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"In her book-club friendly debut, McDonnell weaves the intriguing tale of an early 20th-century opera singer torn between her career and motherhood. Erika von Kessler, a mezzo-soprano of some regard, and her husband, Peter Myrick, have been trying without success to conceive a child for all six years of their marriage. They seek out the expertise of Dr. Ravell, a Boston obstetrician renowned for his fertility successes. Ravell, mesmerized by Erika’s beauty and talent, vows to do anything to help the couple realize their dream of children, even if it means deceiving them, which, of course, it does... McDonnell bases the story on her family history and expertly incorporates surprising facts about the history of fertility research into a twisting tale of miscommunication, love, and unrealized dreams," said Publishers Weekly.

"At the start of Kava's exciting, if grisly, eighth Maggie O'Dell novel (after Black Friday), Liz Bailey, a 27-year-old Coast Guard rescue swimmer, retrieves a stainless steel cooler from Florida's Pensacola Bay. Inside are human body parts. FBI special agent Maggie and Charlie Wurth, the Department of Homeland Security's deputy director, once again team to investigate. Meanwhile, Maggie's hunky new boyfriend, Col. Benjamin Platt, comes to Florida in search of monstrous bacteria killing too many soldiers... Maggie must venture into the eye of Hurricane Isaac as this intense thriller builds to an eye-popping revelation that will leave fans eager for the sequel," said Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly starred and called it "A rich commentary on the obsessions and catastrophes of the information age and a heartbreaker worthy of its title, this is Shteyngart's best yet." And Booklist also starred: "New Yorker Lenny Abramov, the stubbornly romantic son of flinty Russian Jewish immigrants, works for Post-Human Services, a life-extension venture. He is madly in love with young, hip, and unhappy Eunice Park, who is far more concerned about online shopping and her dysfunctional Korean immigrant family... Full-tilt and fulminating satirist Shteyngart (Absurdistan, 2006) is mordant, gleeful, and embracive as he funnels today's follies and atrocities into a devilishly hilarious, soul-shriveling, and all-too plausible vision of a ruthless and crass digital dystopia in which techno-addled humans are still humbled by love and death."

Fifteen years ago, Anna Mayhew won an Oscar for Best Actress. Rich, famous, and beautiful, she had the world at her feet. Nearly forty years old, Anna is being offered these days only bland supporting roles, the kind she got her acting started with. So she spends much of her time thinking up clever and dangerous methods of self-destruction. But she may not have to kill herself after all. Anna discovers she has a stalker -- Vincent, a crazed fan whose idea of love involves a straight razor and lots of blood. What better way to propel the name Anna Mayhew into film immortality? Enter David Spandau, ex-stuntman and private investigator, who has been hired by Anna's sister Pam to protect the star.

"The career of singer Cheryl Bunterman (aka Cherry Pye), who debuted with Jailbait Records at age 15, is foundering due to her lack of talent and indiscriminate appetite for drugs, booze, and sex in this outrageous, offbeat novel from Hiaasen... The torrent of pop culture barbs are bound to please Hiaasen's ardent fans," said Publishers Weekly. From a 'Q & A' with the inimitable Mr. Hiassen: Q: "The singer in the novel, Cherry Pye, seems to resemble at least one troubled real-life pop star." A: "Oh, more than one. You could fill a dump truck with all the hot young singers who can't yodel their way out of a grocery sack. If you're good-looking enough, and you can learn how to lip-synch, the sky's the limit. These days, the technology for counterfeiting talent is mind-boggling -- they could put my dog in a recording studio and make him sound like Pavarotti."

CANCELED
Signed books will be available.

Publishers Weekly starred: "Set on the Atlantic coast of Canada during WWII, Norman’s latest (after Devotion) is an expertly crafted tale of love during wartime... Norman’s writing is effortless, and his plot is grand in scope but studded with moments of tenderness and intimacy..." Kirkus also starred: "Norman (best known for The Bird Artist, 1994) scores again with this gripping account of a family ripped apart by obsession and murder. In format, the novel is a long letter written by Wyatt Hillyer to Marlais, the daughter he scarcely knows, to explain the 'terrible incident' that has kept them apart... Norman has developed this brave, emotionally reticent man with great delicacy. It is extraordinary that a story which carries such a weight of sorrow is never depressing, but Norman the master craftsman pulls it off."

Two Authors Together!
ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE and ZOE FERRARIS
Thursday, August 19 at 7:00 PM

Hedda Chase is a top-flight executive producer at Gladiator Films, fast-tracked in the business since she graduated from Yale. An aggressive businesswoman, she recently pulled the plug on a film project initiated by one of her predecessors. The screenwriter on the project was Hugh Waters, a wannabe with a dead-end marriage and a day job at an insurance company. This script was his ticket out-until Hedda tampered with his plans, claiming his violence was over the top, his premise not credible, and his ending implausible. Hugh decides to prove otherwise by staging his script's ending and casting Hedda Chase as the victim.

