LibraryAware Top 10 Books by Local Authors

Defenestrate: A Novel
by Renee Branum

"A wildly inventive, exhilarating debut narrated by a young woman meditating on her Czech ancestors' "falling curse," her twin brother's fall from a window, and the malleable, breakable bonds keeping her family from falling apart. Marta and her twin brother Nick have always been haunted and fascinated by an ancestral legend that holds that members of their family are doomed to various types of falls. And when their own family falls apart in the wake of a revelation and a resulting devastating fight with their Catholic mother, the twins move to Prague, the city in which their "falling curse" began. There Marta and Nick try to forge a new life for themselves. But their ties to the past and each other prove difficult to disentangle, and when they ultimatelyreturn to their midwestern home and Nick falls from a window himself, they are forced to confront the truths they've hidden from each other and themselves. Through this compelling, exuberant exploration of all the ways there are to fall-from defenestration in nineteenth century Prague to the pratfalls of their childhood idol Buster Keaton, from falling in love to falling midflight from an airplane-Defenestrate is a stunning, unsettling, and deeply original debut. Grappling with family myths, repression, and mental illness, Renee Branum shows us how stories reveal and conceal life's secrets and how they affect one particular family as they try to protect one another from their true history"

Death As a Living: Investigating Murder in the American Heartland
by Doyle Burke

One of the Midwest's most accomplished homicide detectives reveals the secrets behind his most notorious cases. Part memoir, part police procedural, and part true crime anthology, Death as a Living reveals the inside world of homicide and death investigation--the triumph, tragedy, humor, and truly bizarre situations one finds when working that beat. For more than thirty years, involving more than one thousand cases, Burke has worked as a death investigator--first with the Dayton, Ohio police department, then with a county coroner's office. In Death as a Living , he shares his tricks of the trade: how detectives solve cases, what they look for, the importance of forensic science, and the irreplaceable value of instinct. Along the way, Burke offers humorous trial anecdotes, thoughts on race and policing, stories about the fatal toll stress took on fellow officers, and, perhaps most movingly, details about the three fatal shootings of police officers--one of them one of his first friends at the department, another the son of his sergeant--that shaped his career.

Satan's Choir
by Tom Harley Campbell

When the battered remains of a priest are discovered at the bottom of a lake, Dayton homicide detective John Burke is mystified. Who would murder a priest? Why were the initial inquiries abandoned so long ago when the man went missing? Burke's search for a suspect leads him down a dark rabbit hole of intrigue and into his own mysterious past, as he investigates the case.

Whereabouts Unknown
by Meredith Doench

Theodora Madsen has everything she's ever hoped for: a distinguished career as a homicide detective with the Dayton Police Department, a woman she loves, and a baby on the way. While Theo and Bree nest and plan for their family's future, two sixteen-year-old Ohio girls vanish-one from Dayton and the other from Brecksville-each leaving behind a bloody handprint. Then a routine interview goes disastrously wrong, and Theo's injured and facing a lengthy recovery. With her professional future uncertain and the cases growing cold, Theo scrambles to piece together the links between the girls. But the clock is ticking and time is running out.

Deer Season
by Erin Flanagan

PW reviewer Flanagan's masterly debut novel (after the collection It's Not Going to Kill You) dissects a young woman's disappearance from a small town in 1980s Nebraska and the pervading suspicions throughout the community. Twelve-year-old Milo Ahern discovers his 16-year-old sister, Peggy, missing from her bed on a Sunday morning. Her family, assuming she has snuck out again to drink, makes excuses for her. But when her absence lingers, rumors begin to spread and fingers are pointed at Hal Bullard, an intellectually disabled 28-year-old farmhand. Alma Costagan, the brash school bus driver and Chicago transplant whose farm Hal works on alongside her husband, Clyle, defends Hal, though blood in Hal's truck and reports of him returning early from a hunting trip raise questions. The narration oscillates between Alma reflecting on her 14 years of isolation in the town, her five miscarriages, and the pain of Clyle's affair with a local woman; and Milo, a nerdy misfit struggling to cope with his sister's disappearance and his longing to leave the tiny town behind. Flanagan balances the mystery and its surprising resolution with her emotionally rich character explorations. This is a standout novel of small-town life, powered by the characters' consequential determination to protect their loved ones at any cost.

