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Scott Smith’s The Ruins is a calm and harmless enough story at the beginning. Four kids, just out of college, take a trip to Mexico to do nothing more than lounge on the beach and drink tequila. Shortly after arriving they make some new friends and decide to tag along with them on a day trip to the Mayan ruins. Their new friends are searching for a guy who went to the ruins the previous day, but never returned. Armed with not much more than youthful defiance and a sense of adventure, the group heads out, ignoring numerous warning signs to stay away.

As you can guess, they are anything but

Now Charlie’s dead and I’m here in the kitchen—on my way to school, and then to work. It’s my senior year and I still have no idea what I want to do with my life. I am motherless, and in the last year, I lost my best friend twice, fell in love with a guy I shouldn’t have (twice), got beat up by a skinhead Nazi, and had things thrown at me, including beer cans, money, and dog shit.

These elegies aren’t just for the brokenhearted. They are heartbreaking, and they’re really for Mary Murphy. In introducing those who have left, Mary explores her sad, troubled and unforgiving life. She’s sad. She's confused. And she's surrounded by sad and confused people.

The remarkable thing about Mary Murphy is that, in the end, she lives very hopefully. Making these elegies not just for the brokenhearted, not just for her, but for anyone who has struggled and lost. Or struggled and overcome.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted drew me in from the first sentence: “Every family had one and you

Quietly understated, leaving much unsaid under the surface, yet visceral, tangible, and intense--Smith’s storytelling in Ghost Medicine is like his characters.

Troy lives in a remote ranching community at the base of the mountains in the west. The son of a teacher who doesn’t quite fit in, he loves the ranch life and is rarely separated from his Stetson or horse, Reno, yet only wears tennis shoes and t-shirts along with his jeans. The summer before he turns 17, Troy’s mom finally loses her battle with cancer and he runs away on Reno into the mountains, living off the land for a few weeks

Dr. Jack Travis is trouble with a capital “T”.  He runs a free medical clinic for those who can’t afford medical care on the edges of an up and coming posh neighborhood in San Antonio. To support himself and the clinic, he works at several of the surrounding emergency rooms, including Grace Medical. Proximity to a gated community draw controversy to the clinic and Jack defends it and its patients vehemently against attempts to shut them down.

Black River is a debut novel by S. M. Hulse. The Montana landscape is a major player in this story of damage, redemption and forgiveness. Wes Carver returns to Black River with his wife's ashes and a letter from the parole board that a prisoner that held him hostage twenty years ago during a prison riot was being considered for release.

Lockwood & Co. is a paranormal investigative team comprised of three teens: Anthony Lockwood, George Cubbins and Lucy Carlyle. Because only children can see and hear ghosts they are ideal hunters of the paranormal. In The Whispering Skull, second in the Lockwood and Co series by Jonathan Stroud, the team is hired for what seems a simple job in the cemetery. But nothing is ever simple for this trio. What's found in and stolen from the cemetery leads to a fast-paced and thrilling investigation into the late Dr. Edmund Bickerstaff, and his methods for contacting the dead. The skull jar introduced

Camille Claudel is a woman most women cannot stand – she’s arrogant, loud-mouthed and pretentious. She always has an opinion, the right one, and she’s never afraid to share it. If you think these characteristics annoying and rude in today’s society, imagine its late 19th century Paris where men rule society and women are just prizes on their arms. Predictably, Claudel doesn’t win friends in Heather Webb’s Rodin’s Lover, a fictionalized account of the real-life affair of Claudel and Auguste Rodin.

Claudel is born into a well-off but working-class family who spend their summers in Villeneuve

Jude and Noah are twins who share more than just the same birthday, they share the world. The two are incredibly close and share their secrets, friends, talents and more. A novel told from two perspectives, in two different times in the twins' lives, I'll Give You The Sun shows the rift that came between the twins, then shows the reader the trauma that began their separation. 



In middle school, Noah and Jude prepare their applications for art school at the urging of their mother, an art journalist. When their mother praises Noah's art without even looking at Jude's the twins know who is her

Ned Beaumont is right hand man to Paul Madvig, who runs this anonymous city. Beaumont is the fixer and the general election is coming up will be a close one. Madvig is a political cohort to Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry and is in love with Henry's daughter, who does not return the feeling. When a senator’s son is killed, the pressure is on city officials to solve the murder and Beaumont is right in the thick of it.

