Fiction

Title: The Coil: A Novel
Author: Gayle Lynds
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): ISBN / EAN

A sequel to the New York Times bestselling novel, Masquerade, The Coil picks up several years later. Liz Sansborough, former CIA agent and now an academic, has managed to put the pieces of her life back together. But Sansborough has a dark secret - she is the daughter of the one of the most notorious Cold War Assassins, The Carnivore. When a series of prominent political figures are blackmailed into certain actions or die in suspicious ways, the CIA becomes convinced that someone has gotten hold of the Carnivore's files and is using that information to further some secret agenda. Sansborough herself - the closet living link to the Carnivore - is the target of a murder attempt, her offices are searched, her files stolen and her TV program on the secrets of the Cold War inexplicably shelved by the network. When she learns her cousin Sarah Walker - who bears a close resemblance to Sansborough - is kidnapped off the street with the ransom demand being the Carnivore's missing - possibly apocryphal - files, Liz is determined to save her cousin and uncover the swirling conspiracy, linked to a shadowy group known as The Coil, centered around the legacy of her father. But she's far from the only one going after the truth behind the legendary assassin.

Title: My Father's Keeper
Author: Kip Vander Hyde
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0977245101

Synopsis of the book, submitted by the author.

Title: Echoes from the Infantry: A Novel
Author: Frank Nappi
Genre: Fiction, Literary
Reviewer: Bill McDonald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): B000VYVCM0

Frank Nappi is a school teacher on Long Island who, over the last several years, befriended aging World War II veterans in his community. As he heard their reminiscences he became absorbed in their stories of simple heroism--and of trying to recapture what they'd left behind when they returned home. They are the stories of men who never asked for recognition or adulation, only a place in the free and prosperous society they'd built with their own blood, sweat and tears--men who could never entirely leave behind the horrors of the battlefield, or explain them to their own children . . .
Now, Nappi has synthesized those reminiscences and crafted them into a heartwarming and at times harrowing novel: Echoes from the Infantry. It is the fictionalized tale of one Long Island veteran, the misery of combat, and the powerful emotional bond that connected him to his fiancée back home and that allowed him to survive the war with his soul battered but intact.
It is about a father and a son, and their ultimately redeeming struggle to understand the worlds that shaped each one--one a world at war, the other a world shaped by its veterans.

Title: The Power and the Glory
Author: William C. Hammond
Genre: Fiction, Historical
Reviewer: John Cathcart

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1612510523

This third novel in William C. Hammond's nautical fiction series is set in the late 1790s during the Quasi-War with France and offers readers a thrilling look at the new American Navy during the Age of Fighting Sail. Following in the wake of his previous novels, A Matter of Honor and For Love of Country, it features the adventures of the seafaring Cutler family of Hingham, Massachusetts, and an ever-expanding cast of characters some real, some fictional that includes Lt. Richard Cutler along with Capt. Thomas Truxtun, Capt. Silas Talbot, and other naval heroes personifying the best of American honor and courage as they confront French pirates off the coast of Nantucket and heavily armed French frigates in the Caribbean.

Hammond packs his book with electrifying sea battles and daring challenges to French colonial rule in Haiti and the West Indies. He also offers fascinating glimpses into everyday life of the era, from the bedroom of the Cutler clapboard home in Hingham, to the family's sugar cane plantation in Barbados, to Adm. Sir Hyde Parker's flagship in Jamaica. And at the center of all the excitement, passion and intrigue are two of the finest frigates ever constructed, USS Constellation and her sister ship, USS Constitution. Lauded for his careful research, attention to detail, and thorough knowledge of the ways of the sea, Hammond brings history alive while telling a rollicking good tale.