Mystery

Book Review: The Spy Coast

carolLeave a comment

60-year-old Maggie Bird is quietly raising chickens in the seaside village of Purity, Maine. So too are several of her fellow retired CIA officers, who also like the area’s charm–but especially like to keep watch on one another. When a dead body turns up in Maggie’s driveway, she knows it’s a message from former foes, and she turns to her friends, and not Purity’s baffled, acting Police Chief Jo Thibodeau, for help.

As she tries to figure out what led to this, in alternating chapters, Maggie’s reminisces about working her most past dangerous mission, Operation Cyrano, which took her around the world and eventually, she believes forced her to become a traitor. But as ghosts from Maggie’s past continue to seek revenge, she’ll need to call on the favors of some old friends – and perhaps even the local police after all – in order to outmaneuver them.

With plenty of action and espionage, and engaging characters readers will want to get to know more, The Spy Coast by Tess Gerritsen is the perfect book for readers who enjoy spy novels, murder mysteries, and thrillers. This first novel in a planned series will also please fans of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series and the “Red” film series. Place your hold today.

-Carol

New Books Tuesday @ RRPL

semanurLeave a comment

Here we have some new exciting releases for you to take a look at this week!

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DISAPPEARING

Accompanying her sister on a search for their mother, who ran off with an accomplished con man years earlier, Jess, as they make their way across the country, unraveling the mystery of where the couple disappeared to and why, discovers a willingness to expand beyond the walls she’s so carefully built.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DEVLINS

The charming disappointment in the prominent Devlin family, TJ Devlin finds his world turned upside down when his lawyer brother confesses he has just killed one of his clients and, seizing this chance to prove his worth, becomes entangled in a deadly web of deception and murder to save his brother.

CHEATER

San Diego Detective Kit McKittrick investigates a nursing home with numerous skeletons in the closet after a resident is found stabbed to death with his apartment ransacked, in the second novel of the series following Cold Blooded Liar.

THE ANGEL OF INDIAN LAKE

Jade returns to Proofrock, Idaho, to build a life after the years of sacrifice—only to find the Lake Witch is waiting for her. Indian Lake trilogy.

THE WILD SIDE

Called back to the Office of Special Investigations for a highly specialized assignment, school guidance counselor Melanie Drake must pose as an escort to infiltrate a dangerous international group of billionaires during a decadent dinner to collect information vital to national security.

EVERYONE IS WATCHING

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Overnight Guest comes a twisty locked-room thriller about a mysterious, high-stakes game show that proves life-threatening.

STUDIES AT THE SCHOOL BY THE SEA

Even though literature teacher Maggie Adair loves her life at the prestigious Downey House boarding school on the gloriously sunny, windy English coast, lately she’s been feeling restless, lured by the promise of a different life back in her Scottish hometown.

~Semanur

New Books Tuesday @ RRPL

semanurLeave a comment

Here are some of the new books coming to our shelves this week for you to add to your book list! Click on the book title to go to our catalog and place a hold!

THE PRINCESS OF LAS VEGAS

Living in the Buckingham Palace Casino, Crissy Dowling, a Princess Diana impersonator with her own musical cabaret, finds her carefully constructed kingdom crashing down around her when the owner of the casino is brutally murdered and she is drawn in a world of organized crime, cryptocurrency and obsession.

THE #1 LAWYER

A small-town lawyer with a big-time reputation, Stafford Lee Penney, Mississippi’s #1 lawyer who has never lost a case, when his wife is scandalously killed, spirals into a legal and personal legal streak, ruining his career, and making him the nation’s #1 suspect.

EXPIRATION DATE

Every time she meets a new man, Daphne Bell receives a slip of paper with his name and a number on it—the exact amount of time they will be together; usually she is right, but when she meets Jake, her whole system is thrown for a loop.

JAMES

Describes the events of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of the enslaved Jim, who decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island after learning he is to be sold to a man in New Orleans.

THE MORNINGSIDE

Settling at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in Island City, Silvia, struggling with her new reality, becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse and is determined to unravel the truth about this woman’s life, and her own haunted past.

