VOTE NOW: November Polls Open Today

Our November poll will close on Friday at noon (EST). Check out the Back Cover Blurbs below to learn more about each book listed in the poll.

(The Bum Magnet, chick lit) A humorous contemporary women's novel about a woman who, during a holiday meltdown after a recent break-up, decides to swear off men and find out why she always attracts players. The minute she begins her quest, men come out of the woodwork, leaving her in the middle of a tug of war as she struggles to avoid dealing with an old family secret. Readers will laugh loud and often as she determines whether her choices reflect something more than a penchant for good looks, great sex, and bad judgment.

(Replacement Child, memoir) Honest. Funny. Heartbreaking. A plane crash--the injury of a two-year-old girl-- the impossible choice a mother must make--leave a hole in the family that threatens to tear it apart. Replacement Child is a story of love and transformation as you follow one woman's brave path to recovery--sometimes through laughter, sometimes through tears--as she embraces the love that allows her to finally forgive.

(Irreplaceable, literary fiction) Alex Voorman, a cerebral thirty-year-old archaeologist, is married to the woman of his dreams -- a beautiful, ambitious botanist named Isabel. When Isabel is killed by a reckless driver, Alex reluctantly consents to donate her heart. Janet Corcoran, a young, headstrong mother of two and an art teacher at an inner-city school in Chicago, is sick with heart disease. She is on the waiting list for a transplant, but her chances are slim. She watches the Weather Channel, secretly praying for foul weather and car accidents. The day Isabel dies, Janet gets her wish. Flash forward a year. Janet sends Alex a letter. She'd like to learn something about the woman who saved her life. But Alex isn't interested in talking to the recipient of his dead wife's heart. Since Isabel's accident, he's still grief-stricken. Meanwhile, a local blues musician named Jasper, the man responsible for Isabel's death, attempts to atone for his misdeed. Irreplaceable is the story of what happens after the transplant--not only to Alex but within the concentric circles of family that spiral outward from him and from Janet. Stephen Lovely takes us vividly inside the lives of these characters to reveal their true intentions--however misguided--and gives us a stunning debut novel of loss and love.

(Bad Things Happen, thriller) The man who calls himself David Loogan is leading a quiet, anonymous life in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. He's hoping to escape a violent past he would rather forget. But his solitude is broken when he finds himself drawn into a friendship with Tom Kristoll, the publisher of the mystery magazine Gray Streets-and into an affair with Laura, Tom's sleek blond wife. What Loogan doesn't realize is that the stories in Gray Streets tend to follow a simple formula: Plans go wrong. Bad things happen. People die.
Elizabeth Waishkey is a single mother. She's also the most talented detective in the Ann Arbor Police Department. But when Tom Kristoll turns up dead, she doesn't know quite what to make of David Loogan. Is he a killer, or an ally who might help her discover the truth? Loogan suspects his friend's death is part of a much larger puzzle, and he's not going to wait for someone else to put the pieces together.
As Loogan and Elizabeth navigate their way through Kristoll's world, they find no shortage of people with motives for murder, from a young graduate student obsessed with Laura Kristoll to a trio of bestselling writers, all of them with secrets they don't want uncovered. But as the deaths start mounting up-some of them echoing stories published in Gray Streets-Loogan begins to look more and more like the most promising suspect. Soon it becomes clear that only Elizabeth can find the path to solving both the murders and the mystery of Loogan himself.

(The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, historical romance) What fortune awaited sweet, timid Percy Parker at Athens Academy? Hidden in the dark heart of Victorian London, the Romanesque school was dreadfully imposing, a veritable fortress, and little could Percy guess what lay inside. She had never met its powerful and mysterious Professor Alexi Rychman, knew nothing of the growing shadows, of the Ripper and other supernatural terrors against which his coterie stood guard. She saw simply that she was different, haunted, with her snow white hair, pearlescent skin and uncanny gift. This arched stone doorway was a portal to a new life, to an education far from what could be had at a convent-and it was an invitation to an intimate yet dangerous dance at the threshold of life and death...