The catalog of e-books, downloadable audiobooks and a handful of streaming videos.
–
The Libby App
Libby is the companion app to the Digital Catalog and may be found in the Apple & Google app.
–
Hoopla
A catalog of instant check out items, including eBooks, downloadable audiobooks, comic books, TV shows and movies for patrons of the Southeast Steuben County Library.
–
Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Hi everyone, here are our five suggested reads of the week!
Weekly Suggested Reading Five postings are published on Wednesdays.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, April 24, 2024.
–
Close To Death by Anthony Horowitz
Among his many outstanding accomplishments, Horowitz adapted Caroline Graham’s mysteries into the early episodes of the long-running and internationally popular television series Midsomer Murders. Here he’s created a tiny Midsomer village within Riverside Close in Richmond, a town near southwest London. The Close includes every manner of resident, including two ex-nuns and a chess celebrity, and becomes the scene of the murder of Charles Kenworthy, found dead on his porch with the bolt of a crossbow through his chest. Kenworthy was an arrogant and obnoxious man, and nothing in the peaceful complex was the same after he moved in. Each of the original residents had their own reason for wanting him dead. Daniel Hawthorne is called in by the baffled police. He is the shadowy (one might say shady) ex-policeman turned private investigator with whom the author himself has solved four earlier cases. Horowitz has perfected metafiction to the point where the reader settles in comfortably for the fifth time as the self-deprecating author engages with the prickly Hawthorne to create a crime novel based on his investigations. An absolutely engrossing tale, including a locked-room second murder, written with the abundance of whimsy and dark humor that seems to permeate nearly everything that Horowitz creates. Kudos to anyone who can figure this one out!
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Horowitz followers and all lovers of diabolically clever mysteries are primed for the latest Hawthorne and Horowitz adventure. – Starred Booklist Review
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The Gathering by C. J Tudor
Vampires, or “vampyrs,” roam the earth—and provoke heated political debate—in this wildly imaginative supernatural thriller from Tudor (The Drift). Though vampyrs rarely attack humans, hostility toward them in the early 20th century led to the decimation of the species and their relegation to several remote colonies across the United States. In 1983, the federal government enacted the Vampyr Protection Act, declaring them a protected species and polarizing the electorate—right-wing religious fanatics believe vampyrs should be exterminated, while “woke liberals” consider them vulnerable minorities. Against this fraught backdrop, homicide detective Barbara Atkins, who has her PhD in forensic vampyr anthropology, is dispatched to the small town of Deadhart, Alaska, after local teen Marcus Anderson is killed and his neighbors blame a vampyr. While the citizens of Deadhart prepare to cull the nearby vampyr colony in retaliation, Atkins teams up with the local sheriff to investigate Marcus’s death. As they dig, Atkins and the sheriff come to suspect the vampyr theory is cover for a much more personal motive—and then someone else turns up dead. Tudor leverages her snowbound setting for maximum atmosphere, and never lets her high-concept premise overwhelm patient character development. This frostbitten procedural is a bloody good time. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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The House on Biscayne Bay by Chanel Cleeton
Just as her newest protagonists, Anna Barnes and Carmen Acosta, brave a confounding maze and a hidden passage, Cleeton (The Cuban Heiress, 2023) intrepidly ventures into the gothic arena with her latest novel. Marbrisa is an extravagant showplace built on Biscayne Bay near Miami by Anna’s husband, Robert. Anna is a mature woman whose story takes place in Miami’s burgeoning post-WWI era, when rich outsiders buying up land and building mansions clash with the locals. Cue the screeching peacocks, the road-blocking, the slumbering alligators, and murder. In alternating segments, Carmen is a young woman who has come to Marbrisa to live with her estranged sister and brother-in-law after her parents’ tragic death in Havana. It’s the early 1940s, the war is starting in Europe, and history seems set to repeat itself at this ill-fated estate. As the story unfolds, readers will wonder if there’s anyone Anna and Carmen can trust. The gruff housekeeper? The handsome gardener? The nebbishy architect? The relentless detective? This is a sure bet for Cleeton fans and lovers of mansion-centric gothic tales. – Booklist Review
