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Beatrice Ophelia is Flickering Out: A Humorous Whodunit
by Megan Gerig
Beatrice Sawyer is flickering out, for what might be the last time. After being laid off yet again, Beatrice returns with her family to her childhood summer home to unwind. And maybe figure out how to move out of her parents' basement. The town is hosting their inaugural Smallmouth Bass Festival as a last-wick effort to attract tourists, and Beatrice hopes volunteering might shed some light on her future. At first, things seem to be brightening. Beatrice rediscovers the candle shop her grandmother once owned, and a new dream sparks to life. Until she stumbles upon her estranged aunt dragging away the marina owner's body. When her grandfather insists on his daughter's innocence, Beatrice must shelve her newfound dream and team up with her brother and childhood best friend to clear her aunt's name. But as they dig deeper, Beatrice wonders whether their efforts will mend their family ties-or if she'll fail to save her aunt and have to watch her family go up in smoke.
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The Left and the Lucky
by Willy Vlautin
Recipient of the 2025 Joyce Carol Oates Prize One of America's greatest storytellers.--Jonathan Evison The acclaimed Willy Vlautin returns with a heartbreaking and tender novel about two young brothers, the vicissitudes of fate, and unexpected connection--a beautiful and bittersweet portrait that illuminates the power of friendship and how it can save lives in multiple ways. Eddie Wilkens is a workaholic house painter in his early forties. His wife has left him to her regret, and his main employee, Houston, is a loafer and scoundrel who barely shows up for work. Unassuming and self-reliant, Eddie is thoughtful man who rarely gets angry, despite life's frequent provocations, but he is ruled by a guilt that he has carried for nearly twenty years. Next door, a woman and her two sons move in with her frail and aging mother. The youngest boy, Russell, eight-years-old, is quiet and small for his age and lives in constant terror of his increasingly lost and troubled fifteen-year-old brother, Curtis. As their mother struggles to keep the family together and the grandmother's health begins to faulter they find themselves unable to protect Russell and themselves from Curtis's cruelty, which threatens to explode in frenetic violence. Though neither knows it, Russell and Eddie will become each other's saving grace. While Russell's home life disintegrates he begins waiting in Eddie's backyard for him to get off work. Eddie offers the boy small acts of kindness: he feeds him, gives him jobs to do, listens to his dreams of escape, and offers Russell a glimpse into a world of hope and humor. A world of misfit painters, a derelict muscle car, an old dog, and the comradery and companionship of Eddie and his crew. In return, Russell gives Eddie a reason to carry on and helps him lay to rest the guilt that has plagued him for half of his life. Together, this makeshift father and son begin to build better life, daring to trade the bleakness and cynicism around them for hope and friendship. From a writer revered for his thoughtful and compassionate portrayal of realistic American life, The Left and the Lucky is a heartbreakingly honest examination of how circumstance shapes our lives, and how the luck of finding someone who needs us can transcend bitter loneliness and prevent us from giving up on dreaming of a better life.
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Murder at Cinnamon Falls
by R. L. Killmore
A cozy Autumn romance with a killer twist: a murder-romance blend for fans of THE GILMORE GIRLS and THE PUMPKIN SPICE CAFÉ. The perfect blend of romance, murder, and pumpkin spice.After a humiliating breakup at graduation and no job offers on the horizon, Nia retreats to her sleepy hometown of Cinnamon Falls where she can sulk about her life being a mess in peace.When she arrives, the town is gearing up for their annual Fall Fest, where people travel from far and wide to bob apples, carve pumpkins and watch the firework display. But just a few days before opening night, a shocking discovery is made. A body is uncovered in the local diner, alongside a note: Who will be next?Nia must team up with an eclectic group of Cinnamon Falls residents to solve the case, including her tall, dark and handsome high school ex-boyfriend Jesse that she never quite got over...Can Nia and the town solve the case before the killer strikes again?
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This Song Is about Me
by Melissa de la Cruz
A reporter strives to discover the reason behind a superstar's disappearance in an enthralling novel about the mysteries of love and success by a New York Times bestselling author. It was a night to remember. Ryan Holding, the most famous pop star in the world, won every music award imaginable at the industry's highest event. She exited the stage to thunderous applause...then disappeared off the face of the earth. Six years later, her social media accounts remain untouched. Her band has broken up. Her Malibu estate sits quiet. And billions of obsessed fans still ask: Whatever happened to Ryan Holding? Amid theories, suspicions, and rumors, reporter Elyse James wants the truth about the girl who poured her heart into every song she wrote. As Elyse searches through the stories of Ryan's life, from those willing to talk--her best friend, a childhood teacher, and Ryan's first love among them--a portrait of a flesh-and-blood icon begins to emerge. So do clues to a mystery that has captivated the world. Did Ryan disappear to find herself? Or did someone deliberately make Ryan disappear? The answers are the stuff of legend.
