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Families and friendships, secrets and mysterious circumstances, are at the core of our new Top 3 FicPicks, but only one can be our Readers’ Choice. It’s up to you to decide which book will be our next read. 
Your choices are “I Dreamed of Falling” by Julia Dahl, “The Night We Lost Him” by Laura Dave, and “Once More From the Top” by Emily Layden. 
Read the excerpts below and cast your vote here. Voting closes Sunday, September 15 at 6pm. We will reveal the Readers’ Choice Tuesday, September 17. 
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes. 
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From the publisher: Roman Grady is the sole reporter for the local newspaper in a tiny Hudson Valley town – a town so small that every store opening and DUI is considered newsworthy. But when Roman’s longtime girlfriend, Ashley, the mother of his four-year-old son, is found dead, he realizes he had no idea what was really going on in her life.
And when he starts asking questions, he’s not prepared for the answers.
What was Ashley doing at the cliffside home of her troubled ex-girlfriend? How did no one in a house full of people see what happened to her? And why does it seem like everyone in town suddenly has something to hide? As Roman and his mother dig into Ashley’s last few months, the truths they uncover threaten to expose painful secrets. The kind of secrets that can get you killed. 
Julia Dahl lives in the Hudson Valley. 
“I Dreamed of Falling” by Julia Dahl (Hardcover) $22
From the publisher: Liame Noone was many things to many people. To the public, he was an exacting, self-made hotel magnate fleeing his past. To his three ex-wives, he was a loving albeit distant family man who kept his finances flush and his families carefully separated. To Nora, he was a father who often loved her from afar—notably, a cliffside cottage perched on the California coast where he fell to his death.
The authorities rule the death accidental, but Nora and her estranged brother Sam have other ideas. As Nora and Sam form an uneasy alliance to unravel the mystery, they start putting together the pieces of their father’s past and uncover a family secret that changes everything.
Laura Dave grew up in Scarsdale, New York.
CLICK HERE to read an excerpt   
“The Night We Lost Him” by Laura Dave (Hardcover) $21
From the publisher:  Everyone in America knows Dylan Read, or at least has heard her music. Since releasing her debut album her senior year of high school, Dylan’s spent fifteen years growing up in the public eye. She’s not only perfected her skills when it comes to lyrics and melody; she’s also learned how to craft a public narrative that satisfies her fans, her label, and the media. In the circles of fame and celebrity in which she now travels, the careful maintenance of Dylan Read pop star is often more important than the songs themselves.
And so lots of people think they understand everything about Dylan Read. But what no one knows is the part of her origin story she has successfully kept hidden: her childhood best friend Kelsey vanished the year before Dylan became famous. Now, as Dylan’s at the height of her career, Kelsey’s body is found at the bottom of their hometown lake—forcing Dylan to reckon with their shared past, her friend’s influence on her music, and whether there’s more to their story than meets the eye.
Emily Layden lives in upstate New York. 
“Once More from the Top” by Emily Layden (Hardcover) $20

Chapter One
I hadn’t planned to go anywhere that night. Tara made mac and cheese on the stove and I watched Octonauts with Mason until she called us in for dinner. It was just the three of us: me, my son, and his grandma. Mason’s dad, Roman, was in the city, and Tara’s fiancé, John, was working late. We finished eating and I washed the dishes while Mason and Tara built Lego spaceships in the living room. I opened a beer and scrolled through my phone.
When I heard Tara say, “Time for bed,” I met them at the bottom of the stairs.
“I’ll do bedtime,” I offered.
“I want Gerty to do bedtime,” said Mason, touching Tara’s leg.
“Mommy can do tonight,” Tara said.
“No.”
I wasn’t going to make him say more. I knelt and opened my arms. “Can I have a good night?”
Mason gave me a big hug, both arms.
“Good night, Mommy,” he said. He kissed me on the cheek. “Sweet dreams, baby. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
I watched them walk up the stairs, his rejection scratching at my heart. In the kitchen, I finished my beer and was about to open another when the text came in. What else did I have to do? It was eight o’clock on a summer Friday night. Why not distract myself from the fact that my child loved his grandmother more than he loved me?
It wouldn’t always be like this, I told myself as I put on my new sandals. The ones I bought because I knew Roman thought ankle straps were sexy. Soon, everything would be different.
Chapter Two
Roman answered the call reluctantly. He was hungover and hungry and squinting into the sunlight as he sat in traffic on the Palisades headed north from Manhattan.
“I’m so glad you picked up!” said Daniel. “Ash is an hour late and she’s not answering her phone. Can you tell her to get her a** in here? I’ve got to pick up my mom.”
“I’m not home,” said Roman. “I left early.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie. He’d left yesterday and was just now driving back. Daniel could be a gossip, and he didn’t need the whole town wondering why he hadn’t slept at home last night.
