July 2017 list by Jewel Nelson
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| The Chalk Pit by Elly GriffithsBeneath Norwich, England lies a number of medieval and chalk-mining tunnels, and in one of them, a surveyor unearths recent human bones. Forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway teams up with DCI Harry Nelson to investigate the bones amid reports of cults, cannibals, a man who vanished into thin air, and a missing homeless woman. |
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| Song of the Lion by Anne HillermanAttending a high school basketball game, Navajo police officer Bernadette Manuelito hears a car bomb explode in the parking lot. It's thought that the owner of the car, a lawyer mediator working with land developers, the Hopi, and the Dani, was the target, so Bernie's husband, Sgt. Jim Chee, guards him. Meanwhile, Bernie works with retired Lt. Joe Leaphorn to uncover a link from the bomb to one of his earlier cases. |
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Abducted Innocence
by Sandra Bolton
When a Native American girl turns up missing during a traditional ceremony, Navajo police officer Emily Etcitty is on the case. What initially looks like nothing more than a routine runaway turns into a high-priority kidnapping case when a connection is made to several other missing girls under similar suspicious circumstances.
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Tamburlaine: A Broadway Revival
by Gregory A. Kompes
Chris Marlowe, a drag queen of a certain age, has kept the failing, New York City show bar, Tamburlaine, open because of a long-ago made promise. When a young man enters her life, Chris reconnects with the world and everything changes. The bar once again enjoys success, crowds flood to Tamburlaine for the gender-bending shows directed by The Great Jericho Taylor, and Chris's impersonations of the famed comedienne, Rusty Warren are once again loved by audiences. So, why is someone trying to kill Christopher Marlowe-again and again?
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Carolina Cruel
by Lawrence Thackston
In the deep swamps of the South Carolina Low Country, two hunters stumble upon a sheriff’s patrol car, which disappeared over forty years before. Inside the car are bullet holes, blood stains, and scattered bones that provide long-awaited clues to solving one of the palmetto state’s greatest mysteries. Enter cold case reporter, Tindal Huddleston, who must weave through local resistance and historical angst to piece together the explosive story of race, politics, crime and corruption. She recruits Chan Adams, a burned-out former reporter of the local paper, who must overcome the demons of his own painful past before involving himself again in the decades-old case. Against impossible odds, the two reporters will make startling connections between an executed mass murderer, the fallout from the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre, and the hanging of one of the state’s most prominent citizens. And in their search for answers, they will discover a cruelty so devastating; it will change countless lives forever.
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Dead Reckoning
by Glenis Wilson
When he stumbles across the body of local prostitute Alice Goode, champion jockey Harry Radcliffe is once again forced to turn reluctant sleuth. The prime suspect for Alice's murder is ex-con Jake Smith. If Harry doesn't find out who really killed Alice, and gets Jake off the hook, Jake will be coming after Harry - and his estranged wife, Annabel.
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Eleventh Hour: A Kit Marlowe Mystery
by M. J. Trow
April, 1590. The queen's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, is dead, leaving a dangerous power vacuum. His former right hand man, Nicholas Faunt, believes he was poisoned and has ordered Kit Marlowe to discover who killed him.
To find the answers, Marlowe must consult the leading scientists and thinkers in the country. But as he questions the members of the so-called School of Night, the playwright-turned-spy becomes convinced that at least one of them is hiding a deadly secret. If he is to outwit the most inquiring minds in Europe and unmask the killer within, Marlowe must devise an impossibly ingenious plan.
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Thread of Gold
by Anne Da Vigo
During the tumultuous months surrounding World War I, a fortune in gold was rumored to be buried somewhere in the steep hills bordering New York's Finger Lakes. The tale wreaks havoc on the lives of three generations of women. For love-struck teenager Abby Macpherson, the gold is the link between her and her handsome neighbor. For Abby's daughter, Alice, it's the catalyst that drives her from upstate New York to the West Coast, empty and searching.
San Francisco crime reporter Cora Brooks knows nothing about the gold until her publisher sends her to the Finger Lakes to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding a friend's death. Was it murder? She goes unwillingly. Cora wants nothing to do with the birthplace of her mother, who disappeared when Cora was six. Cora's investigation immediately runs into animosity from the dead man's wife and resistance from law enforcement. Flashbacks of the night her mother disappeared begin to haunt her. As she delves more deeply into the story, it becomes increasingly entwined with the gold and the convoluted history of her own family. She plunges forward, determined to learn the truth, risking her sanity and even her life.
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The Moonstone's Curse
by Sam Siciliano
Believing his wife to be in trouble because she will not sell a supposedly cursed heirloom diamond, Charles Bromley enlists the help of Sherlock Holmes, who tries to unravel the mystery once the diamond is stolen.
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All Signs Point to Murder
by Connie Di Marco
Julia Bonatti is alarmed by the astrological signs looming over Geneva Leary’s wedding day, but nobody asked Julia’s opinion and being a bridesmaid means supporting the bride no matter what. Even with the foreboding Moon-Mars-Pluto lineup in the heavens, no one’s prepared for the catastrophes that strike: a no-show sister, a passed-out wedding planner, and a lethal shooting in the dead of night.