Written in 1931, The Glass Key still holds up today. It is set in a violent world inhabited by ruthless people. The dialogue still sparkles and the story still works, making Dashiel

In her debut novel, Natalie C. Parker brings together a unique southern gothic mystery in the thrilling Beware the Wild. One day, after a particularly awful fight, Sterling's brother Phin runs into the mysterious swamp outside their home and never returns. Instead, a strange girl named Lenora May emerges and the entire town (including Sterling's family) treat her as if she's always been Sterling's sister and that a boy named Phin has never existed. Only Sterling remembers her brother and she is determined to get him back from the dark swamp. 



I never knew where Parker was going to take the

If you were born after 1985, you’ll remember the high school game Never Have I Ever where those playing each put their hands into a circle, and one by one everyone goes around and says something they’ve never done. If you’ve done the stated action, you put a finger down, and the last person with fingers remaining “wins” the game. Or do they?

In Katie Heaney’s debut book Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date, Heaney meticulously illustrates her love life starting at the mature age of five. While her promiscuous grade school days, laden with multiple crushes and several boyfriends at the same time, may foreshadow an equally

The Best American Infographics 2014, edited by Gareth Cook, has over 150 great infographics by fabulous information designers and includes diverse topics such as “The Perfect Wine for the Meal". "Drone Attacks" is an infographic that explains who has been injured or killed over the past 10 years by drones. My favorite chapter is "Lost Cat," where Tibby’s owners, wondering what he gets up to when he disappears for weeks at a time, strap a GPS on his collar.

Hazel lives in an out-of-the-way town where faeries are real. The locals know enough lore to stay safe and be respectful, so for the most part the magical creatures leave them alone. Not so much with the tourists, who come because of the stories and to see the horned boy who has been sleeping, unchanged, in a glass coffin in the forest for generations and who sometimes end up dead. So everyone knows the fae are not to be messed with; sometimes it can't be avoided, though. Hazel and her family have had faerie contact in the past that has shaped them in ways they keep secret--sometimes secret

Dancing With Fire literally starts with a bang; an explosion that leaves the Danner girls orphaned and in danger. Kaylin Danner put her dreams on hold when her mother died to help her scientist father raise her two younger sisters. After her father’s biodiesel plant blows up just as he has figured out the formula to efficiently produce this sought-after fuel, events lead her to believe that the explosion and her father’s death may not have been an accident.

Sawyer Scott has been working with Dr. Danner for years as his assistant developing the biodiesel fuel formula. Dr. Danner has been his

This thriller slowly unravels to reveal the fragile and desperate mind of a woman with amnesia. Christine's amnesia is so severe that she can't retain memories for more than a day. She wakes up each morning with no idea of who and where she is. She is surrounded by her husband Ben, a doctor, and a friend. She starts keeping a journal on what she learns about herself each day. As Christine begins to rereads previous entries, she finds inconsistencies in what Ben is telling her about her accident, their son, and how all of their family photos disappeared. While Christine is trying to piece

In this novel, Marie, a young mother, is a server at an upscale Dallas restaurant.  Some nights the tips border on phenomenal. Yet, she is slowly suffocating under a great, sorrowful blanket of depression. She exists, she suffers, she endures acts of degradation and abuse from men on the off chance that occasionally she will experience something other than sadness and pain. Her daughter is a buoy that she lets go of to sink back into the nasty muck. Love Me Back holds no happy ending, no redemption.  Tierce is excellent, she never takes the focus off Marie even when it sickens us to watch.

Sea Swept is vintage Nora Roberts. Told from the male perspective, this is the first in The Chesapeake Bay series. Three adult brothers are called home by a dying father’s wish, and they must band together to take care of Ray Quinn’s youngest “lost boy.” The Quinn brothers are not bound by blood but are indisputably family. Each boy had been saved by Ray and Stella Quinn in their teens. Now that their parents are gone, Ethan, Phillip and especially Cameron must convince Seth’s sexy social worker that they can provide a stable, nurturing home.

Is it realistic? No, it’s romance. The characters

Veda lives in India and is a classical (Bharatanatyam) dancer. She lives and breathes dance, has for as long as she can remember. She plans to make dancing her career, despite her mother continually pushing her toward engineering. She is amazingly talented and has just won first place in a major competition. After the competition, the bus taking the competitors back home crashes. She wakes in the hospital with her right leg missing below the knee. Talk about a strong female protagonist! This girl simply will not give up! She is determined to dance again with her artificial leg, even when her

Before the success of the young adult novels Eleanor and Park and Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell debuted with the adult fiction novel Attachments.

Set at the end of 1999 with Y2K pending, Attachments tells the story of three newspaper employees, Lincoln, Jennifer and Beth. Lincoln is a night systems security officer, whose main duty is to monitor employee emails for potentially inappropriate or prurient activity. Jennifer and Beth are best friends whose emails get flagged to Lincoln on a regular basis. Amused by their snarky and clever non-work related conversations, Lincoln decides not to report their staff email abuse, and instead continues to read their personal email exchanges.