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The Kiss Countdown by Etta Easton
DEBUT After losing her job at a prestigious Houston event-planning company and breaking up with her long-time boyfriend, Amerie Price is trying to launch a solo venture and has absolutely no time for romantic complications. But when her ex and his new girlfriend show up at Amerie’s favorite coffee shop, a random coffee-drinker (who happens to be very cute with a chiseled jawline) makes a convenient fake boyfriend. Vincent Price, a NASA astronaut, gamely plays along with Amerie’s scheme in the moment, but she’s shocked when he suggests they continue the ruse until he blasts off for a six-month mission to space. Vincent’s meddling family is concerned they’ll lose him, and Vincent hopes that having a doting (fake) girlfriend will help soothe their worries about his upcoming mission. Plus, Amerie can move into his apartment, leaving her free to focus on her new business, not making rent. What Amerie doesn’t plan on is truly falling for the secretly sweet Vincent. VERDICT Easton’s debut is perfect for readers seeking romance with excellent character development and STEM at its center. It’s a good read-alike for Denise Williams and Ali Hazelwood. – Library Journal Review
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An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Words matter. With their power to inspire, illuminate, instruct, and influence, the words a president or other prominent individual says at the right time can quell tension or encourage reform, embolden noble deeds or suppress destructive action. As speechwriter and advisor to JFK, RFK, and LBJ, Dick Goodwin wrote some of the most powerful speeches of the 1960s, a time when America was catapulting from the New Frontier to the Great Society and challenged by upheaval at home and abroad. Although he and Doris Kearns were moons orbiting the same political planets, they did not meet until 1972, when both were working at Harvard. Their adjacent experiences and shared passion for politics, justice, and the presidency was the foundation of a love that would last until Goodwin’s death in 2018. As befits all great researchers and eyewitnesses to history, the Goodwins collected a vast trove of archival material from their years as presidential advisers and authors, and it is this unparalleled source material that historian, biographer, and political commentator Kearns Goodwin mines to galvanizing effect in a memoir that purrs with beguiling intimacy and bubbles with effervescent appreciation for an exceptional marriage during more than four decades of profound mutual engagement with politics, social struggles, and each other.
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The presidential biographer’s renown will lure readers to her most personal book. – Booklist Review
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
–
Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, eAudiobooks, and digital magazines. You can use your library card and checkout content on a PC; you can also use the companion app, Libby, to access titles on your mobile devices; so you can enjoy eBooks and eAudiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
The Hoopla Catalog features on demand checkouts of eBooks, eAudiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV shows. Patron check out limit is 10 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla companion app, also called Hoopla is available for mobile devices, smart TVs & media streaming players.
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
–
Have questions regarding how to access digital library content (i.e. eBooks & eAudios)? Drop by the Reference Desk at the library, or give us a call at: 607-936-3713
–
Tech & Book Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Checkout New York Times Bestsellers through the library!
There are currently three catalogs available to Southeast Steuben County Library patrons that you can access to search for and request New York Times Bestsellers, and other popular books and materials.
All you need is a library card to get started!
Note: If you need assistance to set up initial access to the catalogs, call the Reference Desk at: 607-936-3713 x502 and the staff member on duty will be happy to assist you.
–
THE CATALOGS:
Catalog 1: StarCat
StarCat is the catalog of physical materials including print books, DVDs, audiobooks on CD etc. StarCat is available to all patrons of all public libraries in the Southern Tier Library System*
The Digital Catalog (and its companion app Libby) offers all Southern Tier Library System member library patrons access to eBooks, eAudiobooks & digital magazines via a lending model known in Library-ese as “one copy/one user;” that library speak means that eBooks & eAudiobooks found in The Digital Catalog/Libby are like print books found on library shelves, only one patron can check out a copy of a title at a time.
