Staff Picks Winter 2023

Staff Picks Winter 2023

Your Libraries & History staff are loving these books. We think you will, too.

The Lost Book of Eleanor Dare

By Kimberly Brock

What happened to the Lost Colony of Roanoke remains a mystery, but the women who descended from Eleanor Dare have long known that the truth lies in what she left behind: a message carved onto a large stone and the contents of her treasured commonplace book. Brought from England on Eleanor's fateful voyage to the New World, her book was passed down through the fifteen generations of daughters who followed as they came of age.

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The Takedown

By Carlie Walker

It's been a long time since Sydney Swift has gone home. An unrelentingly successful CIA field officer, she has spent the last five years pretending to be someone - anyone - other than herself. But this year, the festive season is coming with some added surprises.

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Assistant to the Villain

By Hannah Nicole Maehrer

With ailing family to support, Evie Sage's employment status isn't just important--it's vital. So when a mishap with Rennedawn's most infamous Villain results in a job offer, naturally she says yes. No job is perfect, of course, but even less so when you develop a teeny crush on your terrifying, temperamental, and undeniably hot boss.

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Wreck the Halls

By Tessa Bailey

Melody Gallard may be the daughter of music royalty, but her world is far from glamorous. She spends her days restoring old books and avoiding the limelight. But when a producer offers her a lot of money to reunite her mother's band on live TV, Mel begins to wonder if it's time to rattle the cage, shake up her quiet life--and see him again, the only other person who could wrangle the rock and roll divas.

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My Murder

By Katie Williams

Lou is a happily married mother of an adorable toddler. She's also the clone of the original Louise who, along with four other victims of a local serial killer, has been brought back to life by a government project to return the women to their grieving families. But as the new Lou re-adapts to her old life, questions remain about what exactly preceded her death, and how much to trust those around her.

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Talulah's Back in Town

By Brenda Novak

Talulah Barclay doesn't like complications. Unfortunately, they seem to love her. Fourteen years after leaving her fiancé at the altar, Talulah returns to her hometown of Coyote Canyon, Montana, to settle her great-aunt's estate. As she'd feared, her "runaway bride" reputation is waiting right where she left it, and her ex's best friend, Brant, isn't about to let her slip by unnoticed.

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Witches Get Stuff Done

By Molly Harper

From the moment Riley Everett set foot in Starfall Point, magic bubbled inside of her. But with only her late aunt's journals and a cantankerous live-in ghost butler to instruct her on all things witchy--including her newly inherited Victorian haunted house--Riley seeks out a coven for sisterhood and support. The last person she expects to be drawn to is the town's frustrating, yet ridiculously attractive head librarian.

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Famous in a Small Town

By Viola Shipman

For most of her eighty years, Mary Jackson has endured the steady invasion of tourists, influencers and real estate developers who have discovered the lakeside charm of Good Hart, Michigan, waiting patiently for the arrival of a stranger she's believed since childhood would one day carry on her legacy--the Very Cherry General Store. Becky Thatcher came to Good Hart with her ride-or-die BFF to forget that she's just turned forty with nothing to show for it. Ending up at the general store with Mary is admittedly not the beach vacation she expected, but the more the feisty octogenarian talks about destiny, the stronger Becky's memories of her own childhood holidays become, and the strange visions over the lake she was never sure were real.

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The Mystery Guest

By Nita Prose

Molly Gray is not like anyone else. With her flair for cleaning and proper etiquette, she has risen through the ranks of the glorious five-star Regency Grand Hotel to become the esteemed Head Maid. But just as her life reaches a pinnacle state of perfection, her world is turned upside down when J. D. Grimthorpe, the world-renowned mystery author, drops dead--very dead--on the hotel's tearoom floor.

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Faking Christmas

By Kerry Winfrey

Laurel Grant works as the social media manager for Buckeye State of Mind, an Ohio tourism magazine and website. She is most definitely not an owner of a farm--specifically, the owner of her twin sister Holly's farm just outside of Columbus--but she lets her boss think she is. Laurel only handles the social media for the farm, but she's happy to keep her little white lie going. And keep it going she must, when Gilbert--recently dumped by his wife--invites himself over for the farm's big holiday dinner.

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The Heavens May Fall

By Allen Eskens

Detective Max Rupert and attorney Boady Sanden's friendship is being pushed to the breaking point. Max is convinced that Jennavieve Pruitt was killed by her husband, Ben. Boady is equally convinced that Ben, his client, is innocent. As the case unfolds, the two are forced to confront their own personal demons. Vividly told from two opposing perspectives, the truth about the stunning death of Jennavieve Pruitt remains a mystery until the very end.

