Reading Recommendations

A 2024 November LibraryReads Pick

Told in alternating timelines, The Lake of Lost Girls is a haunting novel that will thrill fans of All Good People Here and We Are All the Same in the Dark.

Using suspenseful podcast clips to weave a twisty tale of a missing student and her sister who is desperate for answers, The Lake of Lost Girls is perfect for fans of I Have Some Questions for You.

It’s 1998, and female students are going missing at Southern State University in North Carolina, but freshman Jessica Fadley, once a bright and responsible student, is going through her own struggles. Just as her life seems to be careening dangerously out of control, she suddenly disappears.

Twenty-four years later, Jessica’s sister Lindsey is desperately searching for answers and uses the momentum of a new chart-topping true crime podcast that focuses on cold cases to guide her own investigation. Soon, interest reaches fever pitch when the bodies of the long-missing women begin turning up at a local lake, which leads Lindsey down a disturbing road of discovery.

In the present, one sister searches to untangle a complicated web of lies.

In the past, the other descends ever deeper into a darkness that will lead to her ultimate fate.

This propulsive and chilling suspense is a sharp examination of sisterhood and the culture of true crime.

A Library Reads Pick! 

An Amazon Best Book of the Month!

An Aardvark Book Club Pick! 

Rich with unforgettable characters, gorgeously drawn, and full of captivating historical drama, Eleanore of Avignon is the story of a healer who risks her life, her freedom, and everything she holds dear to protect her beloved city from the encroaching Black Death

Provence, 1347. Eleanore (Elea) Blanchet is a young midwife and herbalist with remarkable skills. But as she learned the day her mother died, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is draw attention to herself. She attends patients in her home city of Avignon, spends time with her father and twin sister, gathers herbs in the surrounding woods, and dreams of the freedom to pursue her calling without fear. 
In a chance encounter, Elea meets Guigo de Chauliac, the enigmatic personal physician to the powerful Pope Clement, and strikes a deal with him to take her on as his apprentice. Under Chauliac’s tutelage she hones her skills as a healer, combining her knowledge of folk medicine with anatomy, astrology, and surgical techniques.

Then, two pieces of earth-shattering news: the Black Death has made landfall in Europe, and the disgraced Queen Joanna is coming to Avignon to stand trial for her husband’s murder. She is pregnant and in need of a midwife, a role only Elea can fill.

The queen’s childbirth approaches as the plague spreads like wildfire, leaving half the city dead in its wake. The people of Avignon grow desperate for a scapegoat and a group of religious heretics launch a witch hunt, one that could cost Elea—an intelligent, talented, unwed woman—everything.

From the bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World comes a love story, a quest, an ode to books and to the libraries that house them, and a parable for our peculiar times.
 
"Haruki Murakami invented 21st-century fiction." —The New York Times • "More than any author since Kafka, Murakami appreciates the genuine strangeness of our real world." —San Francisco Chronicle • "Murakami is masterful." —Los Angeles Times
 
We begin with a nameless young couple: a boy and a girl, teenagers in love. One day, she disappears . . . and her absence haunts him for the rest of his life.
 
Thus begins a search for this lost love that takes the man into middle age and on a journey between the real world and an other world – a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.
 
The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a singular and towering achievement by one of modern literature’s most important writers.  
 
"Truth is not found in fixed stillness, but in ceaseless change/movement. Isn't this the quintessential core of what stories are all about?” —Haruki Murakami, from the afterword 

 

"A pure delight from start to finish! Williams, White and Willig are in top form in this clever, engrossing whodunnit with a heart." --Lisa Unger, New York Times bestselling author of The New Couple in 5B

Agatha Christie meets Murder, She Wrote in this witty locked room mystery and literary satire by New York Times bestselling team of novelists: Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White.

There's been a sensational murder at historic Castle Kinloch, a gothic fantasy of grey granite on a remote island in the Highlands of Scotland. Literary superstar Brett Saffron Presley has been found dead--under bizarre circumstances--in the castle tower's book-lined study. Years ago, Presley purchased the castle as a showpiece for his brand and to lure paying guests with a taste for writerly glamour. Now it seems, the castle has done him in...or, possibly, one of the castle's guests has. Detective Chief Inspector Euan McIntosh, a local with no love for literary Americans, finds himself with the unenviable task of extracting statements from three American lady novelists.

The prime suspects are Kat de Noir, a slinky erotica writer; Cassie Pringle, a Southern mom of six juggling multiple cozy mystery series; and Emma Endicott, a New England blue blood and author of critically acclaimed historical fiction. The women claim to be best friends writing a book together, but the authors' stories about how they know Brett Saffron Presley don't quite line up, and the detective is getting increasingly suspicious.

Why did the authors really come to Castle Kinloch? And what really happened the night of the great Kinloch ceilidh, when Brett Saffron Presley skipped the folk dancing for a rendezvous with death?

A crafty locked-room mystery, a pointed satire about the literary world, and a tale of unexpected friendship and romance--this novel has it all, as only three bestselling authors can tell it!

"Noelle Salazar has an unerring instinct for writing tough women with big hearts . . . The Lies We Leave Behind is a globe-spanning wartime journey filled with pathos and heart!" --Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code

For fans of Kate Quinn and Beatriz Williams, this sweeping story follows a fearless nurse who must leave love behind when duty calls her back to the front.

Somewhere in the Pacific, 1943. Kate Campbell is a nurse who bravely flies back and forth from the front to rescue wounded soldiers, amid long days, harsh conditions and often dangerous weather. Driven by a deep personal need to help in the war effort, she is conflicted when an injury results in her reassignment to the relative comfort of the English countryside.