Exception: Magazines found in the digital catalog are available via a different lending model known as simultaneous access. And that fancy library speak means that magazines are available for all patrons to check out at the same time, i.e. if you and all your family and friends wish to read the latest digital edition of Newsweek, all those people could check out the magazine and read it at the same time.
The Digital Catalog/Libby Formats: eBooks can be accessed on mobile devices (AKA smartphone or tablet), computers and eReaders; eAudiobooks can be listen to on mobile devices and computers; and magazines can be accessed on mobile devices and computers.
The Hoopla Digital Catalog (and its companion app, also called Hoopla) offers Southeast Steuben County Library patrons access to a second digital catalog with an on-demand lending model. In library speak, this lending model, like The Digital Catalog/Libby’s magazine lending model, is known as “simultaneous access.” The difference is, the Hoopla catalog offers access to more formats: eBooks, eAudiobooks, eComics, digital albums, TV shows & movies – and all items, in all those formats, are available for patrons to checkout immediately.
Hoopla Formats: All Hoopla content can be accessed on a computer or mobile device, and TV shows and movies can be accessed on computers, mobile devices, smart TVs and media streaming players, i.e. Roku or Apple TV.
The catalog of e-books, downloadable audiobooks and a handful of streaming videos.
–
The Libby App
Libby is the companion app to the Digital Catalog and may be found in the Apple & Google app.
–
Hoopla
A catalog of instant check out items, including eBooks, downloadable audiobooks, comic books, TV shows and movies for patrons of the Southeast Steuben County Library.
–
Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Hi everyone, here are our five recommended reads of the week!
–
Weekly Suggested Reading Five postings are published on Wednesdays.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, April 17, 2024.
–
Has Anyone Seen Charlote Salter? A Novel by Nicci French
The 1990 disappearance of Charlotte Salter, a well-liked mother of four, remained unsolved for decades, burdening the village of Glensted with rumors of infidelity and suspicion. As salt on the wound, the Salters’ close friend, Duncan Ackerly, drowned the day after her disappearance, and Charlotte’s son, Paul, eventually committed suicide. Twenty years later, Charlotte’s remaining adult children, Niall, Ollie, and Etty, have gathered in Glensted to sell the family home. Duncan Ackerly’s sons, Greg and Morgan, have also returned to launch a podcast about the likely connections between Charlotte’s disappearance and their father’s death. With the spotlight on the police’s questionable initial response, Bristol DI Maud O’Connor is sent to Glensted to re-investigate both cases. Maud confronts resistance from her team, raging public criticism of the original investigation, and decades of cold clues with unshakable confidence in the cases’ solvability. French cleverly plays on that suspense by doling out Maud’s plan and clues in tantalizing bits. The wolf hides in sheep’s clothing here, to great effect. – Booklist Review
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I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger
Amid the dystopian collapse of the near future, a musician embarks on a quixotic voyage from the shore of Lake Superior. There’s both a playfulness and a seriousness of purpose to the latest from the Minnesota novelist, a spirit of whimsy that keeps hope flickering even in times of darkest despair. Things have gone dangerously dark along the North Shore, and likely for the country as a whole. A comet is coming that augurs ill, a pandemic has wreaked havoc with the public health, an autocratic despot and raging populism have made books and booksellers all but treasonous. There are corpses floating in the lake from climate change, and there are numerous instances of people swallowing something that kills them; the dead are generally considered seekers of whatever comes next (which has to be better than this) rather than suicides. As narrator Rainy sets the scene, “The world was so old and exhausted that many now saw it as a dying great-grand on a surgical table, body decaying from use and neglect, mind fading down to a glow.” Rainy is a bass player in bar bands, a jack of a variety of trades, and devoted husband to Lark, a bibliophile who runs the local bookstore. Before the collapse of the publishing industry, a cult author had been set to publish a volume with the same title as this novel, and finding one of the few advance copies has been like a holy grail for Lark. Then a copy finds her, courtesy of a fugitive pursued by the powers that be, and whatever tranquility Lark and Rainy had achieved is shattered. Rainy takes to the lake to escape the fugitive’s pursuers and reunite with Lark. He experiences a variety of hardship, challenge, and adventure, yet somehow lives to tell the tale that is this novel. The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times. – Kirkus Review
