Costco Connection - June 2006

Joseph Finder spent much of his early childhood in the Philippines and Afghanistan. His family eventually settled in Albany, New York, where he attended high school. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale and later received his master’s degree from the Harvard Russian Research Center and taught on the Harvard faculty. Now, with acclaimed novels such as Paranoia and Company Man under his belt, Finder has become known as a master of the corporate thriller, a label the author doesn’t particularly like. He feels he writes about regular people in extraordinary situations, but he simply focuses on happenings in the workplace. Finder’s latest novel, Killer Instinct, is a whip-smart thriller and was inspired by a plasma-screen television he bought for his family.

S T. MAR TIN’S / Hardcover Available n ow

PANTHEON / Hardcover Available n ow

Julia Glass is somewhat of a late bloomer. She was a late talker, she didn’t learn how to ride a bike until she was in college and her first novel was published when she was 46. Glass had originally written it as part of a short story in 1984. She stuck it in a drawer and kept revising until the mid-90s. Then, in 2002, Three Junes went on to win publishing’s equivalent of the Academy Award for best actor—the National Book Award for fiction. Her sophomore novel, The Whole World Over, is about how the past impinges on the present and how fate and chance play important roles in our lives. She lives in Massachusetts with her partner, photographer Dennis Cowley, and their two young sons.

Luanne Rice, author of the bestselling novels Summer of Roses and Beach Girls, offers readers the story of the season. “My books are about home, and family,” says Rice, an acclaimed novelist. “There are so many obstacles in the way of finding happiness. I try to show what it takes for ordinary people to be together, and be happy.” Her special gift for bringing readers into her world has never been more apparent than in Sandcastles. Anyone who’s ever built a sand castle can tell you that some things don’t survive the changing tides. But love, family and friendship—all as fragile as sand castles—have a way of standing against anything. In Sandcastles, it will take nothing short of a miracle to heal the rift between a father and daughter, a husband and wife, the past and the present—but a miracle is exactly what is in the works this summer along the enchanting Connecticut shore. The only question is: Can they believe?

BANTAM / Hardcover
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R.A. Scotti began her career as a copy kid, running errands at the Providence Journal. One day, her editor needed someone to cover an event and she took the job. He continued to give her assignments after that. Scotti began her literary career writing international espionage—largely a man’s field. For her first novel, The Kiss of Judas, she pretended she was a man, hence the name R.A. Scotti. And the name stuck. Readers of Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling will enjoy Scotti’s new nonfiction work on the genius, politics and treacherous drama behind the building of St. Peter’s in Rome.