July Adult Reading Challenge
-
Trail of Lightning
Maggie Hoskie is a Dinétah monster hunter, a supernaturally gifted killer. When a small town needs help finding a missing girl, Maggie is their last best hope. But what Maggie uncovers about the monster is much more terrifying than anything she could imagine. Maggie reluctantly enlists the aid of Kai Arviso, an unconventional medicine man, and together they travel the rez, unraveling clues from ancient legends, trading favors with tricksters, and battling dark witchcraft in a patchwork world of deteriorating technology. As Maggie discovers the truth behind the killings, she will have to confront her past if she wants to survive.
-
How High We Go in the Dark
In 2030, a grieving archaeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy.
-
The Color of Water
Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother's past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother. The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in "orchestrated chaos" with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.
-
Dreams from My Father
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.
-
Birding While Indian
Thomas C. Gannon's Birding While Indian spans more than fifty years of childhood walks and adult road trips to deliver, via a compendium of birds recorded and revered, the author's life as a part-Lakota inhabitant of the Great Plains. Great Horned Owl, Sandhill Crane, Dickcissel: such species form a kind of rosary, a corrective to the rosaries that evoke Gannon's traumatic time in an Indian boarding school in South Dakota, his mother's devastation at racist bullying from coworkers, and the violent erasure colonialism demanded of the people and other animals indigenous to the United States.
-
Revenge of the Tipping Point
In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena. Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world's most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis.
-
The Kiss Quotient
Stella Lane comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases—a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and way less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old. It doesn't help that Stella has Asperger's and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice—with a professional. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan. The Vietnamese and Swedish stunner can't afford to turn down Stella's offer, and agrees to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan. Before long, Stella not only learns to appreciate his kisses, but crave all of the other things he's making her feel. Their no-nonsense partnership starts making a strange kind of sense.
-
Sabrina & Corina
Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
-
Everything I Never Told You
In 1970s small-town Ohio, Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Chinese-American family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos.
-
Bad Cree
When Mackenzie wakes up with a severed crow's head in her hands, she panics. Only moments earlier she had been fending off masses of birds in a snow-covered forest. In bed, when she blinks, the head disappears. Night after night, Mackenzie’s dreams return her to a memory from before her sister Sabrina’s untimely death: a weekend at the family’s lakefront campsite, long obscured by a fog of guilt. But when the waking world starts closing in, too—a murder of crows stalks her every move around the city, she wakes up from a dream of drowning throwing up water, and gets threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Sabrina—Mackenzie knows this is more than she can handle alone.
-
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
-
New People
As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her—yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows.
-
Black, White, Other
The groundbreaking oral history, Black, White, Other, made its mark by being the first book to ask black/white biracial people to speak for themselves on matters of race and identity. In the book, journalist Lise Funderburg presents the lives and views of forty-six adult children of black-white unions. Topics include love and marriage, racism in the workplace, religion, community, and bringing up children in a racially divided world.
-
The Island of Sea Women
Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook’s differences are impossible to ignore. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, and she will forever be marked by this association. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers in their village. Little do the two friends know that after surviving hundreds of dives and developing the closest of bonds, forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point.
-
The Berry Pickers
July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.
Most Checkouts Last Month - For Adults
-
Never Flinch
When the Buckeye City Police Department receives a disturbing letter from a person threatening to “kill thirteen innocents and one guilty” in “an act of atonement for the needless death of an innocent man,” Detective Izzy Jaynes realizes that the letter writer is deadly serious, and she turns to her friend Holly Gibney for help. Meanwhile, women’s rights activist Kate McKay is embarking on a multi-state lecture tour. Someone who vehemently opposes Kate’s message of female empowerment is targeting her and disrupting her events. Holly is hired to be Kate’s bodyguard, a challenging task with a headstrong employer and a determined adversary.
-
Bonded in Death
Lieutenant Eve Dallas finds the Rossi case frustrating. She’s got an elderly victim who’d just arrived from Rome; a widow who knows nothing about why he’d left; an as-yet unidentifiable weapon; and zero results on facial recognition. But when she finds a connection to the Urban Wars of the 2020s, she thinks Summerset may know something from his stint in Europe back then. As Summerset eventually reveals, he himself was one of The Twelve. A cryptic message from the killer has boasted that others of The Twelve have died, but he's not finished with his murderous mission yet.
