Today is the release day for Marisha Pessl’s heavily-anticipated second novel, Night Film, (Random House; RH Audio). Random House pulled out all the publicity stops, liberally greasing anticipation with advance readers copies. That worked. It was listed in many of the summer previews, from The Millions to USA Today and was reviewed in advance of publication by several consumer sources.

As a result, libraries are showing a respectable number of holds on cautious ordering (275 on 50 copies in one large system), about the level of prepublication demand for another title Random House pulled out the stops for, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, (RH/Doubleday, 9/13/11).

The latest review, from USA Today is much more intriguing than their 3 out of 4 star rating would indicate. Says the reviewer, “In her haunting 600-page novel, Pessl fashions an indelible character, a deeply enigmatic master of terrifying cinema,” also noting, “There’s even a Night Film app. If this all sounds too multi-media gimmicky, it actually adds to the urgency of a thoroughly spooky story.”

The other reviews have been mixed, but we’re betting that readers will continue to want to know what the fuss is about.

Marisha Pessl’s second novel, Night Film (Random House/; RH Audio) after her award-winning Special Topics in Calamity Physics, (Penguin; perhaps anticipating even greater success with this new book, the paperback cover now prominently states that Pessl is “The author of Night Film“) is enjoying red carpet treatment for its release two weeks from today:

NPR — Exclusive First Read (with an audio excerpt)

Author profiled in the new issue of New York magazine

Entertainment Weekly‘s “Shelf Life” blog offers an “exclusive” of the “chilling” trailer (not all that exclusive; it’s also available on YouTube and below)

Many consumer reviews for this literary thriller are in the works. Prepub reviews are divided; Booklist stars it, LJ is strongly positive overall, but notes it “slows down a bit over its considerable length.” PW also expresses that concern and Kirkus criticizes it for being “A touch too coyly postmodern at times,” but adds it’s “a worthwhile entertainment all the same.” With all the attention, readers will want to find out for themselves; a few libraries are already showing holds in the low triple digits.

Find out for yourself; advance digital copies are currently available on Edelweiss.

The movies based on Dan Brown’s series featuring symbolist Robert Langdon do not follow the sequence of the books. The first to be filmed was The Da Vinci Code (RH/Doubleday, 2003), based on the second in the series. The second movie was based on the first book, Angels & Demons (2000). Skipping ahead to the fourth in the series,  the release date for the adaptations of  Inferno (2013), starring Tom Hanks and directed by Ron Howard, was just announced  for Dec. 18, 2015, according to Deadline.

A film of the third book in the series, The Lost Symbol (2009) is now officially in limbo.

Director David Fincher (The Social Network, Fight Club, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is known for getting strong performances out of actors. He will have his work cut out for him if Ben Affleck takes on the lead in his adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

Affleck is currently in negotiations for the role, reports Deadline, also noting that, if he takes it, his work on directing the adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night will be delayed.

Reese Witherspoon is one of the  producers for Gone Girl, but, says Deadline, she is not expected to star.

A psychological thriller that was just declared “Better Than Gone Girl” by the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s insightful reviewer Laura DeMarco, The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison, (Penguin Trade Pbk original) is showing heavy holds on modest ordering in libraries.

Like the surprise hit it’s compared to, The Silent Wife is the story of a marriage gone wrong, but says DeMarco, in this case, “both members of the couple are a lot more human, more fully fleshed — albeit badly damaged — individuals … Like Gone Girl, The Silent Wife is told in alternating chapters from ‘Him’ and ‘Her.’ But while Flynn’s book almost redefined ‘unreliable narrator,’ Harrison’s narrators come across as more personally deluded than manipulative.”

The Silent Wife is an original trade paperback, which makes it not only easier to buy additional copies but also an immediate book club candidate.

Author of the Mitch Rapp counterterrorism thrillers, Vince Flynn, died yesterday of prostate cancer. He was 47.

Flynn’s best selling books were particularly popular with conservatives (George Bush was a fan and Rush Limbaugh a close friend). In an interview with USA Today in 2012, Flynn said that was probably because of the ” the pro-military, CIA and law enforcement theme of the books … And the idea that the United States is not the problem.””

Flynn’s next novel, The Survivor was originally scheduled to be released in October. USA Today reports that the  publisher, S&S/Atria, does not yet have information on how much of the book was completed.

His most recent book, The Last Man, was published last November.