Publishers Weekly starred: "Ferraris's stellar second novel is again set in Saudi Arabia and features the desert guide Nayir Sharqi and forensic scientist Katya Hijazi, introduced in Finding Nouf. Nayir and Hijazi gingerly probe the death of an unconventional young woman found mutilated and half-nude on a beach near Jeddah, as well as the disappearance of an American security contractor, who, to the dismay of his American wife, had a 'summer marriage' with the victim. Nayir, a sensitive but orthodox Muslim, inches toward realizing that when a woman is cloistered, a man's duties to her multiply a dozenfold, while independent-minded Katya, whom he loves, pretends to be married in order to work as a technician in Jeddah's homicide force... The author, who lived for a time in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s with her then husband, presents a searing portrait of the religious and cultural veils that separate Muslim women from the modern world."

Third of the JP Kinkaid Chronicles. Newlywed superstar guitarist JP Kinkaid and his wife, Bree, head off to London for their honeymoon, which gets sidetracked when legendary director Sir Cedric Parmeley enters his 25-year-old rockumentary, Playing in the Dark, into competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and asks Blacklight to perform a free show at Frejus, near Cannes, to support it. But the film Parmeley screens the night before the Festival opens is not the film the band approved. In that ninety minutes of footage is evidence of an old hate crime, the only kind for which there's no statute of limitations

Kirkus praised: "The body of one zookeeper provides a workout for the brain of another. Zookeeper Teddy Bentley comes from a wealthy family but chooses to live on an old converted trawler in Gunn Landing Harbor. After the strangled corpse of Koala Kate appears alongside her home, Teddy reluctantly agrees to assume Kate's job as TV personality and blogger... Teddy's second case (The Anteater of Death, 2008) showcases an engaging array of quirky characters, human and animal." And Library Journal concluded: "From mucking out the cages to carrying a lemur with a loose sphincter onto a TV set, Teddy's adventures will appeal to fans of animal-themed cozies."

"A rollicking memoir ... investigative details dazzle ... [it] can read at times, not unpleasantly, as if an art history textbook got mixed up at the printer with a screenplay for The Wire " said the New York Times. Kirkus said: "Entertaining, surprisingly informative memoir of an FBI agent who specialized in art thefts. A dozen Scotland Yard agents deal with this massive, multibillion-dollar global problem. The French national police employ 30 agents, Italy even more. Since Wittman's retirement, the FBI employs no one." And Jack Garcia, for FBI undercover agent and author of bestselling Making of Jack Falcone said: "More realistic than The Thomas Crown Affair, more entertaining than Catch Me If You Can. It's hard to believe one undercover FBI Agent rescued so many cultural and national treasures ... but it's all true."

Best known for the Moscow detective novel Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith is also known for delivering stories of crime, conspiracy and intrigue featuring protagonists whose loyalties are sometimes murky. Whether he is dramatizing history or fashioning his own facts, Smith fills his deeply researched novels with a sense of darkness underneath the detail.

Two Authors Together!
TIMOTHY HALLINAN and WENDY HORNSBY
Sunday, August 29 at 2:00 PM

Booklist starred: "...a breakthrough... Riveting, genuinely moving, and entirely plausible... A terrific page-turner, and the surprising denouement will thrill readers..." Kirkus also starred: "Hallinan takes his Poke Rafferty series to the next level with this taut, offbeat and fast-moving thriller... Hallinan’s unlikely hero shines in this sometimes funny, always engrossing and undeniably authentic story that explores a dark and fascinating side of Thailand." And Laura Joh Rowland called it "Sexy, exotic, and profound. Timothy Hallinan makes noir poetry out of corruption and violence."

If you've ever fantasized that an unknown relative has died and left you a fortune, be careful what you wish for. When a stranger insists she's kin to filmmaker Maggie MacGowen, Maggie assumes the woman is what the LAPD calls a "5150," a mentally disturbed person. But after the stranger dies, Maggie discovers that she has an extended family in France -- all of whom have "expectations" for their share of the inheritance. It's a legacy tangled in a complicated weave of issues, history, desires, legalities, and financial desperation.

