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Good Hair Days
by Grace Helena Walz
Two sisters, a failing family business, a messy legacy, and a whole lot of hairspray--Good Hair Days is a modern twist on Steel Magnolias meets Hello Beautiful with some extra Dolly Parton flair.
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The Last Mandarin
by Louise Penny
A gripping thriller about family and power co-written by Louise Penny, #1 bestselling author of the Gamache novels, and Mellissa Fung, an award-winning journalist. A mother and a daughter race against time in this all-too-real thriller that reaches from Tiananmen Square all the way to the White House. Alice Li, a first-generation Chinese American and former food blogger, has long lived in the shadow of her mother, Vivien Li-- a Tiananmen Square dissident turned world-renowned human rights activist and passionate advocate for a free and democratic China. When security and fire alarms go off simultaneously all around the world, setting off a panic, the signal is traced back to China. As world leaders scramble to respond, Vivien and Alice are called to the White House in hopes Madame Li can interpret the Chinese intentions. But why involve Alice? If China isn't behind the attack, Vivien warns, someone even more dangerous is pulling the strings. Mother and daughter must join together to overcome their estrangement if they have any hope of preventing global catastrophe. From DC to Ohio to Hong Kong, they work to prevent the next attack, along the way decoding an ancient legend and uncovering a secret language invented by women, for women.
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The Old Fire
by Elisa Shua Dusapin
Agathe leaves New York and returns to her home in the French countryside, after fifteen years away. She and her sister Vera have not seen each other in all those years, and they carry the weight of their own complicated lives. But now their father has died, and they must confront their childhood home on the outskirts of a country estate ravaged by a nearby fire before it is knocked down. They have nine days to empty it. As the pair clean and sift through a lifetime's worth of belongings, old memories, and resentments surface. Tender and tense, haunting and evocative, The Old Fire is Elisa Shua Dusapin's most personal and moving novel yet. An exploration of time and memory, of family and belonging, it is also a graceful and profound look at the unsaid and the unanswered, the secrets that remain, and whether you can ever really go home again.
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When the Fireflies Dance
by Aisha Hassan
On the outskirts of Lahore, Pakistan, a large yellow moon hung low in the sky when the men came with dogs and guns and cricket bats. In front of his family's small hut on the edge of a looming brick kiln, Lalloo's brother was murdered. Unable to escape the memory of that horrible night, Lalloo's parents and sisters remain trapped, the kiln chimney churning black smoke into the sky as the family slave, brick by brick, to pay off their debts. To rescue them, Lalloo must free himself from his past and carve out his own destiny.
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She Made Herself a Monster
by Anna Kovatcheva
A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut novel: in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer--in truth, a traveling con artist--joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons. We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we've named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster? Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers sleep: animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then she eliminates the threat, and sows seeds of hope in her wake. The village Koprivci is plagued by exceptional illness and misfortune, its children rarely surviving infancy. There, Yana meets Anka: a headstrong orphan who the villagers blame for their curse. As Anka approaches womanhood, the village Captain is grooming her for marriage against her will. Anka is powerless against him--that is, until Yana arrives. Together, the orphan and the vampire slayer hatch a plan: to conjure a monster so vile, it might provide cover for Anka to escape. But their plan quickly takes on a horrifying life of its own.
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Paper Cut
by Rachel Taff
A page-turning suspense debut about a woman infamous for escaping a cult as a teenager, who finds her future threatened when dangerous secrets come back to haunt her--perfect for fans of Jessica Knoll and The Girls.Everybody knows the story. Nobody knows the truth...Lucy Golden is a true-crime icon, infamous for the murder she committed while escaping a California cult twenty years ago. But as everyone in Los Angeles knows, fame is fleeting, and Lucy and her story are always just one news cycle away from obscurity. Not to mention, she's fending off a stalker and moderating an icy feud between her acclaimed photographer mother and her scandalous rock star sister. Worst of all, online trolls are asking increasingly threatening questions about the legendary crime. Questions that could tear her life apart.So when a hotshot documentarian makes her case the subject of his next film, Lucy sees a chance to silence any doubters once and for all. But as filming begins, she must return to the California desert and come face-to-face with a cast of players from her torrid history. Of course, the past is never what it seems, and long-buried secrets soon collide with present-day threats. Can Lucy stop her critics from digging up the truth before it's too late? And how far will she go to protect the story she's been telling--and selling--all along? Told in a narrative split between the present day and Lucy's hit memoir about her fated summer in the cult, Paper Cut combines psychological suspense with coming-of-age Californian cult noir and a sharp examination of the true-crime phenomenon. As incisive as it is propulsive, this mesmerizing debut will keep readers hooked until the last page.
