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The Museum of Forgotten Memories


Anstey Harris - 2020
    Cate and Richard felt an immediate and undeniable spark, but Richard also felt the weight of the world more deeply than most. As the three matured, he receded further and further into darkness until he disappeared altogether. Now, four years after Richard’s passing, Cate is let go from her teaching job and can’t pay the rent on the London flat she shares with her and Richard’s son, Leo. She packs the two of them up and ventures to Richard’s grandfather’s old Victorian museum in the small town of Crouch-on-Sea, where the dusty staff quarters await her. Despite growing pains and a grouchy caretaker, Cate falls in love with the quirky taxidermy exhibits and sprawling grounds and makes it her mission to revive them. When the museum is faced with closure because of a lack of visitors, Cate stages a grand reopening, but threats from both inside and outside the museum derail her plans and send her spiraling into self-doubt. As Cate becomes more invested in Hatters, she must finally confront the reality of Richard’s death—and the role she played in it—in order to reimagine her future. Perfect for fans of Evvie Drake Starts Over, The Museum of Forgotten Memories masterfully weaves life with death, past with present, and grief with hope.

The Honey Bee: A Business Parable About Getting Un-stuck and Taking Control of Your Financial Future


Jake Stenziano - 2019
     The Honey Bee tells the story of Noah—a disappointed, disaffected salesman who feels like his life is going nowhere until the day he has a chance encounter with a man named Tom Barnham, the beekeeper. In his charming, down-home way, Tom the “Bee Man” teaches Noah and his wife Emma how to grow their personal wealth using the lessons he learned from his beekeeping passion. Full of concrete lessons delivered through chapter after chapter of engaging vignettes, each of which includes actionable advice for new or aspiring entrepreneurs. Workbook-style sections at the end of each chapter help bring the lessons home, including questions to help you apply the lessons to your own business, and links to rich digital resources for even more information on how to get started creating your own multiple streams of income.

The Second Life of Mirielle West


Amanda Skenandore - 2021
    Based on little-known history, this timely book will strike a chord with readers of Fiona Davis, Tracey Lange, and Marie Benedict.Based on the true story of America’s only leper colony, The Second Life of Mirielle West brings vividly to life the Louisiana institution known as Carville, where thousands of people were stripped of their civil rights, branded as lepers, and forcibly quarantined throughout the entire 20th century. For Mirielle West, a 1920’s socialite married to a silent film star, the isolation and powerlessness of the Louisiana Leper Home is an unimaginable fall from her intoxicatingly chic life of bootlegged champagne and the star-studded parties of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When a doctor notices a pale patch of skin on her hand, she’s immediately branded a leper and carted hundreds of miles from home to Carville, taking a new name to spare her family and famous husband the shame that accompanies the disease.At first she hopes her exile will be brief, but those sent to Carville are more prisoners than patients and their disease has no cure. Instead she must find community and purpose within its walls, struggling to redefine her self-worth while fighting an unchosen fate.As a registered nurse, Amanda Skenandore’s medical background adds layers of detail and authenticity to the experiences of patients and medical professionals at Carville – the isolation, stigma, experimental treatments, and disparate community. A tale of repulsion, resilience, and the Roaring ‘20s, The Second Life of Mirielle West is also the story of a health crisis in America’s past, made all the more poignant by the author’s experiences during another, all-too-recent crisis.

Another Five Patients


Melissa Crickard - 2019
    When one of the resident physicians, Dr. Kip Paiva, becomes a critically ill patient herself, the team is forever changed. This suspenseful story of medical fiction traces foreign medical graduate Dr. Kip Paiva, an emigrant and survivor of human trafficking in post-apartheid South Africa. Her refuge from a Zulu militant captor comes to an end, as his brutal violence has finally tracked her across the ocean. While her past catches up to her, Dr. Paiva also becomes the scapegoat of a malpractice suit. Frightened for her and her son’s lives, Dr. Paiva begins a journey fueled by bottomless resiliency and a mother’s love. Her story intertwines through five others, all riveting, and all taking place in the busy Spectrum General Hospital in New York. Debut author Melissa Crickard uses this microcosm to illustrate larger aspects of modern medicine. Another Five Patients combines international intrigue and hospital politics with individual human stories involving hospital staff, patients, and their families. The result is a captivating, at times satirical, experience that reminds us that, whether doctor, mother, or child, we are all people, with flaws and emotions in a world of uncertainty.

