Peter Swanson's electrifying psychological thriller Her Every Fear goes on sale today! In addition to being an LLF departmental fave, Her Every Fear has been named one of the 10 essential thrillers by Library Journal, chosen as an Indie Next Pick for January 2017, and voted into the Top 10 December/January Library Reads list. Not to mention garnering rave reviews, including starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist and this latest from the Wall Street Journal: “Chapter by chapter, the text peels back layers to reveal a pathological relationship between Kate’s cousin and a long-ago acquaintance that’s reminiscent of a folie à deux out of Patricia Highsmith… By then, readers, privy to much Kate doesn’t know, may be experiencing their own anxiety.” Anxiety-inducing indeed!
And what better way to spend your book birthday than hanging with librarians! Read on for a special message from Peter Swanson about his new book and his love for libraries.
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No one tells you that when you become a published author you are going to run out of shelf space. First of all, you get many copies of your own book, and even if you give most of them away it’s impossible to not want to hoard at least a few. Then you get sent galleys for possible blurbs, and you also start meeting other authors at readings and festivals, so, naturally, you have to buy their books. Before you know it, you’re out of shelf space.
All of this is just me leading up to saying: Thank God for libraries! I’ve probably visited more often this year, and taken out more books, than in any year since I was a ten year old with a massive book habit. Just last month, I took out every mystery novel I could find that involved voyeurs so I could compile a Top Ten Voyeurs in Literature List for The Guardian. Going online, I found everything I looked for.
That list of voyeuristic thrillers will help promote my new novel (my third) called Her Every Fear. It’s a standalone thriller about an apartment swap that goes very wrong. Kate Priddy from London moves into her second cousin’s apartment in Beacon Hill, Boston for six months. It’s a huge place (lots of shelf space!) but Kate begins to suspect that the cousin she’s never met is a very bad man. It doesn’t help that there’s been a murder in the apartment building, and he is now staying in Kate’s apartment in London. And there’s a voyeur, of course, a man across the courtyard of the apartment building who might or might not be very bad as well.
I hope your patrons enjoy the book, and if you get a chance to read it yourself, I hope you enjoy it as well. As I’m writing this, they are projecting the first big snow storm of the winter, so it’s time for me to get to a library myself and borrow some books.
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Thanks Peter! I hope you'll all join us in this book birthday celebration by diving into Her Every Fear today!
-Amanda