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Previous Staff Picks
Featured Author--- Simon R. Green
Staff Picks for
September/October 2008
Sam's Staff Picks
The Sisters Grimm by Michael Buckley
"In book one of this bestselling series, sisters Sabrina and Daphne are sent to live with their mysterious grandmother, Relda Grimm. The sisters learn they are descendants of the Brothers Grimm, whose famous book of fairy tales is actually a collection of case files. The girls are the latest in a long line of fairy-tale detectives, and their new hometown is filled with Everafters (as magical folks like to be called)some good and some very, very bad. When a mysterious Everafter sets a giant loose on the town, its up to the Sisters Grimm to save the day."
$6.95
Watchmen by Alan Moore
"It all begins with the paranoid delusions of a half-insane hero called Rorschach--but is he really insane or has he, in fact, uncovered a plot to murder super-heroes and possibly millions of innocent civilians? Following two generations of masked super-heroes from the close of World War II to the icy shadow of the Cold War comes this groundbreaking comic story--the story of The Watchmen."
$19.99
Murder with Peacocks by Donna Andrews
"In this lighthearted mystery, Meg is busily planning three chaotic weddings--including one that uses live peacocks as lawn decorations--when an unpopular out-of-town visitor is found dead. All indications lead to foul play, and subsequent disasters threaten to dampen the wedding festivities."
$6.99
The Lorax by Dr. Seuss
"In this cautionary tale of greed and environmental destruction, the lovable Lorax tries to save the Truffula Forest and its inhabitants from disaster at the hands of the cantankerous Once-ler."
$14.95
Mariel of Redwall by Brian Jacques
"When the mouse-ship carrying Joseph the Bellmaker and his daughter, Mariel, runs afoul of a pirate rat king, they are mercilessly tossed overboard. Washed ashore and certain that her father is dead, Mariel vows revenge."
$7.99
Andrew's Staff Picks
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey
"Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist, and London is his stamping ground. It may seem like a good ghostbuster can charge what he likes and enjoy a hell of a lifestyle--but there's a risk: Sooner or later he's going to take on a spirit that's too strong for him. While trying to back out of this ill-conceived career, Castor accepts a seemingly simple ghost-hunting case at a museum in the shadowy heart of London--just to pay the bills, you understand. But what should have been a perfectly straightforward exorcism is rapidly turning into the Who Can Kill Castor First Show, with demons and ghosts all keen to claim the big prize."
$6.99
The Hidden Family by Charles Stross
"The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between their world and ours make them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious.
Miriam, a hip tech journalist form Boston, discovered her alternate-world relatives with explosive results that shook three worlds. Now, as the prodigal Countess Helge Thorold-Hyorth, she finds herself ensnared in schemes and plots centuries in the making. She is surrounded by unlikely allies, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. With her modern American attitudes, she's not sure she can fit in, or if she even wants to, but to stay alive, she really has no choice.
To avoid a slippery slope down to an unmarked grave, Miriam must build a power-base of her own. She started applying modern business practices and scientific knowledge to a trade heretofore dominated by medieval mercantilists-with unexpected consequences for three different timelines, including the quasi-Victorian one exploited by the hidden family."
$7.99
Die Trying by Lee Child
"In a quiet Chicago suburb, a dentist is attacked in his office parking lot and forced into the trunk of his Lexus. On a sidewalk downtown, Jack Reacher and an unknown woman are abducted in broad daylight. Wordlessly and without warning, two armed men - confident and rehearsed - hustle them into the same sedan. Then Reacher and the woman are switched into a second vehicle and hauled away. Reacher and this mysterious woman are caught between a group of men holding them for an impossible ransom and her colleagues, who will risk everything - even their lives - to save her. With only their wits and mutual trust between them, she and Reacher must escape an ingenious wilderness prison and the grasp of a man hell-bent on revenge."
$7.99
City Of Saints And Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer
"In City of Saints and Madmen, Jeff VanderMeer has reinvented the literature of the fantastic. You hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you've ever visited-an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.
