I promise I’m not trying to wish the year away when I post about forthcoming books a month ahead of time. Although it’s been called Treasures in My Closet from the days when all these ARCs were paper, and actually were piled in my closet, nowadays most of them are digital galleys I was granted access to, forthcoming books I want to mention. I hope you find a book or two you want to read in this list of February releases. I’m also looking forward to seeing what books you want to add. (And, don’t forget the January releases listed at https://lesasbookcritiques.com/january-treasures-in-my-closet-8/.)

Let’s kick off the new list with a debut mystery, Murder Will Out by Jennifer K. Breedlove. I usually enjoy the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award winners. Breedlove brings coastal Maine to life in Murder Will Out, a lighter, modern gothic mystery that’s as atmospheric as it is heart-warming. It’s set in coastal Maine where Willow Stone investigates her godmother’s suspicious death and threats surrounding the inheritance of Cameron House. (Release date is Feb. 17.)

Lucy Connelly, author of the Scottish Isle mysteries, launches a new series set in Wales with The Curious Case of the Poisoned Professor. After crossing the pond, Dr. Gwen Griffith finds herself in the quirky place she fell in love with, Dillynaidd, Wales. A former managing editor for a Texan newspaper, Gwen is ready for the next stage in her life as the head of the journalism department at the local university in town. With her best friend, Carolyn Sparks–who is also the university’s dean–at her side, Dillynaidd feels like a dream, until murder comes knocking at her doorstep. Gwen had only just met the victim, Dr. Alice Rice, at a faculty party, but that doesn’t stop police detective Gareth Jones from suspecting her of foul play–after all, the victim was found on her doorstep. With her journalism background, Gwen decides that it’s up to her to clear her own name. But she’ll need all the help she can get when her idyllic small-town life is turned upside down in order to stay one step ahead of the killer. (Release date is Feb. 24.)

Family Drama is Rebecca Fallon’s debut novel. In New England, Susan Bliss is a young mother married to a professor.
In LA, Susan Byrne stars in a soap opera beloved coast to coast. Decades after she’s gone, her twins have no idea of their mother’s fame. But the past can’t stay hidden forever. It’s 1997, and snow is blanketing a New England beach. Two befuddled seven-year-olds watch as their mother’s body is tipped overboard a crumbling boat. A Viking funeral, followed by a raucous wake. A send-off fit for soap opera star: Susan Bliss. Fifteen years earlier, Susan is a blazing, beautiful young woman, passionate about her art. It’s impossible not to fall in love with her, and so Alcott, a practical professor, does—hopelessly. And so begins the love story of Susan’s two-paneled life: an unconventional, jetlag-filled arrangement that takes her back and forth between her life in New England as a wife and mother to young twins to the bright lights of Los Angeles, where she becomes the beloved star of a daytime soap. In the present, Susan’s twins grow up in the shadow of her all-consuming absence. (Release date is Feb. 3.)

In Sadeqa Johnson’s Keeper of Lost Children,  one American woman’s vision in post WWII Germany will tie together three people in an unexpected way. Ethel Gathers, the wife of an American officer, is living in Occupied Germany in the 1950s. After discovering a local orphanage filled with the abandoned mixed-race children of German women and Black American GI’s, Ethel feels compelled to help find these children homes. (Release date is Feb. 10.)

Sacred Light is the fourth book in Kathryn Lasky’s mystery series featuring Georgia O’Keeffe. Under the spellbinding stars of the New Mexico desert, a bloodied axe carves through the night—its story buried in silence and sand . . .New Mexico, 1937. Painter Georgia O’Keeffe is excited for her trip to the intriguing wilderness of the Bisti Badlands—a common site for archaeological excavations, it’s a historical place with enchanting desertscapes but also perilous natural structures. Her trip is overshadowed by the sad news of her friend and native Juan Nez going missing. No one knows where he is, and it’s unlikely he’s gotten lost. He knows these lands like the back of his hand. Has something happened to him and, if so, was it an accident, or has a horrible crime taken place? (Release date is Feb. 3.)

