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Staff Picks Newsletter March 2026 |
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What to read next? Even though winter is coming to a close, there is still time to read. Here are some titles our staff enjoyed and thought you might like as well. Whether you stop in the library for a paperback, hardcover, or audiobook, use Libby or hoopla, there is a title for you. |
Would you like more Staff Picks? |
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At the library
Call us, email us or stop in and we'd be happy to help choose something perfect just for you. |
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Books we enjoyed ... you might too! |
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Blood Over Bright Haven : A Novel
by M. L. Wang
After achieving her dream of becoming the first female highmage, Sciona faces hostility from her colleagues and an unexpected alliance with her janitor, a former nomadic hunter, as they uncover a secret that could revolutionize magic. Illustrations.
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
by Stephen Graham Jones
Written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor, a diary is discovered within a wall. What it unveils is a slow massacre, a chain of events that go back to 217 Blackfeet dead in the snow. The story is told in transcribed interviews by a Blackfeet named Good Stab, who shares the narrative of his peculiar life over a series of confessional visits. This is an American Indian revenge story written by one of the new masters of horror, Stephen Graham Jones--
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Daisy Jones & the Six : A Novel
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Two rising 70s rock-and-roll artists are catapulted into stardom when a producer puts them together, a decision that is complicated by a pregnancy and the seductions of fame. By the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
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The Dark Maestro
by Brendan Slocumb
Curtis Wilson is a classical music prodigy. Playing since the age of five, he is that rare performer who, through sheer force of will and phenomenal talent, has clawed his way out of inner-city DC and risen to the heights of the classical music world-soloing with the New York Philharmonic. Zippy, his father, is a midlevel drug dealer, and Larissa, his father's girlfriend, is a loving mother figure to Curtis and the heart of the family. Then, Zippy runs afoul of the kingpin who has provided his livelihood and nurtured his son's talents, and the family finds their lives in danger. With no choice but to run, they enter the witness protection program and abandon their former lives. A propulsive and moving story about sacrifice, loyalty, and the indomitable human spirit, Dark Maestro is Slocumb at the height of his powers--
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The Devil in Oxford: A Ruby Vaughn Mystery
by Jess Armstrong
If someone were to ask American heiress Ruby Vaughn how exactly the occult came to play such a large role in her life, she would immediately point to her octogenarian housemate and employer, Mr. Owen. Together, the pair run a rare book shop in Exeter. Mr. Owen's penchant for arcane, unusual--and occasionally illegal--books has been known to get Ruby into her fair share of trouble. And after the last year, she is looking forward to spending a quiet holiday in picturesque Oxford while Mr. Owen attends the annual meeting of his antiquarian society. When Mr. Owen secures two tickets to an upcoming exhibition of artifacts amassed by disgraced scholar Julius Harker, Ruby reluctantly agrees to attend. The evening turns out to be more eventful than either of them bargained for--
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The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald
by John U. Bacon
New York Times best-selling author of The Wide Wide Sea and In the Kingdom of Ice, The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald' has been told and retold by authors and bards. But never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful and compelling book.... Dead men tell no tales, but their loved ones do. Mr. Bacon tracked them down and listened. --John J. Miller, Wall Street Journal On the fiftieth anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald's sinking, the bestselling author of The Great Halifax Explosion tells the definitive story of the Mighty Fitz.
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How to Steal a Dog
by Barbara O'Connor
Half of me was thinking, Georgina, don't do this. Stealing a dog is just plain wrong. The other half of me was thinking, Georgina, you're in a bad fix and you got to do whatever it takes to get yourself out of it. Georgina Hayes is desperate. Ever since her father left and they were evicted from their apartment, her family has been living in their car. With her mama juggling two jobs and trying to make enough money to find a place to live, Georgina is stuck looking after her younger brother, Toby. And she has her heart set on improving their situation. When Georgina spots a missing-dog poster with a reward of five hundred dollars, the solution to all her problems suddenly seems within reach. All she has to do is borrow the right dog and its owners are sure to offer a reward. What happens next is the last thing she expected.
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The Impossible Fortune: A Thursday Murder Club Mystery
by Richard Osman
Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan?
It's been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favorite criminal. But when Elizabeth meets Nick, a wedding guest asking for her help, she finds the thrill of the chase is ignited once again. And when Nick disappears without a trace, his cagey business partner becomes the gang's next stop. It seems the duo have something valuable--something worth killing for-- Book five in the Thursday Murder Club series.