Library holds are growing on The Shining Girls, (Hachette/Mulholland) by Lauren Beukes after it was reviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered by Alan Cheuse on Friday,  applauding it for its “heroine, the smart and spunky Kirby Mizrachi, [who] is as exciting to follow as any in recent genre fiction” and the “sharply described murder scenes — some of which read as much like starkly rendered battlefield deaths out of Homer as forensic reconstructions of terrible crimes.”

The novel is also moving up Amazon’s sales rankings, although it hasn’t cracked the Top 100 (it’s currently at #222).

The NYT‘s critic Janet Maslin declared it earlier to be ”a strong contender for the role of this summer’s universal beach read.”  Movie rights have been acquired by Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way.

Librarians responding to our Beach Read Challenge, were only partially won over. Joseph Jones of Cuyahoga P.L. says,

Short chapters and a fast pace makes this a definite beach read. The subject matter may turn off some readers who are not into serial killers, violence against women or just the casualness of the violence. Normally time travel is not an issue for me in books, but the way the author switches back and forth in time EVERY chapter does get a bit annoying. Having the date listed at the beginning of each chapter seemed to mock me more than help me figure out where the story was in the timeline. Also, when the author would try to throw in some cultural history for the different time periods I thought it had a tendency to drag the story down without really adding anything. The saving grace of the book though is Kirby. Broken, flawed and a survivor in every sense of the word, she burns with an intensity that for me defines “shining girl.”

The NYT‘s Janet Maslin has declared The Shining Girls, (Hachette/Mulholland) by Lauren Beukes “a strong contender for the role of this summer’s universal beach read” (i.e., the next Gone Girl). Cuyahoga P.L. buyer Wendy Bartlett is a bit skeptical. Cautioning that she’s not yet read it, she says, “as cool as the plot sounds, it involves a killer who time travels and for most of our customers, time travel is an acquired taste.”

She’s issued a challenge to the Cuyahoga staff to read the galley and let her know whether she’s right or she needs to buy additional copies (she’s ordered a modest 19 copies for Cuyahoga’s 28 branches; most libraries around the country have also placed modest orders).

We’re inviting you to join in. E-galleys are on Edelweiss and NetGalley. Request the book (but hurry, e-galleys will only be available through Monday), read it and tell Wendy what you think in the comments section below.

If you’re not convinced that this is the Book of the Summer, which one are you betting on?’

Janet Maslin declares Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls, (Hachette/Mulholland), “a strong contender for the role of this summer’s universal beach read,” in Tuesday’s NYT, narrowly avoiding the cliche of  “this summer’s Gone Girl.”

On the Salon site Laura Miller, has no such compunction, counting it as one of seven titles worthy of that mantle, occupying the “sweet spot where literary quality mingles freely with crackerjack storytelling.” She notes that Beukes has brought together two favorite fictional themes, time travel and serial killers into “a soulful puzzle novel with an evocative final twist.”

Beukes’s earlier books have ben have been “closer to hard-core science fiction” says Maslin (Zoo City won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2011), but this one is a “pure thriller …an expert hair-raiser.”

Readers will have to wait a bit, however. The book isn’t due to be published until June 4. Librarians can get a jump on it by requesting e-galleys through Edelweiss and NetGalley.

The onslaught of coverage of Dan Browns Inferno, (RH/Doubleday; RH Audio; BOT Audio; RH/Vintage espanol; RH large print), releasing tomorrow, continues today with the first review, by Janet Maslin’s in the New York Times. An unabashed Dan Brown/Robert Langdon fan, she is equally enthusiastic about this new outing.

Reviewing The Da Vinci Code in 2003, she said that in this “gleefully erudite suspense novel, Mr. Brown takes the format he has been developing through three earlier novels and fine-tunes it to blockbuster perfection” and prophetically, that, his is “a name you will want to remember,”

Admitting that the “early sections of Inferno come so close to self-parody that Mr. Brown seems to have lost his bearings — as has Langdon, who begins the book in a hospital bed with a case of amnesia that dulls his showy wits,” she goes on to say, “Inferno is jampacked with tricks. And that shaky opening turns out to be one of them.”

The author is scheduled to appear this week on NBC’s Today Show, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, PBS’s Charlie Rose and NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Library holds, while heavy, are not nearly as high as they were on Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl at its peak, averaging 2:1 on fairly aggressive ordering.

Ouch! In a review that will surely be a candidate for the next “Hatchet Job of the Year Award,” Michiko Kakutani excoriates John  le Carré’s 23rd novel, A Delicate Truth, (Penguin/Viking; Penguin Audio; Thorndike Large Print), which releases next week.

Earlier, one of Kakutani’s colleagues, Dwight Garner, wrote glowingly about the author in  New York Times Magazine, under the headline, “John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age,” calling A Delicate Truth, “an elegant yet embittered indictment of extraordinary rendition, American right-wing evangelical excess and the corporatization of warfare. It has a gently flickering love story and a jangling ending. And le Carré has not lost his ability to sketch, in a line or two, an entire character.” And, in the UK, The Guardian reports that, with this book, the author returns in “top form.”

Kakutani admits that the book offers one worthwhile bit, in the form of its “atmospheric, movielike opening.” Hollywood sees a movie in it; film rights were sold before publication. It was announced last week that screenwriter William Monahan (The Departed ) has been hired to write the adaptation.

The book already has a movie-like trailer.

The first adaptation of a novel by Laura Lippman, Every Secret Thing is filming this month in New York City and on Long Island, which is a bit surprising, since, like Lippman’s other novels, this one is set in Baltimore (in reviewing it, the Baltimore Sun said that “Baltimoreans will relish insiderish elements of the story”).

The novel is Lippman’s first standalone, after having already achieved success with seven mysteries featuring private investigator and former Baltimore reporter, Tess Monaghan. Turning from mysteries to much darker psychological suspense, she writes about two young women who return to their Baltimore neighborhood after seven years in juvenile detention, sentenced for kidnapping a baby who died in their care. Perhaps coincidentally, other children begin to disappear. Lippman builds suspense as the reader tries to figure out who is responsible.

Lippman has continued writing both Tess Monaghan mysteries and standalones. In a review of her most recent title, And When She Was Good, (HarperCollins/Morrow, 2012), the NYT‘s Janet Maslin pronounced that “Ms. Lippman’s stand-alone novels have been much more nuanced and interesting than her Monaghan books.”

Directed by Amy Berg, the film stars Dakota Fanning and Danielle Macdonald as the two young women. Also in the cast are Elizabeth Banks and Diane Lane.

The adaptation of  Joseph Finder’s thriller, Paranoia (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2004), originally scheduled for release in October has been moved up to Aug. 16. Below is more background on the novel from our earlier post.

Described as a “high-tech corporate espionage thriller,” the movie features an impressive cast, including Liam Hemsworth (The Hunger Games), Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford, Amber Heard (The Rum Diary), and Richard Dreyfuss.

The plot concerns an ambitious young technologist, Adam (Hemsworth), who, after making a major misstep is blackmailed by his ruthless CEO (Gary Oldman) into spying on the company’s top rival, run by a character played by Harrison Ford. Adam finds himself living the life of his dreams, as a rich, successful young Manhattan bachelor but eventually has to find a way out from under his boss, “who will stop at nothing, even murder, to gain a multi-billion dollar advantage.”

After four spy thrillers, (including High Crimes, which was made into a movie in 2002, starring Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman), Joseph Finder began specializing in corporate espionage with the release of Paranoia, which was his breakout book. His most recent novels are the first two in a series, featuring Nick Heller; Vanished (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2009) and Buried Secrets (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 2011).

The author notes on his blog that he doesn’t plan to write a sequel to Paranoia, but tells readers (take note, Hollywood) that if they like that book’s main character, they will like his new series character.

The NYT‘s hard-to-please critic, Michiko Kakutani, goes uncharacteristically ga-ga over a thriller, saying that Roger Hobbs, whose debut novel, Ghostman, (RH/Knopf; RH Audio; BOT; Thorndike Large Print) arrives tomorrow, “seizes our attention and holds it tight, not so much through his plotting or his characters but through his sheer, masterly use of details, and the authoritative, hard-boiled voice he has fashioned for [main character] Jack.”

She does find a flaw, however. Jack seems “cobbled together from random traits pasted onto a deliberately enigmatic core that lacks the existential power of Stark’s Parker or Lee Child’s Reacher. Ghostman would have been way more powerful with a more potent and coherent hero, but weirdly this lapse does not prevent the novel from holding the reader’s attention.”

Check your holds.

More drum rolls arrive today for The Dinner by Dutch author Herman Koch (RH/Hogarth; AudioGo; Thorndike Large Print coming soon). Following an “Exclusive First Read” on the NPR Web site on Tuesday (see our earlier story) , the Wall Street Journal, calls it “A European GONE GIRL,” saying this “sly psychological thriller that hinges on a horrific crime and its consequences for two families, has become one of this spring’s most anticipated suspense novels.”

The book doesn’t arrive until Feb. 12, but it’s time for libraries to re-order. Holds are already as high as 15:1 on modest orders.