October 14, 2022
New Fiction
The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr – It’s 1929, and Baxter is considered lucky, as a black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the continent. He has to smile for the white passengers, not too much and not too little, and when they call him ‘George,’ he just has to nod and act invisible. Meanwhile, he’s obsessed with teeth and saving up enough nickel and dime tips to pay for dentistry school. On this particular trip west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stranded for days in the mountains – the passengers’ secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation Baxter is having. And then, when he finds an illicit postcard of two men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping the postcard puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with it or his thoughts of a certain Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson – It’s 1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new night life. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats both from without and from within. For beneath the dazzle of Soho’s gaiety, there is a dark underbelly, a world in which it is all too easy to become lost.
Suspect by Scott Turow – Lucia Gomez, the police chief in Highland Isle near Kindle County, has fought hard for decades to maintain a spotless reputation – until now, when out of the blue, three officers accuse her of soliciting sex in exchange for promotions. With few people left to trust, Gomez turns to an old friend, Rik Dudek, to act as her attorney in the federal grand jury investigation. She insists the accusations are an ugly smear campaign designed to destroy her career and empower her enemies- both outside the police force and within. Clarice “Pinky” Granum spent most of her twenties failing out of various professions. Pinky knows that in the eyes of most people, she’s nothing but a screwup – but now she finally has a respectable-enough job as a licensed PI working for Rik. His shabby office and even shabbier cases are a far cry from the high profile criminal matters Pinky worked on it the law office of her grandfather, Sandy Stern. But Gomez’s case, which has attracted national attention, is their chance to break into the big leagues. Guided by her gut instinct and razor-sharp investigative skills, Pinky dives into a twisted scandal that will draw her into the deepest recesses of the city’s criminal networks, as well as the human mind. But she will need every scrap of tenacity to unravel the dark secrets those closest to her are determined to keep hidden.
New Non-Fiction
The Gorilla Man Strangler Case by Alvin A. J. Esau – The hitchhiker seemed harmless. He was dressed in a blue suit and a colorful sweater, accessorized with a grey cap and tan shoes. He carried nothing. It was the morning of June 8, 1927, when the Chandler family picked up the well-dressed man in Minnesota and dropped him at the Canadian border. They has unwittingly transported notorious serial killer, “The Gorilla Man,” who has strangled more than twenty women from one end of the United States to the other. He would later murder Emily Patterson and 14 year old Lola Cowan in Winnipeg. His identity was unknown. Written by Alvin A. J. Esau, The Gorilla Man Strangler Case: Serial Killer Earle Nelson is a detailed historical account of the Canadian manhunt, capture, and identification of Earle Leonard Nelson, an escapee from a California mental institution. Drawing on archival sources, it’s the first reliable biography of Nelson, who was hung in Manitoba on January 13, 1928. This case study also deals with various political and professional issues that arose in the pretrial, trial, and post-trial periods and spotlights the clash between Nelson’s court-appointed defence attorney James Stitt, and psychiatrist Dr. Alvin Mathers, along with the chilling role of Canada’s so called official hangman “Arthur Ellis”