“Are you sure she’s on?” Roman asked. His longtime girlfriend and the mother of his four-year-old son, Ashley Lillian, rarely worked at the local coffee shop anymore, though the owner did occasionally ask her to cover shifts.
“She’s supposed to fill in for Bobby and train this new girl. I guess it was last- minute. But it’s not like her to forget.”
If Ashley had forgotten her shift, or slept through it, she had probably been out the night before. She’d been going out more the last few months. Not that he could judge: he’d vomited in a trash can outside a Starbucks on Lexington Avenue this morning.
“I don’t know what to tell you, man,” Roman said. “You could go by the house.”
Koffee was on the town’s main street and the Grady house, where Roman and Ashley and Mason lived with Roman’s mom, Tara, and her fiancé, was barely a quarter- mile east toward the Hudson River.
“I don’t think I can leave the new girl alone.”
“I’ll be home in a half hour, forty- five minutes.”
Daniel sighed dramatically. “Tell Ash I said she’s too old for this s***.”
Roman hung up. He checked the GPS—bloodred for the next three miles. The app indicated an accident. He pressed his fingers to his eyes. The air-conditioning in his 2007 Accord was spotty, blowing cold out of one vent, hot out of the other three. They’d paid $600 to have it fixed two years ago, and he wasn’t going to do that again.
He inched forward, surrounded by city couples and families with kids and dogs in their rented Smart cars, mountain bikes or kayaks attached to the roof racks. They were all headed out to enjoy their summer weekend in the mountains or on the river. They were smiling. At least some of them were. He felt like ass, but looking at those weekenders Roman Grady decided that he was going to do his best to enjoy his family this weekend, too. Tonight was the monthly town- sponsored outdoor movie. They’d all go with a picnic. They’d watch the fireworks and carry Mason home to bed, asleep.                                                                                                  He texted Ashley:
you up? call daniel
He added a goofy face emoji. Ashley had been prickly and distracted lately, and instead of allowing her the space to work out whatever needed working out, he’d used it as an excuse to be exasperated. On Thursday night, he picked a fight while she put the dishes in the dishwasher and he prepped coffee for the morning.
“Did you forget to get half-and-half?” He knew she had. It wasn’t in the fridge.
“Was it on the list?”
Ashley was in charge of grocery shopping, which had been challenging lately because her car was acting up.
“I don’t know,” he said, though probably he’d forgotten to add it to the little notepad on the counter.
“You have to put it on the list.”
“You didn’t see we were out?”
“I don’t drink half-and-half.”
“Yeah, but you look in the fridge.”
Ashley said nothing, which enraged him. He’d lived with this woman for years and she knew he drank his coffee with half-and-half every morning, but she couldn’t be bothered to check if there was a carton in the refrigerator door before she went shopping? She checked for Mason’s snacks; she checked for Tara’s tea; she checked for John’s f****** energy drinks. His heart withered in his chest as he thought about her disregard. She doesn’t see me.
She doesn’t know me. She doesn’t love me.
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
“I’m just saying that it would be great if you remembered what I like to drink. And if I forget to put it on the list, when you pass it in the store, you could pick it up.”
She met his eyes. Roman was ready to have it out. He was ready to defend his grievance. But all she said was, “Okay.”
Thinking about it now, he cringed. He’d been an a******. He would apologize and he would make it up to her. As the traffic cleared and he passed the Bear Mountain Bridge, headed up the mountain, he felt ready to make real 
Excerpted From I DREAMED OF FALLING by Julia Dahl, published by Minotaur Books, an imprint of the St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Copyright © 2024 by Julia Dahl. 
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Prologue
He knew any biographer would decide that the story of his life could be summarized by this: When Liam Samuel Noone began accruing his fortune, the first thing he did was buy a piece of land as far away from his hometown as he could possibly get.
Of course, there were places technically farther from Midwood, Brooklyn than the Central California Coast. But Liam felt reborn the first time he arrived in Carpinteria. His pulse quieted, his chest released—a small, yet seismic shift. He drove through the secluded beachside town in a haze—the world around him windy and soulful, cypress trees sweeping every which way, a messy canopy.
Liam was in the early days of taking over the company, and he’d flown out west to meet with a potential investor. They were in discussions to build a boutique hotel together eight miles up the road in Santa Barbara—a hillside retreat, private and luxurious, with forty-eight stand-alone cottages, winding mountain trails, outdoor fireplaces, and cobblestone walkways. A stone-wrapped restaurant.
He was meeting with the investment partner, a former classmate named Ben, at Ben’s oceanfront vacation home on Padaro Lane. They sat outside on the back deck, eating poached eggs and studying blueprints, Liam’s suit no match for the chill coming in off the ocean. He drank extra coffee, refusing Ben’s offer to borrow a coat.
