Proof, by Jon Cowan
As a disgraced lawyer with a drinking problem he's in denial about, Jake West is coasting on what’s left of his charm and money. He used to be the kind of lawyer who could convince anyone of anything—until he decided to take on his father’s biggest client and prove his dad was corrupt. Now Jake finds himself almost at rock bottom, and that’s before his ex-best friend is murdered and Jake is accused of the crime.
In a desperate bid to save himself, Jake must sober up and search for the real killer. As he moves through a labyrinth of lies and corruption, Jake teams up with an eclectic group of equally broken people as they all must skirt the law to find the proof he needs…no matter the cost.
Witness 8 (Eddie Flynn #8), by Steve Cavanagh
A former resident of the ultra-elite Manhattan upper class, Ruby now works as a maid in the type of houses she used to live in. Unassuming, she sees everyone’s dirty secrets from the inside of their beautiful, renovated brownstones. But when Ruby witnesses a murder, she has wicked plans in mind that don’t involve telling the authorities the truth.
Eddie Flynn, streetwise ex con-artist-turned-defense attorney, is the only lawyer in New York City willing to take on hopeless cases. And none is more hopeless than John Jackson’s—the gun that killed his neighbor found, with Jackson’s DNA, in his own home. Flynn and his unconventional team will need to use every trick they know to keep an innocent man from being locked up. But to save his client’s life, Eddie must first protect his own, as the scariest organized criminals in the city are out for his head.
The Ascent, by Allison Buccola
Twenty years ago, the members of a reclusive commune outside Philadelphia vanished without a trace. The mystery of their disappearance has never been solved. No sightings of the members were ever verified, and no bodies ever found. But the group did leave one thing behind: a twelve-year-old girl wandering alone on the side of the road in search of her lost family.
In the years since that morning, Lee Burton has tried to put the pain of her past behind her. She has built a new identity for herself, with a doting husband and seven-month-old daughter, Lucy. No one in her life now knows about her connection to “the cult that went missing,” not even her husband. But new motherhood is proving a bigger challenge than she anticipated. She doesn't want to let Lucy out of her sight even for a moment. She can't return to work. She's not sleeping, and she's starting to have paranoid thoughts of Lucy being harmed.
Then a stranger shows up on her doorstep, offering to finally answer all of Lee’s questions about her past—if she could only trust that the woman is who she says she is. As she digs deeper into the woman's history, the safe, stable life that Lee has constructed for herself threatens to shatter.
One Wrong Move (Jeopardy Falls #1), by Dani Pettrey
Christian Macleod was pulled into a life of crime at a young age by his con artist parents. Now making amends for his corrupt past, he has become one of the country's foremost security experts. When a string of Southwestern art heists captures the FBI's attention, Christian is paired up with a gifted insurance investigator who has her own checkered past.
Andi Forster was a brilliant FBI forensic analyst until one of her colleagues destroyed her career, blaming her for mishandling evidence. She now puts those skills to work investigating insurance fraud, and this latest high-stakes case will test her gift to the limit. Drawn deep into a dangerous game with an opponent bent on revenge, Christian and Andi are in a race against the clock to catch him, but the perpetrator's game is far from finished, and one wrong move could be the death of them both.
The Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger.
Following the sisters from afar is Jonas, the son of a Swedish mother and a Tunisian father. Over the course of three decades, his life intersects with the sisters, from a chance encounter in Tunis to the scene of a fighter jet crash in Stockholm. When Evelyn disappears on a trip to New York, Jonas manages to track her down—and helps her to break the curse that has been looming over the Mikkolas for decades. In the process, a shocking revelation changes everything about who they think they are.
The Remembered Soldier, by Anjet Daanje
Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice.
But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth?
The Boxcar Librarian, by Brianna Labuskes
Millie Lang is shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work, and discovers the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.
More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes.
Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.
The three women’s stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to hide what happened to Colette Durand.
A Beacon in the Night (The Secret Churchill Files #2), by David Lewis
London, 1941. Britain has endured the relentless bombing campaign of the Blitz and emerged, scarred but unbroken.
