Staff Picks April 2021

Affable Jim Williams is hosting one of the most important parties of the Savannah Christmas season. John Kelso is a magazine reporter who finds himself amid the beautiful architecture and odd doings to write a feature on the party. He is intrigued by Williams from the start, but his curiosity is piqued when he meets Jim's violent, young and sexy lover, Billy. Later that night, Billy is dead, and Kelso stays on to cover the murder trial. Between being...

"A weekend retreat at a cozy mountain lodge is supposed to be the perfect getaway. But when the storm hits, no one is getting away. It's winter in the Catskills and Mitchell's Inn, nestled deep in the woods, is the perfect setting for a relaxing maybe even romantic weekend away. It boasts spacious old rooms with huge woodburning fireplaces, a well-stocked wine cellar, and opportunities for cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, or just curling up with...

"When vintage cookware and cookbook collector Jaymie Leighton spies an original 1920's Hoosier-brand kitchen cabinet at an estate auction, it's love at first sight. Despite the protests of her sister, Rebecca, that the nineteenth-century yellow-brick house they share in Michigan is already too cluttered with Jaymie's junk, she successfully outbids the other buyers and triumphantly takes home her Hoosier. But that night on the summer porch, where she's...

Winter Makepeace lives a double life. By day he's the stoic headmaster of a home for foundling children. But the night brings out a darker side of Winter. As the moon rises, so does the Ghost of St. Giles-protector, judge, fugitive. When the Ghost, beaten and wounded, is rescued by a beautiful aristocrat, Winter has no idea that his two worlds are about to collide. Lady Isabel Beckinhall enjoys nothing more than a challenge. Yet when she's asked to...

"A collection of ten short stories that all take place in the same day about kids walking home from school"--

The world's shark population is in trouble for a sad, simple reason: shark fin soup. And although it's illegal, poachers have been targeting Florida's biannual migration of blacktip sharks. Marine biologist Doc Ford needs some assistance protecting the sharks and enlists the help of three kids, Luke, Marta, and Sabina. Together they form Sharks, Inc. and are given an important assignment: to set out each day on their small fishing boat in hopes of...

Brandon is visiting his dad on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 when the attack comes; Reshmina is a girl in Afghanistan who has grown up in the aftermath of that attack but dreams of peace, becoming a teacher and escaping her village and the narrow role that the Taliban believes is appropriate for women--both are struggling to survive, both changed forever by the events of 9/11.

Prairie Lotus is a powerful, touching, multilayered book about a girl determined to fit in and realize her dreams: getting an education, becoming a dressmaker in her father's shop, and making at least one friend. Acclaimed, award-winning author Linda Sue Park has placed a young half-Asian girl, Hanna, in a small town in America's heartland, in 1880. Hanna's adjustment to her new surroundings, which primarily means negotiating the townspeople's almost...

Aurora County, Mississippi, is only the latest stop on the Cakes' nomadic lifestyle, opening bakeries wherever they go; but Emma Alabama Lane Cake (only girl of the six Cake children) is sick of it, and determined not to form any friendships here because they will just disappear as soon as the family moves again--but Aurora County has other ideas, and so does a girl named Ruby Lavender who plans to teach Emma a thing or two about friendship.

"After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution ... Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary...