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Woman Down
by Colleen Hoover
Her words used to set the page on fire. But a viral backlash over her latest film adaptation forced Petra Rose to take a hiatus, resulting in missed deadlines and an overdue mortgage. Branded a fraud and fame-hungry opportunist, she learned the hard way what happens when the Internet turns on you. And she's been uninspired to write ever since. Now, with her next suspense novel outlined and savings nearly gone, she retreats to a secluded lakeside cabin, hoping to find inspiration. It's Petra's last-ditch attempt to save her career--and herself. Then he shows up. Detective Nathaniel Saint arrives with disturbing news, his presence igniting a creativity in her she thought long since burned out. Petra's words return in a rush, and her fictional cop character begins to mirror the very real cop who's becoming her muse.
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Felicia's Favorites
by Danielle Steel
After the unexpected death of their mother, Felicia Morgan Weston, five sisters gather at the family’s Connecticut farmhouse for the reading of her will. Still grieving, they are shocked to discover that their mother left each of them a carefully chosen gift meant to reshape their lives, along with long-hidden secrets. Charlotte, the eldest, a successful entrepreneur and single mother, rethinks her strained relationship with her mother. Quinne, a television producer, is offered a chance to pursue new ambitions. Olivia, a former ballerina left paraplegic after an accident, must confront her fears about love and independence. Veronica is involved in a secret affair with a married senator, while Isabelle’s marriage is shaken by her husband’s infidelity. As each sister responds to her inheritance, they confront grief, regret, and unresolved family tensions. Through these revelations, they begin to understand their mother’s intentions and the love behind her final gifts, ultimately reexamining their futures in unexpected ways.
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Inharmonious
by Tammye Huf
When the United States enters World War II after Pearl Harbor, three young Black men enlist in the Army hoping to serve their country. Cora’s brother Benny joins despite his family’s objections. Because of his light skin and eyes, he is mistakenly enlisted as white and enters a segregated military under a new racial identity. Cora is also devastated when Lee, her longtime friend and the man she expected to marry, enlists without telling her. While the men are away, family friend Roscoe offers to marry Cora to ensure that she and her mother will be cared for if Benny does not return from the war. After the war, Benny comes home but struggles with the consequences of having lived as a white man. Caught between two identities, he finds it difficult to fit into a society rigidly divided by race. At the same time, Black veterans face discrimination and are denied many of the opportunities, including benefits from the GI Bill, that help white veterans build prosperous postwar lives. As Cora, Lee, Benny, and Roscoe reunite, they must navigate love, loyalty, and the lasting effects of war while confronting the racial inequalities that continue to shape their futures.
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Stolen in Death
by J. D. Robb
A violent murder inside a wealthy household sends Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her team into a complex investigation. Multibillionaire Nathan Barrister is found dead, struck in the head with a block of amethyst, near a hidden vault filled with priceless paintings, jewelry, and stolen treasures. Eve’s husband, Roarke, recognizes several of the items as having likely been stolen, suggesting a connection to past crimes. At first, the scene appears to be a burglary gone wrong, but only one object is missing. The investigation takes an unexpected turn when Eve learns the vault belonged to Nathan’s late father and was only recently discovered during home renovations. The family claims they had planned to quietly return the stolen goods to avoid scandal. As Eve digs deeper, she finds that Nathan was widely regarded as a good man, while his father’s past raises troubling questions. What begins as a possible robbery case shifts into a deeper mystery involving family secrets, hidden crimes, and long-buried wrongdoing. Eve must determine whether Nathan’s death was a crime of passion, revenge, or something rooted in his father’s hidden legacy.
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The Heir of Whitestone
by Catherine Coulter
In Victorian England in 1842, engineer Alex Ivanov has built a successful career designing advanced train engines, but his life is shadowed by a hidden past. As a child, he was pulled from the Thames with no memory of who he was and was raised by Ryder Sherbrooke after being presumed drowned. Now, eleven years later, someone is trying to kill him, suggesting his forgotten identity holds dangerous secrets. Lady Camilla Rohman is facing pressures of her own. Trapped by a controlling stepmother and relatives intent on arranging her marriage, she longs for independence. When she meets Alex, the two form a strong connection that quickly leads to marriage. Their happiness is disrupted during their honeymoon when a series of attacks makes it clear that Alex is still being hunted. Determined to uncover the truth, Alex and Camilla investigate his origins, following clues tied to his lost childhood. As they dig deeper, they uncover buried secrets and long-standing conspiracies that connect their present danger to the past. The investigation ultimately reveals shocking truths about Alex’s identity that threaten both their lives and the future they are trying to build together.
