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The Bookbinder's Secretby A. D. BellEvery book tells a story. This one tells a secret. A young bookbinder begins a hunt for the truth when a confession hidden beneath the binding of a burned book reveals a story of forbidden love, lost fortune, and murder. Lilian (Lily) Delaney, apprentice to a master bookbinder in Oxford in 1901, chafes at the confines of her life. She is trapped between the oppressiveness of her father's failing bookshop and still being an apprentice in a man's profession. But when she's given a burned book during a visit to a collector, she finds, hidden beneath the binding, a fifty-year-old letter speaking of love, fortune, and murder. Lily is pulled into the mystery of the young lovers, a story of forbidden love, and discovers there are more books and more hidden pages telling their story. Lilian becomes obsessed with the story but she is not the only one looking for the remaining books and what began as a diverting intrigue quickly becomes a very dangerous pursuit. Lily's search leads her from the eccentric booksellers of London to the private libraries of unscrupulous collectors and the dusty archives of society papers, deep into the heart of the mystery. But with sinister forces closing in, willing to do anything for the books, Lilian's world begins to fall apart and she must decide if uncovering the truth is worth the risk to her own life.
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New York Times Bestselling Author
In a quiet South Seattle neighborhood, a suspected drug smuggler and his girlfriend are murdered in their home. When a young man named Michael Westbrook is accused of the brutal double homicide, his uncle JP Harrison turns to Keera Duggan to defend him. JP is Keera's trusted investigator, and he desperately needs Keera to save his nephew against escalating odds. The evidence is circumstantial--Michael worked with one of the victims, drugs were found in his possession, and he bolted from authorities. Ruthless star prosecutor Anh Tran has gotten convictions on much less. With the testimony of two prison informants, the case looks grave. But Keera never concedes defeat. To free her client, she must dig deep before Tran crushes both of them. As the investigation gets more twisted with each new find, Keera is swept up in a mystery with far-reaching consequences. This case isn't just murder. It's looking like a conspiracy. And getting justice for Michael could be the most dangerous promise Keera has ever made. |
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Missing Samby Thrity UmrigarA tense and twisty story of a woman who goes missing on a morning run and her wife's determination to both find her and clear her own name--from the bestselling author of Honor.
One night after a party, old grievances surface between married couple Aliya and Sam and the night ends badly with a heated argument. Sam goes for a run early the next morning to clear her head--and doesn't come back. Aliya reports her wife missing, but as a gay, Muslim daughter of immigrants, she can't escape the scrutiny and suspicion of those around her. Scared and furious and feeling isolated as strangers and acquaintances alike doubt her innocence, Aliya makes one wrong choice after another. She must fight to prove her innocence in the public eye even as she is torn between her fear that Sam is dead and her desire to find and save her wife. But is safety ever truly possible for them? A provocative examination of suburban mores, Missing Sam captures the terror manifested in today's political climate, and the real dangers, both physical and psychological, of being brown and queer in America.
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Return of the Maltese Falconby Max Allan CollinsHardboiled noir that picks up where legendary author Dashiell Hammett left off, telling the story of iconic private eye Sam Spade and the quest for the priceless Maltese Falcon.
Legendary mystery writer Dashiell Hammett only wrote one novel about detective Sam Spade: The Maltese Falcon, the most famous private eye story ever told. But the case was never really solved - the priceless golden, bejeweled bird that men and women had been dying to possess turned out to be a fake. Now, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Max Allan Collins (author of Road to Perdition) brings closure to this crime classic, reuniting all the surviving members of the original cast alongside femme fatales, crooked collectors, and greedy gangsters for one more thrilling, deadly chase through the streets, wharves, morgues, bars, and back alleys of 1920s San Francisco - and finally answers the question, Whatever became of the Maltese Falcon?
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Tangerinnby Emanuela AnechoumNew York Times and Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2026.
"Italian literature has been waiting years for a novel like this."
-Vincenzo Latronico, author of Perfection.
A luminous debut about the search for belonging, the tension between departure and return, and the legacy of migration, Tangerinn is a novel of memory, a stirring meditation on culture, identity, and inheritance set between London and the windswept beaches of southern Italy. Mina is thirty and living in London. She fled there at twenty to reinvent herself to escape her small-town past, but a decade later she is drifting, untethered and uncertain. When her Moroccan-born father Omar dies, she returns to her childhood home on the Calabrian coast, where he ran a bar called the Tangerinn. It was more than just a bar--it was a gathering place, a haven for migrants and misfits, a dream that Mina's sister, Aisha, is struggling to keep alive. In searching for traces of her father, Mina begins to piece together her own fractured sense of identity. As she reconnects with the memories embedded in the land, she must confront what it means to belong--not just to a place, but to a lineage, a language, a self.
