Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Local Author Donates New Novel to Library - Local journalist Terry Franklin Phillips, Sr. has donated a copy of his new memoir-fiction to the Crawfordsville District Public Library. Its title is “Living in Victory: Finding Happiness in the Most Unlikely Places”. Phillips has caught the spirit of a rural Montgomery County town in 1955 and 1975 (and some of these special traits remain in small caring communities). The variety of characters and literary references bring alive the time setting. We follow a young man from being a college student/neophyte church pastor to becoming a professional photographer/reporter as he experiences true-to-life relationships with the town of Victory’s people. There’s respect for the era and the area. And there’s an added “special something” to ponder that begins and ends the story.

"The Common Good" by John Bower presents black and white photographs
in his seventh photo album showing Indiana sites representing "common efforts for the common good" in "common places where people from all walks of life can come together." He has driven 90,000 miles across the Hoosier state, and he wonders about the debates, sermons, and lectures that took place inside churches, libraries, schools and government buildings as these photos document our shared "history at the local level". The pictures honor decrepit, well-used places.

New novels abound for summer reading schedules. As bonny Prince Charlie and his rebel army ride into Edinburgh in 1745, Kerr family secrets begin to surface in a Scotland plot called "Here Burns My Candle" by Liz Higgs. "Stay a Little Longer" by Dorothy Garlock shows America's heartland at the end of World War I; a young woman has been changed by loss, is challenged by danger, and fights to claim her future. Elizabeth Berg's "The Last Time I Saw You" shows women and men reconnecting with one another and themselves at their 40th high school reunion. "Life in Defiance" is the final part of the Defiance Texas Trilogy by Mary DeMuth and addresses whether to reveal the truth (the name of a murderer) or live with the consequences of burying it forever. Anna Quindlen's "Every Last One" is a family story of an unexpected challenge needing team effort. Another family challenge comes to a single father's family written from three distinct points of view in "This Time Tomorrow" by Michael Jaime-Becerra. International adoption (an orphan in Mumbai cherished by an American doctor) is the theme of "Secret Daughter" by June Cross. "The Walk" by Richard Evans asks what you'd do if you lost everything at the same time. "The Hole We're In" by Gabrielle Zevin depicts an all-American family with little to admire but much to love about each member. In "Down to the Wire" by David Rosenfelt a journalist becomes a hero after an explosion, until he finds the event was a setup.

Scott Turow's "Innocent" the sequel to "Presumed Innocent" takes place twenty years after the first novel; and now the chief judge of an appellate court finds his wife dead, and his opponent from the past accuses him of murder for the second time, leading to a "courtroom at its most taut and explosive". The mystery "Fever Dream" has two authors, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child telling how a special agent mourning the loss of his wife by accident in Africa twelve years ago discovers she was murdered. In Victorian London a botanist realizes that a poison from her own conservatory caused a death, so she hires a fellow Arcane Society member to investigate in Amanda Quick's "The Perfect Poison". The fourth of the Enzo Files is "Freeze Frame" by Peter May telling of the long-ago promise made to a dying man that forensics ace Enzo Macleod must study twenty-years later..