Love has never been part of her plan, but despite herself, she falls for an officer with three bullet wounds, startling blue eyes and a wicked sense of humor. For the first time, Kate sees a future far from the horrors of war and hate. But before she can pursue it, a secret from her past calls her to duty, and she'll have to travel back into danger one more time to rescue a part of herself she'd left behind. But will she make it back? And will that future still be waiting for her if she does?

A LibraryReads Pick

A hilarious love story about a disillusioned divorcée who agrees to let her children play matchmaker.

Columnist Anna Appleby has left her love life behind after a painful divorce. Who needs a man when she has two kids, a cat, and uncontested control of the TV remote? Besides, she’d rather be single than subject herself to the hell of online dating. But her office rival is vying for her column, and no column means no stable source of income. In a desperate attempt to keep her job, Anna finds herself pitching a unique angle: seven dates, all found offline, chosen by her children.

From awkward encounters to unexpected connections, Anna gamely begins to put herself out there, asking out waiters, the mailman, and even her celebrity crush. But when a romantic connection appears where she least expected it, will she be brave enough to take another chance on love?

AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER

A wandering fortune teller finds an unexpected family in this warm and wonderful debut fantasy, perfect for readers of Travis Baldree and Sangu Mandanna.

Tao is an immigrant fortune teller, traveling between villages with just her trusty mule for company. She only tells "small" fortunes: whether it will hail next week; which boy the barmaid will kiss; when the cow will calve. She knows from bitter experience that big fortunes come with big consequences…

Even if it’s a lonely life, it’s better than the one she left behind. But a small fortune unexpectedly becomes something more when a (semi) reformed thief and an ex-mercenary recruit her into their desperate search for a lost child. Soon, they’re joined by a baker with a "knead" for adventure, and—of course—a slightly magical cat.

Tao starts down a new path with companions as big-hearted as her fortunes are small. But as she lowers her walls, the shadows of her past close in—and she’ll have to decide whether to risk everything to preserve the family she never thought she could have.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A fun, DaVinci Code–style blend of puzzles, mysticism and high-octane action” (People), from the author of The Puzzle Master
 
“This rip-roaring adventure thriller is an escapist puzzle box of delights: a neurodivergent hero, an unsolvable mystery, and death hanging over every move.”—Catherine Steadman, author of Something in the Water

Two sisters. A lost imperial treasure. The world’s greatest puzzle master has twenty-four hours to solve the most dangerous mystery of his life . . . or die trying.

It is the Year of the Wood Dragon, and the ingenious Mike Brink has been invited to Tokyo, Japan, to open the legendary Dragon Box.

The box was constructed during one of Japan’s most tumultuous periods, when the samurai class was disbanded and the shogun lost power. In this moment of crisis, Emperor Meiji locked a priceless Imperial secret in the Dragon Box. Only two people knew how to open the box—Meiji and the box’s sadistic constructor—and both died without telling a soul what was inside or how to open it.

Every twelve years since then, in the Year of the Dragon, the Imperial family holds a clandestine contest to open the box. It is devilishly difficult, filled with tricks, booby traps, poisons, and mind-bending twists. Every puzzle master who has attempted to open it has died in the process.

But Brink is not just any puzzle master. He may be the only person alive who can crack it. His determination is matched only by that of two sisters, descendants of an illustrious samurai clan, who will stop at nothing to claim the treasure.

Brink’s quest launches him on a breakneck adventure across Japan, from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo to the pristine forests of Hakone to an ancient cave in Kyushu. In the process, he discovers the power of Meiji’s hidden treasure, and—more crucially—the true nature of his extraordinary talent.

A mother must fight for her daughter’s life in this fierce and haunting tale of witchcraft and revenge from the author of A Haunting in the Arctic.Clem gets a call that is every mother’s worst nightmare. Her nineteen-year-old daughter Erin is unconscious in the hospital after a hiking trip with her friends on the remote Orkney Islands that met a horrifying end, leaving her boyfriend dead and her best friend missing. When Erin wakes, she doesn’t recognize her mother. And she doesn’t answer to her name, but insists she is someone named Nyx.

Clem travels the site of her daughter’s accident, determined to find out what happened to her. The answer may lie in a dark secret in the history of the Orkneys: a woman wrongly accused of witchcraft and murder four centuries ago. Clem begins to wonder if Erin’s strange behavior is a symptom of a broken mind, or the effects of an ancient curse?

In the follow-up to the National Book Award–longlisted Shutter, Navajo forensic photographer Rita Todacheene grapples with a fanatical serial killer—and the ghosts he leaves behind.

A dual-voice cat-and-mouse thriller, told from the points of view of a killer who has created his own deadly religion and the only person who can stop him, an embattled young detective who sees the ghosts of his Native victims.

In Gallup, New Mexico, where violent crime is five times the national average, a serial killer is operating unchecked, his targets indigent Native people whose murders are easily disguised as death by exposure on the frigid winter streets. He slips unnoticed through town, hidden in plain sight by his unassuming nature, while the voices in his head guide him toward a terrifying vision of glory. As the Gallup detectives struggle to put the pieces together, they consider calling in a controversial specialist to help.

Rita Todacheene, Albuquerque PD forensic photographer, is at a crisis point in her career. Her colleagues are watching her with suspicion after the recent revelation that she can see the ghosts of murder victims. Her unmanageable caseload is further complicated by the fact that half the department has blacklisted her for ratting out a corrupt fellow cop. And back home in Tohatchi on the Navajo reservation, Rita’s grandma is getting older. Maybe it’s time for her to leave policework behind entirely—if only the ghosts will let her . . .