It’s no joke that you’re going to love May’s books! The forthcoming books, the May Treasures in My Closet, look good. I hope you find a book or two that interest you. Now, you have time to place holds on them at your local public library or pre-order them from your favorite bookstore.

Let’s kick off the May releases with a book being called “The first official beach read of the summer”. Mary Kay Andrews’ new book is The Weekenders. Idyllic Belle Isle, North Carolina means fun for most people. But, it’s about to end for Riley Griggs. Her beach house is being foreclosed, her friends are keepings secrets, and her husband is missing. As Riley tries to piece everything together, a body washes up on the shore, and the mystery deepens. (Release date is May 17.)

Urban fantasy writer Kelley Armstrong turns to crime fiction with City of the Lost. Homicide detective Casey Duncan is on the run, and her best friend needs to hide from her abusive husband. Rockton, Canada will take people in who need to be lost, and they’re eager to have a homicide detective. But, it isn’t long before Casey realizes she may be in more trouble in her new hiding place. (Release date is May 3.)

The author’s name, Fredrik Backman, may not be as familiar as the title of his bestselling novel, A Man Called Ove. His new book is Britt-Marie Was Here. At sixty-three, Britt-Marie’s orderly life is upended when she leaves her philandering husband and takes a job in a small, derelict town, Borg. It isn’t long before she finds herself being pulled into the daily doings of her fellow citizens in the town of misfits. Can Britt-Marie finally find a place to belong? (Release date is May 3.)

Jo Baker, the author of Longbourn, takes on the story of another writer in the novel, A Country Road, A Tree. A young, unknown writer, Samuel Beckett, journeys from Ireland to Paris when war breaks out in 1939. He lives through the hardships during the Nazis’ rise to power, forms friendships with James Joyce and other luminaries, and works for the French Resistance. It’s a story of survival and determination. (Release date is May 17.)

Nevada Barr’s Anna Pigeon takes on a crime she’s never dealt with before in Boar Island, cyber-bullying and stalking. Anna’s on a short-term assignment at Maine’s Arcadia National Park, accompanied by her friend, Heath, and his sixteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. But, someone has followed Elizabeth to Maine, and continues to stalk her. (Release date is May 17.)

Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s novel, June, is a novel of suspense and passion about a terrible mistake made sixty years earlier that threatens to change a modern family forever. Twenty-five-year-old Cassie Danvers is mourning her grandmother, June, the woman who raised her. Then she’s told she inherited a legendary matinee idol’s vast fortune. When Jack’s daughters show up to fight for their inheritance, the women all discover the connection between June and Jack, and the summer their lives were changed by murder, blackmail, and betrayal. (Release date is May 31.)

A Fine Imitation is Amber Brock’s debut novel. Set in the glamorous 1920s, the story sweeps readers into a privileged Manhattan socialite’s restless life and the affair with a mysterious painter that upends her world, flashing back to her years of Vassar and the friendship that brought her to the brink of ruin. (Release date is May 3.)

When Solemn Redvine, a precocious Mississippi girl, witnesses a man throw a baby down a well, she struggles to understand the event that changes her forever. In Kalisha Buckhanon’s Solemn, she ends up in a group home, and she must face the truth of who she really is. (Release date is May 3.)

Milena Busquets’ This Too Shall Pass has already sold in more than thirty countries. It’s the story of Blanca, a forty-year-old woman whose mother has died. And, it’s the story of one woman’s unforgettable search for a meaningful life. (Release date is May 24.)

In Braving It, James Campbell tells the story of his journey into the far reaches of Alaska with his teenage daughter. He hesitates to take his fifteen-year-old daughter, Aidan, to the rugged interior when his cousin asks him to build a cabin there. But, Aidan thrives there, and after a couple trips there, he takes her back for one final trip before she leaves home. That final trip is their most ambitious trip. Braving It is a tribute to America’s disappearing wilderness, and “a meditation on what it means for a child to grow up – and for a parent to finally, fully let go.” (Release date is May 10.)

In the fifth Guido Guerrieri novel, A Fine Line by Gianrico Carofiglio, the defense attorney takes the case when Judge Larocca becomes the subject of corruption allegations. He teams up with Annapaola Doria, a motorbike-riding bisexual private detective to investigate the judge’s alleged links to the mafia. Scott Turow calls it “A legal thriller that is also full of complex meditations on the life of the lawyer and the difficult compromises inherent in any system of criminal justice.” (Release date is May 10.)

Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven is the second novel set in Europe in 1939 as the war rages. Mary North defies her aristocratic family and stays in London to teach the students who wouldn’t be able to find homes in the conservative countryside. But, as the city lurches into chaos during the Blitz, she’s torn between love of two men, Tom and his closest friend, Alistair.  Cleave “threads a perfect love story through the vast sweep of a global war”, including a part of the world seldom covered in novels, the island of Malta as it’s besieged by the Axis forces. (Release date is May 3.)

Justin Cronin finishes his Passage trilogy with The City of Mirrors. In the earlier books, he imagined the fall of civilization and humanity’s desperate fight to survive. Now, one last time, light and dark will clash, and Amy, the Girl from Nowhere, and her allies, will know their fate. (Release date is May 24.)

Sweetbitter is Stephanie Danler’s debut coming-of-age novel. Twenty-two-year-old Tess comes to New York with an intense desire to belong. After she stumbles into a coveted job at a renowned Union Square restaurant, readers spend a year with her as she learns to punishing job of a “backwater”, and is pulled into the magnetic world of two other servers. (Release date is May 24.)

In Hannah Dennison’s whodunit, A Killer Ball at Honeychurch Hall, antiques dealer Kat Stanford stumbles upon a hidden room in an abandoned wing at Honeychurch Hall. Her excitement turns to horror when she comes across the body of a young woman dressed in Egyptian togs. Suspicion soon falls on those who live at the Hall, both upstairs and down, and even those who are just passing through. (Release date is May 3.)

Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, tells the story of a lifelong friendship in The After Party. It’s the story of 1950s Texas socialites and the one irresistible, controversial woman at the heart of it all. (Release date is May 17.)

Robert Dugoni involves Detective Tracy Crosswhite in a forty-year-old case in In the Clearing. She has a skill for solving unsolved crimes, having dedicated her career to bringing justice and closure after losing her own sister to murder. When a former police academy classmate, Jenny, asks her to help solve a cold case involving a suspicious suicide from forty years earlier, Tracy agrees. Jenny’s father had been the investigating officer. As she looks for answers, she finds dark, well-concealed secrets in a small town. (Release date is May 17.)

The Storm Murders series by John Farrow features mysteries set in storm ravaged locations and featuring retired detective Emile Cinq-Mars. In Seven Days Dead, he’s vacationing on Grand Manan island, off the coast of Maine. A woman races in a small boat through a sea storm, determined to reach her dying father. Cinq-Mars is caught up in a murder investigation, and when secrets start to emerge, he begins to wonder if the dying father and the other death are related. (Release date is May 24.)

In the Name of Gucci by Patricia Gucci is a gripping family drama and never-before-told love story, surrounding the rise and fall of the late Aldo Gucci, the man responsible for making the legendary fashion label a powerhouse. It’s told as only a daughter can tell it. (Release date is May 10.)

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, brings us a story collection in The Pier Falls and Other Stories. The anthology contains a Victorian adventure story, science fiction, a morality tale, contemporary realism. (Release date is May 10.)

In Rock-a-Bye Bones by Carolyn Haines, Thanksgiving is just around the corner and PI Sarah Booth Delaney hopes to heal her broken heart by gathering friends around her. But, just before the holiday, she finds an abandoned newborn baby on her front porch, with bloody footsteps leading away. Now, she must find the mother, whose life is in grave danger. (Release date is May 17.)

And, the last book today is Steve Hamilton’s The Second Life of Nick Mason. After Nick Mason spent five years inside a maximum security prison, he accepts an offer that lets him out twenty years early. But, he faces a terrible price. He’s returned to society and a new life, but whenever his phone rings, he must answer it, and accept his assignment, whatever it is. He made the agreement with a criminal mastermind serving a double life sentence while running an empire from prison. When Nick grows desperate to break free and go straight, he has to risk everything. (Release date is May 17.)

Hopefully, you’ll find something to read in today’s list. If not, maybe in tomorrow’s follow-up. Let me know what book interests you.