GOOD HALF GONE

After witnessing her twin sister get kidnapped years prior, Iris Walsh decides to intern at a hospital for the criminally insane where she believes the perpetrator is being held and discovers something even more sinister going on.

KILL FOR ME, KILL FOR YOU

Two ordinary women make a dangerous pact to take revenge for each other after being pushed to the brink.

~Semanur

New Books Tuesday @ RRPL

semanurLeave a comment

There are tons of new releases that come to our shelves every week. With all the books being unique in their own ways, it is hard to choose between the ones that are suitable for your taste. Here are some books we picked out for you!

STILL SEE YOU EVERYWHERE

Asked by a female serial killer, with only 21 days left to live, to locate her long-lost sister who was kidnapped over a decade ago, Frankie Elkin is led to a tech mogul’s remote island where she goes undercover to learn the truth and possibly save a young woman’s life.

IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW

Retired Detective Molly Murphy Sullivan is back with In Sunshine or in Shadow, the latest book in this beloved series by New York Times bestselling author Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles. Deep in the New York Catskills in 1908, tensions are running high, and it’s not long before a body delays Molly Murphy’s return to Westchester.

THE UNDERGROUND LIBRARY

When the Blitz destroys Bethnal Green Library in London, librarian Juliet Lansdown, along with two other women, relocates the stacks to the local Underground station where the city’s residents shelter nightly, determined to lend out stories that will keep spirits up, but soon tragedy after tragedy threatens to destroy what they’ve built.

WATCH WHERE THEY HIDE

Journalist Jordan Manning delves into the case of a mother in danger and uncovers a dangerous web of secrets that could lead right to the missing woman or put Jordan in the crosshairs of her abductors.

BECOMING MADAM SECRETARY

Describes how Frances Perkins met a young lawyer named Franklin Delano Roosevelt in turn-of-the-century New York and, despite initially not getting along, the pair formed a historic partnership that led them both to the White House.

2054

Set 20 years after the events of the New York Times best-selling 2034 the fate of American democracy is threatened by tech visionary in the Amazon rainforest who uses a breakthrough in AI to assassinate the president.

UNTIL AUGUST

In a rediscovered novel from the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ana Magdalena Bach has been happily married for 27 years, and yet, every August, she travels by ferry to the island where her mother is buried, and for one night takes a new lover.

~Semanur

New Books Tuesday @ RRPL

semanurLeave a comment

Here are some of the new books coming to our shelves this week for you to add to your book list!

THREE-INCH TEETH

When the outlaw he locked up years ago is released from prison, determined to exact revenge on the six people who sent him away, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, with a grizzly bear on a rampage, soon discovers he’s one of those six people.

WONDERING STARS

Tracing the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 to the aftermath of Orvil Red Feather’s shooting, Opal tries to hold her family together while Orvil becomes emotionally reliant on prescription medications, and his younger brother, suffering from PTSD, secretly enacts blood rituals to connect to his Cheyenne heritage.

AFTER ANNIE

After Annie Brown dies suddenly, her family and her best friend struggle to maintain their lives and eventually discover that they are able to grow, change and become stronger due to their memories and the lasting power of love.

THE AMERICAN DAUGHTERS

Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Ady, when she’s separated from her mother, meets Lenore, a free black woman who invites her to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters, setting her on a journey toward liberation and imagining a new future.

GRIEF IS FOR PEOPLE

The author of the New York Times best-sellers I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number shares how she dealt with the grief of losing her best friend to suicide.

AMERICAN WOMAN

Focusing on Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden, a White House correspondent for The New York Times looks at the 21st century’s transformation of the First Lady’s role from a ceremonial symbol to a political operator.

A FATE INKED IN BLOOD

After discovering that she is a shield maiden who can repel any attack, a fanatical jarl binds Freya with a blood oath to protect Skaland in a Norse-inspired fantasy romance, from the best-selling author of The Bridge Kingdom series.

~Semanur

Book Review: Shutter

carolLeave a comment

A forensic photographer who works for the Albuquerque police, Rita Todacheene is good at capturing what others don’t see, through the lens of her cameras. Not only does she have a keen photographer’s eye that helps cops solve the toughest crimes, but she also has a special talent –Rita can see dead people. As a young girl, her only friends were often such ghosts, but the first time Rita confessed this, she was mostly ostracized by her fellow Navajos on the Reservation. Now she knows to keep her “gift” quiet.

