On Our Shelves: New Cozy Mysteries

Winter’s the perfect  time to curl up with a cozy mystery. Here are some of the newest additions to our collection:

Books, Cooks, and Crooks (A Novel Idea Mystery) by Lucy Arlington

A Fatal Slip (A Sweet Nothings Lingerie Mystery) by Meg London

Throw In The Trowel (A Flower Shop Mystery) by Kate Collins

Town In A Strawberry Swirl (A Candy Holliday Murder Mystery) by B.B. Haywood

Days of Wine and Roquefort (A Cheese Shop Mystery) by Avery Aames

Scandal In Skibbereen (A County Cork Mystery) by Sheila Connolly

Murder With Ganache (A Key West Food Critic Mystery) by Lucy Burdette

A Tale of Two Biddies (A League of Literary Ladies Mystery) by Kylie Logan

Beewitched (A Queen Bee Mystery) by Hannah Reed

A Tough Nut to Kill (A Nut House Mystery) by Elizabeth Lee

Poison at the PTA by Laura Alden

Book Club Picks – Humor

smileIs your book club looking for some titles to cheer them up during the dreary winter season?  Here are a few titles they might enjoy reading.

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion – Meet Don Tillman, a brilliant yet socially challenged professor of genetics, who’s decided it’s time he found a wife. And so, in the orderly, evidence-based manner with which Don approaches all things, he designs the Wife Project to find his perfect partner: a sixteen-page, scientifically valid survey to filter out the drinkers, the smokers, the late arrivers.

Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple – Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she’s a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she’s a disgrace; to design mavens, she’s a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Little Bitty Lies by Mary Kay Andrews –  A tantalizing tale about an abandoned Atlanta housewife and mother who tells one tiny white lie that sets her world spiraling outrageously out of control.

Very Valentineby Adriana Trigiani – The adventures of an extraordinary and unforgettable woman as she attempts to rescue her family’s struggling shoe business and find love at the same time.

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boyby Helen Fielding –  Bridget Jones stumbles through the challenges of loss, single motherhood, tweeting, texting, technology, and rediscovering her sexuality in—Warning! Bad, outdated phrase approaching!—middle age.

The Good House by Ann Leary – Hildy Good is a lifelong resident of a small community on the rocky coast of Boston’s North Shore, she knows pretty much everything about everyone.  A successful real-estate broker, mother, and grandmother, her days are full. But her nights have become lonely ever since her daughters, convinced their mother was drinking too much, sent her off to rehab.  Now she’s in recovery—more or less.

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen – A tale at once fiercely pointed and wickedly funny in which the greedy, the corrupt, and the degraders of what’s left of pristine Florida—now, of the Bahamas as well—get their comeuppance in mordantly ingenious, diabolically entertaining fashion.

Truth In Advertising by John Kennedy – Finbar Dolan is lost and lonely. Except he doesn’t know it. Despite escaping his blue-collar Boston upbringing to carve out a mildly successful career at a Madison Avenue ad agency, he’s a bit of a mess and closing in on forty. He’s recently called off his wedding. Now, a few days before Christmas, he’s forced to cancel a long-postponed vacation in order to write, produce, and edit a Superbowl commercial for his diaper account in record time.

Kind of Kin by Rilla Askew – A funny and poignant novel that explores what happens when upstanding people are pushed too far—and how an ad-hoc family, and ultimately, an entire town, will unite to protect its own.

This Is When I Leave You by Jonathon Tropper – A riotously funny, emotionally raw novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind-whether we like it or not.

Louise Reads: The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion

Don Tillman, 39 and a professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. His lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not “wired” for romance. Logically, though, he concedes to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner through an exhaustive 16-page survey he has designed to scientifically eliminate all incompatible candidates.

Rosie Jarman would never make it past page one of Don’s survey. A smoking, drinking, disorganized vegetarian, she is completely unsuitable. Yet Don feels somehow compelled to use his expertise in DNA analysis to assist her with a project of her own – identifying her biological father. An unlikely friendship develops between them as they work together on The Father Project.

In The Rosie Project, Don is our narrator, and seeing the story from his point of view is part of the charm of this book. Similar to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night -Time and Silver Linings Playbook, the narrator of this story is wired differently than most people.  To say Don has social difficulties is an understatement.  In an early scene, Don is discussing a lecture he’d recently given at the university:

“Claudia asked whether I’d enjoyed the Asperger’s lecture… [I] told her I had found the subject fascinating. “Did the symptoms remind you of anyone?” she asked.  They certainly did. They were an almost perfect description of Lazlo Hevesi in the Physics department.”
 

Fans of the television series “The Big Bang Theory” may notice some similarities to the character Sheldon Cooper from that show.  For example, in a scene where Don is explaining his scheduled meal system to Rosie after a meeting at a restaurant goes comically awry:

“So you cook this same meal every Tuesday, right?”
“Correct.” I listed the eight major advantages of the Standardized Meal System:
  1. No need to accumulate recipe books.
  2. Standardized shopping list – hence very efficient shopping.
  3. Almost zero waste – nothing in the refrigerator or pantry unless required for one of the recipes.
  4. Diet planned and nutritionally balanced in advance.
  5. No time wasted wondering what to cook.
  6. No mistakes, no unpleasant surprises.
  7. Excellent food, superior to most restaurants at a much lower price (see point 3).
  8. Minimum cognitive load required.