Crimes and Covers
by Amanda Flower

Christmas is coming to the Western New York village of Cascade Springs, and so is the long-awaited wedding of Charming Books proprietor Violet Waverly and police chief David Rainwater. Grandma Daisy and Violet's best friend, Sadie, go all out to make the nuptials the event of the season--whether Violet likes it or not. But the reception becomes memorable for all the wrong reasons when a woman's dead body floats by on the frigid Niagara River. Violet is shocked to recognize the deceased as a mysterious woman who visited Charming Books two days before the wedding, toting a rare first edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Well aware that a mint condition copy could be worth more than $14,000, Violet told the woman she would have to have the book appraised before she could consider buying it. Most displeased, the woman tucked the precious tome under her arm and stormed out of the shop. Now she's dead, and an enigmatic message scrawled in pen upon her palm reads, 'They stole my book.' It's a confounding case, indeed. But fortunately, Violet can draw on the resources of her bookshop's magical consciousness, which communicates clues to Violet via quotes from Walden. With Emerson the tuxedo cat and Faulkner the crow at her side, Violet sets out to recover the priceless book by solving a murder most transcendental.

Chasing Drew Hastings: A Memoir
by Drew Hastings

When Drew Hastings was seven years old, his father, also named Drew Hastings, left the family, remarried, and had another son, named Drew Hastings. "Suddenly there were three Drew Hastings," Hastings writes, "me, the one who left me, and the one who replaced me." And so begins a life-long pursuit of a name, and one long, slow skid toward the realization that we're all just making it up as we go along. The son of a single mother, Hastings picks his way through suburban and urban Ohio, obsessed with proving himself against the backdrop of the counterculture of the Sixties and Seventies. He opens a paper shredding business, tries his hand as a rug salesman, even dabbles in muskrat trapping. Most enterprises end in disaster and nothing lasts long. Finally someone suggests standup comedy--friends always said he was funny, plus the idea of 'Drew Hastings' on marquees all over the country is too much to pass up. He moves to Hollywood where he flirts with fame but can't quite bring himself to grovel hard enough. And just as a dark depression takes hold, he finally bolts, buys a farm in rural Appalachian Ohio, and at the age of fifty, starts over, breeding cattle, developing real estate, and yes, becoming the mayor of Hillsboro, Ohio. Refreshingly honest and darkly funny, Chasing Drew Hastings is a wide-ranging memoir of a life ruled by misadventure and coincidence, of growing up a confused kid and striving to find out what it means to be a man. Drawing on everything from small town politics to the ambition and malaise of show biz, Drew Hastings reckons with American masculinity, fatherhood, and inheritance head on. Unlikely, irreverent, and wholly original, the result is endlessly entertaining, and perhaps even inadvertently revelatory.

The Color of Acceptance
by Carol Siyahi Hicks

The Color of Acceptance is a tale of prejudice, passion, and perseverance. An adopted biracial child struggling for acceptance begins a journey to discover the truth of her identity. It's a story of ongoing discrimination. Of loves found and lost. Of an overwhelming challenge that weds her fervor from social justice to her art, testing her commitment, her skills as an artist, and her sanity.

On the March: A Novel of the Women's March on Washington
by Trudy Krisher

If you're familiar with the power of #metoo and #shepersisted, you'll understand the power of 'On the March.' This novel about The Women's March on Washington captures the revived feminist spirit of our times. 'On the March' dramatizes how the event of the march helped women of different ages, races, and backgrounds come together to create positive change in the world and in each of their lives -- with warmth, honesty, and humor.

The Echoes
by Jess Montgomery

As July 4, 1928 approaches, Sheriff Lily Ross and her family look forward to the opening of an amusement park in a nearby town, created by Chalmer Fitzpatrick-a veteran and lumber mill owner. When Lily is alerted to the possible drowning of a girl, she goes to investigate, and discovers schisms going back several generations, in an ongoing dispute over the land on which Fitzpatrick has built the park. Lily's family life is soon rattled, too, with the revelation that before he died, her brother had a daughter, Esme, with a woman in France, and arrangements have been made for Esme to immigrate to the U.S. to live with them. But Esme never makes it to Kinship, and soon Lily discovers that she has been kidnapped. Not only that, but a young woman is indeed found murdered in the fishing pond on Fitzpatrick's property, at the same time that a baby is left on his doorstep. As the two crimes interweave, Lily must confront the question of what makes family: can we trust those we love? And what do we share, and what do we keep secret?