Die Again is the 11th title in the Rizzoli and Isles series by Tess Gerritsen. This mystery features a dual story line that takes place in Africa and in Boston, Massachusetts. The mysteries are not simultaneous in their execution, although they are presented to the reader in alternating segments. Eventually, of course, the mystery of what occurred in Africa ties into and becomes part of the Boston murder. But figuring that out and tying them together proves to be tricky. 

In Working Stiff, Judy Melinek provides a fascinating look into the work of a New York City medical examiner. Never sensational, Melinek describes some of the more interesting autopsies she’s performed, how she dealt with the families of the deceased, and cases that landed her at crime scenes and in courtrooms—all surprising aspects of this occupation that I had never considered.

The grueling, heartbreaking, and necessary work of her office during and after 9/11 is undeniable. And Melinek shares her role in those events openly and honestly. While a successful medical examiner must hold her

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman is a difficult yet rewarding read—if you can stick with it. The novel tells the story of four strong-willed and resourceful women living in Masada, a mountain plateau in the Judean desert, in 70 C.E. The book is divided into four chapters with each chapter dedicated to a first-person narrative from one of our four leading females. The connecting detail of this quartet is that each woman is a dovekeeper, responsible for tending to and caring for the dove cote which supplies much needed manure for growing crops in the desert.

The story opens with Yael, the

Beginning at midnight on Sunday August 13, 1961 the German Democratic Republic, communist East Germany, ran coils of barbed wire fencing through the center of Berlin. By morning, East Berlin was completely cut off from West Berlin. After the wire came the wall and the Stasi – the East German state security service, one of the most effective and repressive intelligence and secret police agencies to ever have existed.

Now it’s 1983. Little has changed. West Berliners can apply for visas to make day visits on the East Berlin side, but the East Berliners are still watched and restricted. Some

Mistakes made when Annie Black was a 20-year-old American living in London have come to haunt her decades later with very real, devastating consequences. Annie and those affected by her choices endure desire, love, rejection, and forgiveness as they work through the repercussions of choices made years ago. The novel flips back and forth between present-day events occurring in San Francisco and past events that occurred in Annie’s life while she was in Europe.  A melancholy, but enjoyable book. 

In a phone call that changes her life, Rachel Milligan learns that the parents of her 7-year-old niece, Holly, have had a tragic accident while on vacation.  Believing she is the only living guardian left to take care of the little girl, Rachel is shocked when Holly's custody is awarded to Lydia, a distant Amish aunt. Rachel complies with the court order and takes Holly to her new family. However, she hopes to convince Lydia to let the child stay with her. As Christmas approaches, Rachel's fantasy begins to fall apart when family secrets come out in the little Amish community. The story takes

In By the Book, editor Pamela Paul has compiled 65 interviews of a wide range of popular authors and famous readers from her column by the same name in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. If you are not familiar with the column you are certainly familiar with many of these modern-day intellects, ranging from poets to pundits, singers to scientists and actors to authors of modern fiction. Some of the questions asked seemed pretty standard fare and were asked of most of those featured: “What book is on your night stand now?”; “If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be?” 

When his mother began cancer treatments, Connor started experiencing nightmares: screaming, darkness, howling winds, slipping hands and a monster. But tonight is a little different because when Connor wakes from his nightmare, he hears something calling his name. It really is a monster, in the shape of a yew tree, slowly approaching his window. It wants something from him, something Connor is not ready to give.

A Monster Calls is illustrated in black and white images that beautifully complement the text. This book is extremely intense, I was completely engulfed by the story. How do you

Refusing to leave her parents and her sister behind, Lenka stays with them in Czechoslovakia to face the uncertainty of life for Jews during WWII. Lenka’s new husband, Josef, leaves for the safety of America without her. Lenka receives news that the ship carrying Josef was torpedoed by a German U-boat and Josef is dead.  Unbeknownst to Lenka, however, Josef lives and is searching for her. Lenka and her family are first sent to live and work in Terezin (a Jewish ghetto) and then to Auschwitz. Josef is mistakenly told Lenka was killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.  Each thinking the other is

Jordan Stratford has taken a neat idea—young Mary Shelley and young Ada Lovelace team up to solve mysteries—and crafted a juvenile adventure story that's so much fun, it threatens to burst out of the book jacket and shoot off the pages like a cannon ball.

The year is 1826. Fourteen-year-old Mary Godwin, the sensitive and curious daughter of feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and free thinker William Godwin, is beginning her tutelage alongside the brilliant but temperamental and eccentric 11-year-old Lady Ada Byron, daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron. Their tutor is the young, handsome Peebs