But now the war has entered another phase. Instead of indiscriminate bombing, the Luftwaffe is pinpointing historic targets, including cathedrals and ancestral homes, with the help of homing beacons placed by the enemy. It’s as if Germany plans to erase Britain’s very essence and culture, destroying morale as it does so.
But soon it is not just historical targets under attack, but hospitals and nursing homes too. Tasked with rooting out the saboteurs placing the beacons, Caitrin finds that all roads lead to Daniel “Teddy” Baer, a charismatic Whitechapel crook with high aspirations and zero scruples.
As a member of the female-driven 512 counterespionage unit, Caitrin understands how often women are underestimated and overlooked—and how to use it to her advantage. But she is not the only one who knows how to hide in plain sight, how to outwit and effortlessly manipulate. And sometimes, as with a beacon hidden deep within a building, danger only becomes apparent when it flares to life.
A Drop of Corruption (Shadow of the Leviathan #2), by Robert Jackson Bennett
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, an impossible crime has occurred. A Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—abducted from his quarters while the door and windows remained locked from the inside, in a building whose entrances and exits are all under constant guard.
To solve the case, the Empire calls on its most brilliant and mercurial investigator, the great Ana Dolabra. At her side, as always, is her bemused assistant Dinios Kol.
Before long, Ana’s discovered that they’re not investigating a disappearance, but a murder—and that the killing was just the first chess move by an adversary who seems to be able to pass through warded doors like a ghost, and who can predict every one of Ana’s moves as though they can see the future.
Din has seen Ana solve impossible cases before. But this time, with the stakes higher than ever and Ana seemingly a step behind their adversary at every turn, he fears that his superior has finally met an enemy she can’t defeat.
Nonfiction Titles
Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War, by Michael Vorenberg
We set out on the James River, March 25, 1865, aboard the paddle steamboat the River Queen. President Lincoln is on his way to General Grant’s headquarters at City Point, Virginia, and he’s decided he won’t return to Washington until he’s witnessed, or perhaps even orchestrated, the end of the Civil War. Now, it turns out, more than a century and a half later, historians are still searching for that end.
Was it April 9th, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed “Juneteenth” the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”? That the answer was elusive was baffling even to a historian of the stature of Michael Vorenberg, whose work served as the principal source of Spielberg’s Lincoln. He was inspired to write this groundbreaking book, finding its title in the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg discovers in these pages, the most important of which came well over a year after Lincoln’s untimely death.
To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the U.S.’s interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane.
The Art Spy: The Extraordinary Untold Tale of WWII Resistance Hero Rose Valland, by Michelle Young
Based on troves of previously undiscovered documents, The Art Spy chronicles the brave actions of the key Resistance spy in the heart of the Nazi’s art looting headquarters in the French capital. A veritable female Monuments Man, Valland has, until now, been written out of the annals, despite bearing witness to history’s largest art theft. While Hitler was amassing stolen art for his future Führermuseum, Valland, his undercover adversary, secretly worked to stop him.
At every stage of World War II, Valland was front and center. She came face to face with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, passed crucial information to the Resistance network, put herself deliberately in harm’s way to protect the museum and her staff, and faced death during the last hours of Liberation Day.
Vivid and atmospheric, The Art Spy moves from the glittering days of pre-War Paris, home to geniuses of modern culture, including Picasso, Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Le Corbusier, and Frida Kahlo, through the tension-riddled cities and resorts of Europe on the eve of war, to the harrowing years of the Nazi occupation of France when brave people such as Valland and Rosenberg risked everything to fight monstrous evil.
Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future, by Neil Shubin
Scientific discoveries at Earth’s polar regions have changed the way we see the world and these insights are becoming ever more urgent.
The book blends travel, science, and environmental writing to deepen our understanding of animal and plant life, the history of our ice ages, the age of dinosaurs, the history of Western exploration, and the clues meteorites preserved at the poles contain about the cosmos.