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A Lie for a Lie
by Ren DeStefano
A deadly game of cat and mouse unfolds when a housewife with a secret life takes on a tech billionaire with secrets darker than her own . . . from the author of How I'll Kill You. Margaux leads a double life that would make most people dizzy. By day, she's a seemingly ordinary interior decorator with a picture-perfect marriage. By night, she works for a mysterious employer known only as Mr. X. Her specialty: infiltrating the lives of dangerous targets, gaining their trust, and ultimately exposing their crimes. Her latest assignment: unraveling the reclusive life of Bertram Casimir, a billionaire tech CEO whose career is as mysterious as his past. His sister claims he stole her app to build his fortune. Not only that, his girlfriend may or may not have recently gone missing. Bertram sees through Margaux's carefully constructed facade, matching her move for move. As the lines between hunter and prey blur, Margaux finds herself unexpectedly drawn to Bertram. They share more than she'd like to admit--a dangerous intelligence, a taste for high-stakes manipulation. When the evidence begins to shift, threatening to destroy everything she knows, Margaux realizes this is far more than just another job. Her hidden past--and her life--are now on the line. One lie remains, and it might just save her.
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Love Is an Algorithm
by Laura Brooke Robson
Joyful, generous and smart. --Holly Gramazio, New York Times bestselling author of The Husbands A March Book of the Month pick Take the uncertainty out of love with Pattern, it's more than just a dating app Eve wants to make music that's fueled by love, passion, and rage (feelings). She trusts her gut and her friends and in no way wants to rely on technology, let alone AI, to tell her how she feels. Danny is anxious--about his dad, his dating life, his coffee order (why is it twelve dollars?), and about the dating app he helped create, which seems determined to serve him terrible matches. When Eve and Danny start dating, it feels like the solution to all of Danny's worries--except when it doesn't. Is she happy? Should he be doing more? Or less? This becomes the catalyst for a revolutionary new version of Danny's app that promises to quantify relationship health and potential, helping users understand what's really going on. Problem solved As Pattern and Bug, the ever-so-friendly AI assistant, catch fire, users everywhere begin outsourcing major life decisions to Danny's algorithms. But as Danny reckons with his newfound success, Eve--whose career relies on her ability to write her emotions into song--grows increasingly skeptical of the app's impact on genuine connection. Their relationship becomes the ultimate modern experiment: How do you fall and stay in love in the digital age?
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The Knight and the Moth
by Rachel Gillig
INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Prepare to meet your next obsession. -- Rebecca Ross, author of Divine Rivals From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Gillig comes the next big romantasy sensation, a gothic, mist-cloaked tale of a young prophetess forced on an impossible quest with the one knight whose future is beyond her sight. This edition will showcase all-new stenciled edges - available only in this first print run. Sybil Delling has spent nine years dreaming of having no dreams at all. Like the other foundling girls who traded a decade of service for a home in the great cathedral, Sybil is a Diviner. In her dreams she receives visions from six unearthly figures known as Omens. From them, she can predict terrible things before they occur, and lords and common folk alike travel across the kingdom of Traum's windswept moors to learn their futures by her dreams. Just as she and her sister Diviners near the end of their service, a mysterious knight arrives at the cathedral. Rude, heretical, and devilishly handsome, the knight Rodrick has no respect for Sybil's visions. But when Sybil's fellow Diviners begin to vanish one by one, she has no choice but to seek his help in finding them. For the world outside the cathedral's cloister is wrought with peril. Only the gods have the answers she is seeking, and as much as she'd rather avoid Rodrick's dark eyes and sharp tongue, only a heretic can defeat a god.
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Such a Perfect Family
by Nalini Singh
A man with a deadly past marries into the perfect, respectable family in this riveting thriller from New York Times bestselling author Nalini Singh... A woman buried. A woman broken. A woman crashed. A woman burned. And the man who knew them all. Love at first sight, a whirlwind Vegas wedding, a fairytale romance. For seventy-nine days, Tavish Advani has been the happiest man in the world-until his new life turns to ash, his wealthy in-laws' house going up in a fiery explosion. His badly injured wife lies in a coma, her family all but annihilated. Tavish thought he left the sins of his Los Angeles life behind, but it's not so easy to leave behind an investigation into the deaths of several high-profile women-all of whom he professed to love. Tragedy and death follow him no matter where he goes...but this time he knows he's innocent. Desperately trying to clear his name as the authorities zero in, he begins his own investigation into the fire-and learns that his wife's picture-perfect family may have been nothing but a meticulously constructed mirage. The truth is much darker than anything Tavish could've imagined...-- Provided by publisher.
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Upward Bound: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Woody Brown
Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles's disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister Delia; Jorge, the gentle nonverbal giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center's pool who feels out of her depth; then there's Mike, Upward Bound's director who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an impressive holiday show starring the center's sorely underestimated clients. Framing these interlocking narratives - and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways - is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers-- Provided by publisher.
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Every Exit Brings You Home
by Naeem Murr
A profound, bittersweet portrait of a Gazan immigrant's heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy. As a financial crisis looms, Jamal Jack Shaban is trying to save his neighbors from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really? For his flight attendant colleagues, he's an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jack's traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Nor does Dimra know about Jack's attraction to Marcia: an angry single mom new to the building. The resulting tangle of love, desire, and conflict returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a taboo affair nearly destroyed his life. A man of many sidesadulterer, devoted husband, fixer, community leader, liar, and the survivor of human and cosmic cruelty in both the past and the novel's presentJack is a paragon of both desire and hope, someone who has committed to love because the alternative is utter darkness. A gorgeous blend of gentle comedy and poignant tragedy, of blasted hopes and one man's indomitable dedication to the well-being of others, this is a book to love and never forget.
