May 27, 2022
Library Corner
May 27, 2022
New Fiction
When She Dreams by Amanda Quick – Return to 1930s Burning Cove, California, the glamorous seaside playground for Hollywood stars, mobsters, spies, and a host of others who find more than they bargained for in this mysterious town. Maggie Lodge, assistant to the reclusive advice columnist known only as Dear Aunt Cornelia to her readers, hires down-but-not-quite-out private eye Sam Sage to help track down the person who is blackmailing her employer. Maggie and Sam are a mismatched pair. As far as Sam is concerned, Maggie is reckless and in over her head. She is not what he had in mind for a client, but he can’t afford to be choosy. Maggie, on the other hand, is convinced that Sam is badly in need of guidance and good advice. She does not hesitate to give him both. In spite of the verbal fireworks between them, they are fiercely attracted to each other, but both are sure it would be a mistake to let passion take over. They are, after all, keeping secrets. Sam is haunted by this past, which includes a marriage shattered by betrayal and violence. Maggie is troubled by intense and vivid dreams – dreams that she can sometimes control. There are those who want to run experiments on her and use her for their own purposes, while others think she should be committed to an asylum. When the pair discovers someone is impersonating Aunt Cornelia at a conference on psychic dreaming and a woman dies at the conference, the door is opened to a dangerous web of blackmail and murder. Secrets from the past are revealed, leaving Maggie and Sam in the path of a ruthless killer who will stop at nothing to exact vengeance.
The Change by Kirsten Miller – After Nessa James’s husband dies and her twin daughters leave for college, she’s left all alone in a trim white house near the ocean. In the quiet of her late forties, the former nurse begins to hear voices. It doesn’t take long for Nessa to realize that the voices calling out to her belong to the dead – a gift she’s inherited from her grandmother, which comes with special responsibilities. On the cusp of fifty, suave advertising director Harriett Osborne has just witnessed the implosion of her lucrative career and her marriage. She hasn’t left her house in months; from the outside, it appears as if she and her garden have both gone to seed. But Harriet’s life is far from over – in fact, she’s undergone a stunning and very welcome metamorphosis. Ambitious former executive Jo Levison has spent thirty years at war with her body. The free-floating rage and hot flashes that arrive with menopause feel like the very last straw – until she realizes she can channel them, and finally comes into her power. Guided by voices only Nessa can hear, the trio discovers a teenage girl whose body was abandoned beside a remote beach. The police have written the victim off, but the women refuse to buy into the official narrative. Their investigation leads to more bodies and to the town’s most exclusive and isolated enclave, a world of stupendous wealth where the rules don’t apply. With their newfound powers, Jo, Nessa, and Harriet will take matters into their own hands.
The Summer Place by Jennifer Weiner – When her twenty-two-year-old stepdaughter announces her engagement to her pandemic boyfriend, Sarah Danhauser is shocked. But the wheels are in motion. Headstrong Ruby has already set a date(just three months away!) and spoken to her beloved safta, Sarah’s mother, Veronica, about having the wedding at the family’s beach house in Cape Cod. Sarah might be worried, but Veronica is thrilled to be bringing the family together one last time before putting the big house on the market. But still the road to a wedding day usually comes with a few bumps. Ruby has always known exactly what she wants, but as the wedding date approaches, she finds herself grappling with the wounds left by the mother who walked out when she was a baby. Veronica ends up facing unexpected news, thanks to her meddling sister, and must revisit the choices she made long ago, when she was a bestselling novelist with a different life. Sarah’s twin brother, Sam, is recovering from a terrible loss and contemplating big questions about who he is – questions he hopes to resolve during his stay at the Cape. Sarah’s husband, Eli, who’s been inexplicably distant during the pandemic, deals with the consequences of a long-ago lapse from his typical good-guy behavior. And Sarah, frustrated by her husband, concerned about her stepdaughter, and worn out by the challenges of life during quarantine, faces the alluring reappearance of someone from her past and a life that could have been. When the wedding day arrives, lovers are revealed as their true selves, misunderstandings take on a life of their own, and secrets come to light. There are confrontations and revelations that will touch each member of the extended family, ensuring that nothing will ever be the same.
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams – Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and ever curious, she spends her childhood in Oxford in the room where her father and fellow lexicographers are collecting words for the first complete edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. While they work, young Emse begins to collect other words, ones that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose vocabulary will fill those pages.