Written with infectious enthusiasm and irresistible curiosity, Shubin shares lively adventure stories from the field to reveal just how far scientists will go to understand polar regions and to reveal the poles’ impact on the rest of life on the planet.
Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend, by Rebecca Romney
Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more.
But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work. Every character in Northanger Abbey who isn’t a boor sings the praises of Ann Radcliffe. The play that causes such a stir in Mansfield Park is a real one by the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald. In fact, the phrase “pride and prejudice” came from Frances Burney’s second novel Cecilia. The women that populated Jane Austen’s bookshelf profoundly influenced her work; Austen looked up to them, passionately discussed their books with her friends, and used an appreciation of their books as a litmus test for whether someone had good taste. So where had these women gone? Why hadn’t Romney—despite her training—ever read them? Or, in some cases, even heard of them? And why were they no longer embraced as part of the wider literary canon?
Jane Austen’s Bookshelf investigates the disappearance of Austen’s heroes—women writers who were erased from the Western canon—to reveal who they were, what they meant to Austen, and how they were forgotten. Each chapter profiles a different writer including Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Hannah More, Elizabeth Inchbald, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Maria Edgeworth—and recounts Romney’s experience reading them, finding rare copies of their works, and drawing on connections between their words and Austen’s. Romney collects the once-famed works of these forgotten writers, physically recreating Austen’s bookshelf and making a convincing case for why these books should be placed back on the to-be-read pile of all book lovers today. Jane Austen’s Bookshelf will encourage you to look beyond assigned reading lists, question who decides what belongs there, and build your very own collection of favorite novels.
Much Ado About Keanu: A Critical Reeves Theory, by Sezin Devi Koehler
Thanks to his prolific movie career (seventy-eight movies as of 2023) and endearing real-life persona, Keanu Reeves has become the universal screen saver of pop culture—nobody can go a few days without some reference to Keanu or his movies popping up. But Reeves is much more than box office receipts and internet memes, and Much Ado About Keanu provides the deep dive into his art, identity, and ethnicity that this oft-misunderstood cultural icon deserves.
Despite the sometimes-mocking estimations of his acting skills—and his seven Razzie nominations—Keanu is one of the most thoughtful and talented performers of Generation X, and during his forty-year career he has made huge strides for Asian representation in spite of his identity often being whitewashed. Pop-culture sociologist and Reeves devotee Sezin Devi Koehler explores all of this, presenting insightful essays that critically examine Reeves’s creative output from an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective.
Much Ado About Keanu connects existing media studies around various themes in Reeves’s films—particularly Asian and Indigenous representation, gender studies, philosophy, technology, and sexuality studies—in a “critical Reeves theory” sure to engage not just fans but all of us who live in Keanu’s world.
One Pot One Portion: 100 Simple Recipes Just for You, by Eleanor Wilkinson
100 simple, comforting, and special one-pot recipes that yield the perfect single serving for people who cook, eat, or live alone and want to eat well.
COMFORT recipes for ultimate Risotto Carbonara, Pumpkin Curry, and Meatball and Mozzarella Orzo. FRESH recipes packed with color and Ginger Chicken Rice Bowl, Peanut Noodle Salad, and Pork and Ginger Lettuce Wraps. SIMPLE recipes for satisfaction with Tortellini and Sausage Soup, Brothy Pasta with Beans and Greens, and Chorizo, Potato and Feta Frittata. SPECIAL recipes for next-level Lobster Spaghetti with Lemon and Tomatoes, Salami and Hot Honey Pizza, and Tuna Tostadas with Avocado, Jalapeños, and Pickled Ginger. SWEET recipes to add extra sweetness to your Cardamon and Coconut Rice Pudding with Mango, Apple Tarte Tatin, and Self-Saucing Chocolate Mug Cake.
One Pot, One Portion also includes an index of all the ingredients and the recipes that use them to help make grocery shopping easier, plan your meals ahead of time, make grocery shopping less stressful, and minimize waste. Cooking for one has never felt easier, more practical, or more satisfying.