Being a Witch, and Other Things I Didn't Ask for


Sara Pascoe - 2015
    But after leaving the boring village and foster home for the excitement of London, Raya finds out she’s a witch, with this annoying habit of time-travelling – by accident. And this sarcastic witch’s cat Oscar tags along for the ride. But why would she fling herself into the midst of the Essex Witch Trials in 1645 England? After being arrested by Matthew Hopkins, one of history’s most notorious witch hunters, her social worker and witch mentor Bryony goes back to try to save them from the gallows. But returning to present day London remains out of reach with Raya’s powers still out of control when they find themselves in 1645 Istanbul/Constantinople. There, life is more amazing than she ever dreamed. Can she stay? And at what cost?

Rain City Lights


Marissa Harrison - 2020
    A young woman is pushed onto the streets where she learns the harsh realities of what it means to survive, to serve justice, and to fight for the man she loves. As they navigate their way through Seattle's Underground, Monti & Sasha will break and warm your heart!"Sometimes you make so much history with someone, the present just don't make sense."In the summer of 1981, a serial killer preys on black, teenage prostitutes working Seattle’s arterial highways. But the eyes of youth are blind to danger, and Montgomery “Monti” Jackson is distracted by her own problems. She’ll be starting high school soon, and the return of her mother’s boyfriend heightens the tension in her fractured household.To add to her worries, Monti fears she may be in love with her best friend Sasha. But as close as they’d once been, now they couldn’t feel further apart. Sasha is a burnout punk rocker, and has befriended the neighborhood drug dealer. And when an eviction notice is posted on Monti’s door, a strange dynamic forms between them.One night, an altercation leaves her family penniless. So Monti turns to the very streets where a killer stalks and ensnares young women, beginning her journey towards understanding one, simple truth - sometimes your only choices in life are to love and survive.

Righteous Assassin


Kevin G. Chapman - 2018
    . . .That was the fourth unsolved murder in four months – each on the last Saturday. The other three were even more unusual . . . .Could they be related? The victims share no similar traits and have no connections. Why would a single killer choose such strange and disparate methods? Why spread your victims across all of New York?Each new murder adds a piece to the killer’s jigsaw puzzle, but unraveling the clues and finding the killer’s pattern may not be enough to catch himNYPD homicide Detectives Mike Stoneman and Jason Dickson have to stop the elusive killer before he completes his decathlon of death. And, they have to deal with an FBI profiler, who has been called in to help. Mike must also avoid being distracted by Medical Examiner Michelle McNeill, who seems to be on his mind a lot lately. She’s an asset to the investigation, but is this any time to be starting a romance?The task force is racing against the calendar. Only one thing is certain – on the last Saturday of the month, there will be blood.

Athena's Choice


Adam Boostrom - 2018
    She watches reality shows with her friends, eats well, and occasionally wonders to herself: what would life be like if men were still alive?It has been almost 50 years since an experimental virus accidentally killed all the men on earth. However, a controversial project is currently underway to bring men back. There's just one catch. The project has been sabotaged.So begins Athena's Choice. When the police of 2099 are tasked with finding the saboteur, they receive a mysterious command to investigate the otherwise innocuous Athena Vosh. After it becomes clear that the young girl might know more than she lets on, Athena is brought in to participate in the official investigation. Simultaneously, the girl begins to experience a series of cryptic dreams featuring a ruined library and an old book containing the saboteur’s true identity. As the police close in on their prize, Athena finds herself on a journey of her own. Her clue-filled dreams and incorruptible spirit bring her face-to-face with a pair of forgotten truths about happiness and gender. The world waits to see if men will return as Athena fights a separate battle, culminating in the choice that will define her and others' lives forever.

Rooked


Caitlin Sara - 2018
    . . Despite her desire for control, Ara Hopkins has always felt like a pawn—constantly being maneuvered by those surrounding her. Carrying a riddled past of abandonment by her mother, a jealous step-sister and exploitation by men she was supposed to be able to trust, Ara craves a social media certified life. So, when she meets her husband, a New York congressman’s son, she believes she’s finally won her game. Secure in a life her mother would approve of—and having firmly shut the door on her chaotic and miscalculated past—Ara feels she’s thriving. Until the night her husband is murdered. Thrust into a game of deceit and lies, Ara realizes that nothing is as it seems and that the past can quickly return to the present. The facade crumbles as relationships are tested and family boundaries crossed. Faced with losing it all, she discovers what a person is really capable of. Because in this game of life, it's either rook or be rooked. An intricately braided plot with unforeseeable twists and a sucker-punch ending, Rooked is a captivating thriller that shatters all perceptions.

