Staff Picks

This debut novel for Emma Cline is very true to the 1960s, with young girls looking to find themselves and ending up finding security in cults. The main character,  Evie, is lost — her parents just got divorced, her dad is living with a younger woman, her mom is trying to find a new husband, and Evie and her best friend have a falling out.  What she ends up finding is this clan of girls in the park.  That leads her to their ranch, where she gets drawn into their wild lifestyle of drugs, sex, and eventually horrible crime.  The story starts in Evie’s present time and keeps flashing back to tell this story.  I enjoyed this weird book, which concentrated not on the horribleness of this time, but more on the relationship between the girls.

This is the first book by this author.  I read it over a weekend.  The story begins as a letter from Rahkee (a young Indian woman) to her fiance as she is leaving him to return to her ancestral home in India to deal with her past.  The bulk of the novel settles on Rakhee’s summer spent in India before her 11th birthday with her mother’s (Amma) mysterious family and away from her father, Aba. Most of the story is told through the voice of young Rakhee, an innocent girl exposed to a brand new life in India as she discovers a secret garden that holds dark secrets of her family’s past that will change her life forever during that summer.  It’s a quick read that was beautiful but also sad.

Is reincarnation possible?  This wonderful new book explores what can possibly happen after we die and how far we would go to help our children and those we love.  This is a debut novel by  Sharon Guskin.

Janie Zimmerman became pregnant after a one-night stand.  Now her son Noah is four years old and highly intelligent.  He begins to experience bizarre behavior.  He becomes difficult, and is kicked out of school.  He is not crazy.  He does not like baths and is afraid of water.  He speaks of another mother whom he wants to go home to.  Dr. Jerome Anderson, a psychologist,  has been studying young children who seem to recall details from previous lives and is documenting this into a book.  Soon Noah, Janie, and Anderson  find themselves on a journey looking for answers — has Noah indeed been reincarnated?

I have never read Lisa Gardner before.  This book is the eighth in the  Detective D. D. Warren series, but you really didn’t need to have read the others.  This chilling murder mystery thriller stands on its own.  Florence Dane spent 472 days as the prisoner of a sexual predator, spending most of her time in a wooden coffin.  The story picks up after fice years of her being free.  Her kidnapping has left her scarred and obsessed with finding missing people and bringing their kidnappers to justice, which leads to her being abducted all over again.  Detective D. D. Warren’s job is now to find Flora as well as another missing girl.  A very highly emotional, haunting thriller.

Where It Hurts is a hard crime story.  It is tightly plotted and very descriptive with lots of information on its setting in Long Island, which made it a bit slow at times.  However, the characters and plot were so interesting that  it had me coming back to see how it would all play out.

This is the first book in a series featuring ex-cop Gus Murphy.  His son’s sudden death has thrown him into a deep hole of grief leading to the end of his marriage, problems with his daughter, and a menial job as a hotel van driver, living at the hotel and isolated from everything he knew. Then he is contacted by a man he regularly used to arrest and asked to look into the barbaric death of the man’s son.  Initially reluctant to do so, Gus slowly uncovers more and more details about those involved and as he does so, he also learns to deal with his personal grief and move on with his life.

I have never read this author before, but will look into some of his other popular series since I enjoy mystery.