Thursday, July 16, 2015

Summer Reads: New Adult Fiction



Summer months are the perfect time to escape with fiction and the new book shelves at the Peter White Public Library have plenty of offerings for all reading tastes.
Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason is the prequel to the critically acclaimed Inspector Erlendur series.  Readers will find Erlendur as a young and budding detective on the busy streets in Reykjavik.  Erlendur is haunted by the drowning death of a tramp he regularly sees on his nightly rounds.  When nobody else cares about the crime, the young detective gets dragged into the strange and dark underworld of the city in an effort to solve the mystery.
Orient is a small isolated town on the north fork of Long Island.  As the summer draws to a close, the residents are gripped by a series of mysterious deaths.  Mills Chevern is a new resident of town.  An orphan with no ties and a hazy history, suspicion lands on him.  Can he solve the mysteries before time runs out?  That is the question posed in Orient by Christopher Bollen.
         
High season is coming to an end for Jackson Hole fishing guide Jake Trent.  With time on his hands, the ex-lawyer’s thoughts turn to his sputtering romance with ranger Noelle Klimpton.   Suddenly, a surprise call from a long-lost lover throws his life into disarray.  The second installment in the Jake Trent series by David Riley Bertsch, River of No Return is filled with twists and turns.
            Anne Rice reinvented the vampire universe in her Vampire Chronicles series.   Her latest, Prince Lestat is a chillingly hypnotic thriller that picks up where Rice left off with the Queen of the Damned and The Vampire Lestat.  She creates new characters, legends and lore in this eagerly-awaited novel.
            The Witch of Painted Sorrows by M.J. Rose conjours the brilliance and intrigue of Belle Epoque Paris through the travels of New York socialite Sandrine Salome.  Salome flees an abusive husband by traveling to her grandmother’s Paris mansion.  There she finds a situation more menacing than that which she left at home.
            In southeast Minnesota, a school board meeting is drawing to a deadly close as the Board chair announces that the rest of the meeting will be closed to the public and press.  He persuades his fellow board members to vote for the execution of local reporter Clancy Conley.  Detective Virgil Flowers is confronted with numerous crimes as he is called from one investigation to another in John Sanford’s Deadline.
            Lynne Truss is best known for Eats, Shoots and Leaves: the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.   She tries her hand at mystery with Cat out of Hell.  Librarian Alec Charlesworth is having a bad day.  He recently lost his job, his beloved wife has just died and to top it off, his sister is missing.  Things can’t get any worse, or can they?  When his sister’s cat Roger starts talking to Alec, he finds that he is not alone.   Roger and Alec try to piece together clues involving local history, mysterious deaths and missing persons in this clever mystery.
            Sano Ichirio’s career as the Shogun’s detective has experienced ups and downs, but nothing seems to be as bad as he finds things in 1709.  He has been demoted to a lowly patrol guard.  His relationship with his wife Reiko is in tatters and his two bitter enemies have formed an alliance.  With the Shogun old and ailing, can Sano find the culprit who tried to murder the Shogun and to destroy Japan before all is lost?  The Iris Fan is the seventeenth novel in Laura Joh Rowland’s Sano Ichirio series. 
            Jane Smiley has written the first in what is to be a new family-saga trilogy set in Iowa.  Spanning three decades, the 1920s through 1950s, Some Luck tells the tale of Roseanna and Walter Langdon and their five children.  Each chapter covers a single year.  As the novel opens, Walter has returned from World War I.  He and Rosanna raise five children, each of whom follows a different path.  Upon completing this novel, Smiley fans will be eagerly awaiting the next installment.
            One of the most popular thrillers this year is Paula Hawkins’ slow burning psychological thriller The Girl on theTrain. Each morning Rachel takes the same London commuter train past a stretch of cozy suburban homes.  Each day, the train stops at the same signal and Rachel observes a couple eating breakfast on their deck.  She starts to spin a fantasy life about the couple, until one day, their perfect life is disrupted by a shocking sight.  Her actions
in reporting the situation spin out of control in a story reminiscent of a Hitchcock thriller.
            Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty also focuses on suburban conflict as three mothers juggle rivalries and plenty of juicy secrets.  The connections between the three women drawn together in a peaceful little town develop into more than they expect.   The little lies they each tell themselves to survive may not be so innocent after all.
             Hildie Good is a native of a small little town on Boston’s rocky North Shore.  She is a successful real estate broker, mother and grandmother, but her children have decided she is too dependent on wine.  They send her off to rehab and upon release, she is in a less than dedicated recovery.  Wealthy newcomer Rebecca McAllister provides some diversion, but also spells danger.  As a cluster of secrets becomes known, this darkly comic novel, The Good House by Ann Leary, takes a deadly turn.
           
Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood reaffirms her reputation as a chronicler of humankind’s darkest impulses.  This collection of nine loosely linked short stories features grotesque and delightfully wicked facets of humanity.  A fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband.  A young woman disfigured by a genetic defect is mistaken for a vampire while a murderess who has killed all four of her husband exacts her final revenge on the first man who ever wronged her.  Atwood fans will love these tales.
            There is no limit to the variety of fiction available on the new book shelves of the Peter White Public Library.

--Pam Christensen, Library Director

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