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A Hundred Crickets Singing

By Cathy Gohlke

1944: a violent storm rips through No Creek, North Carolina exposing a hidden trunk and secrets dating back to the Civil War. Celia Percy suspects the truth could transform the future for her friend Marshall, who is now fighting overseas, but whose ancestors were once enslaved by the Belvidere family. 1861: After her mother's death, Minnie Belvidere works frantically to keep her household running and her family together. Her brothers are divided in loyalties between the Confederacy and the Union.

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Voice of the Ancient

By Connilyn Cossette

When a nearby city is attacked, Avidan fights for the newly crowned King Saul. When one of his cousins goes missing during the battle, he searches for him and instead stumbles across Keziah--the daughter of a powerful man. Traveling together, they must rely on each other to stay alive and learn to trust the King of Israel to guide their every step.

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The Best Friend

By Jessica Fellowes

Bella and Kate. Kate and Bella. From childhood they were bosom friends, Bella sensible and cautious, Kate gregarious and just a little dangerous. Yet in spite of their intimacy, their trust is fragile. Men came into their lives and things changed: a black seed was set in the heart of their relationship. Over decades, acts of both cruelty and love ferment until one shocking event tests them more than ever. Neither will escape unscathed.

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The Last Politician

By Franklin Foer

The Last Politician is a landmark work of political reporting--which includes thrilling, blow-by-blow insider reports of the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Biden White House's swift response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine--that is destined to shape history's view of a president in the eye of the storm.

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Deal Breaker

By Harlan Coben

Sports agent Myron Bolitar is poised on the edge of the big time. So is Christian Steele, a rookie quarterback and Myron's prized client. But when Christian gets a phone call from a former girlfriend--a woman who everyone, including the police, believes is dead--the deal starts to go sour. Trying to unravel the truth about a family's tragedy, a woman's secret, and a man's lies, Myron is up against the dark side of his business--where image and talent make you rich, but the truth can get you killed.

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The Life We Bury

By Allen Eskens

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran--and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home. As Joe writes about Carl's life he doubts Carl's guilt and decides to uncover the truth.

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The Emotional Lives of Teenagers

By Lisa Damour

In teenagers, powerful emotions are the rule, not the exception. Unfortunately, many of today's parents now regard their teens' negative feelings as disruptive, dangerous, or diagnosable. To make matters worse, the global pandemic, academic pressure, social media stress, and a bleak environmental future have left today's teenagers feeling overwhelmed. Parents who read this book will learn that a teenager's mental health isn't just about "feeling good," it's about having the appropriate feelings at the appropriate time.

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The Running Grave

By Robert Galbraith

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.

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The Vaster Wilds

By Lauren Groff

A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.

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Linked

By Gordon Korman

Link, Michael, and Dana live in a quiet town. But it's woken up very quickly when someone sneaks into school and vandalizes it with a swastika. Nobody can believe it. How could such a symbol of hate end up in the middle of their school? Who would do such a thing? Because Michael was the first person to see it, he's the first suspect. Because Link is one of the most popular guys in school, everyone's looking to him to figure it out.

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Wellness

By Nathan Hill

When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life. For the first time, Jack and Elizabeth struggle to recognize each other, and the no-longer-youthful dreamers are forced to face their demons, from unfulfilled career ambitions to childhood memories of their own dysfunctional families. In the process, Jack and Elizabeth must undertake separate, personal excavations, or risk losing the best thing in their lives: each other.

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Mother-Daughter Murder Night

By Nina Simon

Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she's built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage--and hoping that boredom won't kill her before the cancer does. Then Jack stumbles upon a dead body while kayaking near their bungalow. When Jack becomes a suspect, the Rubicon women are thrown into chaos.

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The Librarianist

By Patrick DeWitt

Bob Comet is a retired librarian, isolated but not lonely, living out his quiet days in a mint-colored house in Oregon, surrounded by his books and small comforts. One morning, out on his daily walk, he performs an act of kindness that brings him into contact with a nearby senior center, where he soon begins volunteering. Here, as a community of peers and friends gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.

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A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey

By Jonathan Meiburg

In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by an animal he met in the Falkland Islands: handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcons that were 'tame and inquisitive, quarrelsome and passionate, ' and so insatiably curious that they stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Almost two hundred years later, Jonathan Meiburg takes us through South America in search of these birds: striated caracaras, which still exist, though they're very rare.

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Florida Scrub-Jay: Field Notes on a Vanishing Bird

By Mark Jerome Walters

The only bird species that lives exclusively in Florida, the Florida scrub-jay was once common across the peninsula. But as development over the last 100 years reduced the habitat on which the bird depends from 39 counties to three, the species became endangered. With a writer's eye and an explorer's spirit, Mark Walters travels the state to report on the natural history and current predicament of Florida's flagship bird.

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Remarkably Bright Creatures

By Shelby Van Pelt

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

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Holly

By Stephen King

When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly Gibney is reluctant to accept the case. Her own mother has just died, and Holly is supposed to be taking time off. But something in Penny Dahl's desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.