With anger and grief threatening to tear the Leary family part, Julia is determined to understand how such a terrible tragedy could occur. As she digs deeper into the family’s secrets, her astrological insights will lead her to the truth about a criminal enterprise that stretches far beyond the California coast.
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Child of My Winter
by Andrew Lanh
Rick van Lam is bui doi, "a child of dust," as the Vietnamese scornfully called a mixed-blood kid whose father was an unknown American GI. But Rick was lucky-in time he was sent to America. And he's ended up in Hartford, Connecticut, where he's made a life as a private eye after leaving a career as a cop at the NYPD.
Rick is also teaching a part-time course at Farmington College where brainy Vietnamese student Dustin Trang, a scholarship student with no social skills and an oddly hostile family, is scorned and bullied. It reminds Rick of his own miserable days in a Saigon orphanage and he reaches out. But Dustin rebuffs him.
One night as a blizzard strikes, a professor is shot down in the campus parking lot. The man had befriended Justin, but their relationship had visibly soured. Dustin is everyone's hot suspect for the murder, but Rick believes the boy is innocent. Oddly, Dustin seems indifferent to others' suspicion that he's a killer. And he seems resistant to helping his case.
Rick knows he owes who he has become to the loving support of his friend, Hank Nguyen, and Hank's multigenerational family. To pay it forward for Justin, Rick persuades Hank, a state cop, and some of his circle of Hartford friends to dig into Dustin's dysfunctional world, interviewing faculty and students, relatives, and a busy congregation that seems to be a focal point for the fractured Trang family.
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Over Maya Dead Body
by Sandra Orchard
While on vacation with her family on Martha's Vinyard, FBI agent Serena Jones is caught up in a local investigation of a suspicious death tied to an antiquities smuggling ring, just as a heap of romantic complications begin to surface.
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The Diary of Young Arthur Conan Doyle--Adventures in The Wild West 1878
by John Raffensperger
Here is the first of the “lost” diaries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, written in 1878 while he was a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. This rollicking story of high adventure begins with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the clerk for the legendary Doctor Joseph Bell—who became the real-life inspiration for the world’s most famous literary detective, Sherlock Holmes. This diary details how Doyle and Dr. Bell journey to America on a secret forensic mission to solve a string of grisly and mysterious murders. Peopled with Doyle’s real-life contemporaries—including JM Barrie and Robert Louis Stevenson, both of whom attended the University of Edinburgh with Doyle, it is an exciting mix of murder, mystery, literary history, and humor sure to please Sherlock Holmes fans everywhere!
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Death Scene: A 1920s Mystery
by Jane A. Adams
1928. A rising star of the silent screen, Cissie Rowe had a bright future ahead of her in the new talking pictures. Not any more. Cissie had died, tragically, many times on screen - but this time it's for real.
When Cissie is found brutally murdered in her own home, DCI Henry Johnstone and DS Mickey Hitchens are despatched to the seaside town of Shoreham-by-Sea to investigate. Famed for the quality of its light, Shoreham is home to a film studio and thriving theatrical community. But who among them would want the popular young actress dead?
The two London detectives soon discover that no one, including the victim, is quite what they seem - and that the make-believe continues both on and off the famous glasshouse stage.
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Murder in Mayfair: An Atlas Catesby Mystery by D. M. QuincyIn 1810, Atlas Catesby, a brilliant adventurer and youngest son of a baron, is anxious to resume his world travels after a carriage accident left him injured in London. But his plans are derailed when, passing through a country village, he discovers a helpless woman being auctioned off to the highest bidder--by her husband. In order to save her from being violated by another potential buyer, Atlas purchases the lady, Lilliana, on the spot to set her free. But Lilliana, desperate to be with her young sons and knowing the laws of England give a father all parental rights, refuses to be rescued--until weeks later when her husband is murdered and Atlas is the only one who can help clear her name of the crime.
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| Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love by James RuncieCozy Mystery/Short Stories. Like previous entries in this charming series, this 6th collection features clergyman-detective Sidney Chambers investigating cases big and small. First, while on a walk in the 1970s Cambridgeshire woods with his seven-year-old daughter, the archdeacon discovers a corpse. With his friend DI Geordie Keating sometimes helping, Sidney also aids a friend who's been raped, looks for a runaway teen, and tries to locate a missing medieval book. Slightly cozier than Grantchester, the TV series based on them, these leisurely paced novels are reminiscent of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries. |
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The Bonepicker
by Lu Clifton
It’s bitter cold in Oklahoma’s Ouachita Wilderness when Detective Sam Chitto of the Choctaw Tribal Police takes on a thirty-five year old cold case involving a missing Vietnam veteran and a murdered couple. The discovery of a man’s skull in the murdered woman’s casket, which her family had disinterred for further investigation, attracts the attention of the veteran’s mother. Believing the skull to be that of her son, she tasks Chitto with becoming a Bonepicker. Because bones survived flesh, Choctaw of old preserved the bones of their deceased, believing their essence dwelled within. Honored people, called Bonepickers, retrieved the bones and presented them to the family for burial. When his preliminary investigation reveals former suspects in the old murder inquiry have a shorter-than-average life span, Chitto goes looking for the reason. As he unravels the mystery, long-held secrets that have kept residents living in fear the past thirty-five years begin to crumble.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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