Two Bestselling Authors: Cussler and Steel

The Striker by Clive Cussler

It is 1902, and a bright, inexperienced young named Isaac Bell, only two years out of his apprenticeship at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, has an urgent message for his boss. Hired to hunt for radical unionist saboteurs in the coal mines, he is witness to a terrible accident that makes him think that something else is going on, that provocateurs are at work and bigger stakes are in play.

Until the End of Time by Danielle Steel

Bill is a dedicated young lawyer working at his family's prestigious New York firm, who leaves everything he trained for to follow his dream and become a minister in rural Wyoming; Jenny, his wife, is a stylist whose heart and soul are interested in fashion. She leaves the milieu and the life she loves to join him. The certainty they share is that their destinies are linked forever. Fast forward thirty-eight years, Robert is a hard-working independent book publisher in Manhattan, who has given up all personal life to build his struggling business. He is looking for one big hit to publish. Lillibet is a young Amish woman, living as though in the seventeenth century, caring for her widowed father and three brothers on their family farm. In secret at night, by candlelight, she has written the novel that burns within her, and gets it into Robert's hands, wrapped in her hand-stitched apron. He falls in love first with the book, and then with the woman he has never met.

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Teen Pick of the Week: Scarlet

Scarlet: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer

Cinder, the cyborg mechanic, returns in the second thrilling installment of the bestselling Lunar Chronicles. She's trying to break out of prison--even though if she succeeds, she'll be the Commonwealth's most wanted fugitive. Halfway around the world, Scarlet Benoit's grandmother is missing. When Scarlet encounters Wolf, a street fighter who may have information about her grandmother's whereabouts, she is loath to trust this stranger, but is inexplicably drawn to him, and he to her. As Scarlet and Wolf unravel one mystery, they encounter another when they meet Cinder. Now, all of them must stay one step ahead of the vicious Lunar Queen Levana, who will do anything for the handsome Prince Kai to become her husband, her king, her prisoner.

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Fiction Pick of the Week: Traps

Traps by Mackenzie Bezos

In this tautly woven tour de force, the paths of four very different women intersect, briefly but significantly, in ways that will change each of them forever. Dana is a beautiful young security guard trained in special ops who can disarm a bomb or suture a wound but is terrified of committing to the man she loves. Lynn is a fiercely independent older woman living alone in Nevada and running a ranch for rescued dogs. Jessica is a reclusive movie star and mother of two whose father keeps selling her out to the paparazzi. Vivian is a seventeen-year-old prostitute who will do anything to protect her twin babies. Bezos brings deep intelligence and rich texture to her portraits of four women whose fates, though only tangentially connected, are linked in miraculous ways.

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Teen Pick of the Week: Legacy

Legacy by Molly Cochran

When Katy Jessevar's widowed father exiles her to a boarding school in Whitfield, Massachusetts, fate opens the door to her future and her past. Katy soon learns that like many of the old families in town, her never-spoken-of mother was from a notorious witching line, and that she, too, possesses the special powers. With dark forces converging on Whitfield, it's up to Katy to unravel her family's many secrets to save the boy she loves--and the town itself--from destruction.

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Nonfiction Pick of the Week: The Missing Ink

The Missing Ink by Philip Hensher

When Philip Hensher realized that he didn't know what a close friend's handwriting looked like ("bold or crabbed, sloping or upright, italic or rounded, elegant or slapdash"), he felt that something essential was missing from their friendship. It dawned on him that having abandoned pen and paper for keyboards, we have lost one of the ways by which we come to recognize and know another person. People have written by hand for thousands of years--how, Hensher wondered, have they learned this skill, and what part has it played in their lives? The Missing Ink tells the story of this endangered art.

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Teen Pick of the Week: Prettiest Doll

Prettiest Doll by Gina Willner-Pardo

Everyone says Olivia is pretty. She has been winning beauty pageants since she was three. Now, at thirteen, she's preparing for the Prettiest Doll competition. It should be just another pageant, except that somehow it isn't. Liv is afraid that "pretty" is all people see when they look at her. She wants to know she's more than that. She gets a chance to find out when she meets a runaway named Dan, who looks much younger than his fifteen years. Together they set off for what turns out to be a journey of discovery, finding out about family secrets, each other, and themselves. The story of two teens making their way in the world preoccupied with physical appearance sparkles with wry humor, a first romance, and a revealing behind-the-scenes look at the world of beauty pageants.

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Mystery Pick of the Week: Dogstar Rising

Dogstar Rising by Parker Bilal

The unsolved murders of young boys are fanning the embers of religious hatred in the city. As tensions mount, Makana, a private investigator who fled his home in Sudan a decade ago, has a premonition that history may be about to repeat itself. Hired to investigate threats made against a hapless travel agent, Makana finds himself drawn to Meera, a woman who knows what it is like to lose everything--and who needs his help. But Makana's troubled past is trying to lay claim to him once again, this time in the form of a businessman with a powerful secret.

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Teen Pick of the Week: Fire in the Streets

Fire in the Streets by Kekla Magoon
 The Times: 1968
The Place: Chicago
Maxie is a Black Panther -- or at least she wants to be one. She believes in the movement. She wants to belong. She wants to join the struggle. But everyone keeps telling her she's too young. She's allowed to help out in the office, but she certainly can't help patrol the streets. However, Maxie's convinced that is she tries a little harder, she can prove to the rest of them--and to Sam, her former boyfriend-- that she has what it takes to join the organization full-time. Then Maxie learns that there is a traitor in their midst--someone who's talking to the police--and she thinks that if she can figure out who it is, it may be her ticket to becoming a real Panther. But when she learns the truth, the knowledge threatens to destroy the world. Maxie has finally discovered what she'll have to do to become a Panther, but it is worth the ultimate price?

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