The sixth book in Con Lehane’s 42nd Street Library mystery series is Murder in the Reading Room. New York crime-fiction librarian—and reluctant amateur sleuth—Ray Ambler investigates a puzzling murder that’s too close to home for comfort. Raymond Ambler, crime-fiction curator at New York City’s prestigious 42nd Street Library, doesn’t consider it a big deal when he misses a call from visiting professor Robin Cartwright . . . until she turns up dead in a hotel room. Who killed the quiet academic, and why? Ambler feels duty-bound to find the culprit, and not just because the police half-suspect he’s guilty of the crime. It wasn’t just Professor Cartwright’s phone call he missed, but any sign that she was in danger. Robin was researching accidental deaths she believed were murders—could her work have got her killed? Soon Ambler’s knee-deep in suspects, including a shady ex-husband, a slippery pastor, and at least one of his own colleagues. But the clock is ticking. If he doesn’t catch a ruthless killer soon, it won’t just be his own life in danger, but those of his partner and newborn child. (Release date is Feb. 3.)

Lisa Q. Mathews’ second Irish Bed & Breakfast mystery is Buried in Shamrocks. Kate Buckley returns to her Irish-themed hometown for the summer, but when her ex becomes the prime suspect in his fiancée’s murder, she must clear his name for the sake of their daughters. Kate and her daughters, Maeve and Bliz, are back in Shamrock, Massachusetts, and Kate faces a big decision: Should they move back to their hometown for good? As she contemplates the idea, all the businesses in town, including her family’s B&B, the Buckley House, are busy preparing for the annual Great Shamrock Fair in hopes of luring back tourists after a murder during St. Patrick’s Week. But when Kate’s ex, Ian, arrives in town from Ireland to perform with his band at the festival and his new fiancée, Fallon, is found dead at the fairgrounds, any chance of a fun and peaceful family summer goes up in green smoke. (Release date is Feb. 24.)

It’s hard to believe that Booking for Trouble is the sixteenth book in Jenn McKinlay’s Library Lover’s series. It’s all hands on deck when a dead body is found near the small town of Briar Creek . Just off the shores of the coastal Connecticut town of Briar Creek are two small islands, which library director Lindsey Norris visits with her new book-boat, inspired by the bookmobiles she’s seen traveling across the country. Nothing, not even the infamous feud between the families who own the Split Islands, can stop Lindsey from getting books into the hands of readers. But when Lindsey and her boat captain husband, Mike Sullivan, discover a body on the rocky outcropping of one of the islands, Lindsey’s new library venture quickly becomes a murder investigation. (Release date is Feb. 24.)

Well, this debut is a little different; Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack. A thirty-two-year-old sex worker is shocked when she’s approached by undercover government agents to aid them in a top-secret plot to assassinate a politician known as Meat Neck. But once the deed is done, she realizes what made her the perfect recruit: She’s 100% disposable. Holed up in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, she now has only two days, her wits, and a laptop to save her own life.Her best bet is to reach out to the wildly popular feminist investigative podcast Justice for Bimbos. In a hastily typed series of emails, the newly minted “Murder Bimbo” explains how she was recruited and then trained by a cabal of code-named US agents to take out Meat Neck.
Then she opens a new email. This time, it’s addressed to her ex, and the facts line up a little differently…(Release date is Feb. 10.)

Carlene O’Connor’s twelfth Irish Village mystery is Murder at an Irish Session. As pregnant Siobhán O’Sullivan awaits bringing her new life into the world, she’s bringing new life to her village of Kilbane in County Cork, Ireland, with a music and matchmaking festival. But one matchmaker is about to find out that Cupid’s arrow can be fatal. Siobhán loves to see the joy playing trad music brings to her brother Ciaran, but his concern that he’ll never find a mate pulls at her heartstrings. So she proposes that Kilbane host a music and matchmaking festival to draw single trad musicians. While renowned matchmaker Liam Noone plays Cupid with his Lucky Book, music—and hopefully love—will fill the pubs and the autumn air. Turning over his precious Lucky Book to Siobhán for safekeeping, Liam takes the stage to introduce matched musician couples who will kick off the festival in the town square. Suddenly all goes black. When the lights come back on, the matchmaker has met his maker, impaled through the heart with an arrow made from the sharpened bow of a bass. Was it the fiddle player, the flute player, the drummer, the piper, the squeeze box player, or the bass player who struck a sour note? Garda Siobhán and her husband Macdara must pick up the tempo to make whoever committed this crime of passion face the music. (Release date is Feb. 24.)

