Promise Me You'll Leave Us Alone: Harlan Coben's "Six Years"

Every romance novel on the face of the earth would have you believe that there is “one true love” out there somewhere, a fated meeting just waiting for two pairs of eyes to lock together across a crowded room. It didn’t quite happen that way for Jake Fisher – Natalie Avery was wearing sunglasses the first time he laid eyes on her – but it was damned close. The two spent a couple of delirious months together at adjacent artistic retreats in upstate Vermont, long enough for Jake to decide Natalie was the fabled “one.” And then she dumped him – dumped him hard one day and sent him an invitation to her wedding the next. When the ceremony was concluded, she made Jake promise that he would never, ever contact her and her new husband.

Dan Brown's "Inferno": Bleeayahhhh...

It looks like Robert Langdon is at it again. The Harvard professor of symbology (and, apparently, art history [and medieval literature, too]) awakens to find himself in an Italian hospital, a bullet wound in his scalp, and two days missing from his memory. Rattling around his addled brain are a sense of foreboding and a snippet of memory of a beautiful woman with silver hair. When a black-clad assassin bursts into the hospital room and murders a doctor before his eyes, he escapes into the night with another doctor - a beautiful bald-headed English polyglot genius - only to realize he's in his favorite city in the whole wide world, Florence. Firenze. Whatever.

A hidden pocket in his Harris Tweed jacket yields a strange device that projects an image of Botticelli's La Mappa dell'Inferno, a map of Hell as envisioned by Dante. What follows next should be no surprise to those who devoured Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and The Lost Symbol. I mean it: no surprise...

The image has been subtly altered to... well, it's Dan Brown and Robert Langdon, so of course it's been subtly altered to provide clues to... who knows? We know: an evil genius has set some arcane plan in motion, a plan that only Langdon and his latest sexy sidekick, Sienna, can prevent. Maybe. Maybe not.

Joe Hill, NOS4A2 -- All I Want for Christmas is Three Rows of Teeth

Victoria "Vic" McQueen discovered she had an unusual talent at the ripe old age of eight, discovered it the first time she rode her too-large bicycle through that abandoned covered bridge in Haverhill, Massachusetts, her home town. What she discovered when she popped out the other end of the bridge wasn't the opposite bank of the Merrimack River -- it was the place where her mother had lost her favorite bracelet that same morning. Vic, she learned, had a talent for finding, and that Shorter Way Bridge was her route from lost to found.

Other people had their own talents and their own means for short-circuiting the journey from then to now; now to then. When she was 13, Vic met another one; Here, Iowa, librarian Maggie Leigh; whose supernatural Scrabble tiles foretold Vic's future... "THE BRAT COULD FIND THE WRAITH." The Wraith?