New Release Alerts
The following are books that are soon to be released and are certain to be popular. To place a hold, just click on the title and then on "Request/Hold"and have your Library card handy.
Man in The Dark by Paul Auster
Retired book critic August Brill lies in bed recovering from a car accident. As sleep eludes him, he conjures stories for himself in order to avoid confronting his wife’s recent death, among other things. He imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America 9/11 never happened and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued.
Legally Dead by Edna Buchanan
U.S. Marshal Michael Venturi of the Witness Protection Program relocates a mobster, now a government witness, to a small rural town after creating a new identity for him. The man proves to be a monster unleashed on an unsuspecting community with tragic results. To make amends Venturi leaves the Marshals Service and assembles a team of close confidants to secretly create new identities for innocent men and women who really deserve fresh starts in new lives. But before they are relocated and reborn, each must change a lifetime of habits and actually become someone else, with new traits, tastes, and personalities.
Foreign Body by Robin Cook
When a medical student discovers something fishy about her grandmother’s death during a hip replacement in India, she calls in her mentor, a medical examiner who uncovers more deaths. Their questions uncover a sinister, multi-layered conspiracy of global proportions.
The Assassin by Stephen Coonts
When an Iraqi bomb kills a wealthy man’s only child, the grieving father decides he and his privileged friends aren't doing enough to defend civilization against the jihadist threat. He gets tacit approval from one of those friends, the U.S. president, for him to finance their own private war. When al-Qaeda mastermind Abu Qasim discovers the identities of the vigilantes and targets them, Carmellini and his CIA boss, Adm. Jake Grafton, determine to set a trap that involves Qasim's possible daughter.
Silks by Dick Francis
Setting aside his barrister's wig, Geoffrey Mason heads to Sandown to don his racing silks. An amateur jockey, his true passion is to be found in the saddle on a Thoroughbred, pounding the turf in the heat of a steeplechase. But when a fellow rider is brutally murdered - a pitchfork driven through his chest - Mason's racing life soon becomes all too close to his working life. The prime suspect is one of their brethren, champion jockey Steve Mitchell; the evidence seems overwhelming.
Fifth Floor by Michael Harvey
Private investigator Michael Kelly, first seen in The Chicago Way returns in a tantalizing mystery buried in Chicago’s past. When Kelly is hired by an old girlfriend to tail her abusive husband, he expects trouble of a domestic rather than a historical nature. The trail leads to an old house on Chicago’s North Side. Inside it, he finds a body, and perhaps the answer to one of Chicago’s most enduring mysteries: who started the Great Chicago Fire and why. Kelly becomes embroiled in a scam that stretches from current politics back to the night Chicago burned to the ground, and along the way, he finds himself framed for murder, before finally facing a killer bent on rewriting history.
Rough Justice by Jack Higgins
Dispatched by the President to report on the state of still troubled Kosovo, his trusted agent Blake Johnson runs into a military man there named Harry Miller, who has the same task from the British Prime Minister. They band together just in time to stop a Russian officer from torching a mosque—or rather, Miller stops him, with a bullet to the forehead. Death begets death, and revenge leads only to revenge, and before the chain reaction of events is done—from Kosovo to London to Beirut to Ireland to Moscow—there will be plenty of both.
People Who Walk In Darkness by Stuart Kaminsky
Rostnikov is a Russian bear of a man, an honest policeman in a very dishonest post-Soviet Union Russia. Rostnikov travels to Siberia to investigate a murder at a diamond mine, where he discovers an old secret…and an even older personal problem. His compatriots head to Kiev on a trail of smuggled diamonds and kidnapped guest workers…and what they discover leads them to a vast conspiracy that not only has international repercussions but threatens them on a very personal level.
The Mercedes Coffin by Faye Kellerman
Billionaire genius Genoa Greeves never got over the shocking death of her favorite teacher, Bennett "Dr. Ben" Alston Little, murdered execution-style and stuffed into the trunk of his Mercedes-Benz. No arrests were ever made, no killer charged for the brutal crime. Fifteen years later, the high-tech CEO reads about another execution-style murder; this time the victim is a Hollywood music producer named Primo Ekerling. There is no obvious connection, but the case is eerily similar to Little's and Genoa feels the time is right to close Dr. Ben's case once and for all—offering the L.A.P.D. a substantial financial "incentive" if justice is finally served for Little.
