December 1, 2017 | madame librarian
"As the holidays approach, all is merry and bright for Inspector Witherspoon, Mrs. Jeffries, and the staff at Upper Edmonton Gardens...but murder knows no season. MURDER UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR Christopher Gilhaney isn't a popular man, and he proves why once again when he insults every guest at Abigail Chase's Guy Fawkes Night dinner party. When Gilhaney is shot dead under the cover of the night's fireworks, his murder is deemed a robbery gone wrong. But when the case hasn't been solved six weeks later, Inspector Witherspoon is called upon to find the killer--and quickly! With Christmas almost here, Inspector Witherspoon and everyone in his household is upset at the possibility of having to cancel their holiday plans--all to solve a case that seems impossible. Only Luty Belle, Ruth, and Mrs. Goodge refuse to give up and let the crime become a cold case. In fact, the American heiress, the charming next-door neighbor, and the formidable cook use all of their persuasive powers to get the others on board, because these three wise women know justice doesn't take time off for Christmas"--.
The first book in a classic Golden Age mystery series perfect for fans of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot When Mordecai Tremaine arrives at the country retreat of one Benedict Grame on Christmas Eve, he discovers that the revelries are in full swing in the sleepy village of Sherbroome--but so too are tensions amongst the assortment of guests. When midnight strikes, the partygoers discover that presents aren't the only things nestled under the tree...there's a dead body too. A dead body that bears a striking resemblance to Father Christmas. With the snow falling and suspicions flying, it's up to Mordecai to sniff out the culprit--and prevent anyone else from getting murder for Christmas. Murder for Christmasis a festive mystery for the holiday season: mulled wine, mince pies... and murder.
November 2, 2017 | madame librarian
"A good book should leave you... slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it."--William Styron, interview, Writers at Work, 1958
In 1902 New York, Alice Roosevelt, the bright, passionate, and wildly unconventional daughter of newly sworn-in President Theodore Roosevelt, is placed under the supervision of Secret Service Agent Joseph St. Clair, ex-cowboy and veteran of the Rough Riders. St. Clair quickly learns that half his job is helping Alice roll cigarettes and escorting her to bookies, but matters grow even more difficult when Alice takes it upon herself to investigate a recent political killing--the assassinationof former president William McKinley. Concerned for her father's safety, Alice seeks explanations for the many unanswered questions about the avowed anarchist responsible for McKinley's death. In her quest, Alice drags St. Clair from grim Bowery bars to the elegant parlors of New York's ruling class, from the haunts of the Chinese secret societies to the magnificent new University Club, all while embarking on a tentative romance with a family friend, the son of a prominent local household. And while Alice, forced to challenge those who would stop at nothing in their greed for money and power, considers her uncertain future, St. Clair must come to terms with his own past in Alice and the Assassin , the first in R. J. Koreto's riveting new historical mystery series.
Gin Sullivan is back in her small hometown of Trumbull, Pennsylvania on an extended leave from her job at the Chicago medical examiner's office and rekindling an old flame with her high school sweetheart, Jake. Gin is readjusting to life at home when Jake receives harrowing news early one morning. The new housing development his construction firm is building has caught fire and underneath one of the burnt homes is a dead body. When the body is identified as a man who may very well be the violent offender who terrified Gin's childhood town years ago, the pool of suspects broadens and it becomes a greater challenge to pinpoint his killer. Gin is determined to unearth old demons, hers included, but soon finds some people will kill to keep them buried. Small town secrets cast daunting shadows in All the Secret Places , Anna Carlisle's riveting second Gin Sullivan mystery.
November 1, 2017 | madame librarian
"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend."--Paul Sweeney
"Two FBI agents go undercover in the bureau's first wire-wearing operation, and end up befriending the charismatic con man they're charged with bringing down"--.
A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made The open range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players--from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West.
October 18, 2017 | davisr
Looking for a good mystery to read? Enjoy cooking or reading about food? Try out one of these culinary mysteries today!
Goldy Bear ("Goldilock's Catering: Where Everything Is Just Right!") was not thrilled with the prospect of serving food and drink at the wake of her's son's former teacher, but a job is a job, particularly in the small town of Aspen Meadow, Colorado, in October. It turns out to be Goldy's last job for a while when the police close down her business after her ex-father-in-law is served coffee liberally laced with rat poison. Concerned that she might miss the lucrative holiday season, Goldy turns to sleuthing, but she becomes unnerved when it appears that her own son might somehow be involved in both his teacher's death and his grandfather's poisoning.
Hannah Swensen's supplies are delivered daily by Ron LaSalle, whom she often passes on her way to work. On this fateful day, Ron's truck is soon parked behind the store, but he fails to reappear. When Hannah finds him seated in the truck, the window open, a bullet through his chest, she's inspired to work her way through the townspeople, looking for a motive for Ron's death, even as she manfully resists her widowed mothers attempts to find her a husband.
October 7, 2017 | madame librarian
“The benefits of reading books include a longer life in which to read them.” –A. Bashivi, M. D. Slade, B. R. Levy. (Social Science & Medicine. Vol 164. Sept, 2016)
Jeremy Black offers a historian's interpretation from the perspective of the late 2010s, assessing James Bond in terms of the greatly changing world order of the Bond years--a lifetime that stretches from 1953, when the first novel appeared, to the present. Black argues that the Bond novels--the Fleming books as well as the often-neglected novels authored by others after Fleming died in 1964--and films drew on current fears in order to reduce the implausibility of the villains and their villainy. Class, place, gender, violence, sex, race--all are themes that Black scrutinizes through the ongoing shifts in characterization and plot. His well-informed and well-argued analysis provides a fascinating history of the enduring and evolving appeal of James Bond.
