Preview Shelf by Janice Clauser

Library News and Notable New Books

How to Write a Novel This Month - Did you know that November is National Novel Writers’ Month? The site nanowrimo.com invites authors to write 50,000 words during 30 days and join a free regional group for consultation.

Jean Auel's "The Land of Painted Caves" brings her ice-age epic Earth's Children series to a conclusion. Shana Abe's "The Time Weaver" tells of the drakon, a supersensual race of shapeshifters whose world exists side by side with our own.
A good wife/mother vanishes in "Now You See Her" by James Patterson. Marta Perry's "Murder in Plain Sight" focuses on secrets buried in Amish country (this is a large print version with its yellow dot on the cover). Learning to love again after heartbreak and loss is the basic subject in David Baldacci's "One Summer". "Carte Blanche: 007" is the title of the new James Bond novel by Jeffery Deaver; our hero is asked to protect the British Realm by any means necessary for an organization that operates independent of MI5 and MI6.

University of Indianapolis retired professor of English and creative writer Alice Friman's "Vinculum" is a small volume of poetry giving her ideas on religion, humor, science, and history "with precision".

November might lure you to mysteries. Nancy Rosenberg's "My Lost Daughter" depicts a judge torn between helping her daughter who is ill and tending to an important murder trial. Janet Evanovich's "Smokin' Seventeen", a Stephanie Plum novel, brings out a lady New Jersey bounty hunter's struggle; her name is on a killer's list just when she needs to choose between a good boyfriend and a bad boyfriend or dump them both. "No Rest for the Dead" "by" Jeff Abbott was actually written by a committee (26 writers taking turns writing chapters.) "Mr. Monk on the Couch" by Lee Goldberg presents the character we've known on TV along with his assistant who investigates a case because Monk doesn't see any reason to get involved. Iris Johansen's "Quinn" presents a plot with a former Navy SEAL and a CIA agent looking for a young girl together. Three of Kaki Warner's novels have arrived together; they are "Pieces of Sky", "Open Country", and "Heartbreak Creek" set on our western American frontier. The first in Rachael Herron's new knitting romance series is "How to Knit a Love Song", turning an inherited cottage into a knitshop. Three, new Eternity Springs novels by Emily March are "Heartache Falls", "Hummingbird Lake", and "Angel's Rest". Three family oriented stories are Jerry Eicher's "Ella's Wish" in the Little Valley series, "The Protector" by Shelley Gray from the Families of Honor series, and "The Way to a Man's Heart" by Mary Ellis in the Miller Family series.

A new history of World War II is "The Storm of War" from "Britain's finest military historian" Andrew Roberts, vividly noting the war's 2,174 days, $1.5 trillion cost, and 50 million deaths. Showing our country in peril from outlandish acts, the sharp-witted, comic plot gives a guided tour of "ten levels of cultural hell" in Laura Ingraham's "Of Thee I Zing". In "The Red Market" author Scott Carney tells about his five years tracing the lucrative and secretive trade in human bodies and body parts with all its implications making up a $6 billion annual business. "The King's Speech" by Mark Logue, from which the movie script was adapted, is the diaries of the Australian who taught British King George V how to speak to his subjects by treating his crippling speech defect. In "My Life in France" famous cook Julia Child tells that she didn't know a thing about food when she landed in France in 1948; this writing reveals her endearing personality.