Fiction. SUGAR MOUNTAIN is a cautionary tale about an all-too-possible catastrophe: a deadly flu epidemic that starts in China and spreads throughout the world, slowly at first, then unbelievably fast. And there is no cure. People who prepare for such possibilities are variously referred to as "homesteaders," "preppers," or "survivalists." This is a story of one such extended family, the Arkwrights, and how, at their farm in western Massachusetts, they gather and stand together in the face of a relentless mass killer. As well as the ravaging influenza, they must contend with provisioning themselves and fending off a local well-armed and ruthless para-military group all the while hanging on to enough humanity to make their survival meaningful. SUGAR MOUNTAIN explores how such a calamity affects individual family members, their neighbors—many of whom are not prepared—and society as a whole. This is a story of a fight to survive in the midst of pressures and threats and against long odds. As one member of the family records in her journal, "The world is coming to an end... The world is starting all over again."

Sugar Mountain

Literature & Fiction

Alcorn, Alfred

Contemporary

Caravel Mystery Books

Fiction. Mystery. Ben Jones, the protagonist of James Anderson's haunting debut novel, THE NEVER-OPEN DESERT DINER (Caravel Books, 2015), is on the verge of losing his small trucking company. A single, thirty-eight-year-old truck driver, Ben's route takes him back and forth across one of the most desolate and beautiful regions of the Utah desert. The orphan son of a Native American father and a Jewish social worker, Ben is drawn into a love affair with a mysterious woman, Claire, who plays a cello in the model home of an abandoned housing development in the desert. Her appearance, seemingly out of nowhere, reignites a decades-old tragedy at a roadside café referred to by the locals as The Never-Open Desert Diner. The owner of the diner, Walt Butterfield, is an embittered and solitary old man who refuses to yield to change after his wife's death.

The Never-Open Desert Diner

Anderson, James

Fiction. Translated from the Swedish by Laura A. Wideburg. "In the disturbing second tale of revenge to feature tormented and twisted Justine Dalvik from Swedish author Frimansson (after GOOD NIGHT, MY DARLING), Justine is still battling demons, both real and imagined, while living in her family home in Haesselby. The tall, forbidding manse was the last place married, mother-of-two Berit Assarson was seen alive. Seven years have passed since Berit's disappearance, and her husband, Tor, and her best friend, Jill Kylen, are trying to move on with their lives. Both harbor lingering, foggy suspicions about Justine, just like young Micke, whose father, Nathan, vanished while traveling with Justine. In spare prose, Frimansson skillfully weaves themes of darkness and light, guilt and innocence, life and death. Not for the faint of heart, this bleak mystery will linger in readers' minds long after the last page is turned"--Publishers Weekly.

The Shadow in the Water

Inger Frimansson

Genre Fiction

Fiction. THE LORD GOD BIRD is a startling novella filled with dark images of America in the South in 1949. Jake Hamrick, a 19-year-old who has been obsessed since childhood with the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, a bird that is on the verge of extinction, leaves Illinois for Louisiana to find the creature, accompanied by Robin, his tiny girlfriend. They search in the bayous where the bird was last reported, and Robin, as obsessed as Jake, dresses like the bird, smearing her naked body with white clay, wearing a cloak of black crow feathers, her hair in a red crest. She is discovered by local hunters and Robin and Jake are pursued deep into the bayous, where they are harbored by Robert, an ancient black man. It is a cinematic novella of obsession, passion, violence, love and loss that you won't forget.

The Lord God Bird

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Hill, Russell

Thrillers & Suspense

Fiction. Ray Adams buys his girlfriend, beautiful Ava Belle, a baseball team for her birthday. She loves dogs and baseball. Ray's gift is a broken-down semi-pro team in California's Central Valley, with a 70-year-old Jewish manager who's been in baseball for 50 years and breaks into Yiddish homilies when the going gets tough. He assembles a rag-tag lineup of sheetrockers, farm laborers, wanna-be big leaguers, and a freak submarine pitcher—19-year-old Billy Collins. The only problem is that Billy has a drunken, abusive father who, when he shows up at the ballpark, causes Billy to fall apart. How to get rid of Bucky Collins becomes a primary goal not just for the team's sake, but for Billy's. Rough him up? Pay him off? See that he has an "accident"? With him around, the team and Billy are simply not functional.

The Dog Sox

Fiction. Here's a book which starts innocently enough with a photographer buying an old camera and discovering some black and white negatives hidden in the box that the camera came in when it was originally sold. Wanting to find out about the photos leads him to people and places he didn't expect, and to long-unsolved crimes by prominent people. Suddenly those negatives become extremely dangerous to possess.

Deadly Negatives

Mystery

Fiction. THE OTHER ROMANIAN is Anne Argula's fourth novel featuring her acerbic and tough-talking detective, Quinn. The first of these fast and clever novels, HOMICIDE MY OWN, earned Argula an Edgar nomination for Best Paperback Original. This latest work continues with that same tone: smart, sexy, and definitely off-beat. If you haven't met Quinn yet, you're in for a welcome surprise. If you have met her, welcome back. Argula starts you guessing with the first line, and you aren't likely to stop guessing until the very last line.

The Other Romanian

Argula, Anne

Fiction. Jewish Studies. Margot Brenner seems to have everything a 25-year-old could want: a medical degree, a pediatric internship at a prestigious New York hospital, an attentive boyfriend. So why does she abandon her boyfriend and internship for a position at a second-rate hospital in a small German city? She knows her father and brother were victims of the holocaust when they became trapped in Germany at the onset of WWII, but she wants...specifics. Her father's old friend, Willie Meinhof, who sheltered them as long as he could, and who suffered for that, should know. In Wolfenbuttel, where Willie and his son, also a doctor, now live, Margot finds surprising resistance from Willie. "Let the past stay buried; let sleeping dogs lie," is his attitude. But Margot persists, until the answers she finds show that things are rarely what they seem, and that an agonizing choice in 1939 has terrible consequences in the present.

Honest Deceptions

Hess, Hannah S.

WINNER 2014 DAPHNE DU MAURIER AWARD for Excellence in Mystery and Suspense Writing     "We are constantly immersed in a network of signs and symbols whose meaning eludes us, but which, if only we could read them, would reveal every detail of our past and even of our future. Little signs presaging an event, and persisting in their own way till long after it is over. A sort of anticipating echo. They are everywhere-- a casual word in a conversation overhead, an unusual design of seaweed and twigs washed up on the beach, a picture on a postcard slipped in between the pages of a borrowed book, a glove abandoned on a train. But to make them speak intelligibly ... that is another question"In this novel, we meet four unlikely misfits seeking inspiration in the timeless Italian landscape. Soon, however, they find their destinies entangled in the meanders of the mysterious sculpture garden of Bomarzo with its freaks and monsters. Daphne, a writer with a hashish habit; Clive, an American gigolo and aspiring artist; Nigel, an English aristocrat down at the heels; and Finestone, a fly-by-night art historian all come together in a decrepit villa looked after by two Italian servants who are not what they seem. To find what they're looking for, all the characters must descend into the depths of hell. But not everyone will make it out alive.

Signatures in Stone

Lappin, Linda

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