September 12th, 2026
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On Top Shelf
Fresh Pick
TRADWIFE
📚 New Books This Week 📰 Latest News 🎪 Reader Games

Snowbound secrets, shifter wars, family lies, and epic battles — September delivers it all.

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Some promises cost you the one you love.

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The Temple of Kronos wants her dead. The Stoneslayer wants her destroyed. Neither will have her.

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A poisoned cousin, a five-year-old's life, and a family with too many secrets.

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Betrayal runs in her blood. Justice runs in his. Together, they burn it all down.

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"ANOTHER WINNER!"
From New York Times
Bestselling Cleo Coyle

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Running from her past, she finds a killer, a protector, and her faith.

SODA LAKE
By: John C Hampsey

Rare Bird Books
November 2025
On Sale: October 21, 2025
208 pages
ISBN: 1644284863
EAN: 9781644284865
Kindle: B0FMRHYKSK
Hardcover / e-Book
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Thriller Psychological

Soda Lake opens with an unnamed narrator seeing a man disappear into a lake of white salt. This sets the narrator on a quest of discovery, shaped by a series of stories with interconnected characters who all grapple with threats to their identity. The narrator's suspenseful journey mixes personal and collective human history, and his definition of self mysteriously fades as he gets closer to the elusive and timeless “McCuade,” who may or may not be real.

 

Shifting from the coastal valley of central California to Chicago, Ireland, Greece, and France, each chapter in the novel presents a protagonist in the midst of a psychological struggle wherein the idea of McCuade becomes stronger than the reality of the characters themselves. With a twenty-first-century nod to works as diverse as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Soda Lake blends elements of the archetypal detective quest with stories of the uncanny in order to freshly render the individual human psyche in its struggle to stand up to a progressively transmogrifying world.

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