On a clear October day, the American skies empty after hundreds of pilots refuse to fly, triggering a complete ground stop as authorities seek to explain an act of baffling coordination that the pilots insist was anything but planned. The pilots received disturbing, middle-of-the-night calls from their mothers, and each mother had a simple and urgent request: Do not fly today. But none of the mothers remember making them --- and some of them are dead. While the nation’s military chiefs and artificial intelligence experts mobilize in search of answers, a 16-year-old girl named Charlie on the coast of Maine watches a strange, silvery balloon drift across the water and toward her home. Her father’s dream of opening a craft brewery on an old airfield has been a disaster, and all she wants is an escape back to Brooklyn. She’s about to get much more than that.
For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being consigned to a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada’s greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment. THE KNOWING is the unfolding of history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of her country as only she can --- through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother, Annie Carpenter, and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.
In the early hours of March 24, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumble with tanks as soldiers seize the presidential palace and topple Argentina’s leader. The country is now under the control of a military junta, which holds power until 1983 and decimates a generation. One of the military’s most diabolical acts is kidnapping hundreds of pregnant women. After giving birth in captivity, the women are “disappeared,” and their babies are secretly given to other families. For mothers of pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law, the source of their grief is twofold --- the disappearances of their children and the theft of their grandchildren. A group of fierce grandmothers forms the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen infants and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them.
When Detective Inspector Jaye Hamilton stops at an Auckland liquor store for a bottle of champagne, it is supposed to be celebratory: his daughter, Addison, has just gotten engaged. Instead, he is suddenly gunned down at the register by a balaclava-clad assailant in what appears at first to be a random act. The getaway car is quickly recovered, containing the cell phone of a young Māori man, Toa Davis, who is immediately the object of an all-out police search. Jaye’s ex-wife, former Māori detective Hana Westerman, asks in on the investigation. The gun used in the assault is distinctive, and she learns that a local gang leader, Erwin Rendall --- who had threatened Hana in the past --- owns such a weapon. After Davis turns up dead, the hunt for Rendall is on.
In 1928, a young social worker and hobby pilot named Amelia Earhart arrived in the office of George Putnam, heir to the Putnam & Sons throne and hitmaker, on the hunt for the right woman for a secret flying mission across the Atlantic. A partnership --- professional and soon otherwise --- was born. THE AVIATOR AND THE SHOWMAN unveils the untold story of Amelia's decade-long marriage to Putnam, offering an intimate exploration of their relationship and the pivotal role it played in her enduring legacy. Their ahead-of-its time partnership supported her grand ambitions --- but also pressed her into more and more treacherous stunts to promote her books, influencing a certain recklessness up to and including her final flight.
The murders of four innocent college students attending the University of Idaho left us all with so many questions. Now, after more than 300 interviews, James Patterson and prize-winning journalist Vicky Ward finally have some answers. We know what it was like to live in Moscow, Idaho, on November 13, 2022, the day of the cold-blooded killings. We know what the local police and FBI did right. And what they did wrong. We’ve learned so much about the four heartbroken families --- the Mogens, Goncalveses, Kernodles and Chapins. And we have the backstory for Bryan Kohberger --- brilliant grad student, loner, apparent incel. Now you are the jury. The evidence is in.
For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America. The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Architectural Digest and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes and political beliefs the world over. Condé’s billionaire owner, Si Newhouse, and his stable of star editors, photographers and writers were the gatekeepers who decided what and who mattered, and they offered those opinions to tens of millions of readers every month. EMPIRE OF THE ELITE is full of fresh behind-the-scenes reporting about a plethora of boldface names and sets out to explain how Condé Nast established itself as a de facto American aristocracy, anointing an elite and dictating the culture they presided over.
War has taken everything from physicist Keizo Kan. His young daughter was killed in the Great Tokyo Air Raid, and now his Japanese American wife, Noriko, has been imprisoned by the brutal Thought Police. An American bomber, downed over Japan on the first day of August 1945, offers the scientist a surprising chance at salvation. The Imperial Army dispatches him to examine an unusual device recovered from the plane’s wreckage --- a bomb containing uranium --- and tells him that if he can unlock its mysteries, his wife will be released. Desperate to stave off Japan’s surrender to the Allies, the army will stop at nothing to harness the weapon’s unimaginable power. They order Kan to prepare the bomb for manual detonation over a target --- a suicide mission that will strike a devastating blow against the Americans.
In seven days Jet Mason will be dead. Jet is the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Woodstock, Vermont. Twenty-seven years old, she’s still waiting for her life to begin. I’ll do it later, she always says. She has time. Until Halloween night, when Jet is violently attacked by an unseen intruder. She suffers a catastrophic head injury. The doctor is certain that within a week, the injury will trigger a deadly aneurysm. Jet has never thought of herself as having enemies. But now she looks at everyone in a new light: her family, her former best friend turned sister-in-law, her ex-boyfriend. She has at most seven days, and as her condition deteriorates, she has only her childhood friend, Billy, for help. But nevertheless, she’s absolutely determined to finally finish something: Jet is going to solve her own murder.
When Savvy Summers first opened Essie's soul food café, she never expected her customer-favorite sweet potato pie to become the center of a murder investigation. But when Grandy Jaspers, the 75-year-old neighborhood womanizer, drops dead at table two, she suddenly has more to worry about than just maintaining Essie's reputation for the finest soul food in the Chicagoland area. Even as the police deem Grandy’s death an accident, Savvy quickly finds herself --- and her beloved café --- in the middle of an entire city’s worth of bad press. Desperate to clear her name and keep her business afloat, Savvy and her snooping assistant manager, Penny Lopés, take it upon themselves to find who really killed Grandy.
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Coming Soon
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August's Books on Screen roundup includes the films The Thursday Murder Club, My Oxford Year and Night Always Comes on Netflix, the Providence Falls trilogy on Hallmark, The Map That Leads to You on Prime Video, and She Rides Shotgun in theaters; the conclusion of "And Just Like That..." on HBO Max and "The Institute" on MGM+; the series premieres of "Outlander: Blood of My Blood" on STARZ and "The Terminal List: Dark Wolf" on Prime Video; the season premieres of "The Marlow Murder Club" on PBS "Masterpiece" and "My Life with the Walter Boys" on Netflix; and the DVD/Blu-ray releases of The King of Kings and How to Train Your Dragon.