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Nosy Neighbors by Freya Sampson
Ms. Dorothy Darling knows everything that goes on in Shelley House, a small, ramshackle apartment building in England. The opera-loving septuagenarian keeps watch from her front window, so she knows when her neighbor, Joseph Chambers, has illegally rented his spare room to Kat Bennett, a 25-year-old loner with pink hair. Kat wants nothing more than to keep her distance, so when everyone is served with an eight-week eviction notice, she figures she’ll just move on. But then Joseph is attacked, and Kat stays to watch his dog, Reggie. Dorothy and Kat both have secrets keeping them at Shelley House, and soon they are caught up in Joseph’s campaign to save the building from a shady developer. Sampson (The Lost Ticket, 2022) once again presents a charming story about intergenerational friendship leading to healing. As the narrative alternates between Dorothy and Kat’s distinct voices, readers learn why the two women have their walls up, and have the pleasure of watching those walls come down. This heartwarming tale is full of subtle humor and rich characters. – Booklist Review
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Old Flames and New Fortunes by Sarah Hogle
Moonville, a quaint town in rural Ohio, is where Romina Tempest and her two sisters run a whimsical shop full of candles, flowers, and fantasy books, all infused with the sisters’ magic. Romina calls herself a flora fortunist and uses the language of plants to make spellbinding arrangements. The owner of the shop, Trevor, is Romina’s best friend, and they hope to secure a loan from his father to help expand the business. They walk into what they think is a business meeting only to find that Trevor’s father is announcing his impending marriage to the mother of Romina’s high-school sweetheart, Alex King. Furthermore, Alex is there. Right there. The boy who broke her heart over a decade ago is back in Moonville. Romina and Trevor find themselves in the middle of a fake-dating scheme to get back at Alex, but through the chaos, Romina and Alex realize that an ember of their teenage love still burns. This second-chance romance is a bit jumbled at times, but Hogle (You Deserve Each Other, 2020) succeeds in crafting a fun romance with a touch of fantasy. – Booklist Review
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The Secret Lives of Booksellers and Librarians: Their Stories Are Better Than the Bestsellers by James Patterson & Matt Eversmann
Not to spoil the secret promised in the title, but what unites all of the booksellers and librarians interviewed for this book is a love of books and reading and other people who love books and reading. Patterson and Eversmann include such luminaries as Judy Blume, who quit writing after 50 years and opened a book store in Key West, and a bookstore owner in Rehoboth, Delaware, who regularly rubs elbows with the Bidens. Several themes emerge: subjects grew up loving reading (there are a few mentions of favorite reads, like the Lord of the Rings series and even James Patterson); they love the community-hub aspect of where they work; and they relish a book-search challenge, like “”the cover is blue.”” What they don’t enjoy are challenges to books, with several entries devoted to those who are fighting for intellectual freedom, like the librarian in Texas who was fired for not taking down a pride display. With its bite-sized chapters, this collection of profiles doesn’t go into much depth, but it will appeal to readers looking for some quick, bookish inspiration.
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Patterson is always in this category; add to that a topic that’s a natural for all booklovers. – Booklist Review
–
Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
–
Have questions or want to request a book?
Feel free to call the library! Our telephone number is 607-936-3713.
–
Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, eAudiobooks, and digital magazines. You can use your library card and checkout content on a PC; you can also use the companion app, Libby, to access titles on your mobile devices; so you can enjoy eBooks and eAudiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
The Hoopla Catalog features on demand checkouts of eBooks, eAudiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV shows. Patron check out limit is 10 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla companion app, also called Hoopla is available for mobile devices, smart TVs & media streaming players.