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In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America's Child
by Kim Cross
This book embeds readers in one of the most famous true-crime stories of our generation: the kidnapping of Polly Klaas, a case as pivotal in the history of the FBI as the Unabomber or Oklahoma City bombing. On October 1, 1993, [Polly] was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom in Petaluma, California, during a sleepover with two friends. ... This rarest of all kidnappings--a stranger abduction from the home--triggered one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. Riddled with red herrings, grave mistakes, dead ends, and false leads, from fake ransom calls to junior high pranks to dramatic SWAT raids, the 65-day search for 'America's child' became every FBI agent's--and every parent's--worst nightmare. ... Many of these investigators have never shared their stories-until now--
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The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town
by John Grisham
In the Major League draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the state of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job, he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa. In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years the police could not solve the crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz. The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder. With no physical evidence, the prosecution's case was built on junk science and the testimony of jailhouse snitches and convicts. Dennis Fritz was found guilty and given a life sentence. Ron Williamson was sent to death row. If you believe that in America you are innocent until proven guilty, this book will shock you.
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The Lilac People
by Milo Todd
In 1932 Berlin, Bertie, a trans man, and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin's thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond, but everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend Sofie to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation. In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him--not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country.
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The Mad Wife
by Meagan Church
In the 1950s, nothing is valued more than conformity, and Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the ideal housewife. But after the birth of her daughter, Lulu's carefully constructed life begins to teeter. Exhausted by expectations and haunted by tragic memories, Lulu looks to her new neighbor, Bitsy. Bitsy, always the model of a perfect housewife, is not quite what she seems and Lulu knows something dark lurks beneath Bitsy's constant smile. Increasingly fixated on Bitsy and her perfectly crafted life, Lulu's mental state begins to fracture, and memories she had suppressed long ago begin to rise to the surface. Soon, Lulu is forced to confront the possibility that she might be headed down a path much darker than she could ever foresee. Set against the backdrop of a post-war era defined by tradition and constrained femininity, The Mad Wife weaves together a coming-of-age search for identity with a psychological drama so poignant, you won't be able to put it down--
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Malibu rising
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Malibu: August, 1983. It's the day of Nina Riva's annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, a talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, on a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together, the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over - especially as the offspring of the legendary singer, Mick Riva. The party goes dangerously out of control as secrets and loves that shaped this family's generations come to light, changing their lives forever.
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The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel
by Michael Connelly
Following his resurrection walk and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty. Representing the victim's family, Mickey's case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails. Along the way he joins up with a journalist named Jack McEvoy, who wants to be a fly on the wall during the trial in order to write a book about it. But Mickey puts him to work. The case is fraught with danger because billions are at stake. It is said that machines became smarter than humans on the day in 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov with a gambit called the knight's sacrifice. Haller will take a similar gambit in court to defeat the mega forces of the AI industry lined up against him and his clients--
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Red, White & Royal Blue
by Casey McQuiston
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius - his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when tabloids get a hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
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Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit
by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
In Rooted, cutting-edge science supports a truth that poets, artists, mystics, and earth-based cultures across the world have proclaimed over millennia: life on this planet is radically interconnected. Our bodies, thoughts, minds, and spirits are affected by the whole of nature, and they affect this whole in return. In this time of crisis, how can we best live upon our imperiled, beloved earth?--
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The Rose Code : A Novel
by Kate Quinn
1940. As England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to mysterious country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds of Britain train to break German military codes. They are vivacious debutane, Osla, imperious self-made, Mab and local village spinster, Beth. But war, loss, and the impossible pressure of secrecy will tear the three apart.
1947, As the royal wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip whips post-war Britain into a fever, three friends-turned-enemies are reunited by a mysterious encrypted letter - the key to which lies buried in the long-ago betrayal that destroyed their friendship and left one of them confined to an asylum.
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The Silence of the Girls
by Pat Barker
The ancient city of Troy has withstood a decade under siege of the powerful Greek army, which continues to wage bloody war over a stolen woman - Helen. In the Greek camp, another woman - Briseis - watches and waits for the war's outcome. She was queen of one of Troy's neighboring kingdoms, until Achilles, Greece's greatest warrior, sacked her city and murdered her husband and brothers.
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Skylark
by Paula McLain
1664. Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpãetriáere asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined. 1939. Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized--
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We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth
by Edited by Dahr Jamail & Stan Rushworth
Although for a great many people, the human impact on the Earth--countless species becoming extinct, pandemics claiming millions of lives, and climate crisis causing worldwide social and environmental upheaval--was not apparent until recently, this is not the case for all people or cultures. For the Indigenous people of the world, radical alteration of the planet, and of life itself, is a story that is many generations long. They have had to adapt, to persevere, and to be courageous and resourceful in the face of genocide and destruction--and their experience has given them a unique understanding of civilizational devastation.--
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What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World
by Prentis Hemphill
This book argues that the principles of embodiment awareness--the awareness of our body's sensations, habits, and the beliefs that inform them--are critical to lasting healing and change. Hemphill ... shows us that we don't have to carry our emotional burdens alone. They demonstrate a future in which healing is done in community, weaving together stories from their own experience as a trauma survivor with clinical accounts and lessons learned from their time as a social movement architect. They ask, 'What would it do to movements, to our society and culture to have the principles of healing at the very center? And what does it do to have healing at the center of every structure, and everything we create?'--
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