At some point, Liam looked east and spotted a cottage, perched cliffside at Loon Point. It was lit up by the rising sun—the incandescent yellow ricocheting off the bluff front, landing on its white rock and citrus grove. The rose gardens.
The property encompassed a large parcel of land, five exquisite acres, endless ocean views, the Santa Ynez foothills in the distance.
An old woman lived in the one structure on the property, a Craftsman bungalow, a white wooden sign by the front door with the bungalow’s name, WINDBREAK. Liam knocked on the front door and asked her what she wanted for her home. She said she wanted to live there peacefully without people knocking on her door asking her what she wanted for her home. He smiled at her and apologized. I can’t afford it anyway, he said.
Which was when she let him in.
Now, more than three decades later—how can that much time just pass?—he walks over to the northeast edge, his favorite vantage point, the ocean expansive beneath him, the ancient olive trees and the wind and the sharp breeze, wild all around him.
He takes a deep breath, swallows the tears pushing in from the back of his throat as he remembers that day.
He isn’t normally so nostalgic and has never been much for fantasy. But he feels himself doing it: pretending, again, that he is still that riled-up young man, knocking on an old woman’s door, wanting to start a new life. As opposed to the older man he now is, an empty house behind him, no one to answer how he’d gotten it wrong. How he’d ended up here, emotional and weary, but willing to say out loud  (to finally say out loud) all the things he wished he could undo. It isn’t regret, exactly. It isn’t anything as clichéd or inactive as regret. No. It is penance.
That is why he keeps playing the moments back on an unforgiving loop: the moments he is trying to return to, to relive. The first moment at eighteen, then at twenty and twenty-six and thirty-seven and forty-five. Fifty-eight. Sixty-one. Sixty-eight. In the ways that matter, it is all the same moment, isn’t it?
The same choice. You move toward your destiny or you move away.
He digs his feet into the white rock, a light rain starting to fall. When exactly did this place become a referendum on what he’d failed to do? It would be easy (and probably wrong) to name that shift as a recent occurrence. But however it happened, slowly and at once, Windbreak is now the place that reminds him of himself the most. The irony of that! Instead of the escape he assumed it would be, a reprieve from the childhood home that he’d run from, it has turned out to be the opposite. It is his time capsule.
He turns and looks at Windbreak, the small Craftsman, all the lights on: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a galley kitchen. A house, a cottage, that is smaller than the guesthouses on any of the neighboring properties, let alone the eight-thousand-square-foot main houses. Everyone assumed he’d knock the small house down eventually, build anew. This bungalow, perfect and misplaced, wasn’t nearly big enough to house a large family. It wasn’t big enough for his families certainly.
But it wasn’t as simple as building a larger home. He was always nervous to bring his daughter here when she was small, and then the boys when they were. The palisades were no security from the drastic edges. That cliffside was too precipitous, eighty feet down to the ocean and the rock and the California coast. What if they fell? What if any one of them with their small quick legs and ready elbows went over the edge before he could catch them? 
Excerpted from THE NIGHT WE LOST HIM: A NOVEL by Laura Dave. Copyright © 2024 by Laura Dave. Reprinted by permission of Marysue Rucci Books,  an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
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Chapter One
2022
Lake Tahawus is shaped like a long, jagged scratch. When I see her on a map I think of a bear claw slashing at a tent, tearing a curved tatter in the canvas. Thirty-five miles point to point and four hundred feet at her deepest, the lake was born millions of years ago when the glaciers crept from north to south over the land, carving great gashes in the earth. In time the angry, uneven slice that cuts a crooked y-axis through upstate New York filled with water and sediment and algae and fish and, eventually, the endless debris of human life: private camps, built by the railroad tycoons in the Gilded Age; KOAs and hiking trails; bait shops and gas stations; marinas and members-only clubs.
In Thompson Landing, where I grew up, we think of Tahawus as ours. We learn to swim in her shallows and work summer jobs as lifeguards and camp counselors and fishing guides. We keep her secrets—the trails to the best jumping rocks, which islands have the sandiest beaches, where the loons nest on the western shores—like our own.
She does not always repay the favor. This is how it was with Kelsey Copestenke’s body.
