The following is a list of books recently added to the Brooke County Public Library’s collection:
ADULT FICTION
HUNTING TIME by Jeffery Deaver. Allison Parker is on the run with her teenage daughter, Hannah, and Colter Shaw has been hired by her eccentric boss, entrepreneur Marty Harmon, to find and protect her. Though he’s an expert at tracking missing persons, even those who don’t wish to be found, Shaw has met his match in Allison, who brings all her skills as a brilliant engineer designing revolutionary technology to the game of evading detection. The reason for Allison’s panicked flight is soon apparent. She’s being stalked by her ex-husband, Jon Merritt. Newly released from prison and fueled by blinding rage, Jon is a man whose former profession as a police detective makes him uniquely suited for the hunt. And he’s not alone. Two hitmen are also hot on her heels, an eerie pair of thugs who take delight not only in murder but in the sport of devising clever ways to make bodies disappear forever. Even if Shaw manages to catch up with Allison and her daughter, his troubles will just be beginning.
CHILD ZERO by Chris Holm. It began four years ago with a worldwide uptick of bacterial infections: meningitis in Frankfurt, cholera in Johannesburg, tuberculosis in New Delhi. Although the outbreaks spread aggressively and proved impervious to our drugs of last resort, public health officials initially dismissed them as unrelated. They were wrong. Antibiotic resistance soon roiled across the globe. Diseases long thought beaten came surging back. The death toll skyrocketed. Then New York City was ravaged by the most heinous act of bioterror the world had ever seen, perpetrated by a new brand of extremist bent on pushing humanity to extinction. Detective Jacob Gibson, who lost his wife in the 8/17 attack, is home caring for his sick daughter when his partner summons him to a sprawling shantytown in Central Park, the apparent site of a mass murder. Jake is startled to discover that, despite a life of abject squalor, the victims died in perfect health–and his only hope of finding answers is a twelve-year-old boy on the run from some very dangerous men.
MURDER AT BLACK OAKS by Phillip Margolin. Defense Attorney Robin Lockwood is summoned by retired District Attorney Francis Melville to meet with him at Black Oaks, the manor he owns up in the Oregon mountains. The manor has an interesting history – originally built in 1628 in England, there’s a murderous legend and curse attached to the mansion. Melville, however, wants Lockwood’s help in a legal matter – righting a wrongful conviction from his days as a DA. A young man, Jose Alvarez, was convicted of murdering his girlfriend only for Melville, years later when in private practice, to have a client of his admit to the murder and to framing the man Melville convicted. Unable to reveal what he knew due to attorney client confidence, Melville now wants Lockwood’s help in getting that conviction overturned. Successful in their efforts, Melville invites Lockwood up to Black Oaks for a celebration. Lockwood finds herself among an odd group of invitees – including the bitter, newly released, Alvarez. When Melville is found murdered, with a knife connected to the original curse, Lockwood finds herself faced with a conundrum – who is the murder among them and how to stop them before there’s another victim.
ADULT NON-FICTION
BARTLETT’S FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS by John Bartlett. More than 150 years after its initial publication, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations now enters its nineteenth edition. First compiled by John Bartlett, a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a commonplace book of only 258 pages, the original 1855 edition mainly featured selections from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Today, Bartlett’s includes more than 20,000 quotes from roughly 4,000 contributors. Spanning centuries of thought and culture, it remains the finest and most popular compendium of quotations ever assembled.
MADE WITH LOVE by Tom Daley. A British Olympic gold medal-winning diver and beloved LGBTQ icon shares his joy of knitting and crocheting through thirty original projects that run the gamut from toys to clothing for adults and kids to home décor.
EASY/JUVENILE/YOUNG ADULT/GRAPHIC NOVEL
THE PRISONER OF SHIVERSTONE by Linette Moore. Eleven-year-old Helga Sharp is found unconscious in a drifting rowboat near the coast of Utley Island. Utley, as Helga finds out when she awakens in the hospital, is forbidden territory: it’s a prison island to which the Mainland has exiled troublesome mad scientists for generations. Helga is questioned by the island’s guards and though they’re suspicious of her story, they agree to let her stay until they find her family. The truth is, it’s no accident that Helga landed here. She is a keen inventor, but the Mainland is suspicious of all scientists and inventors. While working on her projects in secret, Helga made radio contact with Erasmus Lope, a mad genius who everyone thought had died in a lab experiment gone spectacularly wrong. But Lope is alive, and Helga is on a mission to rescue him from the prison island. Now Helga must find a way to break Lope out, right under the noses of the family of famous heroes that run Utley Island. There’s only one big problem–Lope’s trapped inside a giant crystal in the mad scientists’ museum!
RUBY FINLEY VS. THE INTERSTELLAR INVASION by K. Tempest Bradford. Eleven-year-old Ruby is a Black girl who loves studying insects, much to the grossed-out dismay of her Gramma and the pride of her parents. So when she finds the weirdest insect she’s ever seen in her front yard, she makes sure Gramma isn’t looking and captures it for further study. But then Ruby realizes that the creature isn’t just a rare insect. It’s an alien bug. And it has promptly burned a hole through her window and disappeared. Soon things around the neighborhood go missing, and no one’s heard from the old lady down the street for a week. Ruby will have to team up her with her rag-tag group of friends to find this new invasive species before the feds do.