At the Belmont Library
1110 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont
(two blocks south of Ralston)
650-591-8286

The best-selling author of Stiff and Bonk explores the irresistibly strange universe of space travel and life without gravity. Space is a world devoid of the things we need to live and thrive: air, gravity, hot showers, fresh produce, privacy, beer. Space exploration is in some ways an exploration of what it means to be human. How much can a person give up? How much weirdness can they take? What happens to you when you can’t walk for a year? have sex? smell flowers? What happens if you vomit in your helmet during a space walk? To answer these questions, space agencies set up all manner of quizzical and startlingly bizarre space simulations. A surreally entertaining trip into the science of life in space and space on Earth.

"M" is for Mystery Book Club Tuesday, August 31 at 7:00 PM "M" has its own Book Club that meets once a month in the store. This month the group will discuss Little Face by Sophie Hannah. If you have never attended, and are interested, just drop us an email. Please note: This is not a signing and the author will not be present. For further information click on Book Club notice.

Publishers Weekly starred: "Nine years after winning the National Book Award, Franzen's The Corrections consistently appears on 'Best of the Decade' lists and continues to enjoy a popularity that borders on the epochal, so much so that the first question facing Franzen's feverishly awaited follow-up is whether it can find its own voice in its predecessor's shadow. In short: yes, it does, and in a big way. Readers will recognize the strains of suburban tragedy afflicting St. Paul, Minn.'s Walter and Patty Berglund, once-gleaming gentrifiers now marred in the eyes of the community by Patty's increasingly erratic war on the right-wing neighbors... Franzen pits his excavation of the cracks in the nuclear family's facade against a backdrop of all-American faults and fissures, but where the book stands apart is that, no longer content merely to record the breakdown, Franzen tries to account for his often stridently unlikable characters ..."

"Agatha-winner Bowen successfully mixes Wodehousian farce with a whodunit plot in her fourth 1930s mystery starring Lady Georgiana Rannoch (after 2009's Royal Flush). When the queen asks Georgiana, a distant relative of George V, to attend the wedding of a royal cousin and old schoolmate, Princess Maria Theresa, in Romania, the impoverished 22-year-old must scramble to come up with a maid to maintain appearances. Bowen once again demonstrates her mastery of the light, romantic mystery." Rhys Bowen has been nominated for every major mystery award, and has won seven. Born in England, she resides among us here in northern California.

"Gibson, who made a name with Neuromancer (1984) and other speculative takes on new technologies, returns to his familiar concerns with hacker culture, surveillance, paranoia, and viral marketing, with occasional digressions into the semiotics of fashion and celebrity and references to cosplay, base jumping, and the Festo AirPenguin (look it up)," said Booklist. And from Publishers Weekly: "Opposing forces contend violently over what are in the end ephemeral trivialities, the minutiae of modern fashion, in Gibson's quirky tale of 21st-century brand positioning. The attention of eccentric financial genius Hubertus Bigend, seen previously in Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, has landed on military fashion, a field he believes is immune to the vagaries of the market... Gibson's style has become even more distilled, more austere, since his science fiction days."

WOMEN OF MYSTERY SHOWCASE
Saturday, September 11 at 2:00 PM

Featuring: HAILEY LIND - Arsenic and Old Paint: The Art Lover's Mystery Series (Trade paperback original, Perseverance Press, $14.95) TERRI THAYER - False Impressions (A Stamping Sisters Mystery) (Mass market paperback original, Berkley, $7.99) PENNY WARNER - How to Crash a Killer Bash: A Party-Planning Mystery (Mass market paperback original, Obsidian, $6.99)

"Saylor, well known for his Roma Sub Rosa historical mysteries, switched gears for his bestselling Roma and now continues the history of ancient Rome from A.D. 14 to 141 with a hefty tome of the Pinarius family as its members serve a succession of Roman emperors as soothsayers, senators, and artisans, while trying not to get killed in the slew of conspiracies that marked the Roman political scene. The patriarch, Lucius Pinarius, grooms his son, also named Lucius, to be a member of an ancient priesthood of soothsayers who interpret natural phenomenon to divine the future. Young Lucius is particularly skillful, earning the emperor's praise and confidence," said Publishers Weekly.

Publishers Weekly starred: "Pope improves on her 2008 debut, Cézanne's Quarry, which also featured magistrate Bernard Martin, in this fascinating look at the rise of anti-Semitism in France after the arrest of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894... Pope, a historian, gives us a complex lead and with great skill makes the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the times both palpable and tragically prophetic."

"Lindsay's fifth thriller featuring Dexter Morgan (after Dexter by Design) brilliantly combines suspense and gallows humor. Dexter, a blood splatter analyst for the Miami-Dade PD, seriously considers giving up his secret life as a killer of serial killers after the birth of his first child, Lily Anne. Then Dexter's police sergeant sister, Deborah, calls him to the scene of a possible kidnapping... Readers will look forward to seeing the further impact of fatherhood on Lindsay's highly original protagonist in the next installment," said Publishers Weekly.

