Hi everyone, here are our five suggested reads of the week!
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Ash Dark as Night by Gary Phillips
The times, they are a-changing in Phillips’s outstanding sequel to One-Shot Harry (2022). It’s August 1965: Vietnam is heating up; the civil rights movement is marching forward. Escalating tensions between the police and Black Americans have boiled over most recently in the Watts Riots. Black photographer Harry Ingram is in Los Angeles to document the unrest and winds up capturing the police shooting of unarmed activist Faraday Zinum. The widely reproduced photo brings Harry newfound fame, as well as the unwelcome attention of LAPD chief William Parker and his intelligence division. Meanwhile, an acquaintance hires Harry to look into the disappearance of her business associate Moses Tolbert, who ran a building company in the Watts neighborhood and vanished during the riots. As Harry investigates, stumbling into citywide conspiracies along the way, he finds that he has a natural aptitude for the work, and ponders the possibility of becoming a private detective full-time. Phillips folds real historical figures, including TV journalist Louis Lomax, and events into a complex narrative of shifting alliances that captures the urgency and volatility of the mid-’60s. The results rank with the best of Walter Mosley in the canon of Los Angeles noir. Agent: David Hale Smith, InkWell Management. – Starred Publishers Weekly Review
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Inner City Blues by Paula L. Woods
The award-winning first book in the series featuring black LAPD homicide detective Charlotte Justice.
Meet Detective Charlotte Justice, a black woman in the very white, very male, and sometimes very racist Los Angeles Police Department. The time is 48 hours into the epochal L.A. riots and she and her fellow officers are exhausted. She saves the curfew-breaking black doctor Lance Mitchell from a potentially lethal beating from some white officers—only to discover nearby the body of one-time radical Cinque Lewis, a thug who years before had murdered her husband and young daughter. Was it a random shooting or was Mitchell responsible? And what had brought Lewis back to a city he’d long since fled?
Charlotte’s quest for the truth behind Cinque’s death will set her at odds with the LAPD hierarchy, plunge her into the intricacies of everything from L.A.’s gang-banging politics to its black blue-bloods, and lead her into deep emotional waters with Mitchell’s partner (and her old flame), Dr. Aubrey Scott.
In Charlotte Justice, Paula L. Woods has created a tough, tart, but also vulnerable heroine sure to draw comparisons to such classic figures as Easy Rawlins and Kinsey Milhone, but a true original as well.
Winner of the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel from Mystery Readers International.
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The Island Club by Nicola Harris
On California’s Balboa Island in the 1950s, three different women strive to make the best of their strenuous situations. Milly moved to the island in hopes that she would have more quality time with her husband, who works in the movie business in L.A. Despite her plans for family dinners and beach trips, she is alone most of the time as he barely comes home from work. Sylvia, a pillar in the social community, has started a tennis club with her husband, hoping to boost membership and boost their already fulfilling income. Sylvia’s husband has a habit of playing poker, and with a shattering loss, he puts the family in danger and the club at risk of closure. Adele, once a famous tennis pro who left the profession due to a scandal that ruined her career, slowly begins to coach women at the tennis club but keeps her identity a secret. Harrison (Hotel Laguna, 2023) excels at creating compelling characters. These women struggle with loneliness and sexism, but Harrison focuses on their resilience and strength and the powerful bonds of female friendship.- Booklist Review
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Mr. Moonlight: Brian Epstein and the Making of the Beatles by Philip Norman
There will never be another pop manager like Brian Epstein, the young record retailer from Liverpool behind the 20th century’s greatest romance. Having achieved his much-derided aim of making the Beatles “bigger than Elvis,” Brian went on to make them bigger than any earthly instrument could measure. Only a handful of years older, he nonetheless referred them as “The Boys,” protecting and pampering them like the children he could never hope to have.
Brian’s achievement in a profession in which he had no experience, and for which nor rulebook existed, remains jaw-dropping. A devout classical music fan, he was nonetheless solely responsible for a new genre of pop that was to change its course, and Britain’s international image, forever—yet, disgracefully, earn him no public honor nor even thanks.
Mr. Moonlight draws on a cache of exclusive interviews with those closest to Brain, including his mother, Queenie, and brother, Clive, to tell the story of this hugely complex, self-contradictory, and ultimately tragic character. This revelatory narrative explores the unplumbed depths of Brian’s many trials and tribulations—how he almost lost the Beatles to organized crime, the antisemitism and homophobia he had to face even at the height of his success, his complex relationship with John Lennon that led to their reckless “Spanish Honeymoon”—and sheds new light on Brian’s mysterious, lonely death in the throes of the so-called Summer of Love.
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A Year of Marvelous Ways by Sarah Winman
In this latest from Winman (Still Life), a war-weary young man and a sage older woman come together in a journey of recovery. Francis Drake (not the explorer), a lucky survivor of World War II, finally arrives back in England with a letter entrusted to him by a dying soldier with a plea to deliver it to his father in Cornwall. Making his way there, Drake is sidetracked after catching sight of Missy Hall, his childhood companion and the love of his life. She invites him up to her room, where they spend the night together. But by the next day, she has disappeared again. Now bereft, drunk, and much the worse for wear, Drake washes up on the shores of St. Ophere, a tiny Cornish hamlet where an 89-year-old woman named Marvelous Ways seems to have been waiting for him. With hearty soups and herbal remedies, she nurses him back to health while spinning out tales about her life and lost loves.
VERDICT Once again, Winman delivers historical fiction that memorably evokes the sweetness and sorrow of times past.–Library Journal Review
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Happy reading!
Linda Reimer, SSCL
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Note: Book summaries are from the respective publishers unless otherwise specified.
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Information on the four library catalogs
The Digital Catalog aka Libby: https://stls.overdrive.com/
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.
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Hoopla Catalog: https://www.hoopladigital.com/
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.
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Kanopy Catalog: https://www.kanopy.com/en
The Kanopy Catalog features thousands of streaming videos available on demand.
The Kanopy Catalog is available for all Southern Tier Library System member library card holders, including all Southeast Steuben County Library card holders!
You can access the Kanopy Catalog through a web browser, or download the app to your phone, tablet or media streaming player (i.e. Roku, Google or Fire TV).
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StarCat: The catalog of physical/traditional library materials: https://starcat.stls.org
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.
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Have questions about how to access Internet based content (i.e. eBooks, eAudios)? Feel free to drop by the Reference Desk or call the library and we will assist you! The library’s telephone number is: 607-936-3713.
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Tech & Book Talk is a Southeast Steuben County Library blog.
Tech & Book Talk at SSCL 