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
–
Tech & Book Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Checkout New York Times Bestsellers through the library!
There are currently three catalogs available to Southeast Steuben County Library patrons, that you can access to search for and request New York Times Bestsellers, and other popular books and materials.
All you need is a library card and password!
Note: If you need assistance to set up initial access to the catalogs, call the Reference Desk at: 607-936-3713 x502 and the staff member on duty will be happy to assist you.
–
THE CATALOGS:
Catalog 1: StarCat
StarCat is the catalog of physical materials including print books, DVDs, audiobooks on CD etc. StarCat is available to all patrons of all public libraries in the Southern Tier Library System*
The Digital Catalog (and its companion app Libby) offers all Southern Tier Library System member library patrons access to eBooks, eAudiobooks & digital magazines via a lending model known in Library-ese as “one copy/one user;” that library speak means that eBooks & eAudiobooks found in The Digital Catalog/Libby are like print books found on library shelves, only one patron can check out a copy of a title at a time.
Exception: Magazines found in the digital catalog are available via a different lending model known as simultaneous access. And that fancy library speak means that magazines are available for all patrons to check out at the same time, i.e. if you and all your family and friends wish to read the latest digital edition of Newsweek, all those people could check out the magazine and read it at the same time.
The Digital Catalog/Libby Formats: eBooks can be accessed on mobile devices (AKA smartphone or tablet), computers and eReaders; eAudiobooks can be listen to on mobile devices and computers; and magazines can be accessed on mobile devices and computers.
The Hoopla Digital Catalog (and its companion app, also called Hoopla) offers Southeast Steuben County Library patrons access to a second digital catalog with an on-demand lending model. In library speak, this lending model, like The Digital Catalog/Libby’s magazine lending model, is known as “simultaneous access.” The difference is, the Hoopla catalog offers access to more formats: eBooks, eAudiobooks, eComics, digital albums, TV shows & movies – and all items, in all those formats, are available for patrons to checkout immediately.
Hoopla Formats: All Hoopla content can be accessed on a computer or mobile device, and TV shows and movies can be accessed on computers, mobile devices, smart TVs and media streaming players, i.e. Roku or Apple TV.
The catalog of e-books, downloadable audiobooks and a handful of streaming videos.
–
The Libby App
Libby is the companion app to the Digital Catalog and may be found in the Apple & Google app.
–
Hoopla
A catalog of instant check out items, including eBooks, downloadable audiobooks, comic books, TV shows and movies for patrons of the Southeast Steuben County Library.
–
Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Hi everyone, with this posting we will be switching to a slightly different format, in that I will suggest five books to read each week, instead of ten.
Our weekly Suggested Reading Five posts, combined with the recent addition of our monthly New Books Coming Your Way posts, should offer plenty of suggested reading recommendations for everyone.
However, if you’re in need of even more reading recommendations than you find on the Tech & Book Talk blog, please feel free to stop by the Circulation Desk or Reference Desk at the library and staff will be happy to assist you in finding even more books to read! We’ll even be happy to print off author readings lists for you, to help you keep track of which books you have, or haven’t, read by your favorite authors!
Alternatively, you can send me an email with your book-related questions. My email address is: reimerl@stls.org
Have a great day,
Linda Reimer, SSCL
–
Weekly Suggested Reading Five postings are published on Wednesdays.
And the next Suggested Reading posting will be published on Wednesday, April 10, 2024.
