Nobody ever notices the maid — until something goes wrong. That’s the premise of The Maid, Nita Prose’s fresh and vastly entertaining debut mystery featuring Molly Gray, an unconventional and often-overlooked housekeeper at a posh big-city hotel whose unique perspective makes her uniquely suited to solve a murder. Adrift and lonely after the death of…
Spy thriller fans, take note: Box 88 should be on your reading list! Lachlan Kite is part of Box 88, a spy organization so secret that not even MI6 and the CIA know it exists. (Why the odd name for a spy agency? That gets explained in the book.) When Kite is abducted and interrogated…
Korea: 1917-1965 Jade: a young girl sold to a prominent courtesan house by her desperate family JungHo: a homeless orphan hustling for survival on the streets of Seoul Yamada: a well-connected and high-ranking officer in the Japanese army MyungBo and SungSoo: old friends who find themselves on opposing political sides Over the course of decades,…
Believe it or not 2021 is wrapping up and Readers' Advisor Jo is back for our annual episode recounting Cook Library's favorite books of the year! Make sure you visit either Cook Park or Aspen Drive library to pick up your very own copies of our Fiction and Nonfiction Favorites booklets. Or take a look…
Peppered with flavorful tidbits of Celtic mythology, paragraphs from traditional Selkie tales published from 1849 – 1903 which help set the mood, The Hidden by Melanie Golding is a psychological thriller that starts out intensely with an abandoned child and a bloody body in a bathtub. The chapters are short and switch perspectives, timeframes and characters. They keep the reader…
Yesterday I examined fiction that received the most love in 2021 from book reviewers. Today I will look at nonfiction. I compiled 27 notable lists with more than 500 books, including our own favorites from the Cook Memorial Public Library District staffers. Thirty-four books, from social commentary and history to climate change and humor, rose…
While the Covid-19 pandemic raged throughout the world in 2020 and we were forced to stay inside and bake bread or binge-watch shows, writers were busy creating stories. What resulted was a bounty of amazing fiction in 2021. In my search for the top-reviewed books of the year, I once again compiled an overall tally,…
Climate fiction -- stories dealing with the repercussions of climate change -- has been increasingly popular in recent years. From award-winning literary fiction to young adult thrillers, the fallout from global warming and changing weather patterns has given authors plenty to work with. Naturally, science fiction is a natural fit for these types of books,…
With climate change at the forefront of the news these days, we’ve been seeing a lot of fiction integrating themes about nature and the environment. The Island of Missing Trees is one of those books. British-Turkish author Shafak brings together nature and humanity in a gentle, almost playful way – one of the narrators is…
Confession: I hosted Thanksgivng this year. But I did not serve turkey. Turkey is not bad. It is a perfectly fine piece of protein, I guess, and de rigueur during Thanksgiving, and you can make a very nice soup with the leftovers. It’s just that I wanted something a little different this year, and the…
