check this out: fpl staff picks

Donald LeBlanc, Reference Librarian

The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by Jake Tapper

In The Outpost, acclaimed journalist Jake Tapper gives us the gripping saga of the group of brave, doomed soldiers who were stationed at (Combat Outpost Keating). Epic in ambition and conception, The Outpost reads like the grand war novels of the past---The Thin Red Line, The Naked and the Dead, The Things They Carried---packed with unforgettable characters, tension, violence, betrayal, love, and heartbreak.  Yet The Outpost is not fiction but brilliantly reported fact, the result of hundreds of firsthand interviews in Afghanistan and around the world. It is a masterpiece that, like Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” will be read a century from now by those hoping to understand what went wrong in Afghanistan, and the courage of those who fought there.

---from the book jacket 

Christina Hicks, Young Adult Librarian

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

From Maggie Stiefvater, the bestselling and acclaimed author of the Shiver trilogy and The Scorpio Races, comes a spellbinding new series where the inevitability of death and the nature of love lead us to a place we’ve never been before.

---from the book jacket

 

 

 

Michelle Farthing, Circulation

Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

Thomas De Quincey, infamous for his memoir Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, is the major suspect in a series of ferocious mass murders identical to ones that terrorized London forty-three years earlier.

The blueprint for the killings seems to be De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Desperate to clear his name but crippled by opium addiction, De Quincey is aided by his devoted daughter Emily and a pair of determined Scotland Yard detectives.

In Murder as a Fine Art, David Morrell plucks De Quincey, Victorian London, and the Ratcliffe Highway murders from history. Fogbound streets become a battleground between a literary star and a brilliant murderer, whose lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.

---from Amazon

 Matthew Riley, Assistant Library Director

Just Kids by Patti Smith

In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies.  An honest and moving story of youth and friendship, Smith brings the same unique, lyrical quality to Just Kids as she has to the rest of her formidable body of work—from her influential 1975 album Horses to her visual art and poetry.   ---from Amazon

 

 

Mary Keever, Circulation Manager

 

The Bat by Jo Nesbo

The electrifying first appearance of Jo Nesbø’s detective, Harry Hole.

Inspector Harry Hole of the Oslo Crime Squad is dispatched to Sydney to observe a murder case.  Harry is free to offer assistance, but he has firm instructions to stay out of trouble. The victim is a twenty-three year old Norwegian woman who is a minor celebrity back home. Never one to sit on the sidelines, Harry befriends one of the lead detectives, and one of the witnesses, as he is drawn deeper into the case.  Together, they discover that this is only the latest in a string of unsolved murders, and the pattern points toward a psychopath working his way across the country. As they circle closer and closer to the killer, Harry begins to fear that no one is safe, least of all those investigating the case.  ---from Amazon