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Recommended Reading

A whimsical critique of everyday people whose habits irritate the sensibilities of real-world folks features a collection of sardonic essays that points fun at such examples as PTA moms who flip out if their kids eat hot dogs, the braggart writers of annual holiday letters, and rabid lawn manicurists.

Making her way through a Victorian London season in spite of gossip about a self-proclaimed descendant of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, as well as the audacious thefts of several valuable objects that once belonged to the historic queen, Lady Emily Ashton finds herself targeted by a would-be killer who has murdered a fellow socialite.

Visiting an isolated Lake Superior isle to study wolf behavior, ranger Anna Pigeon joins a scientific group that subsequently discovers unusual DNA evidence suggesting that a giant and dangerous wolf hybrid has been introduced by an unknown source.

Helps families reduce calories, fat, cholesterol, and sodium with more than 190 recipes for lighter versions of all-American favorite home cooking, regional dishes, and Americanized ethnic recipes.

The disappearance of twelve-year-old Newell Ewing and the resulting mystery brings together the lives of a group of seemingly unrelated strangers in Las Vegas — including his parents, an illustrator, a stripper, a teenage anarchist, and a group of street runaways.

Seven-year-old Rachel is forcibly removed from her family’s 1890s Honolulu home when she contracts leprosy and is placed in a settlement, where she loses a series of new friends before new medical discoveries enable her to reenter the world.

When the corpse of a brutally mutilated murder victim turns up at the time of the full moon, accompanied by some most unusual paw prints, professional wizard and supernatural investigator Harry Dresden finds himself searching Chicago for the werewolf stalking the city.

While Cornelia gains unexpected insight into her troubled marriage, Piper finds her carefully controlled life unraveling in the wake of a friend’s crisis, and Lake tells a complex series of lies to gain her son’s entry into a school for gifted students.

In 1976 Buenos Aires, Kaddish Poznan, the outcast son of a whore, who makes his living defacing Jewish gravestones, and his wife, Lillian, are devastated by the disappearance of their own son, Pato, which forces them into the bleak corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases in search of the truth, in a debut novel set against the backdrop of Argentina’s Dirty War.

Ordered by Henry II to establish the possible role of Eleanor of Aquitaine in the poisoning death of Henry’s mistress, a reluctant Adelia Aguilar joins forces with her infant daughter’s father, the Bishop of St. Albans, during an investigation within the labyrinth-walled tower of the victim’s home.

In the wake of hurricane Katrina and the explosion at the vampire summit, Louisiana cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse confronts the disappearance of her boyfriend Quinn, dramatic changes in the paranormal world of the vampires and weres, danger, and betrayal.

A long-anticipated sequel to the best-selling Chocolat finds Vianne assuming a low-profile new identity in Paris, where she opens a chocolaterie and hopes to escape the ghosts of her past before a devious new friend threatens everything she has worked for.

A dual portrait of Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi describes their forty-year struggle against each other for the future of Indian independence, detailing their influence on each other, as well as their lasting legacy for the British empire.

Follows the lives of three women in love with the wrong men — Madeleine Heller, attracted to her sister’s fiancé; Frieda Lewis, the muse to an ill-fated rock star; and Bryn Evans, engaged to be married but secretly obsessed with her ex-husband.

A chronicle of the period in American history between Columbus’s discovery of the New World and Jamestown’s founding evaluates the dramatic voyages and first-contact experiences of numerous European adventurers in search of such elusive treasures as gold, the fountain of youth, and potential religious converts.

Exploring the secrets and complexities lying at the heart of family life and relationships, a collection of eight stories includes the title work, about a young mother in a new city whose father tends her garden while hiding a secret love affair.

Drawing on his own experiences as a brain injury case manager, a critical study of traumatic brain injury and its repercussions follows survivors as they struggle to make new sense of the world and examines the anatomy and physiology of the brain, how it works, how it heals itself, and how brain science is answering questions about the human mind.

In Mallory, New York, as five sisters, aged eleven to seventeen, deal with assorted problems, conflicts, fears, and yearnings, a mysterious middle-aged man watches them, fascinated, deciding which one he likes the best.

Precious Ramotswe heads to a Botswana game preserve to investigate the death of an elderly American tourist, while at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, Mma Ramotswe’s husband suddenly decides to mortgage the garage.

A public radio commentator presents a reader-guided story with more than 150 possible endings that include such fates as a happy life in an opulent mansion, a successful corporate career, and a fatal duck attack.

In the aftermath of a horrific small-town school shooting, lawyer Jordan McAfee finds himself defending a youth who desperately needs someone on his side, while intrepid detective Patrick DuCharme works with a primary witness in the daughter of the superior court judge assigned to the case.

Spanning the era from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, a collection of stories journeys inside the world of the diverse inhabitants of Knockemstiff, a tough, Midwestern town, as their lives change and intertwine.

The well-hidden past of country music superstar Mitch Campbell, the new spokesman for the National Weapons Alliance’s campaign in support of Americans’ right to carry a concealed weapon, is about to come back to haunt him when an immigrant turns up dead just before the NWA rally.

Televangelist Peter Boothe’s plans to build a mega-church on the banks of the Pedernales River are threatened when backhoe operator Hollis Farley unearths a dinosaur fossil on the site, but when Farley turns up dead, Game Warden John Marlin joins the investigation and discovers a host of suspects, including a bitter geology professor, a fossil collector, and the minister’s wife.

Fourteen-year-old Henry, wishing to honor his brother Franklin’s dying wish, sets out to hike Maine’s Mount Katahdin with his best friend and dog, but fate adds another companion — the Cambodian refugee accused of fatally injuring Franklin.

As ordinary people across America are transformed into raving, paranoid, murderous monsters by a mysterious bioengineered parasite, Perry Dawsey, a former football star, confronts his own battle with the infection as he discovers that the parasites want something special from him that goes way beyond mere murder.

Twelve previously unpublished writings on war and peace include such pieces as an essay on the destruction of Dresden, a story about the first-meal fantasies of three soldiers, and a meditation on the impossibility of shielding children from the temptations of violence.

A specially authorized prequel to L. M. Montgomery’s classic series about the irrepressible red-haired orphan, published to commemorate the original work’s one hundredth anniversary, follows Anne’s early years before her adoption by the Cuthberts. Great Book!