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To Be or Not to Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure

By Ryan North

The greatest work in English literature, now in the greatest format of English literature: a chooseable-path adventure! William Shakespeare's Hamlet has finally been restored to its original second-person non-linear branching narrative format. Now it's up to you to decide what happens next.

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Things We Never Got Over

By Lucy Score

Naomi Witt is on the run. Not just from her fiancé and a church full of well-wishers, but from her entire life. Although if you ask her, Naomi's riding to the rescue of her estranged hot mess of a twin, Tina. Too bad for Naomi, her evil twin hasn't changed at all. After helping herself to Naomi's car and cash, Tina leaves behind something unexpected: the niece Naomi didn't know she had. Now she's a guardian to an eleven-year-old-going-on-thirty with no car, no money, and no plan.

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The Rise and Reign of the Mammals: From the Shadow of the Dinosaurs to Us

By Stephen Brusatte

Brusatte explores the remarkable story of the family of animals that inherited the Earth--mammals-- and brilliantly reveals that their story is every bit as fascinating and complex as that of the dinosaurs. Beginning with the earliest days of our lineage some 325 million years ago, Brusatte charts how mammals survived the asteroid that claimed the dinosaurs and made the world their own, becoming the astonishingly diverse range of animals that dominate today's Earth.

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Why We Love Baseball

By Joe Posnanski

Joe Posnanski is back with a masterful ode to the game: a countdown of 50 of the most memorable moments in baseball's history, to make you fall in love with the sport all over again.

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To Infinity and Beyond

By Neil deGrasse Tyson

In this entertaining book, illustrated with vivid photographs and art, readers travel through space and time, starting with the Big Bang and voyaging to the far reaches of the universe and beyond. Along the way, science greets pop culture as Tyson explains the triumphs--and bloopers--in Hollywood's blockbusters: all part of an entertaining ride through the cosmos.

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The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906

By Matthew Davenport

At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately one minute, shockwaves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death and trapped many alive. Fires ignited and blazed through dry wooden ruins and grew into a firestorm. For the next three days, flames devoured collapsed ruins, killed trapped survivors, and nearly destroyed what was then the largest city in the American West.

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Sisters Under the Rising Sun

By Heather Morris

In the midst of World War II, an English musician, Norah Chambers, places her eight-year-old daughter Sally on a ship leaving Singapore, desperate to keep her safe from the Japanese army as they move down through the Pacific. Norah remains to care for her husband and elderly parents, knowing she may never see her child again.

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A Traitor In Whitehall

By Julia Kelly

1940, England: Evelyne Redfern, known as "The Parisian Orphan" as a child, is working on the line at a munitions factory in wartime London. When Mr. Fletcher, one of her father's old friends, spots Evelyne on a night out, Evelyne finds herself plunged into the world of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's cabinet war rooms. However, shortly after she settles into her new role as a secretary, one of the girls at work is murdered, and Evelyne must use all of her amateur sleuthing expertise to find the killer.

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The Paris Deception

By Bryn Turnbull

Two women embark upon a plan to save Paris's "degenerates," working beneath the noses of Germany's top art connoisseurs to replace the paintings in the Jeu de Paume with skillful forgeries--but how long can they sustain their masterful illusion?

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The Girl from Guernica

By Karen Robards

On an April day in 1937, the sky opens and fire rains down upon the small Spanish town of Guernica. Seventeen-year-old Sibi and her family are caught up in the horror. Griff, an American military attaché, pulls Sibi from the wreckage, and it's only the first time he saves her life in a span of hours.

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Tom Lake

By Ann Patchett

In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

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The Only One Left

By Riley Sager

At seventeen, Lenora Hope Hung her sister with a rope Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. It's now 1983, and home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at a decaying Hope's End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse fled in the middle of the night. In her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora was rendered mute by a series of strokes and can only communicate with Kit by tapping out sentences on an old typewriter. One night, Lenora uses it to make a tantalizing offer--I want to tell you everything.

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1989

By Val McDermid

It's 1989 and journalist Allie Burns is growing up. Older and maybe wiser than the hustling young hack we met in 1979, she's running the northern news operation of the Sunday Globe, chafing at losing her role in investigative journalism and at the descent into the gutter of the UK tabloid media. But there's plenty to keep her occupied. The year begins with the memorial service for the victims of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, but Allie has barely filed her copy when she stumbles over a story about HIV/AIDS that will shock her into a major change of direction.

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Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing

By Matthew Perry

The beloved star of Friends takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this candid, funny, and revelatory memoir that delivers a powerful message of hope and persistence In an extraordinary story that only he could tell, Matthew Perry takes readers onto the soundstage of the most successful sitcom of all time while opening up about his private struggles with addiction.

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The Woman in Me

By Britney Spears

In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice--her truth--was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey--and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.

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The Bear

By Andrew Krivak

A girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last two left. But when the girl suddenly finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness, which offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen.

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