The Copywriter is Daniel Poppick’s comic novel of a poet as an office worker. It’s the summer of 2017 and D__, a poet working by day as a copywriter at a retail start-up, can’t dispel a creeping sense of dissolution on the horizon. Whether it be the company’s new twenty-four-year-old CEO, who has more charisma than work experience, the growing distance between D__ and his longtime girlfriend, or a mounting sense of unreality in the wake of the first delirious year of the Trump administration, there’s a sense that things are speeding towards collapse—and that they’ve perhaps been unraveling for some time. Borne along on these ambivalent straits, D__ begins to keep a notebook, filling it with everything: dreams, scenes from his own life, emails, and broadly-defined moments, both real and fictional, that he calls parables—attempts to learn from the underlying schedule of the universe, some music of the spheres that, if heard correctly, might help him finally understand his life, his art, and labor. Unfurling over the course of two years, season by season, (Release date is Feb. 3.)

The next two novels on the list are for those of us who love books and libraries. In Libby Page’s This Book Made Me Think of You, A woman receives an unexpected gift from the man she loved and lost—a year of books, one for every month—launching a reading-inspired journey to live, dream, and love again in this glimmering and heart-stopping novel. Twelve books. Twelve months. One chance to heal her heart…When Tilly Nightingale receives a call telling her there’s a birthday gift from her husband waiting for her at her local bookshop, it couldn’t come as more of a shock. Partly because she can’t remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. But mainly because Joe died five months ago….When she goes to pick up the present, Alfie, the bookshop owner with kind eyes, explains the gift—twelve carefully chosen books with handwritten letters from Joe, one for each month, to help her turn the page on her first year without him. (Release date is Feb. 3.)

From New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn comes a gorgeously written fantastical adventure which poses the question: Have you ever wished you could live inside a book? Welcome to The Astral Library, where books are not just objects, but doors to new worlds, new lives, and new futures. Alexandria “Alix” Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives…inside their favorite books. The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy—Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself? (Release date is Feb. 3.)

Stolen in Death is J.D. Robb’s sixty-second book featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas. A blow to the head with a block of amethyst has left multibillionaire Nathan Barrister dead—while nearby, a vault, its door ajar, sits filled with priceless paintings, jewelry, and other treasures. Lieutenant Eve Dallas’s husband, Roarke—who misspent his youth in Ireland as a scrappy thief—recognizes at least two stolen pieces among the hoard. The crime scene suggests a burglar caught in the act. But only one item seems to be missing. Then it’s revealed that the vault had actually belonged to the victim’s late father—and no one in the household knew it was there until a recent remodeling project exposed it. To protect the family name and business, they explain to Eve, they’d been looking for a way to return the ill-gotten gains anonymously and avoid the police. But now the police are all over their elegant house, and have a bigger, bloodier mystery to solve. (Release date is Feb. 3.)

Jeffrey Siger is the author of the Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis mysteries set in Greece. Now, he launches the Redacted Man series with A Study in Secrets. Michael A— lives a quiet, comfortable life since his retirement from the intelligence services. Practically a recluse, he spends his days imagining the lives of the anonymous people he watches in the park beneath the window of his elegant New York townhouse—number 221—his every need tended to by his housekeeper, Mrs. Baker. For weeks, a girl has sat in the park every morning at dawn. Always alone. Always watchful. And when the sun rises, she vanishes, as if she was never there. But one day her routine changes—and Michael realizes that she faces terrible danger. He makes an uncharacteristic decision to abandon his solitude and help her. Soon, Michael finds himself plunged into the New York underworld, and he’ll have to use all the tricks of his former trade if he’s to keep not just himself, but his new friend, alive. (Release date is Feb. 3.)

So many favorite authors! For a short month, February has so many exciting books. I’m glad I’m retired and have time to read. What about you? What books excite you this month?