–
The Cemetery Of Untold Stories: A Novel by Julia Alvarez
Alvarez (Afterlife, 2020) brings the magic again in this nesting box of a novel. Writer Alma, Alvarez’s stand-in for a touch of autobiographical fiction, and her sisters Refuge, Consolation, and Pity, the English versions Alma often invokes for Amparo, Consuelo, and Piedad, have inherited property in the Dominican Republic. The sisters are not happy with Alma’s decision to make over one of the parcels in the eponymous cemetery. She and her sculptor friend, Brava, haul boxes of her unfinished manuscripts there, and she buries the pages that won’t burn, hoping to finally be free of them. As Alma and Brava transform the cemetery plot with statues and install a gate that opens only when a story is told, the surrounding neighborhood watches and wonders. Alma hires one of the neighbors to be the cemetery’s caretaker, and the restless ghosts/statues tell sensitive Filomena their stories. These tales surround and crisscross each other as Filomena and her family; Alma’s father, Dr. Manuel Cruz; and Bienvenida Inocencia, the discarded first wife of the brutal dictator Trujillo, are linked in surprising ways, most especially in a humanity that transcends pathos and passion. May Alvarez continue to excavate stories for many years to come!
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The best-selling Alvarez has a committed readership, and word of this inventive novel will also attract new followers. – Booklist Review
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Erasure by Percival Everett
Percival Everett’s blistering satire about race and publishing, now adapted for the screen as the Academy Award-winning AMERICAN FICTION, directed by Cord Jefferson and starring Jeffrey Wright
Thelonious “Monk” Ellison’s writing career has bottomed out: his latest manuscript has been rejected by seventeen publishers, which stings all the more because his previous novels have been “critically acclaimed.” He seethes on the sidelines of the literary establishment as he watches the meteoric success of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, a first novel by a woman who once visited “some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days.” Meanwhile, Monk struggles with real family tragedies—his aged mother is fast succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and he still grapples with the reverberations of his father’s suicide seven years before.
In his rage and despair, Monk dashes off a novel meant to be an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’s bestseller. He doesn’t intend for My Pafology to be published, let alone taken seriously, but it is—under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh—and soon it becomes the Next Big Thing. How Monk deals with the personal and professional fallout galvanizes this audacious, hysterical, and quietly devastating novel.
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The Morningside: A Novel by Téa Obreht
Silvia, a tall, worried, intrepid 11-year-old, and her wiry, pragmatic, reticent mother, climate refugees, finally reach waterlogged Island City and the Morningside, a luxury apartment building that, like everything on this near-future Earth, has seen better days. The superintendent is Silvia’s Aunt Ena, who tells heart-stopping stories of the lost old country and the family Silvia knows nothing about, since her intractable mother insists on keeping their past secret. Silvia soon becomes obsessed with Bezi Duras, the mysterious woman who lives in the penthouse with her enormous dogs, convinced that she is a Vila, “a spirit of the mountain” with epic powers. As in her previous richly imagined and profoundly insightful novels, Tiger’s Wife (2011) and Inland (2019), Obreht writes at the crossroads of myth and history, but here with a twist as she envisions a catastrophic tomorrow in which rampaging forces of nature and human atrocities intensify in impact and scope. Silvia’s narration is a marvel of evolving perception under duress as she navigates the “world beneath the world” and a “cosmos of dangers.” With fairy-tale eeriness, a man with a staggering backstory running a pirate radio station, Silvia’s mother’s treacherous work as a salvage diver in the city’s flooded towers and, finally, her harrowing revelations, this is a bewitchingly atmospheric, psychologically lush, and deeply knowing tale of ancient sorrows and coalescing crises, courage and fortitude. – Booklist Review
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Table For Two: Stories by Amor Towles
