almost a year. He teams up with the woman’s sister to find her. But, she’s only left one clue behind, a message on the padlock she hung on the bridge. (Release date is April 28.)

Some of us have been waiting for years for Julia Spencer-Fleming’s next Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery. Hid from Our Eyes tells the story of two murders, twenty years apart, with eerie similarities: a woman in a party dress murdered with no obvious cause of death. The last known suspect? Russ Van Alstyne, never convicted but never completely learned either. Now, decades later, a third young woman is found dead in a party dress. The new case couldn’t have come at a worse time for Russ. He’s now Millers Kill Police Chief. His department is on the chopping block. There’s a new baby at home, and Clare is facing her own troubles. The pressure is on. (Release date is April 7.)

The jacket copy of Elena Taylor’s All We Buried caught me when it said, “For fans of Julia Keller…All We Buried disturbs the long-sleeping secrets of a small Washington State mountain town.” Interim sheriff Elizabeth “Bet” Rivers investigates a case in her hometown of Collier. She’s always had a repeat nightmare of a shadowy figure throwing a suspicious object into her hometown lake. But, a body floats to the surface in the lake, and no one can identify Jane Doe. Now, it’s time to confront the tragic history of the town. But, the more she learns, the more she realizes she doesn’t know the townspeople as well as she thought. (Release date is April 7.)

Elaine Viets returns with A Star is Dead, the latest Angela Richman, Death Investigator mystery. When a bitter, aging movie diva ends up dead in Angela’s community, she’s not willing for a friend, Mario Garcia, to be railroaded because he’s a Hispanic immigrant and the outsider in the movie star’s crew. She might be interfering in a police investigation, but she has a few clues the police detective refuses to see. (Release date is April 7.)

Once again, Kate White brings readers a twisted, gripping story, Have You Seen Me? When finance journalist Ally Linden arrives early to work in her Manhattan office, she finds she’s forgotten her keycard and needs to have a colleague she’s never met let her in. When her boss finally arrives, he’s surprised to see her. She hasn’t worked there in five years. Ally knows her name, but little else. After multiple interviews with a hospital psychiatrist, she begins to piece together important facts, but she still has no memory of the previous two days. It seems sessions with her therapist triggered a childhood memory of a murder that was never solved. Now, as ominous details of Ally’s missing two days pile up, so does the terrifying pressure. She has to recover the time she lost before the time she has left runs out. (Release date is April 28.)

Fans of Marie Benedict or Melanie Benjamin may want to try Tracey Emerson Wood’s novel, The Engineer’s Wife. It’s based on the true story of the woman who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Emily Warren Roebling refuses to live conventionally. She’s determined to make change as she fights for women’s suffrage. But when her husband, Wash, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, is injured on the job, he asks her to give up her dreams to make his possible. Under his guidance, she assumes his role, and becomes consumed by his project. Whose legacy is she building, hers, or her husband’s? (Release date is April 7.)

Do any of those titles appeal to you? If not, maybe you’ll enjoy something from the following list. These are additional treasures in my closet.

Beah, Ishmael – Little Family: A Novel (4/28)
Bell, Darcey – Something She’s Not Telling Us (4/7)
Brown, Janelle – Pretty Things (4/21)
Cha, Frances – If I Had Your Face (4/21)
Halls, Stacey – The Lost Orphan (4/7)
Lowry, Mary Pauline – The Roxy Letters (4/7)
McFarland, Jeni – The House of Deep Water (4/21)
Moshfegh, Ottessa – Death in Her Hands (4/21)
Scott, Stephanie – What’s Left of Me is Yours (4/21)
Sligar, Sara – Take Me Apart (4/28)
Thompson, Victoria – Murder on Pleasant Avenue (4/28)
Thorpe, Rufi – The Knockout Queen (4/28)
Venter, Irma – Hard Rain (4/16)
White, Elle Brooke – Dead on the Vine (4/7)
Zhang, C Pam – How Much of These Hills is Gold (4/7)