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For Human Use
by Sarah G. Pierce
LIV is the #1 dating app in the world. Life with a living partner can be tricky. But LIV offers a solution! Date a corpse. Romantic relationships mean having tough conversations and rough patches. An embalmed body, though? Well, they've got no opinions, desires, or complex emotional responses. What was once taboo is now a booming business. At the center of this revolution are three living, breathing humans who all feel quite differently about the new world they've built. Tom is the venture capitalist rockstar who's mortified he's funding the whole thing. Auden is LIV's visionary founder who's ready to see his app succeed no matter what. And Mara is caught in the middle. Auden loves her, and Tom is infatuated, but she's really only interested in finding out where her life could go next. Forging a business relationship based on a dating app for corpses is one thing. But navigating a messy love triangle will be almost impossible.
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A Leopard-Skin Hat
by Anne Serre
A Leopard-Skin Hat may be the French writer Anne Serre's most moving novel yet. Hailed in Le Point as a 'masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance,' it is the story of an intense friendship between 'the Narrator' and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders. A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the narrator's loving and anguished attachment to her. Anne Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author's little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell, written in Anne Serre's signature style.
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Revenge Prey
by John Sandford
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTELLER Lucas Davenport must track down a ruthless Russian hit team, in this latest thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford. Leonard Summers--not his real name--is on the run. A former high-ranking Russian intelligence officer who defected to the U.S. after providing critical information about Russian spies in U.S. government service, Leonard, his wife Martha, and son Bernard have spent the past year holed up in a CIA facility near Washington. After the CIA makes a deal with the U.S. Marshal Service's Witness Protection Program (WPP), Leonard's family is transported to Minneapolis. The plan is to hide them in a wooded Minneapolis suburb that resembles their former home and dacha near Moscow. The Summers are received at their destination by Lucas Davenport and fellow marshal Shelly White. Unbeknownst to them, the WPP group has been tracked by a Russian hit team. And while nobody in the WPP has ever been attacked...Leonard might be the first victim. As shots are fired and enemies dodged, Lucas must move quickly to uncover where the leak is coming from, before the hit team can strike again.
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The Pie & MASH Detective Agency
by J. D. Brinkworth
Oddball couple Jane and Simon take a private detective class and must use their (admittedly limited) skills to solve a series of mysterious disappearances in this delightful debut mystery. Jane Pye and Simon Mash are a millennial couple with a little extra time on their hands. Jane was recently let go from her position as a back-end programmer, having never been quite sure what that meant. And Simon's career as a corporate collaboration consultant seems to be less collaborating and more scrolling the internet in search of matching velour tracksuits and well-balanced charcuterie boards. When they sign up for a private detective class on a whim, they quickly realize they've bitten off more than they can chew. Their instructor, having a feeling his two worst students don't have a chance of solving anything beyond finding the classroom, assigns them the case of Nellie Thorne, a woman recently reported missing. But she's not the first Nellie Thorne to disappear. In fact, she's the fifth in fifty years. Jane and Simon set out to solve the case, armed with just a few days of notes, matching trench coats, and a feeling they should have enrolled in a different class. The investigation leads the newly minted Pie and Mash Detective Agency to places they never thought they'd go, including haunted woods, mysterious archives, and, most terrifyingly for Jane, Simon's mum's house. As clues emerge, more questions than answers begin to pile up. What links the missing Nellies? Why do locals think she's a ghost? Is their teacher hiding something? So what if they're heavy on heart but light on experience. Jane and Simon are determined to uncover the truth in time to pass the class and save the day.