In his first collection, Towles sequel-izes his debut novel, Rules of Civility (2011), with a 200-page novella and adds six short fictions involving unlikely encounters and unexpected outcomes. Set in the late 1930s, the novella, Eve in Hollywood, extends the story of Evelyn Ross, nervy sidekick of Rules protagonist Katey Kontent. On a train from New York to Los Angeles, the flinty, facially scarred blond, impulsively rejecting a return to her home in Indiana, strikes up a friendship with widowed former homicide cop Charlie Granger. They meet months later in L.A. when Eve’s cutely met new friend, starlet Olivia de Havilland, is blackmailed over surreptitiously taken nude photos. In classic noir fashion, an untrustworthy man of significant girth is at the heart of the plot. The book’s other lively pairings include a used bookseller and a young would-be writer who finds his calling forging signatures of famous authors for him (Paul Auster plays a key role); a newly committed concertgoer and an older patron who drives him to distraction by secretly recording the music; and two travelers stranded at the airport who share a cab ride to a hotel, where one of them transforms from a harmless nice guy into a raging alcoholic and the other attempts to drag him away from the bar on desperately phoned orders from the man’s wife. Towles has fun leaping ahead with his narratives. In a cruel twist of fate, a peasant in late-czarist Russia pays a price for daring to profit from holding people’s places on excessively long food lines in Moscow. Towles sometimes lays on the philosophical wisdom and historical knowledge a bit, but the novella and all the stories are treated to his understated (and occasionally mischievous) irony. A sneakily entertaining assortment of tales. – Kirkus Review
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The Truth About The Devlins by Lisa Scottoline
The ne’er-do-well son of a successful Irish American family gets dragged into criminal complications that suggest the rest of the Devlins aren’t exactly the upstanding citizens they appear. The first 35 years in the life of Thomas “TJ” Devlin have been one disappointment after another to his parents, lawyers who founded a prosperous insurance and reinsurance firm, and his more successful siblings, John and Gabby. A longtime alcoholic who’s been unemployable ever since he did time for an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Carrie’s then 2-year-old daughter, TJ is nominally an investigator for Devlin & Devlin, but everyone knows the post is a sinecure. Things change dramatically when golden-boy John tells TJ that he just killed Neil Lemaire, an accountant for D&D client Runstan Electronics. Their speedy return to the murder scene reveals no corpse, so the brothers breathe easier–until Lemaire turns up shot to death in his car. John’s way of avoiding anything that might jeopardize his status as heir apparent to D&D is to throw TJ under the bus, blaming him for everything John himself has done and adding that you can’t trust anything his brother has said since he’s fallen off the wagon. TJ, who’s maintained his sobriety a day at a time for nearly two years, feels outraged, but neither the police investigating the murder nor his nearest and dearest care about his feelings. Forget the forgettable mystery, whose solution will leave you shrugging instead of gasping, and focus on the circular firing squad of the Devlins, and you’ll have a much better time than TJ. As an adjunct member says, “You’re not a family, you’re a force.” Exactly, though not in the way you’d expect. – Kirkus Review
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Happy reading!
Linda
–
Have questions or want to request a book?
Feel free to call the library! Our telephone number is 607-936-3713.
–
Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
The Digital Catalog, is an online catalog containing eBooks, eAudiobooks, and digital magazines. You can use your library card and checkout/download content to a PC; you can also use the companion app, Libby, to access titles on your mobile devices; so you can enjoy eBooks and eAudiobooks on the go!
All card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can check out items from the Digital Catalog.
The Hoopla Catalog features instant checkouts of eBooks, eAudiobooks, comic books, albums, movies and TV shows. Patron check out limit is 10 items per month.
Hoopla is a Southeast Steuben County Library service available to all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders.
The Hoopla App is available for Android or Apple mobile devices, PCs, Macs*, smart TVs & media streaming players.
Card holders of all Southern Tier Library System member libraries can access StarCat to search for and request materials available at libraries through out the Southern Tier Library System.
–
*You must have an active Internet connection to access Hoopla content on a Mac.
–
Tech Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
This blog post includes all the new titles that have been ordered by the library in April 2024.
Some of these titles have arrived and can be requested through StarCat; other titles are not yet published and/or are not yet ready to circulate (and thus are not yet found in StarCat).
So, if you see a book you’d love to read, but don’t find it listed in StarCat, send me an email and let me know which title you’d like to read; and I will place it on hold for you, when it is ready to circulate.
New Books is a monthly post, usually published the first weekday of each month; and occasionally published the second day of the month, as is the case this month!
The next New Books Coming Your Was post will be out on May 1, 2024.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 