December 3, 2021
New Fiction
Sleigh Bells Ring by RaeAnne Thayne – Angel’s View Ranch has always been special to Annelise McCade. Once upon a time, it was her family’s land, until her grandfather sold it to billionaire Wallace Sheridan. Now employed as the live-in caretaker, Annie is just trying to make it through the holidays with both her sanity and her niece’s and nephew’s faith in the magic of Christmas intact. The six year old twins recently lost their mother, so Annie tells herself it wouldn’t be a problem to bring them to Angel’s View. Why should it be? The Sheridan’s haven’t visited in years, not since Wallace died. They would never know the twins were there…until Tate Sheridan shows up out of the blue two weeks before Christmas. Crushed to learn that Tate is there to sell his grandfather’s property – and mortified that her secret guests have been discovered – Annie offers her resignation. But Tate asks them to stay and help him get the house ready for one last family Christmas before it’s put on the market. Annie and Tate have three days to work their magic before the Sheridan clan arrives – and to work through the growing attraction between them. But Annie simply can’t fall for the man who will put her out of a job and a home. Still, the sparkle of the season is impossible to deny…and this Christmas has surprises in store for everyone.
As the Wicked Watch by Tamron Hall – When crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago, she’s one step closer to her dream: a coveted anchor chair on a national network. Jordan is smart and aggressive, with unabashed star power, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Her signature? Arriving first on scene – in impractical designer stilettos. Armed with a master’s degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has thus far been able to balance her dueling motivations: breaking every big story – and giving voice to the voiceless. From her time reporting in Texas, she’s sure she has covered the vilest of human behaviours, but nothing has prepared her for Chicago. You see, Jordan is that rare breed of journalist who can navigate a crime scene as well as she can a newsroom – often noticing what others tend to miss. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of Black women. All until Masey James – the story that Jordan just can’t shake, try as she might. A fifteen year old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot, Masey has come to represent for Jordan all of the frustration that her job – with its required distance – often forces her to repress. Putting the rest of her workload and her (fraying) personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that a missing Black child would so rarely get. There’s a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he’s hiding in plain sight.
The Unheard by Nicci French – Maybe Tess is overprotective, but passing her daughter off to her ex and his new young wife fills her with a sense of dread. It’s not that Jason is a bad father – it just hurts to see him enjoying married life with someone else. Still, she owes it to her daughter, Poppy, to make this arrangement work. But Poppy returns from the weekend tired and withdrawn. And when she shows Tess a crayon drawing – an image so simple and violent that Tess can hardly make sense of it – Poppy can explain only with the words “He did kill her.” Tess is horrified. She is certain Poppy saw something - or something happened to her – that the child is too young to understand. Jason insists the weekend went off without a hitch. Doctors advise that Poppy may be reacting to her parents’ separation. And as the days go on, even Poppy’s disturbing memory seems to fade. But a mother knows her daughter, and Tess is determined to discover the truth. Her search will set off an explosive tempest of dark secrets and buried crimes…and more than one life may be at stake.
New Non-Fiction
Permanent Astonishment by Tomson Highway – Tomson Highway was born in a snowbank on an island in the sub-arctic, the eleventh of twelve children in a nomadic, caribou-hunting Cree family. Growing up in a land of ten thousand lakes and islands, Tomson relished being pulled by dogsled beneath a night sky alive with stars, sucking the juices from roasted muskrat tails, and singing country music songs with his impossibly beautiful older sister and her teenaged friends. Surrounded by the love of his family and the vast, mesmerizing landscape they called home, his way in many ways an idyllic far north childhood. But five of Tomson’s siblings died in childhood, and Balazee and Joe Highway, who loved their surviving children profoundly, wanted their two youngest sons, Tomson and Rene, to enjoy opportunities as big as the world. And so when Tomson was six, he was flown south by float plane to attend a residential school. A year later Rene joined him to begin the rest of their education. In 1990 Rene Highway, a world renowned dancer, died of an AIDS-related illness. Permanent Astonishment: Growing Up in the Land of Snow and Sky is Tomson’s extravagant embrace of his younger brother’s final words: “Don’t mourn me, be joyful.” His memoir offers insights, both hilarious and profound, into the Cree experience of culture, conquest, and survival.