Book Talk

Hibernate with a good book!

Winter was made for reading. Sit yourself in a comfortable chair, get the afghan and a cup of tea and enjoy!

Sixteen-year-old mail-order bride Minna Losk travels from Odessa to America with dreams of a rich young husband and freedom from labor and fear. Instead she finds a rigid, orthodox man nearly twice her age who takes her to his one room sod hut in South Dakota. In The Little Bride by Anna Solomon, Minna finds herself on the desolate prairie with her husband and two grown sons and a brutal winter. And she finds herself attracted to her oldest stepson.

In Death Benefit, by Robin Cook, medical student Pia Grazdani is working on cutting edge research with a brilliant molecular geneticist. When a catastrophic accident happens in the supposedly secure lab, Pia and fellow medical student, George trace the incident to Wall Street and an attempt to manipulate actuarial data in the insurance industry.

Appalachian folklorist Pepper Devilin is killed by an intruder in his Blue Mountain home. Thanks to emergency rescue he doesn’t stay dead but lapses into a three month coma. When he comes to, he realizes that he has been dreaming about Paris in the 1920’s, and that he knows what his attacker was after. What is in the blue tin box, that he got from his mother, that can be so important to his attacker? Phillip DePoy offers the newest in his Fever Devilin series with A Corpse’s Nightmare.

Award winning author Tony D’Souza has written a contemporary nightmare. James and Kate are typical children of the late 20th century. They have been given everything and expect everything; till the economic downturn and the pregnancy. In Mule, James is offered an opportunity to make some fast cash transporting marijuana from California to Florida. The American Dream has taken a downward turn.

Reagan is hoping for a new beginning in her family home of Harmony, Texas, but with friends ill or vanishing she is afraid to end up alone again.  That worry seems prevalent in Harmony. But when a storm threatens Harmony, residents begin to realize that to make human connections sometimes you have to put your heart at risk. Jodi Thomas has written another entry in her Harmony series, The Comforts of Home.

Psychologist Elena Burroughs has reached a milestone. She has now been widowed as long as she had been married. Author of a highly regarded book on dream interpretation, even her work hasn’t engaged her recently. Then she meets a new patient. Sandra, only her first name is given, who arrives beautifully dressed and with two body guards. As she tries to unravel her patient’s terrifying recurrent dreams, she begins to realize that Sandra and her family face a network of dangerous forces. Read Book of Dreams by Davis Bunn.

Crime fans should check out Matthew Klein’s Switchback. Wealthy from his hedge fund business, married with a beautiful young wife, Katherine, and a sexy secretary, Tricia, Timothy Van Bender has it all…until … a bad bet on Japanese currency puts his fund on the edge of collapse. His wife calls him just as she jumps off a cliff to her death. The police investigate Timothy and Timothy investigates his late wife’s surprising secrets, that secretary Tricia seems to know well, when she shows up claiming to be Timothy’s wife.

Virginia Cooper
Adult Services Librarian