Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason



Jason Getty is your average Joe.  Quiet, slightly boring and divorced, Jason has always kept to himself.  One evening, Jason is pushed to the brink of his sanity and the resulting action ends in murder.  Panicked, Jason buries his victim at the back edge of his property and spends the next year or so living on pins and needles.  Jason finally realizes that it's time to rejoin society and begins by having a lawn care business come and take care of the lawn that he's been too scared to mow.  While finishing the job, one of the gardeners finds a dead body in the flowerbed next to the house.  The police are called and a time clock is started leaving Jason to decide what his next move should be.

Jason decides to play it cool; thinking that if he bolts, he'll surely be caught and forced to take the fall for not one, but two murders.  While the police are investigating, they unearth a second body near the first.  Needless to say, this does nothing to calm Jason's nerves.  While it begins to appear that at least one of the bodies belonged to the wife of the home's former owner, a new twist appears in the form of a years-old missing persons case. 

Leah Tamblin has always been haunted by the disappearance of her fiance Reid.  Plagued by her true feelings for the man that she was with for more than a decade, Leah decides to visit the house where the police found his remains.  If for no other reason than to give herself closure for the fact that he was no-good cheater even in the few weeks leading up to their wedding.  Unfortunately for Leah, she decides to visit Jason Getty's property on the night when he has decided to do something about the third corpse.  A variety of bizarre events converge so that Jason and Leah are on the run to catch the man who murdered the first two victims.  Will Jason get away with murder? Or will he be forced to take the blame for all three bodies?

Readers who enjoy a good mystery will be swept up into the thick of the "who will take the blame" story of Three Graves Full.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Nick and Amy were young journalists who met, fell in love and married. They lived a New York City dream life until the Great Recession, when they both lost their jobs. For economic and other reasons, they moved to Nick’s childhood hometown in Missouri. This was a difficult adjustment for Amy who was New York born and bred. On the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary, Amy went missing and the house showed signs of a violent struggle.  Gone Girl is the story of the search for Amy. It is told in two voices: Nick’s report of what is happening as the search goes on, alternating with entries from Amy’s diaries, beginning with the night she first met Nick.

Enough said! No spoilers here and the less the reader knows about this book, the more enjoyable it will be. This is a suspense story worthy of Alfred Hitchcock. Readers will change their theories of what happened after every chapter: She’s dead! She’s alive! He’s guilty! He’s innocent! They’re in cahoots! He’s a jerk! He’s a liar! He’s misunderstood! She’s spoiled! She’s a pain! She’s a saint!  Gone Girl is a page-turner that will keep you reading late into the night.

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Just go to your phone's app store, search for CountyCat Mobile, download, and you've got the library with you wherever you go.  You can do all the stuff you can do on CountyCat online, plus keep up with the library's Facebook page and Twitter, find events at the West Allis and other Milwaukee County libraries, find your closest library (hey, maybe you're hanging out in Bay View for the afternoon and want to grab a library book - you can use your West Allis library card at any Milwaukee County library!), and check out all the new stuff we're getting in.

My favorite feature?  The BookLook scanner!  Scan the ISBN barcode of any book, anywhere, and CountyCat Mobile will tell you if the library owns the book!  As someone who is always in the bookstore wondering if I should buy the book or just put it on hold, I looooove this.  Especially because now I can put it on hold on my phone while I'm standing in the bookstore instead of writing down titles on the back of a Starbucks napkin.  Sweet!

And yes, of COURSE it's free!

The Ashford Affair by Lauren Willig

On the eve of the 21st century, Clementine Evans's life is falling apart.  Her engagement has just been broken off, her very proper and conventional mother is horrified, her step-cousin, the irksome Jon, is back in town, she's a slave to her law firm in a desperate race to make partner, and her beloved Granny Addie is seriously ill.  When Addie confusedly calls Clemmie by the name Bea, a whole closet full of skeletons and dark family secrets is cracked open.

In 1926 Africa, Addie is taking the train to see her once-favorite cousin Bea at her coffee farm in Kenya.  Engaged to be engaged, Addie isn't even sure why she has come all the way to the sun-soaked African savanna from the foggy streets of London to see Bea, who she hasn't seen or spoken to in years.  Cut off from the aristocratic family that took her in as an orphaned, poor cousin after the epic scandal of Bea's marriage to Frederick Desborough, Addie knows she must see the woman who was once her best friend before she marries the scholarly (and, quite frankly, boring) David.  And, even though she has quite firmly told herself otherwise, she knows she has really come to see Frederick again - Frederick, who once held all her hopes and her heart, and is now her cousin's husband.