While she can usually block out her visions, after Rita photographs the particularly brutal scene of a supposed suicide, the victim’s enraged ghost, Erma, begins to full-on haunt Rita. Erma insists that her death was murder, forcing Rita on a quest to find her killers and avenge her death. Unbeknownst to Rita, investigating this case gets her the wrong kind of attention from Albuquerque’s most dangerous drug cartel and the crooked cops who work for them.

Shutter by Ramona Emerson was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction. Not only is this a suspenseful debut crime novel, it is also a compelling coming of age tale, as Rita’s Indigenous upbringing and the history of her visions are revealed in flashbacks along the way. Filled with non-stop action, grisly descriptions of violent crime scenes and corpses, and plenty of not-so-friendly ghosts, this truly original blend of mystery and the supernatural might be just the change of pace you are looking for. And good news –its sequel, Exposure, will be published in October 2024.

-Carol



Book Review: The River We Remember

carolLeave a comment

When the body of Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, it sets off an irreversible chain of events that forever changes lives in Black Earth County in southwestern Minnesota in 1958. Quinn, one of the rural county’s wealthiest landowners, was a cruel man whose death comes as a relief to most of his neighbors. But before Sherriff Brody Dern even examines the crime scene, prejudices influence townspeople to pin the murder on Noah Bluestone, a war vet, and a Dakota Sioux whose ancestor first owned Quinn’s land. As Brody continues to investigate, tensions rise and a myriad of secrets come to light about his neighbors – even as Brody desperately tries to conceal his own dark past. Can Brody get to the truth of Quinn’s death before innocent people begin to turn against one another?

With a cast of exquisitely drawn characters, most of whom are still haunted by World War II, The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger is part police procedural, part exploration of small town life in 1950’s Minnesota. With vivid descriptive and a gripping narrative that you’ll want to savor, this novel is Krueger at his most skilled. Pick up a copy today!

-Carol

New Books Tuesday @ RRPL

semanurLeave a comment

Take a look at some of the exciting new releases coming to our shelves in this week…

RANDOM IN DEATH

When a 16-year-old girl is murdered during a show at a New York club, Lieutenant Eve Dallas, with the lab results showing a toxic mix of substances and infectious agents in the victim’s body, must find a madman consumed by hatred who’s just another face in the crowd.

HARBOR LIGHTS

Eight short stories and a never-before-published novella, from the best-selling author of Cadillac Jukebox include the tale of a father and son who watch evil forces disguised as federal agents try to ruin their family.

THE FRIENDSHIP CLUB

After a series of terrible dates, Marni McGuire, the host of a popular TV cooking show, forms an unbreakable bond with her best friend Ellen as well as a young intern on the show and her pregnant daughter Bella as they navigate the challenges and celebrate the joys of life.

DEAD MAN’S HAND

Brad Taylor and Pike Logan face off against Putin’s agents and a group of rogue Ukrainian partisans plotting to assassinate a Swedish deputy minister in the latest novel, in the series following The Devil’s Ransom.

DIVA

Describes the scandalous love affaire between the legendary opera singer, Maria Callas, and the fabulously rich Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, whose relationship ended suddenly with the shocking news that he was to marry Jacqueline Kennedy.

NO ONE CAN KNOW

Returning to the house where her parents were murdered, mother-to-be Emma Palmer who has never told anyone what she saw the night her parents died, even when she became the prime suspect, is reunited with her estranged sisters who will do anything to keep the past buried.

ONE IN A MILLION

When Frank Culhane, the wealthy patriarch of one of Texas’s most prestigious families, is murdered, Detective Sam Rafferty, a city outsider, is propelled into a tangle of simmering rivalries and forbidden attractions as Frank’s second wife and his scorned first wife hold the future of his ranching dynasty in their hands.

THE MISSING WITNESS

Framed for the murder of an FBI agent after testifying against David Chen and his illegal businesses, Kara Quinn goes on the run, determined to clear her name without putting her partner, Matt Costa, in danger.