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Cold Zero: A Thriller
by Brad Thor
A vanished plane. An earth-shattering secret. A countdown to World War III. Hemisphere Airlines Flight 777--the most advanced jetliner ever built--disappears without a trace over the North Pole. Crippled by sabotage, it crash-lands on the ice, stranding the surviving passengers in a wasteland of frigid cold and chaos. The real storm, however, is still coming. Hidden inside the wreckage is the prototype for a revolutionary piece of technology that could upend the balance of world power. Now Washington, Moscow, and Beijing are racing to be the first on scene to retrieve it--at any cost. Trapped in the middle of the world's most dangerous flash point are CIA operative Kasey Sheridan and former fighter pilot turned first officer, Brett Sharpe. Hunted by enemy forces, they must spirit both the device and its creator across the ice to safety--before rival superpowers turn the Arctic into a war zone. With the clock ticking and the temperature dropping, the fate of the free world is about to be decided at the top of the globe.
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How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder
by Nina McConigley
A bold, inventive, and fiercely original debut novel that begins with an uncle dead and his tween niece's private confession to the reader-she and her sister killed him, and they blame the British.
Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die. According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life.
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Is This a Cry for Help?
by Emily Austin
Darcy appears to have built an ideal life. She works as a librarian, her wife Joy runs a bookbinding business, and together they share a cozy lakeside home filled with books, keepsakes, and two beloved cats. But when Darcy learns that her former boyfriend, Ben, has died, she is overwhelmed by guilt and unresolved feelings, leading to a mental breakdown and a leave of absence from work. When Darcy returns to the library, she finds her community divided by growing efforts to ban books and challenge the library’s diversity and inclusion programs. As debates over intellectual freedom intensify, Darcy is forced to confront both public conflict and her own personal struggles. With support from Joy, her colleagues, and members of the community, Darcy begins to examine her past relationships and the choices that have shaped her life. Through this process, she gains a deeper understanding of herself and finds the confidence to advocate for the values she believes in. As tensions over censorship continue to rise, Darcy’s personal recovery becomes intertwined with the fight to protect the library and the community it serves. The novel follows her journey through grief, self-discovery, and healing as she works to reclaim her sense of purpose and embrace a more authentic version of herself.
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Dead Ringer
by Chris Hauty
Set in present-day, a disgraced former Secret Service [officer] and a Jesuit professor join forces to delve into the mysteries surrounding the events of November 22, 1963. Fixated on deciphering the conspiracies behind the history-changing assassination, they are oblivious to the fact that the cabal is still active--and may face an end as bloody as the carnage in Dealey Plaza. Will they be able to uncover the truth in time? Or will they become two more footnotes in history?
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I Love You Don't Die
by Jade Song
Vicky has long been obsessed with death, surrounding herself with reminders of mortality from her childhood above a Chinatown funeral parlor to her job at a company that creates custom urns. Living in Manhattan and working her dream job should make her happy, but she struggles with depression, loneliness, and a lack of meaningful connections beyond her best friend, Jen. Everything changes when a dating app leads her into a relationship with an artist and a labor organizer. For the first time, Vicky finds the love, intimacy, and sense of belonging she has been missing. But as doubts begin to surface in her romantic relationship, friendship, and career, Vicky finds herself confronting the same fears and uncertainties she has always tried to manage through her fascination with death. Faced with the possibility of losing what matters most, she must decide whether to embrace the connections she has made or retreat into the self-destructive patterns that have long defined her life.
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Sandwich
by Catherine Newman
From the beloved author of We All Want Impossible Things and Wreck, a moving, hilarious story of a family summer vacation full of secrets, lunch, and learning to let go. For the past two decades, Rocky has looked forward to her family's yearly escape to Cape Cod. Their humble beach-town rental has been the site of sweet memories, sunny days, great meals, and messes of all kinds: emotional, marital, and--thanks to the cottage's ancient plumbing--septic too. This year's vacation, with Rocky sandwiched between her half-grown kids and fully aging parents, promises to be just as delightful as summers past--except, perhaps, for Rocky's hormonal bouts of rage and melancholy. (Hello, menopause ) Her body is changing--her life is, too. And then a chain of events sends Rocky into the past, reliving both the tenderness and sorrow of a handful of long-ago summers.It's one precious week: everything is in balance; everything is in flux. And when Rocky comes face to face with her family's history and future, she is forced to accept that she can no longer hide her secrets from the people she loves.