The Middleman


Olen Steinhauer - 2018
    Told from the individual perspectives of an FBI agent, an undercover agent within the group, a convert to the terrorist organization, and a writer on the edges of the whole affair, this is another tightly wound thriller, and an intimate exploration of the people behind the politics, from a master of suspense.

The Electric Hotel


Dominic Smith - 2019
    A sweeping work of historical fiction, it shimmers between past and present as it tells the story of the rise and fall of a prodigious film studio and one man’s doomed obsession with all that passes in front of the viewfinder.For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films, who started out as a concession agent for the Lumière brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard. But when a film-history student comes to interview Claude about The Electric Hotel—the lost masterpiece that bankrupted him and ended the career of his muse, Sabine Montrose—the past comes surging back. In his run-down hotel suite, the ravages of the past are waiting to be excavated: celluloid fragments and reels in desperate need of restoration, and Claude’s memories of the woman who inspired and beguiled him.

From the Moon I Watched Her


Emily English Medley - 2021
    Jimmy Carter is in office. The Walters are a good, churchgoing family who stand for holiness, purity, grace, and Christian love. Except when they don't. Family patriarch and fanatic preacher, Victor Black, knows many things for sure, including the fact that abortion is murder and should be punishable by death--a position he defends live in a televised debate. Black’s youngest granddaughter, Stephanie Walters, sits in the front row wearing her frilly Sunday dress, listening carefully to every word. But it doesn't take long for cracks to appear in the Walters upstanding family facade. Stephanie's mother, Lily, begins telling unsettling stories about having a baby who died, and her story keeps changing. It’s clear Lily has a secret--one that righteous Victor Black would kill her for if he knew. This family secret burns more than the lies . . .From the Moon I WatchedHer is a coming-of-age tale about the skeletons that lurk under church pews and the little girl who goes looking for and finds them. Amid the dark and quirky terrain of camp revivals, burning crosses, and public shunnings, one child from the Southern Churches of Christ cries out.

The Locksmith's Daughter


Karen Brooks - 2016
    She has apprenticed with her father since childhood, and there is no lock too elaborate for her to crack. After scandal destroys her reputation, Mallory has returned to her father's home and lives almost as a recluse, ignoring the whispers and gossip of their neighbors. But Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's spymaster and a frequent client of Mallory's father, draws her into his world of danger and deception. For the locksmith's daughter is not only good at cracking locks, she also has a talent for codes, spycraft, and intrigue. With Mallory by Sir Francis’s side, no scheme in England or abroad is safe from discovery.But Mallory's loyalty wavers when she witnesses the brutal and bloody public execution of three Jesuit priests and realizes the human cost of her espionage. And later, when she discovers the identity of a Catholic spy and a conspiracy that threatens the kingdom, she is forced to choose between her country and her heart.Once Sir Francis's greatest asset, Mallory is fast becoming his worst threat—and there is only one way the Queen’s master spy deals with his enemies…

Daisy in the Doghouse


Joe Barrett - 2019
    Meanwhile, Daisy, his precocious twelve-year-old daughter, has recently garnered a substantial following for her new blog, documenting surreptitious “social experiments” performed on her unaware family. When Daisy’s blogging activities are outed, Jack decides to leverage his daughter’s popularity with American youth to communicate the greed and hypocrisy inherent in the corporate professions of many parents. Inspired by her father’s rants, the popularity of Daisy’s blog soars, resulting in an unlikely sequence of events that ultimately has a very positive impact on way that people treat each other in American society.

Churchill's Secret Messenger


Alan Hlad - 2021
    Since her parents were killed in a bombing raid, Rose Teasdale has spent more hours than usual in Room 60, working double shifts, growing accustomed to the burnt scent of the Prime Minister’s cigars permeating the stale air. Winning the war is the only thing that matters, and she will gladly do her part. And when Rose’s fluency in French comes to the attention of Churchill himself, it brings a rare yet dangerous opportunity.Rose is recruited for the Special Operations Executive, a secret British organization that conducts espionage in Nazi-occupied Europe. After weeks of grueling training, Rose parachutes into France with a new codename: Dragonfly. Posing as a cosmetics saleswoman in Paris, she ferries messages to and from the Resistance, knowing that the slightest misstep means capture or death.Soon Rose is assigned to a new mission with Lazare Aron, a French Resistance fighter who has watched his beloved Paris become a shell of itself, with desolate streets and buildings draped in Swastikas. Since his parents were sent to a German work camp, Lazare has dedicated himself to the cause with the same fervor as Rose. Yet Rose’s very loyalty brings risks as she undertakes a high-stakes prison raid, and discovers how much she may have to sacrifice to justify Churchill’s faith in her . . .