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The School of Night
by Karl Ove Knausgaard
London. 1985. A city rife with possibility and desire. One young man who wants it all. Kristian Hadeland, young and ambitious, has moved to London to study photography; he knows that he and his art are destined for more. His family never understood him, and his fellow photography students bore him. But when he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist, the future he yearns for becomes possible--as long as he is willing to sacrifice everything and stop at nothing. Twenty-four years later, Kristian sees his dreams come to fruition when a major retrospective of his work is held in New York City. As his past catches up to him, Kristian's world begins to crumble. Success comes at a price, but is he prepared to pay it? In a thrilling twist on Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Karl Ove Knausgaard masterfully spins a cautionary tale about the lengths that we will go to achieve success--and how far we are willing to fall. His most daring and macabre novel yet, The School of Night is an indelible tale about dark temptations and moral depravity, and what we forget when we bargain with the devil.
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All the World Can Hold
by Jung Yun
Let the Great World Spin meets My Name Is Lucy Barton in this novel set aboard an aging cruise ship bound for Bermuda, where growing tensions lead three strangers to confront their past regrets and imagine different futures. It's Sunday, September 16, 2001. Franny and her husband have traded in their elegant Park Avenue co-op for a suite on board the Sonata, a once-glittering cruise ship with a complicated history now long past its prime. Though they're not cruise people, Franny is determined to host the trip as planned because it's her mother's seventieth birthday, or chilsun, a major rite of passage celebrated by Korean families. But as her husband keeps pointing out, Franny and her mother aren't close, and it is surreal--even wrong--to be on a cruise as the death toll from the attacks on 9/11 continues to rise. Also on board is Doug, an aging actor and former star of Starlight Voyages, the hit Love Boat-style television series famously filmed on the Sonata. With few professional prospects, a now sober Doug has reluctantly joined his former castmates on a reunion cruise for fans of the show, but he dreads the dark specter of his past misdeeds. Meanwhile, Lucy, the only Black female graduate student in her department at MIT, has uncharacteristically accepted an invitation to join her roommate on the cruise during the height of recruitment season. Lucy's impulsive decision reflects her growing ambivalence about the tech companies that are trying to hire her, including a new one with a strange-sounding name, Google. All the World Can Hold beautifully explores how we balance our needs and our wants, as well as the regrets we live with and the chances to set them right. And though it's not a 9/11 novel, it does remind us that while the great world spins, the interpersonal dramas don't cease, even as more dire ones play out in the larger world.
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Where the Girls Were
by Kate Schatz
It's 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Baker Phillips: She's the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist. But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully-planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible. But then, everything changes. Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash-in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family's shining star to their embarrassing secret. Sent to a home for unwed mothers, Baker finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with a group of pregnant girls who share her shame and fear. As she reckons with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the girls who went away.-- Provided by publisher.
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Mists Over the Channel Islands: A Novel of World War II
by Sarah Sundin
The German invasion of the British Channel Islands shatters Dr. Ivy Picot's peaceful world, and she risks her life treating escapees from labor camps. Dutch engineer Gerrit van der Zee crosses paths with Ivy while building enemy fortifications. As their missions grow increasingly dangerous, they must decide if love can survive the cost of defiance?
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Frida's Cook
by Florencia Etcheves
This colorful, emotive historical debut whisks us to the home of Frida Kahlo, where food, art, and love weave together an unforgettable story of friendship and loyalty, with a bright Coyoacán as a vivid background. A hidden painting. A buried past. A legacy waiting to be uncovered. Mexico City, 1939: Young and determined Nayeli Cruz flees from her Oaxaca home to arrive in Mexico City with neither friends nor prospects. Alone and armed only with her sharp wit and extraordinary talent in the kitchen, she finds herself in front of La Caza Azul, the home of Frida Kahlo. As she begins work as the artist's cook, Nayeli is pulled into Frida's world of pain, passion, and defiance. But it isn't long before amid the vibrant tapestry of flavors, scents, and colors, the two women form a deep bond--one that will shape the course of Nayeli's life and leave behind a secret buried in art. Buenos Aires, Present Day: Paloma, Nayeli's granddaughter, stumbles upon a mysterious painting depicting her grandmother as a young woman. The artist's identity is unknown, but the artwork's existence threatens to unravel long-held family secrets. As Paloma delves into her grandmother's past, she uncovers a tale of passion, betrayal, and resilience that challenges everything she thought she knew about the one woman who raised her. A lyrical and timeless portrait of the human side of one of the world's most famous painters, Frida's Cook celebrates the power of female friendship, art, and love.
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Want to request any of these titles? Place a hold through the online catalog or call the library 831-768-3404 for assistance. |
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Watsonville Public Library
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