With precise, sensual prose and an acute sensitivity to atmosphere and emotion, Anechoum delivers a novel that is at once tender and fierce, local and borderless, as intimate as it is political. |
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#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
An electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next, & not for the first time, Jill Doll Blaine finds herself hurtling toward earth, reconstituting as she falls, right down to her favorite black pumps. She plummets towards her newest charge, yet another soul she must usher into the afterlife, and lands headfirst in the circular drive of his ornate mansion. She has performed this sacred duty 343 times since her own death. Her charges, as a rule, have been greatly comforted in their final moments. But this charge, she soon discovers, isn't like the others. The powerful K. J. Boone will not be consoled, because he has nothing to regret. He lived a big, bold, epic life, and the world is better for it. Isn't it?
Vigil transports us, careening, through the wild final evening of a complicated man. Visitors begin to arrive (worldly and otherworldly, alive and dead), clamoring for a reckoning. Birds swarm the dying man's room; a black calf grazes on the love seat; a man from a distant, drought-ravaged village materializes; two oil-business cronies from decades past show up with chilling plans for Boone's postdeath future. With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we've come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time--the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress--and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution. |
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New York Times Bestselling Author
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Caputo returns to the heart of the human condition with Wandering Souls, a collection of powerful stories that explore war, love, nature, life, and death. In the gripping title story, a Vietnam vet revisits the war-torn landscape of his past, searching for the grave of a forgotten soldier--only to uncover far more than he bargained for. In another tale, a wildlife photographer in the African savanna risks everything for a chance at true love. A thief escaping Central America finds himself aboard a ship, only to be thrust into the peril of an approaching storm. These and other stories in Wandering Souls are told with the authenticity and keen insight that have made Caputo's writing unforgettable, offering emotionally intense and richly atmospheric narratives. With his distinctive style, Caputo delves into the complex relationship between man and memory--sometimes haunting, sometimes redemptive--capturing moments of profound emotional reckoning that compel his characters to confront their pasts and the indelible marks left by the places that shaped them.
In Wandering Souls, the past is never truly gone; it is a force that defines us, for better or worse. |
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Wreck Your Heart: A Mysteryby Lori Rader-DayFrom award-winning author Lori Rader-Day, Wreck Your Heart is an engaging, wisecracking and wonderful crime novel with a big heart, about a country and midwestern singer out to catch her big break before family--or murder--wrecks everything. Dahlia Doll Devine had the kind of hardscrabble beginning that could launch a thousand broken-hearted country songs, but now she's the star of her own stage at McPhee's Tavern. As part of Chicago's--yes, Chicago's--country music scene, Dahlia is an up-and-coming singer in spangles and boots of classic country tunes. Up and coming, that is, until her boyfriend Joey up and went, taking the rent money with him. So Dahlia is back to square one, relying on Alex McPhee--again. Alex helped her out of a bad situation when she was a kid living rough with her mother. Now he's part landlord, part band booster, all-around rescuer. It's just that Dahlia wishes she didn't keep giving him reasons to have to do it. Just as Dahlia suspects she's scraped rock bottom, the mother she hasn't spoken to in twenty years shows up with something to say. The next morning, a distraught young woman arrives at the bar, asking after her missing mother--Dahlia's mother, too, even if the missing suburban PTA mom the girl describes sounds pretty different from the one who let Dahlia down all those years ago. Though no one is using the word sister any time soon, Dahlia lets herself be drawn into reuniting the family that might have been hers. But when a body is discovered outside McPhee's Tavern, the crime threatens not just the place Dahlia has made into a home, but everything she's believed about her past, her dreams for the future, and the people she was just, maybe, beginning to let into her heart.
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Footballby Chuck KlostermanA hilarious but nonetheless groundbreaking contribution to the argument about which force shapes American life the most. For two kinds of readers: those who know it's football and those who are about to find out.
