4/22/2025: How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin
\nIt&rsquo\;s 1965 and teenage Frances Adams is at an English countr
y fair with her two best friends. But Frances&rsquo\;s night takes a hairp
in turn when a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day\,
Frances will be murdered. Frances spends a lifetime trying to solve a crim
e that hasn&rsquo\;t happened yet\, compiling dirt on every person who cro
sses her path in an effort to prevent her own demise. For decades\, no one
takes Frances seriously\, until nearly sixty years later\, when Frances i
s found murdered\, like she always said she would be.
\;
In
the present day\, Annie Adams has been summoned to a meeting at the spraw
ling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great-aunt Frances. But b
y the time Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll\, F
rances is already dead. Annie is determined to catch the killer\, but than
ks to Frances&rsquo\;s lifelong habit of digging up secrets and lies\, it
seems every endearing and eccentric villager might just have a motive for
her murder. Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Cast
le Knoll\, or will dredging up the past throw her into the path of a kille
r?
\;
As Annie gets closer to the truth\, and closer to the
danger\, she starts to fear she might inherit her aunt&rsquo\;s fate inst
ead of her fortune.
5/27/2025: The Feather T hief: Beauty\, Obsession\, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson
\n
On a cool June evening in 2009\, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music\, twenty-yea r-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornit hological collections in the world\, the Tring museum was full of rare bir d specimens whose gorgeous feathers \;were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmo n fly-tying. Once inside the museum\, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundre ds of bird skins--some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Da rwin's\, Alfred Russel Wallace\, who'd risked everything to gather them--a nd escaped into the darkness. Two years later\, Kirk Wallace Johnson was w aist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide tol d him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the fea ther thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin pai d the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers\, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long\, worldwide invest igation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime\, and one man' s relentless pursuit of justice\, The Feather Thief is also a fas cinating exploration of obsession\, and man's destructive instinct to harv est the beauty of nature.
\n6/24/2025: The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez
\n
When Alma Cruz\, a celebrated writer\, inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic\, her homeland\, she has the idea of tur ning it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions\, and the characters whose l ives she tried and failed to bring to life. Alma wants her characters to r est in peace\, \;but they have other ideas. The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back\, re writing and revising themselves. Finally\, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.
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