Envy The Night by Michael Koryta
It has been seven years since Frank Temple III joined the rest of the world in learning his father's bloody secret: The U.S. marshal maintained a covert career as a contract killer, a double-life that ended in suicide to avoid prosecution and prison. Devin Matteson, the man who’d lured his father into the killing game only to later give him up to the FBI, is returning to the isolated Wisconsin lake that was once sacred ground for their families, it’s a homecoming Frank knows he can’t allow.
Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing
Nobel Prize-winner Lessing explores the lives of her parents, both of them irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in the trenches, and thereafter he had to wear a wooden leg. Her mother Emily's great love was a doctor, who drowned in the Channel, and she spent the war nursing the wounded in the Royal Free Hospital. In the fictional first half of Alfred and Emily, Doris Lessing imagines the happier lives her parents might have made for themselves had there been no war. This is followed by a piercing examination of their relationship as it actually was in the shadow of the Great War, the family's move to Africa and the impact of her parents' marriage on a young woman growing up in a strange land.
Death's Half Acre by Margaret Maron
Unchecked urbanization has begun to eclipse the North Carolina countryside. As farms give way to shoddy mansions, farmers struggle to slow the rampant growth. In the shadows, corrupt county commissioners use their political leverage to make profitable deals with new developers. A murder will pull Judge Deborah Knott and Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant into the middle of this bitter dispute and force them to confront some dark realities.
When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson
The Rubins are the perfect family. They're wonderfully happy and very glamorous. The mother, Claudia, is the ultimate Jewish matriarch: a powerful rabbi who, with charm, brains, and determination. Now this magnificent dynastic Jewish family is getting ready to marry off their perfect eldest son, Leo, to the very appropriate Naomi. History, community, and even gastronomy unite the guests lucky enough to attend this joyous occasion. But when the groom — one minute before exchanging vows — bolts with the wrong woman, the myths that have defined this family take on darker overtones.
The King's Gold by Arturo Perez-reverte
Seville, 1626. After serving with honor at the bloody siege of Breda, Captain Alatriste and his protégé, Inigo Balboa, have returned: battle-weary, short of cash, and with few prospects for honest work. But the Spanish empire is as dangerous as ever, and it's not long before Alatriste receives an intriguing offer of short-term employment. He and Inigo must recruit a dozen swordsmen and mercenaries for a risky job involving a dazzling amount of contraband gold and a heavily guarded Spanish galleon returning from the West Indies. The offer comes from the king himself, for at stake is nothing less than the Spanish Crown, and its dominion over the wealth of the Americas.
Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs
The 11th in the Temperance Brennan series. A call to examine a skull found in a hidden floor space plunges Tempe into a case that may involve ritual murder. The skull and some kettles containing bones and various fetishes suggesting Santer'a or some other alternative religion may tie in with two headless bodies, one found floating in a river and another marked with Satanic symbols. Furious when a local politician uses the cases as an excuse to whip up hostility against little-understood religions, Tempe is far from convinced that the Wiccan who is arrested is guilty. When Rinaldi, one of the detectives she's working with, is killed in a drive-by, Tempe falls off the wagon but soldiers on, mortified, until she finally makes the connections between the crimes that lead to a close call with death and a startling conclusion.
Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.
Off Season by Anne Rivers Siddons
For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly--happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine. It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.
Ghost Train To The Eastern Star by Paul Theroux
Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through.
Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn
William Friedrich, an ambitious professor of psychology at Yale in 1952, has stumbled upon a drug that promises happiness—and that can make him a famous man. When his experiment goes awry, and a research subject commits murder, the consequences will haunt him and his family forever.
How Fiction Works by James Wood
What makes a story a story? What is style? What's the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions answered in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.