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Luminous
by Silvia Park
In a near-future, reunified Korea where humans and advanced robots coexist, eleven-year-old Ruijie survives by scavenging parts from a robot junkyard to support her failing body. One day she discovers a remarkable robot boy unlike any she has ever seen, a finding that will connect her to a long-buried family mystery. Years earlier, siblings Jun and Morgan lost their brother Yoyo, who disappeared without explanation. Yoyo was not human but an experimental humanoid robot created by their father. Despite his artificial origins, he was a beloved member of the family, and his disappearance left emotional wounds that never healed. Now estranged from one another, Jun and Morgan have built separate lives. Jun works as a detective in the Robot Crimes Unit, investigating a case that is uncovering dangerous secrets from the past. Morgan designs robots and is struggling to maintain control over her most important creation. As Jun’s investigation deepens and Ruijie’s discovery draws attention, the siblings are forced back together. The search for answers about Yoyo’s fate intertwines with a murder investigation, exposing hidden truths about their family, robotics, and identity. As old wounds resurface, Jun, Morgan, Ruijie, and the robot boy must confront the past to understand what happened to Yoyo and what it means to be human.
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Isles of the Emberdark: A Cosmere Novel
by Brandon Sanderson
All his life, Sixth of the Dusk has been a traditional trapper of Aviar--the supernatural birds his people bond with--on the deadly island of Patji. Then one fateful night he propels his people into a race to modernize before they can be conquered by the Ones Above, invaders from the stars who want to exploit the Aviar. But it's a race they're losing, and Dusk fears his people will lose themselves in the effort. When a chance comes to sail into the expanse of the emberdark beyond a mystical portal, Dusk sets off to find his people's salvation with only a canoe, his birds, and all the grit and canniness of a Patji trapper. Elsewhere in the emberdark is a young dragon chained in human form: Starling of the starship Dynamic. She and her ragtag crew of exiles are deep in debt and on the brink of losing their freedom. So when she finds an ancient map to a hidden portal between the emberdark and the physical realm, she seizes the chance at a lucrative discovery. These unlikely allies might just be the solution to each other's crises. In their search for independence, Dusk and Starling face perilous bargains, poisonous politics, and the destructive echo of a dead god. Sanderson expands his thrilling novella Sixth of the Dusk into a mythic novel of legends, lore, and warring galactic superpowers.
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Half City
by Kate Golden
Keep your daggers sharp, and your wits even sharper. Viv Abbot is an average twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn't even like in the hopes of winning her prickly mother's approval. She also happens to be a demon hunter. Ever since her father's murder, she's been forced to hunt deviants alone, meaning everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider . . . until the day she crosses paths with a dangerously alluring demon, Reid Graveheart. The reformed deviant tells her of a school for people just like her: Harker Academy for Deviant Defense. If she enrolls, she'll learn to hone her craft, work with other hunters, and never be alone again. But Viv has a deadly secret. One that not even her new friends at Harker can know about, not if the school might hold the answers to untangling the mystery surrounding Viv's father's death. When strange occurrences begin to plague the students, Viv will have to figure out who she can trust, all while trying to ace her classes, avoid falling for a demon, and make it through her first year at Harker in one piece. How hard could that be?
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The Astral Library
by Kate Quinn
Alexandria “Alix” Watson has spent her life relying on books more than people. Raised in foster care and working multiple low-paying jobs, she escapes her difficult circumstances by spending evenings at the Boston Public Library, immersing herself in fantasy novels and dreaming of a better future. Everything changes when she discovers a hidden door leading to the Astral Library, a mysterious place where books serve as gateways to other worlds and new lives. There she meets the Librarian, the immortal and sharp-tongued guardian who helps desperate people find refuge within the stories they love. Alix is invited to join this extraordinary world and begins to imagine a future beyond the limitations of her own life. Before she can fully embrace her new opportunity, however, a dangerous enemy emerges and threatens the Astral Library and everyone it has helped. Joined by the Librarian and a charming costume-shop owner, Alix embarks on a perilous journey through the worlds of classic literature, from the society of Jane Austen to the mysteries of Sherlock Holmes and the glittering parties of The Great Gatsby. As the threat grows closer, Alix must uncover the motives of their mysterious adversary and determine whether the true target is herself, the Librarian, or the magical library that has become her home.
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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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