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Berlin Shuffle
by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz
A prophetic lost classic from interwar Germany, following a group of Berliners navigating economic turmoil and the rise of fascism, now translated into English for the first time Berlin in the 1920s is the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess: a hedonistic Babylon, though there's little glamour for the hundreds of thousands out of work, the war wounded, the prostitutes, and the beggars. Come evening they too want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where they gather to drink, dance, and reassert their pride. But there's disaster lurking in the alleys and flophouses, a disaster that the twenty-two-year-old author Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz saw coming for his nation. In this dark comedy of petty theft, soapbox speeches, and bar fights is the disarray of a country devouring itself. Tragically, Germany's self-destruction engulfed the author, who was killed five years after finishing this novel. When Boschwitz's The Passenger was rediscovered in 2021, it was heralded as a masterpiece that captured the terror of the Nazi reign. Now, Berlin Shuffle--his literary debut from 1937, finally available in English, with a preface by the preeminent translator Philip Boehm--brings to life the society that would enable fascism's takeover. The triumph of one of world literature's spectacular talents, Berlin Shuffle is a dire warning sent from a pivotal moment in history to our own time.
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The Bookbinder's Secret
by A. D. Bell
Every 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. Now a USA Today bestseller 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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One Sharp Stitch
by Allie Pleiter
When thirty-something Shelby Phillips returns to her quiet hometown just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, she reluctantly takes over her mother's Nimble Needle needlepoint shop-and gets entangled in a murder investigation... It's only temporary. That's what Shelby tells herself when she returns to excruciatingly harmless Gwen Lake after her promising graphic arts career implodes. Her plan is as simple and fool-proof as a tent stitch: manage the family needlepoint shop during her parents' month-long RV vacation. It's not as if they're retiring . . . right? When Shelby becomes responsible for hosting a trunk show with local vendors, she's determined to pull it off. Even if that means dealing with former classmate Kat Katsaros, a rising entrepreneur specializing in needlework scissors. Kat has changed since high school-and she's angling to take over the Nimble Needle herself. The tension unspools when Shelby makes a terrible discovery on the morning of the event: Kat's dead body. Shelby can't believe the death was an accident, and she's set on exposing the killer. She finds help in a new friend, a potential crush, and the surprising support of her sister and the Nimble Needle stitchers. Still, Shelby must move quickly to stop the crafty culprit before her maybe not-so-temporary new life in Gwen Lake comes apart at the seams.
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A Particularly Nasty Case
by Adam Kay
When his toxic medical director dies of a heart attack, fellow doctor Eitan Rose smells foul play. Nobody else does, though, including some quite crucial players like the police and the medical examiner. So Eitan vows to uncover the truth himself. But Eitan's own past and reputation are far from spotless, despite his budding relationship with Cole, a handsome hospital porter, and reluctant camaraderie with his office mate, Margaret-with-the-cats. As his colleagues become increasingly concerned about his mental health, Eitan's investigation spirals out of control. Could a killer really be stalking the wards? Or is Eitan making a catastrophic mistake?
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Isabella's Not Dead
by Beth Morrey
Isabella's not dead. That's what Gwen tells anyone who asks about the best friend who ghosted them all fifteen years ago. But if Isabella's not dead, then where is she? And why did she leave, just when Gwen needed her most? Freshly fifty-three, out of a job and with children who no longer need her, Gwen decides to find out. Setting out to solve the mystery, Gwen embarks on an adventure across the country then across Europe that will test her friendships and her marriage, putting her on a collision course with reluctant acquaintances, a mother-in-law best described as eccentric, and a rabbit hole full of clues. But Isabella's not the only one who's lost. A tale of deep, frayed friendship, fractured memories, and skewed perspective, 'Isabella's not dead' is the story of one woman's quest to reclaim her best friend, and herself
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The Midnight Knock
by John Fram
A mind-bending locked-room thriller about eight strangers trapped in a remote Texas motel as they race against time to save their lives. In the frigid west Texas desert, weary travelers converge at a lonely roadside motel nestled at the foot of a massive mountain. Ethan and Hunter have left behind a corpse and a horrific act of violence. Kyla and Fernanda are fleeing for the border. Stanley and his granddaughter are returning from Mexico with a mysterious man in hot pursuit. All of them are on the run from something. All of them are hiding something. And somehow, they're all connected to the motel's other guest, an enigmatic woman named Sarah Powers. Within hours, Sarah is dead. The strange twins who run the Brake Inn Motel offer the guests an ultimatum: uncover the killer by midnight--or die when the protective lights around the motel go out. Because something very old and very dangerous lurks in this corner of the desert. And it's hungry. As time ticks away, alliances fracture, secrets unravel, and the guests will not only have to confront the violence of the past but also face the darkness within themselves. A masterful blend of psychological tension, supernatural horror, and layered storytelling, The Midnight Knock takes you on an eerie journey through the wide open and desolate landscape of Texas where everyone is a suspect.
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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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