RICHARD LUPOFF
Sunday, September 19 at 2:00 PM

Kirkus praised: "Clever thinking and judicious bribery produce results as Lindsey follows the path of the missing laptop... He won't give up until he finds what he needs to close his case and catch a killer." And from Publishers Weekly: "Lupoff's eighth and possibly final mystery featuring insurance investigator Hobart Lindsey and Berkeley, Calif., homicide detective Marvia Plum (after 1997's The Radio Red Killer)... Lindsey's old boss from the Special Projects Unit of International Surety calls him out of retirement to deal with a plagiarism case. The widow of murdered crime writer Gordon Simmons claims that a hard-boiled novel, The Emerald Cat, by an unknown author is a thinly disguised version of an unpublished manuscript that had been on Simmons's PC -- and that whoever stole it is also responsible for his death... [Lupoff's] glimpses into the sordid side of book publishing ring true."

From the Introduction by Ed Gorman: "If there's one thing Dick Lupoff understands (with perverse glee) it's the sorry state of the human condition. In this collection you'll find a wide variety of humans whose conditions leave much to be desired. A pit bull owner who's just as nasty as his dog. A thief who believes his father-in-law was a real Nazi. A dead-end boxer who has come back in a boxing movie. Not only are the storylines original, the writing is indelibly stamped with Dick's vision and voice. Dick's writing talents really can't be defined by the usual means. Yes, he writes science fiction. Yes, he writes fantasy. Yes, he writes mystery. But what he really writes are Lupoffs. Long, short, hilarious, whimsical, dark, mysterious - they're all Lupoffs."

This raw, brutally candid memoir is as high intensity and as riveting as any of Ellroy's novels. The year was 1958. Jean Hilliker had divorced her fast-buck hustler husband and resurrected her maiden name. Her son, James, was ten years old. He hated and lusted after his mother and "summoned her dead." She was murdered three months later. The Hilliker Curse is a predator's confession, a treatise on guilt and on the power of malediction, and above all, a cri de cœur. James Ellroy unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown, and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought Her.

For Mike Daley and Rosie Fernandez -- former spouses and current law partners -- the stakes have never been higher. In the seventh installment of this bestselling, critically acclaimed series, the duo learn that their sixteen-year-old daughter's boyfriend has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his father, a Superior Court judge. Bobby Fairchild, however, claims to have found his father's body upon returning home from a date with Grace. The police, who found Bobby at the scene of the crime holding the murder weapon, contend that his parents' acrimonious divorce sent the boy over the edge.

Prominent wine critic Richard Wilson makes a living elevating and destroying winemakers' reputations with the stroke of his pen. When he disappears after a tasting at Napa Valley's Norton Winery, his sister Janie looks to her ex-husband Babe Stern for help. But when Wilson's body is found floating in a vat at Norton, Stern's search turns into a hunt for the killer. Working with the Napa Valley police, Stern quickly finds a string of suspects, all with one thing in common: their desire to get revenge for the reviews that shattered their wines and livelihoods. But as the police work to quickly clear the case, those same suspects have a string of alibis and the trail begins to fade. Stern digs further into the circumstances of Wilson's death and finds himself following his only lead, to Burgundy, France.

"M" is for Mystery Book Club Tuesday, September 28 at 7:00 PM "M" has its own Book Club that meets once a month in the store. This month the group will discuss The Tourist by Olen Seinhauer. If you have never attended, and are interested, just drop us an email. Please note: This is not a signing and the author will not be present. For further information click on Book Club notice.

"The result of extensive research at the Great Ape Trust research facility in Des Moines, this fourth novel from Gruen (following the phenomenal Water for Elephants) has the dramatic tension of a crime thriller. Isabel Duncan is both scientist and den mother to six bonobos, outgoing, intelligent, and mischievous great apes who use American Sign Language and graphic symbols to communicate. Without warning, an explosion shatters their orderly existence. Were the animal rights protesters, an annoying presence outside the lab, behind this vicious act... This will draw both confirmed and new devotees of Gruen's fiction. A perfectly plotted good read," said Library Journal.

At the Belmont Library
1110 Alameda de las Pulgas, Belmont
(two blocks south of Ralston)
650-591-8286

"Nisbet, whose cult appeal has never really translated to the mainstream, hits another one out of the park ... lovers of the unorthodox, the intellectually challenging, and the aggressively offbeat will enjoy themselves immensely," said Booklist. "Jim Nisbet is a cult favorite in Europe and it's easy to see why. In the tradition of Jim Thompson and Damon Runyon, Nisbet is too good to miss and [this] is a masterpiece that raises the bar even for such a master storyteller," said the San Francisco Chronicle.

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