Four books I might be interested in 'waiting' on...all to be published on May 5th

Hello book friends!  Hope you are well, safe, and being sensible about social distancing.  Also wearing your mask if needed.  Who would have thought that we'd be sharing those sentiments with friends and loved ones over and over?  Ah well, here's the scoop on a few books that have caught my eye recently and possibly made their way onto my endless TBR (it's truly endless - not even kidding!).  All four of these books have a planned publication date two weeks from now - May 5th.

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Ghosts of Harvard is the first novel by Francesca Serritella.  She is the co-author of several humorous essay collections with her mother, Lisa Scottoline.  I love Scottoline's books and that alone would get me to take a look at this one.

Ghosts of Harvard

by Francesca Serritella

Cadence Archer arrives on Harvard’s campus desperate to understand why her brother, Eric, a genius who developed paranoid schizophrenia took his own life there the year before. Losing Eric has left a black hole in Cady’s life, and while her decision to follow in her brother’s footsteps threatens to break her family apart, she is haunted by questions of what she might have missed. And there’s only one place to find answers.

As Cady struggles under the enormous pressure at Harvard, she investigates her brother’s final year, armed only with a blue notebook of Eric’s cryptic scribblings. She knew he had been struggling with paranoia, delusions, and illusory enemies—but what tipped him over the edge? Voices fill her head, seemingly belonging to three ghosts who passed through the university in life, or death, and whose voices, dreams, and terrors still echo the halls. Among them is a person whose name has been buried for centuries, and another whose name mankind will never forget.

Does she share Eric’s illness, or is she tapping into something else? Cady doesn’t know how or why these ghosts are contacting her, but as she is drawn deeper into their worlds, she believes they’re moving her closer to the truth about Eric, even as keeping them secret isolates her further. Will listening to these voices lead her to the one voice she craves—her brother’s—or will she follow them down a path to her own destruction?

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Caroline B. Cooney is probably a name you might recognize from the many Young Adult books she's written over the years, such as The Face On the Milk Carton.  This is not a YA book, but instead a tale set in a retirement community.  Sounds interesting to me!

Before She Was Helen

by Caroline B. Cooney

When Clemmie goes next door to check on her difficult and unlikeable neighbor Dom, he isn't there. But something else is. Something stunning, beautiful and inexplicable. Clemmie photographs the wondrous object on her cell phone and makes the irrevocable error of forwarding it. As the picture swirls over the internet, Clemmie tries desperately to keep a grip on her own personal network of secrets. Can fifty years of careful hiding under names not her own be ruined by one careless picture?

And although what Clemmie finds is a work of art, what the police find is a body. . . in a place where Clemmie wasn't supposed to be, and where she left her fingerprints. Suddenly, the bland, quiet life Clemmie has built for herself in her sleepy South Carolina retirement community comes crashing down as her dark past surges into the present.

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The next book is by Kimberly McCreight.  I read another by her, Reconstructing Amelia, and liked it a lot.  Might have read another, Where They Found Her.  This new one sounds good as well.

A Good Marriage

by Kimberly McCreight

Lizzie Kitsakis is working late when she gets the call. Grueling hours are standard at elite law firms like Young & Crane, but they’d be easier to swallow if Lizzie was there voluntarily. Until recently, she’d been a happily underpaid federal prosecutor. That job and her brilliant, devoted husband Sam—she had everything she’d ever wanted. And then, suddenly, it all fell apart.

No. That’s a lie. It wasn’t sudden, was it? Long ago the cracks in Lizzie’s marriage had started to show. She was just good at averting her eyes.

The last thing Lizzie needs right now is a call from an inmate at Rikers asking for help—even if Zach Grayson is an old friend. But Zach is desperate: his wife, Amanda, has been found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their Brooklyn brownstone. And Zach’s the primary suspect.

As Lizzie is drawn into the dark heart of idyllic Park Slope, she learns that Zach and Amanda weren’t what they seemed—and that their friends, a close-knit group of fellow parents at the exclusive Brooklyn Country Day school, might be protecting troubling secrets of their own. In the end, she’s left wondering not only whether her own marriage can be saved, but what it means to have a good marriage in the first place.

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Last is a book that I read about on Wendy's blog, Musings of a Bookish Kitty.  I'm not much of a sci-fi reader, but occasionally one of those books sounds interesting to me.  Goldilocks is one of those books. 

Goldilocks

by Laura Lam

Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation.

It's humanity's last hope for survival, and Naomi, Valerie's surrogate daughter and the ship's botanist, has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity like this - to step out of Valerie's shadow and really make a difference.

But when things start going wrong on the ship, Naomi begins to suspect that someone on board is concealing a terrible secret - and realizes time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . .

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What do you think?  Any of these sound appealing to you?  Or feel free to tell me about another book that will be coming out soon that you're 'waiting' for.