Debut novelist Graeme Simsion has written a warm-hearted, laugh-out-loud funny, and surprisingly poignant story. No huge surprises, The Rosie Project follows many of the tropes that are the stock-in-trade of romantic comedies,  but I was still caught up in the story from the first words and it never lagged or disappointed. A feel-good book that delivered!  Audiobook listeners will enjoy first-time narrator Dan O’Grady’s performance, his Australian accent (the story is set in Melbourne) added an authentic touch.

If you like The Rosie Project, you may also enjoy:

The Big Bang Theory starring Johnny Galecki, Kaley Cuoco, Jim Parsons, Simon Helberg, and Kunal Nayyar

The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

What to Read After, or While Waiting for, The Fault in Our Stars

Are you among the masses that read and loved The Fault in Our Stars by John Green? If not, know that the book is emotionally charged. While considered a young adult novel because of the ages of the two main characters, the book has been read and raved about from teens and adults alike. It is not an easy read, but one that is worth the emotional investment that it seems to require. The book is about sixteen year old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, who has accepted her terminal diagnosis. Then a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

Going Bovine by Libba Bray
Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen year-old who, after being diagnosed with Creutzfeld Jakob’s (aka mad cow) disease, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital in an attempt to find a cure.

You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis
Teenaged Luna, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with her movie director father, tries to piece together the death of her mother with the seven unheard messages left on her forgotten cell phone.

Me & Earl & the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews
Seventeen-year-old Greg has managed to become part of every social group at his Pittsburgh high school without having any friends, but his life changes when his mother forces him to befriend Rachel, a girl he once knew in Hebrew school who has leukemia.

How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr
Told from their own viewpoints, seventeen-year-old Jill, in grief over the loss of her father, and Mandy, nearly nineteen, are thrown together when Jill’s mother agrees to adopt Mandy’s unborn child but nothing turns out as they had anticipated.

A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend by Emily Horner
As she tries to sort out her feelings of love, seventeen-year-old Cass, a spunky math genius with an introverted streak, finds a way to memorialize her dead best friend.

Before I Die by Jenny Downham
A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.

Hate List by Jennifer Brown
Sixteen-year-old Valerie, whose boyfriend Nick committed a school shooting at the end of their junior year, struggles to cope with integrating herself back into high school life, unsure herself whether she was a hero or a villain.

Still looking for more? Then you might also be interested in: Saving June by Hannah Harrington, Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson, Ask the Passengers by A S King, Every Day by David Levithan, Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn, David Levithan,  The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan, Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A S King,  Just One Day by Gayle Forman, Where She Went by Gayle Forman, The Moon and More by Sarah Dessen, Hold Me Closer, Necromancer Lish McBride,  Wonder by R J Palacio, The Cardturner by Louis Sachar, and Speechless by Hannah Harrington.

Top Audiobook Picks Around the World

Do they even HAVE audiobooks in other countries?  They most certainly do!  Here are the number-one audiobook requests from iTunes around the world, so grab your earphones and go global with these best sellers. Can’t find it? Request it!  We’d be happy to get it for you!

UK Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – Helen Fielding   Bridget Jones has hit middle age, facing the challenges of single parenthood and re-entering the dating world with all its technological traps in this funny and enjoyable sequel.

FranceInferno   Brown takes on Dante Alighieri and his Divine Comedy as Robert Langdon races through Italy to solve the clues and save the world from a terrorist plot to infect the world in his latest mystery thriller.

CanadaWinners – Danielle Steele    Steele weaves together a tale of loneliness and companionship as a surgeon and her patient’s father are faced with grief and tragedy, and learn to live again.

Ireland The Garden Party and Other Stories – Maeve Binchy.     A collection of short stories by best-selling author Maeve Binchy. Stories included are: The Garden Party read by Niamh Cusack; The Special Sale read by Dervla Kirwan; The Sensible Celebration read by Doreen Hepburn and Dollys Mother read by Stella McCusker.

Portugal The Blood Crows Simon Scarrow    Two thousand years ago, Prefect Cato fights with native tribes to maintain Roman control over Londinium and England. Back in Rome, Emperor Claudius struggles to maintain his empire with or without England.

SwedenThe Alchemist – Paulo Coelho     Santiago, a simple Andalusian shepherd boy, dreams of  finding the greatest worldly treasure ever discovered. From Spain he travels to the markets of Tangiers, across the Egyptian desert,  to a fateful encounter with the mysterious alchemist.

NetherlandsThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon    A moderately autistic boy witnesses a crime, and struggles to make understanding of what he saw.

Greece Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach    The 197o best-seller about the spiritual journey of a seagull, who thinks soaring is a loftier goal in life than eating. A short book of few words, it packs a powerful punch as the seagull learns to realize that sometimes personal goals may not be popular with those around you, but the journey of self-discovery is sometimes the loftiest goal of all.

GermanyThe 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson.    In order to avoid his 100th birthday party, Allan Karlsson climbs out the window of his room at the nursing home, heads to the bus stop, steals a suitcase from a fellow passenger and winds up on a strange and sometimes dangerous adventure, which is nothing new to a man with a lot of history under his belt.

DenmarkThe Preacher by Camilla Lackberg     A child stumbles upon the body of a murdered woman.  Soon two more bodies are discovered, and another girl disappears.  Can the constable find the murderer and find the missing girl before it’s too late?