From the author of the Pink Carnation spy novels comes this lavish period drama that fans of Downton Abbey will love to while away a weekend with!  Clemmie and Addie's stories are a tangled web of secrets, lies, and family drama that unfold in chapters alternating between 1999 New York and London and the champagne-soaked 1920s London and colonial Kenya.  With a dash of humor and quick wit, star-crossed romance that's absolutely worth the wait, and a generous dose of crazy family, anyone who loves a good generational saga will want to add The Ashford Affair to their spring reading list!

The Ashford Affair will be published on April 9, 2013.  The library received its advanced reader's copy from the publisher.  Watch CountyCat for this great read to be added so you can place a hold!

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Winner of the National Books Award in 2012, The Round House is just as much a coming of age story as it is a crime drama.  Our narrator, thirteen-year-old Joe, is faced with an event that will change life on a North Dakota reservation as he knows it.  His mother Geraldine is attacked and assaulted on a Sunday in the summer of 1988.  With no one else to turn to, her husband Bazil (the local tribal judge) confides in Joe and together the two begin to piece together the details of the attack.  Reservation politics make it difficult to determine where the crime was committed and who should be held responsible and Joe and his father fight for normalcy as they watch Geraldine sink lower and lower into solitude and fear.  As the summer days pass by, Joe and his three friends manage to find out who the attacker is and go to great lengths to seek justice.  Readers who enjoyed Erdrich’s other family sagas such as Love Medicine will recognize many of the names (Mooshum, Nanapush) that crop up time and again.  This book is filled with the quiet grace and heart-breaking complexity of Erdrich’s other novels and paints a truthful portrait of a family who struggles to survive the emotional aftermath of a horrific crime.

HHhH by Laurent Binet

How is it possible to write an entertaining book about Reinhard Heydrich, “Hitler’s Hangman,” “the Blond Beast,” the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution? Lawrence Binet has done so by writing a Metafiction in which the subject of the book is the actual writing of the book.  HHhH (Himmler’s Hirn Heist Heydrich or Himmler’s Brain is Called Heydrich,) is a fictional recounting of the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by two Czechoslovakian partisans. By making this story his own story, the author is able to distance the reader from the tension and horror of the actual story, that is, until the end. The bare bones of the plot are that in late 1941, three men parachuted into German-occupied Czechoslovakia for the purpose of assassinating Heydrich and in mid-1942 made their attempt. But by inserting himself into the book, the author has made the story into so much more. In the course of explaining the history of Nazism and the beginnings of World War II, he makes the book an examination of courage, cowardice, wisdom and stupidity.

Here I Go Again by Jen Lancaster

Lissy Ryder is that girl: the one in high school who was head cheerleader, homecoming queen and the one who tore you to shreds just for being different. Now things are a bit different. Sure at one time she was married to her high school sweetheart with a great job doing PR in Chicago, but now he wants a divorce and her liberal use of work time has caused her to be downsized. Living in her parents home deep in credit card debt, Lissy doesn't have much to look forward to- except her 20 year high school reunion.

Expecting her classmates to accept simple apologies, Lissy goes ready to start her own PR firm to represent their now successful lives. It's too bad for Lissy that none of them want to forgive her. After having a bit too much box wine to drink, she ends up in the care of classmate Debbie, now Deva. Deva gives Lissy a remedy that will help her find inner peace, which really takes Lissy back. Back 1991 and her 17 year old self.

With a second chance to right all her wrongs, will the new Lissy Ryder make all the right choices, and will those choices be worth it in the end? Jen Lancaster does it again with a hysterical look at second chances and how one little change to the past can create an entirely different future. Make sure you have a huge chunk of time to read, because once you start Here I Go Again, you won't want to put it down!

Harvest by Jim Crace

What were the common people of medieval England doing while kings and lords and ministers were struggling for power and wealth? They were struggling for the basics of life, for food, shelter and clothing. On a sunny day in late autumn all the inhabitants of a remote village gather to harvest the barley crop. Life for these people is hard and precarious.  The work is difficult and the quality of the harvest will determine whether they will fatten or starve during the coming winter.  The unexpected arrival of several strangers is alarming but only one is actually dangerous. Master Jordan, a rich merchant, has recently inherited this land because his cousin, Mistress Kent, died without a male heir. Seeking greater profit than barley can bring, he announces his intention to put the people off the land and turn the grain fields into sheep meadows. Frightened by threats of torture and cruel punishments, the villagers flee to an unknown fate. Life as they know it is changing and there is little room for farmers in a land dedicated to producing wool. In seven days their world is destroyed. When Master Jordan and his entourage return to the city, Walter Thirsk, a widower with ties to the old master is left behind to care for the property. But two other strangers, who had been unfairly accused and punished for theft and vandalism they had not committed, take the opportunity presented by the deserted village to actually steal from and vandalize the manor house, the barns and the village huts. Progress and profit have led to the destruction of an orderly society.

Harvest will be published on February 12, 2012.  The library received its review copy from the publisher.  If you would like to read this book, you can place a hold on it in CountyCat, and you will be notified when it is ready for check out!