-
Blood Moon
Beth Collins, a senior producer on true crime series Crisis Point, is convinced that teenager Crissy Mellin's disappearance was not an isolated incident. A string of disappearances of similar girls have only one thing in common: They took place on the night of a blood moon. Beth enlists Detective Bowie of the Auclair Police Department to help her figure out what happened to Crissy then find the true culprit before he acts on the next blood moon. With their jobs and their lives at risk, Bowie and Collins band together to catch the killer while fighting an irresistible spark between them that threatens to upend everything.
-
The Women
When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. She meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.
-
Never Say Never
Oona Kelly Webster has a loving family and a job she adores, editing a prestigious line of books. To celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she and her husband, Charles, have planned a visit to France. But then Charles drops a bombshell: he has been hiding an affair for a year and is leaving Oona for a younger male lover. She decides to travel to France anyway, finding healing in the little white dog she rescues and her friendly neighbor hailing from Trinidad. As their feelings for each other begin to deepen, Oona wrestles with the risks of opening her heart again.
-
Just for the Summer
Instant #1 New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America Book Club Pick!
Justin has a curse. Every woman he dates goes on to find their soul mate the second they break up. When Emma slides into his DMs with the same problem, they come up with a plan: They'll date each other and break up. Their curses will cancel each other's out, and they'll both go on to find the love of their lives. It's a bonkers idea... and it just might work. -
The Big Empty
Traci Beller was thirteen when her father disappeared in the sleepy town of Rancha, not far from Los Angeles. Now, ten years later, Traci is a high-profile influencer with millions of followers and the money to hire the best detective she can find: Elvis Cole. Elvis calls his ex-Marine friend, Joe Pike, for help, and they follow Tommy Beller's trail into the depths of a monstrous, hidden evil.
-
Paranoia
At every death scene, Bennett says a prayer over the victim. But recently, too many of the departed have been fellow cops. "I want you to look at these deaths on special assignment," NYPD Inspector Celeste Cantor says. "Report only to me." Bennett excels as a solo investigator. But he's chasing a killer who feeds on isolation and paranoia.
-
Hidden Nature
Natural Resources police officer, Sloan Cooper, accidentally walked right into a robbery in progress and was shot by a jittery thief. Since she has a long recovery ahead, so she moves back to her parents’ peaceful house in Heron’s Rest. But when a woman vanishes, leaving her car behind in a supermarket parking lot, Sloan searches online for similar cases and finds them spread across three states. The new man in her life shares her passion for solving this mystery. And she's willing to risk her life again if that's what it takes to stop the horror.
-
Lethal Prey
Doris Grandfelt, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death. Her body was found the next night, dumped among a dense thicket of trees along the edge of an urban park, eight miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota. Twenty years later, Doris' twin sister Lara is determined to find Doris’s killer once and for all. She dumps the entire investigative file on every true crime site in the world and offers a $5 million reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in to review anything that might be a new lead. As the nation maneuvers the detectives closer to the truth, Lucas and Virgil will find that digging up Doris’s harrowing past might just get them buried instead.
-
Better Than Friends
When Olive Porter's off-the-grid parents go missing, she reluctantly seeks out NPS special investigator Noah Turner, her ex and the only person she both trusts implicitly and not at all. When Olive shows up looking like a million bucks, Noah has to do a gut and heart check. Because nope, no matter what, he can't fall for her again, the woman who once blew up his entire life and never looked back.
-
Holmes is Missing
Success has come quickly to Holmes, Marple & Poe Investigations. The New York City agency led by three detectives--Brendan Holmes, "the brain," Margaret Marple, "the eyes," and Auguste Poe, the "muscle"--with famous names and mysterious pasts is one major case away from cementing its professional reputation. But as a series of child abductions tests the PIs' legendary skills, the cerebral Holmes's absence leaves a gaping hole in the agency roster. Only by closing ranks and solving the mystery within can they recover all that's been lost.
-
The Writer
NYPD Detective Declan Shaw gets a call: How fast can you get to the Beresford building on Central Park West? In the tower apartment, Shaw finds a woman waiting for him. She's covered in blood. A body is lying dead on the floor of the luxurious living room. Every book in the apartment's floor-to-ceiling shelves is by the same author: bestselling true-crime writer Denise Morrow. "This is you?" Shaw asks the woman. "You're a writer?"
-
Nobody's Fool
Sami Kierce, a young college grad, wakes up one morning covered in blood with a knife in his hand. Next to him is the dead body of his girlfriend, Anna. Twenty-two years later, Kierce, now a private investigator, is a new father who's working off his debts by teaching wannabe sleuths at a night school when he recognizes a familiar face at the back of the classroom: Anna. As soon as Kierce makes eye contact with her, she bolts. He knows he must find this woman and solve the impossible mystery that has haunted his every waking moment since that terrible day.