Ambergris: city of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading-and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced he's made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he's really from a place called Chicago....
By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and "eyewitness" reports invokes a universe within a puzzlebox where you can lose-and find-yourself again."
$14.00
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
"Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs, violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside--the Extramuros--for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.
Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent's gates--at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.
Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros--a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose--as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world--as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond."
$29.95 prior to new hardcover discount
Lelia's Staff Picks
Bobbie Faye's Very (Very, Very, Very) Bad Day by Toni McGee Causey
"Set in Lake Charles, La., Causey's hilarious, pitch-perfect debut chronicles one day in the life of 28-year-old Bobbie Faye Sumrall, a magnet for mayhem who feels 'a day without disaster would be a day in someone else's life.' For starters, a faulty washing machine floods the trailer home she shares with her five-year-old niece. Then she learns that kidnappers are holding Roy, her rogue of a younger brother, for ransom and want nothing less than the tiara inherited from her mother that Bobbie Faye plans to wear as the queen of the upcoming pirate-themed Contraband Days Festival. After a simple bank trip turns into a nightmare and thieves get away with the tiara, Bobbie Faye commandeers a truck and its hunky driver, Trevor, for a wild chase through bayou country. Friends cheer her on, while others take bets on her next calamity. Causey doesn't miss a beat in this wonderful, wacky celebration of Southern eccentricity."---Publishers Weekly
$12.95
Little Shop of Murders by Susan Goodwill
"Kate and Aunt Kitty are at the bank depositing their hard-earned fundraiser proceeds when Walter, a bathrobe-clad octogenarian, robs the bank using a banana. Kate and Kitty speed off in Kitty's mammoth white 1974 Eldorado convertible to retrieve their funds, but find a dead body instead. Handsome Sheriff Ben arrives, but not until AFTER the murderers have come calling. Things get stickier when the Treasury Department and a biker gang - the Devil's Cheerleaders - get involved, too. Despite continuous misadventures - from Sausage Festival pandemonium to unsympathetic law enforcement officials in unattractive shoes to a malfunctioning giant man-eating plant from Splotski's Theatre Rentals - Kate and Kitty are determined that the show must go on."
$13.95
Interworld by Neil Gaiman & Michael Reaves
"Joey Harker isn't a hero. In fact, he's the kind of guy who gets lost in his own house. But then one day, Joey gets really lost. He walks straight out of his world and into another dimension.
Joey's walk between the worlds makes him prey to two terrible forces--armies of magic and science who will do anything to harness his power to travel between dimensions. When he sees the evil those forces are capable of, Joey makes the only possible choice: to join an army of his own, an army of versions of himself from different dimensions who all share his amazing power and who are all determined to fight to save the worlds."
$6.99
His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik
"Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise to Britain's defense by taking to the skies . . . not aboard aircraft but atop the mighty backs of fighting dragons.
When HMS Reliant captures a French frigate and seizes its precious cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, fate sweeps Capt. Will Laurence from his seafaring life into an uncertain future-and an unexpected kinship with a most extraordinary creature. Thrust into the rarified world of the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire, he will face a crash course in the daring tactics of airborne battle. For as France's own dragon-borne forces rally to breach British soil in Bonaparte's boldest gambit, Laurence and Temeraire must soar into their own baptism of fire."
$7.99
The Gingerbread Girl by Stephen King
"In the emotional aftermath of her baby's sudden death, Em starts running. Soon she runs from her husband, to the airport, down to the Florida Gulf and out to the loneliest stretch of Vermillion Key, where her father has offered the use of a conch shack he has kept there for years. Em keeps up her running -- barefoot on the beach, sneakers on the road -- and sees virtually no one. This is doing her all kinds of good, until one day she makes the mistake of looking into the driveway of a man named Pickering. Pickering also enjoys the privacy of Vermillion Key, but the young women he brings there suffer the consequences. Will Em be next?"
$7.99 Audio Book Rental or $19.95 Purchase
