Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

Former Resident Donates His New Book - A new Young Readers fiction is a gift to the Crawfordsville District Public Library from author Rick French, a Montgomery County native, Southmont High School graduate, and 14-year member of the Crawfordsville Police Department, now living in Avon. The story follows two young school friends in a small Midwestern town. One is inherently humble and unselfish, the other full of ego who eventually appreciates that his buddy was behind him to succeed "All Along".

Today notes new adult novels. "Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness" by Tilly Bagshawe finds the situation devastating when a terribly wealthy and respected financial wizard disappears from his yacht at sea. Janet Evanovich has issued a Stephanie Plum novel called "Sizzling Sixteen" that starts with the need to raise three quarters of a million dollars to settle a gambling debt owed by a bail bondsman.

Catherine Coulter's "Whiplash" is an FBI thriller that begins when a vital drug supply runs out and the manufacturer's foreign employee is found murdered behind the factory's U.S. headquarters. "The Lonely Polygamist" by Brady Udall is called An American Family Writ Large and features the husband of four wives and father to 28 children involved in an affair that threatens to destroy his family's future. In "The Girl Who Chased the Moon" by Sarah Allen two very different women discover how to find their place in the world, no matter how out of place they feel in a quirky little Southern town with a magical atmosphere.

"Reckless" by Andrew Gross shows three seemingly unrelated events that reveal a scary scheme stretching from New York to London to Central Europe. Andy Straka's "Kitty Hitter" is a Frank Pavlicek mystery; the ex-homicide detective and falconer is summoned to NYC to find a physician/animal rights activist's missing cat. "The Bride Collector" by Ted Dekker seeks a virtuoso killer carving a path of death across the West, killing beautiful women in the name of love.

"Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann is a National Book Award winner. Its cover quotes Dave Eggers; "There's so much passion and humor and pure life force on every page that you'll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed." It profiles New York City in the 1970s. Nelson DeMille's "The Lion", a sequel to "The Lion's Game" from 2000, brings back a Special Agent to confront his sworn enemy, a Libyan terrorist known as The Lion. "The Passage" by Justin Cronin is sci fi about a security breach at a secret U.S. government facility. "It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born."

On to nonfiction, "Fifty Dresses That Changed the World" by the Design Museum displays fashions from the Coco Chanel 1926 flapper dress to Wallis Simpson's 1937 Mainbacher skinny wedding dress to Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation dress, Versace's 1994 safety-pin dress, and finally Hussein Chalayon's LED dress of 2007.

"The Complete Idiot's Guide to Staging Your Home to Sell" makes your residence irresistible to buyers, according to Julie Dana and Marcia Turner. "Every Landlord's Legal Guide" covers leases, deposits, repairs, rent, privacy, terminations, disclosures, state laws, and discrimination by authors Marcia Stewart, Ralph Warner, and Janet Portman. Diana Palmer, Kasey Michaels and Catherine Mann offer "More Than Words: Stories of Hope" about everyday women from all walks of life making their communities a better place through their commitments.

How rainbow trout beguiled America and overran the world fills "An Entirely Synthetic Fish" written by Anders Halverson. "Versailles" by Antony Spawforth is a "biography of a palace", perhaps the world's most famous "Grand House".