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How to Be a Rich Old Lady: Your Guide to Easy Investing, Building Wealth, and Creating the Wild, Beautiful Life You Wantby Amanda HoldenA life-changing path to the financial freedom we all deserve: How to Be a Rich Old Lady is filled with humor, heart, and real-world perspective. Amanda Holden spent years working in investment management, where she saw exactly who gets access to the power, ease, and opportunity money can bring--and it wasn't people like her friends. She also saw how the financial system is designed to feel exclusive and confusing, and how it blames individuals for economic problems they didn't create. So, Amanda left her finance job to launch Invested Development, a financial education company where she has taught more than twenty-five thousand students how to invest with radical clarity, accessibility, and joy. Here, all her expertise is packed into a guide that won't feel like getting cornered by a crypto bro. Instead, it reads like a text from your smartest friend: Let's figure out money, so we can stop thinking about money. Because this practice isn't just about planning for your wild and glorious future--it's about the relief of knowing you're doing everything you can right now. In these pages, you will: Set up a fully automated investing strategy--so you can move on with your life; Use hands-on tools and worksheets to guide you to financial independence; Learn about investing in a way that is truly memorable; Demystify retirement accounts and tax rules; Learn who to trust in the finance world--and who to avoid; Master how to research, buy, and track the right investments for you; Explore what it means to live a wild, beautiful life beyond Roth IRAs. How to Be a Rich Old Lady is a step-by-step road map to financial freedom. It's not just about numbers on a spreadsheet but building a life that feels secure enough to dream into. Maybe your Rich Old Lady is wearing belly chains at the beach, tanned and wrinkly and totally unbothered. Maybe she's befriending the birds at her cozy forest cabin. Maybe she's leaving $500 tips on her diner coffee. Whatever your vision, this approachable guide to investing and wealth-building will help you build a plan to greet her with confidence, security, and genuine hope for tomorrow.
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Humor Me: How Laughing More Can Make You Present, Creative, Connected, and Happyby Chris DuffyFrom a comedian and host of hit TED podcast, How to Be a Better Human, a hilarious and enlightening guide to laughing your way into a fuller life Warning: this book may cause repeated smiling. It's a delightful read about how we can bring more levity into our lives.--Adam Grant, author of Hidden Potential and Think Again.
In his days as an exhausted fifth grade teacher, Chris Duffy taught the funniest person he's ever met: eleven-year-old Gary. Gary was the school newspaper's official food critic, blasting cafeteria pizza for looking like cardboard and opining that the baked beans weren't beany enough. These days, Duffy is a professional comedy writer and the host of a podcast with millions of listeners, but he's never forgotten the transformative joy of laughing with Gary during a bleak Boston winter.
In Humor Me, he shares a road map for how to cultivate and strengthen a sense of humor in a challenging world. Duffy embarks on a journey that takes him from comedy clubs to emergency rooms to a helicopter full of Navy SEALs and back to his own keyboard to reveal how--and why--a good laugh can bring us closer to the good life. Drawing on personal stories, insights from the social sciences, and the wisdom of comedians, Duffy offers practical strategies, including: How to hone the art of noticing, finding humor in the most unlikely places. Why you should take social risks (to build connection through humor ). How to apply the comedy secret that laughs come in threes. Humor Me promises to deepen your friendships, enhance your creativity, and lighten life's burdens, and is a genuinely funny read along the way. |
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Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arcticby Kenneth R. RosenA gripping blend of travelogue and frontline reporting that reveals how climate change, military ambition, and economic opportunity are transforming the Arctic into the epicenter of a new cold war, where a struggle for dominance between the planet's great powers heralds the next global conflict. Russian spies. Nuclear submarines. Sabotaged pipelines. Undersea communications severed in the dark of night. The fastest-warming place on earth--where apartment buildings, hospitals, and homes crumble daily as permafrost melts and villages get washed away by rising seas--the Arctic stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. As climate change thaws the northern latitudes, opening once ice-bound shipping lanes and access to natural resources, the world's military powers are rushing to stake their claims in this increasingly strategic region. We've entered a new cold war--and every day it grows hotter.
In Polar War, Kenneth R. Rosen takes readers on an extraordinary journey across the changing face of the far north. Through intimate portraits of scientists, soldiers, and Indigenous community leaders representing the interests of twenty-one countries across four continents, he witnesses firsthand how rising temperatures and growing tensions are reshaping life above and below the Arctic Circle. He finds himself on the trail of Navy SEALs training for arctic warfare, embarks on Coast Guard patrols monitoring Russian incursions, participates in close-quarter-combat training aboard foreign icebreakers in the Arctic sea ice, and visits remote research stations where international cooperation is giving way to espionage and the search for long-frozen biological weapons. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and three years of reporting from the frontlines of climate change and great power competition, Rosen blends incisive analysis with the vivid immediacy of a travelogue. His deeply researched and personal accounts capture the diverse landscapes, people, and conflicted interests that define this complex northern region. The result is both an elegy for a vanishing landscape and an urgent warning about how the race for Arctic dominance could spark the next global conflict. |
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When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America's Black Botanical Legacyby Beronda L. MontgomeryThis stunning cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery offers up lessons from the natural world shared through the stories of long-lived trees. The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely. In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the ways seven trees--as well as the cotton shrub--are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.
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Onondaga Free Library
4840 West Seneca Tpk Syracuse, NY 13215
Hours:
Monday 9:00am-8:30pm Tuesday 9:00am-8:30pm Wednesday 9:00am-8:30pm Thursday 9:00am-8:30pm Friday 10:00am-5:00pm Saturday 10:00am-5:00pm* Sunday CLOSED*Summer Saturday Hours:
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