At the Coopers Chase Luxury Retirement Village, four intrepid retirees have formed the Thursday Murder Club – each week they gather to discuss and solve local cold cases. But trouble is brewing in their bucolic countryside village, and soon the pensioners have not one but two current murders to solve when the owner of the…
When he doesn’t show up for school with his homemade pies for Pi Day, Adam Merkel’s middle school colleagues start worrying about their new math teacher. By third period, it’s announced that the teacher has been found dead and it was one of his 6th grade students, Sal Prentiss, who had found his burned body…
“Do you believe in time?” This question, posed by Su Lan to an attending nurse the night her daughter, Liya, is born is a question that haunts the pages of Meng Jin’s Little Gods from start to finish. Su Lan, a brilliant physicist, is obsessed with erasing her past and understanding the complexities of time.…
How has COVID-19 impacted the book publishing industry? Our guest Skip Dye - SVP of Library Sales & Digital Strategy and SVP Director of Sales Operations at Penguin Random House - knows a thing or two about how publishers are adapting to this very different world we find ourselves in. We pack a lot into…
I did not go looking for Fallen Mountains. Several months ago, I needed a Hoopla title for my mystery book club and wanted something different than the lighter fare we’d been reading lately — all good books, certainly, but variety is the spice of a reading life, and I was determined to find something new.…
Saving Ruby King is a powerful story about family, the pull of history, the power of friendship, and church culture in the Black community on Chicago’s South Side. Ruby King and her mother, Alice, have been beaten by their alcoholic father and husband for years. When Alice is found murdered in her home, her homegoing…
Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians opens on the anxiety-inducing scene of Ricky Boss Ribs running for his life. He’s being tracked and hunted… But is it by the horde of angry men from outside the bar or does it have something to do with the mysterious herd of elk waiting in the field…
More than four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare is still as relevant today as is Lin-Manuel Miranda. Yet, we still don’t know much about his personal and family life except that at age 18 he married 26 year old Anne (AKA Agnes) Hathaway and that their first daughter Susannah was born six months…
Arriving at Ellis Island, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Most immigrants to America came through New York City, either at Castle Garden or Ellis Island. But New York isn't the only port on our coast, nor were Castle Garden and Ellis Island the only places for immigrants to land. Port cities line up…
Author Photo: ©Kristee Mays Photography Why haven’t more people heard of Nancy Wake? An upper-class expat who smuggled documents and people out of WWII Paris, armed the French Resistance, and killed a Nazi commander bare-handed, this war heroine should be a household name -- but she isn't. Author Ariel Lawhon sets out to rectify the…