EASTER BASKET MURDER

A collection of Easter-themed mysteries set in coastal Maine features sleuths from three best-selling cozy mystery series: Lucy Stone, Hayley Powell and Julia Snowden, who investigate a deadly art theft and a body that mysteriously vanishes after being discovered.

~Semanur

New Books Tuesday @ RRPL

semanurLeave a comment

Here are some of the new books coming to our shelves this week for you to add to your book list!

HOLMES, MARPLE & POE

Brendan Holmes, Margaret Marple and Auguste Poe open a private investigating company together and their daring methodology and news-making solved cases would make their last-namesakes proud and attract the attention of an NYPD detective.

THE HEIRESS

After North Carolina’s richest—and most notorious—heiress dies, her adopted son, Camden, rejects his inheritance until 10 years later, when his uncle’s death pulls him and his wife back into the family fold at Ashby House where he realizes the bonds of family stretch far beyond the grave.

DEEP FREEZE

After surviving a bus accident, veteran Joh Reiff awakens in the hospital alive and suspicious that the doctors aren’t telling him something, in the first novel of a new series by the author of the “Breakthrough” series.

COLD VICTORY

Two women in 1947 Helsinki, one American and one Russian, have their loyalties and friendship put to the test when their husbands drunkenly challenge each other to a secret cross-country ski race at an embassy party pitting freedom against communism.

THE NIGHT ISLAND

When a mysterious informant disappears, Talia March, searching for a list of people like her and her friends, is forced to team up with Luke Rand, a hunted and haunted man chasing the same list, when they are both targeted by a killer.

GOODBYE GIRL

A Miami criminal defense lawyer helps a Grammy-winning popstar who signed an onerous contract as a teen that leaves her ex-husband with all her royalties, in the eighteenth novel of the series following Twenty.

HOLIDAY COUNTRY

Spending the summer in Turkey with her family, Ada begins to imagine a different future for her mother after a mysterious man from her past returns and must come to terms with her own attraction to him.

~Semanur

Semanur’s Top Ten of 2023

semanurLeave a comment

As we approach the conclusion of 2023, it’s not just the turning of a calendar page—it’s a moment of reflection. Today, I invite you to step into my literary sanctuary as I unveil a curated selection of my favorite books from this year.

Shielding herself from the world behind the safety of her camera lens, photographer Ayah Fleming is pulled into the past when she returns home and uncovers the truth about her descendants with the help of a man who makes her long for a brighter future.

Sent into an arranged marriage, Tan Yunxian, forbidden to continue her work as a midwife-in-training as well as see her forever friend Meiling, is ordered to act like proper wife and seeks a way to continue treating women and girls from every level of society in 15th-century China.
From the best-selling and critically acclaimed author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace comes a look at the school-to-prison pipeline and life in the juvenile “justice” system.
Drawing on 30 years of experience, a renowned cat behavior scientist references historical records and examines modern scientific studies of cat-human communication to reveal previously unexplored secrets of how cats all over the world have learned to talk to us.
In 1974, Paris perfumer Radha, on the cusp of a breakthrough, travels to India where she enlists the help of her sister and the courtesans of Agra, who use the power of fragrance to seduce, while finally confronting a past secret, which threatens her already vulnerable marriage.
Based on a true story and a five-million-word secret journal, this extraordinary work of fiction follows an orphaned heiress, banished from India to England, and a brilliant, troublesome tomboy who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in 1805 York where they fall secretly, deeply and dangerous in love.
Accused of murder, an enslaved woman goes on the run with an abolitionist schoolteacher in the fall of 1863, dodging constables and slave catchers, in the new novel by the New York Times best-selling author of If I Disappear.
In the years before the Civil War, Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march, seeks comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother, opening herself to a world beyond this world.
In 1921 Penang, when Willie, a famed writer and old friend of her husband’s, arrives for an extended stay, Lesley, as her friendship with Willie grows, makes a dangerous decision to confide in him about life in the Straits, including her relationship with a charismatic Chinese revolutionary a confession that has devastating consequences.
As WWII ends, Elise returns to Paris to reunite with her daughter only to find her friend Juliette, the woman she entrusted her daughter with, has seemingly vanished without a trace, which leads Elise on a desperate search to New York and to Juliette one final, fateful time.
~Semanur