It was Canadian tourists who found her, on a portaging trip across the islands. The article in the Post-Ledger doesn’t say which of Kelsey’s remains they discovered on the beach that afternoon—only that they were “partial”—but I learn from a quick google that when a body decays underwater the first pieces to break off are, typically, the extremities, and so it was most likely the delicate bones of a finger or a metatarsal that washed ashore. Although the details of the initial discovery are slim, the newspaper is meticulous in chronicling how the rest of Kelsey was found, later: the father-and-son duo called in from Seattle; the special sonar technology they use to trawl deep basins of water. There’s even a diagram of a tiny action-figure person on a pixelated lake floor, arms spread wide like a crucifixion. Because of something called an “instinctive drowning response,” a corpse usually descends chest-up, the father is quoted as saying, hits the bottom feetfirst, then falls backward, coming to rest in a winged position. “That’s the image we look for on the sonar,” he said, and held his arms out to a T. The writer explains how deep a lake must be to hold a body down, and how because the water in Tahawus is very cold and slightly alkaline, the remains were, in general, remarkably well-preserved for their age.
The victim went missing fifteen years ago, and the case of her disappearance had long gone cold. Kelsey Copestenke was a seventeen-year-old junior at George Thompson High School when she vanished, and a classmate—the article literally says this, and I don’t blame the writer, not really, because including my name will invariably boost this floundering local paper’s SEO performance, even if it makes it sound like this is my story and not the story of my dead best friend—and a classmate, he writes, of Diamond-selling and Grammy Award–winning singer-songwriter Dylan Read.
Chapter 2
2022
It’s Sloane who sends me the article about Kelsey Copestenke’s body. Every day, her two assistants comb the internet’s chatter about me, sifting through forums and Google Alerts and social media for anything that might require our attention. Most days they flag a few posts on Twitter and Instagram that I could engage with if I wanted, because it long ago stopped feeling safe for me to riffle through my own notifications; very rarely is there legitimate news we don’t already know about, and most mornings it’s nonsense—”Hear Dylan Read’s ex’s unfiltered opinion on singer’s new beau”; “Dylan Read’s $900 Gucci Sweatshirt: Get the Look”; “Dylan Read records at Highway 61—fans think new music coming this year!” (In the last case—I’m caught exiting the studio downtown, we hadn’t expected the paparazzi storm, thought I’d snuck in unnoticed—Sloane might scan the resulting photos, just to be sure there’s none that someone could unfairly distort. I keep my eyes trained on the ground three feet in front of me, walk very carefully—you never know what they might say if I roll my ankle on a crack in the sidewalk. “Dylan Read Drunk at the Studio: Famed Good Girl Finally Gone Bad?”)
The subject line of Sloane’s email is news alert and the body of the message is simply Did you know this girl? I don’t blame her for being so direct: First of all, Sloane’s style is to cut straight to the chase, which is why I hired her; second of all, I understand that her default position is skepticism. The press will do anything to morph even the most tangential connections into something material; why would she think this story—sad as it may be—is any different from the usual grasping at straws?
I’m reading the article for the fourth time when Nick texts. Good morning, babe, he writes, followed by a selfie, shot unflatteringly from below, his green eyes wide and eyebrows raised.
We’ve been together for almost six years and I am still shy about sending him unflattering photos of my own. I reply with a heart-eyed emoji instead. How’s set?
Behind schedule already . . .
It’s 11 a.m. on the East Coast, where they’re shooting Nick’s adaptation in the Long Island purgatory that is neither Queens nor the Hamptons, an American stand-in for the exurbs he called home in Ireland. The series is based on his debut novel, a multigenerational family narrative about addiction. Its initial sales were average, but there’s been a renewed interest in his back projects since Leesider sold two million copies, or maybe since we started dating.
When’s your meeting? he asks.
Two hours.
Of course. Nothing in LA starts before 10.
This f****** city. Our shared refrain: LA is perfect; LA is impossible. We call the place in New York “Home,” capital H, because it’s the place I bought because of us and the place that feels most like ours, but the truth is we live nomadically. A career in entertainment means you go where the work is. I think I mind it—the travel, the distance, the lack of feeling settled—less than Nick does.
Good luck, Nick says. And just remember: if you can’t make whatever the f*** you want, the rest of us don’t stand a chance.
He’s right that another artist in my position—with six number-one albums, eight Grammys, and a catalog valued at nearly half a billion dollars—might not feel the need for luck before a label listening session. Another artist might feel, by now, that the label’s opinion is no longer relevant. They need me more than I need them.
But Nick knows that I don’t see any professional obligation that way. He knows that I always feel like I have something to prove. I don’t want to ignore the executive notes; I want to make something so good they don’t have any. I love you, I type, and then click my phone to black.
When I lift my eyes from the screen my heart throttles into my throat. Kelsey Copestenke is tucked into the chair across the room, feet on the seat, knees to chest. She looks exactly as she did fifteen years ago: dark hair; pale, pore-less skin; that ovalish jaw, a little asymmetrical on the left side.
He seems sweet, she says, her amber eyes blazing. Why didn’t you tell him about me?
Excerpted from ONCE MORE FROM THE TOP by Emily Layden. Copyright © 2024 by Emily Layden. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint HarperCollins Publishers.
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