"In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson recounts the global collapse of the postwar economy in the 1970s. While economists struggle to return us to the high economic growth rates of the past, Levinson counterintuitively argues that the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly; slow economic growth is the norm-no matter what economists and politicians may say. Yet these atypical years left the public with unreasonable expectations of what government can achieve. When the economy failed to revive, suspicion of government and liberal institutions rose sharply, laying the groundwork for the political and economic polarization that we're still grappling with today. A sweeping reappraisal of the last sixty years of world history, An Extraordinary Time describes how the postwar economic boom dissipated, undermining faith in government, destabilizing the global financial system, and forcing us to come to terms with how tumultuous our economy really is"--.
October 6, 2017 | madame librarian
"Mackenzie Harris fled her hometown of Bluff Point, Maine, seven years ago after being left at the altar and seeking solace in the arms of her best friend's off-limits brother. When she returns for her best friend's wedding, Gavin is hoping to pick up where they left off with the help of a stray puppy"--.
All the money in the world doesn't mean a thing if we can't get out of bed. And the healthiest body in the world won't stay that way if we're frazzled about five figures worth of debt. Today Show financial correspondent Jean Chatzky and the Cleveland Clinic's chief wellness officer Dr. Michael Roizen explain the vital connection between health and wealth, giving readers the tactics, strategies, and know-how to live longer, healthier, more lucrative lives. The same principles that allow us to achieve a better body will allow us to do the same for our investment portfolio. For instance, physical and financial stability comes down to the same equation: inflow versus outflow. Do we burn more calories than we ingest? Likewise, are we making more money than we spend? The authors detail ways to improve behavior so that the answers tilt in the readers' favor. They also offer ways to beat the system by automating how we do things and limiting our decisions in the face of too much food or too much debt.
"As a 911 dispatcher, Dana Newell takes pride in being calm in tough circumstrances. In addition to her emotionally-charged career, she's faced enough emergencies in her own life. She recently escaped her abusive fiancé to move to tranquil Rock Harbor where she hopes life will be more peaceful. But the idyllic town hides more danger and secrets than it first appeared. Dana is continually drawn to her new friend Boone, who has scars inside and out. Then she answers a call at her job only to hear a friend's desperate screams on the other end. Soon, the pain in her past collides with the mysteries of her new home-- and threatens to keep her from the future she's always wanted." - Provided by publisher.
October 4, 2017 | madame librarian
International Dagger Award shortlisted author of The Murderer in Ruins, Cay Rademacher, delivers a beautifully atmospheric new story with a captivating main character in Murderous Mistral: A Provence Mystery. Capitaine Roger Blanc, an investigator with the anti-corruption-unit of the French Gendarmerie, was a bit too succesfull in his investigations. He finds himself removed from Paris to the south of France, far away from political power. Or so it would seem. The stress is too much for his marriage, and he attempts to manage the break up while trying to settle into his new life in Provence in a 200-year-old, half-ruined house. At the same time, Blanc is tasked with his first murder case: A man with no friends and a lot of enemies, an outsider, was found shot and burned. When a second man dies under suspicious circumstances in the quaint French countryside, the Capitaine from Paris has to dig deep into the hidden, dark undersides of the Provence henever expected to see.
Deputy Mattie Cobb is in a dark place and has withdrawn from Cole Walker and his family to work on issues from her past. When she and her K-9 partner Robo get called to track a missing junior high student, they find the girl dead on Smoker's Hill behind the high school, and Mattie must head to the Walker home to break the bad news. But that's only the start of trouble in Timber Creek, because soon another girl goes missing--and this time it's one of Cole's daughters. Knowing that each hour a child remains missing lessens the probability of finding her alive, Mattie and Robo lead the hunt while Cole and community volunteers join in to search everywhere. To no avail. It seems that someone has snatched all trace of the Walker girl from their midst, including her scent. Grasping at straws, Mattie and Robo follow a phoned-in tip into the dense forest, where they hope to find a trace of the girl's scent and to rescue her alive. But when Robo does catch herscent, it leads them to information that challenges everything they thought they knew about the case. Mattie and Robo must rush to hunt down the kidnapper before they're too late in Hunting Hour , the third installment in critically acclaimed author Margaret Mizushima's exhilarating mystery series.
September 6, 2017 | madame librarian
This month we've read a collection of essays by Pulitzer Prize winner, David McCullough, the real story about America's 'Wild West', the 1947 World Series--the first to be televised, and two thrillers.
This collection of speeches by historian David McCullough reminds us of fundamental American principles. Over the course of his distinguished career, David McCullough has spoken before Congress, the White House, colleges and universities, historical societies, and other esteemed institutions. Now, as many Americans engage in self-reflection following a bitter election campaign that has left the country divided, McCullough has collected some of his most important speeches in a brief volume that articulates important principles and characteristics that are particularly American.
A revolutionary new appraisal of the Old West and the America it made The open range cattle era lasted barely a quarter-century, but it left America irrevocably changed. These few decades following the Civil War brought America its greatest boom-and-bust cycle until the Depression, the invention of the assembly line, and the dawn of the conservation movement. It inspired legends, such as that icon of rugged individualism, the cowboy. Yet this extraordinary time and its import have remained unexamined for decades. Cattle Kingdom reveals the truth of how the West rose and fell, and how its legacy defines us today. The tale takes us from dust-choked cattle drives to the unlikely splendors of boomtowns like Abilene, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. We venture from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakota Badlands to the Chicago stockyards. We meet a diverse array of players--from the expert cowboy Teddy Blue to the failed rancher and future president Teddy Roosevelt. Knowlton shows us how they and others like them could achieve so many outsized feats: killing millions of bison in a decade, building the first opera house on the open range, driving cattle by the thousand, and much more. Cattle Kingdom is a revelatory new view of the Old West.
