Selected New Books in Ekstrom Library: 2020

On the Back of a Turtle is an all-inclusive history of the Huron-Wyandot people--from before the creation of the Great Island, now called North America, to the present day. As characters and tribes emerge in the Huron-Wyandot's oral tradition of creation, and take their respective places upon the Great Island, the author reveals the most difficult element of the Huron-Wyandot's history: how the tribal name was obtained. The reader will be fascinated to learn how one of the smallest tribes, birthed amid the Iroquois Wars, rose to become one of the most respected and influential tribes of North America.

Legendary travel writer Paul Theroux drives the entire length of the US-Mexico border, then goes deep into the hinterland to uncover the rich, layered world behind today's brutal headlines. Just south of the Arizona border, in the desert region of Sonora, he finds a place brimming with vitality, yet visibly marked by both the US Border Patrol looming to the north and mounting discord from within. Theroux stops to talk with residents, visits Zapotec mill workers in the highlands, and attends a Zapatista party meeting, communing with people of all stripes who remain south of the border even as their families brave the journey north.

In his first and only official autobiography, music icon Elton John reveals the truth about his extraordinary life, from his rollercoaster lifestyle as shown in the film Rocketman, to becoming a living legend. In Me, Elton also writes powerfully about getting clean and changing his life, about finding love with David Furnish and becoming a father. In a voice that is warm, humble, and open, this is Elton on his music and his relationships, his passions and his mistakes.

Electra d'Aplièse is a top model who seems to have it all: beauty, fame, and wealth. When her father dies, she turns to alcohol and drugs to ease the pain. As friends and colleagues fear for her health, Electra receives a shocking letter from a stranger who claims to be her grandmother. Featuring Lucinda Riley's "engaging and mesmerizing" (Library Journal, starred review) storytelling and filled with unforgettable and moving characters, The Sun Sister explores how love can cross seemingly impossible boundaries.

Librarian Martha Storm has always found it easier to connect with books than people. All of that changes when a book of fairy tales arrives on her doorstep. Inside, Martha finds a dedication written to her by her grandmother Zelda--who died under mysterious circumstances years earlier. When Martha discovers a clue within the book that her grandmother may still be alive, she becomes determined to discover the truth.

When Amos Decker and his FBI colleague Alex Jamison are called to London, North Dakota, they instantly sense that the thriving fracking town is ripe for trouble. The promise of a second gold rush has attracted an onslaught of newcomers all hoping for a windfall, and the community is growing faster than houses can be built. The sudden boom has also brought a slew of problems with it, including drugs, property crimes, prostitution -- and now murder.

Nick Heller is at the top of his game when he receives word that his old army buddy Sean has died of an overdose. Then at Sean's funeral, a woman, the daughter of a pharmaceutical kingpin worth billions, approaches Nick with a job. Now she wants to become a whistleblower, exposing her father and his company for burying evidence that its biggest money-maker was dangerously addictive. All Nick has to do is find the document that proves the family knew the drug's dangers. But Nick soon realizes that the sins of the patriarch are just the beginning.

Trained as an off-the-books government assassin and spoken about only in whispers, Evan Smoak was one of the most talented and feared men in the Program. But he broke free and reinvented himself as The Nowhere Man, known for only helping the truly desperate. If anyone is truly desperate, it's Max Merriweather. His cousin has been brutally murdered, leaving Max an envelope that contains nothing but a mysterious key. However, someone really wants that key, badly enough that Max is in deadly danger.

Clay Edison has his hands full. He's got a new baby who won't sleep. He's working the graveyard shift. Then comes the first call. Workers demolishing a local park have made a haunting discovery: the decades-old skeleton of a child. No sooner has Clay begun to investigate than he receives a second call--this one from a local businessman, wondering if the body could belong to his sister. She went missing fifty years ago, the man says. And things only get stranger from there.

Three victims, three bullets, three cities. The shooters' aim is as fearsomely precise as their target selection. When Lindsay realizes that the fallen men and women excel in a lucrative, criminal activity, she leads the charge in the manhunt for the killers. As the casualty list expands, fear and fascination with this suspicious shooting gallery galvanizes the country. The victims were no angels, but are the shooters villains . . . or heroes?

When the Royal Thai Police storm a hotel and arrest Rafael de Bourbon for blackmail and extortion, "Rafa" is thrown into Bangkok's most notorious jail. In desperation, he reaches out to the one man who can prove his innocence. Simon Riske, ex-con and now "private spy," owes Rafa his life. Riske rushes to Bangkok to secure his friend's release and overnight, finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue larger and more dangerous than he could imagine.

Louisiana, 1875: In the tumultuous era of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Hannie, a freed slave; Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now destitute plantation; and Juneau Jane, Lavinia's Creole half sister. For Lavinia and Juneau Jane, the journey is one of stolen inheritance and financial desperation, but for Hannie, torn from her mother and siblings before slavery's end, the pilgrimage west reignites an agonizing question: Could her long-lost family still be out there?

In Oak Knoll, a verdant, tight-knit North Carolina neighborhood, professor of forestry and ecology Valerie Alston-Holt is raising her bright and talented biracial son, Xavier, who's headed to college in the fall. All is well until the Whitmans--a family with new money and a secretly troubled teenage daughter--raze the house and trees next door to build themselves a showplace. With little in common except a property line, these two families quickly find themselves at odds: first, over an historic oak tree in Valerie's yard, and soon after, the blossoming romance between their two teenagers.

A moving and complicated love story for our time, The Reckless Oath We Made redefines what it means to be heroic. Zee has never admitted to needing anybody. But she needs Gentry. Her tough exterior shelters a heart that's loyal to the point of self-destruction, while autistic Gentry wears his heart on his sleeve, including his desire to protect Zee at all costs. When an abduction tears Zee's family apart, she turns to Gentry--and sets in motion a journey and a love that will change their lives forever.

The world has changed around seventy-nine-year-old librarian Millicent Carmichael. Missy once led a busy life driven by two children, an accomplished husband, and a Classics degree from Cambridge. Now her husband is gone, her daughter is estranged after an argument, and her son has moved to his wife's native Australia, taking Missy's beloved only grandchild half-a-world away. The last thing Missy expects is for two perfect strangers and one spirited dog to show Missy just how much love she still has to give.

When Maeve Stephens learns her birth mother has left her a house, a vintage VW Beetle, and a marauding cat, in the small town of Timber Creek, Washington, she packs up to discover the truth about her past. She arrives to the sight of a cheerful bulldog abandoned on her front porch, a reclusive but tempting author living next door, and a set of ready-made friends at the St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets. But there's something that doesn't sit right with Maeve -- what's the secret that her mother had hidden?

One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two young sisters go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime.

The world's largest bounty has just been placed upon America's top spy. His only hope for survival is to outwit, outrun, and outlast his enemies long enough to get to the truth. But for Scot Harvath to accomplish his most dangerous mission ever--one that has already claimed the lives of the people closest to him, including his new wife--he's going to need help--a lot of it. Not knowing whom he can trust, Harvath finds an unlikely ally in Norwegian intelligence operative Sølvi Kolstad. Just as smart, just as deadly, and just as determined, she not only has the skills, but also the broken, troubled past to match Harvath's own.

In 1995 Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, Nainoa Flores falls overboard a cruise ship into the Pacific Ocean. Noa is gingerly delivered back to his mother in the jaws of a shark. Nainoa's family hails his rescue as a sign from ancient Hawaiian gods--a belief that is validated after he exhibits puzzling new abilities. But as time passes, this divine favor drives the family apart. When supernatural events revisit the Flores family in Hawai'i they are all forced to reckon with the bonds of family, the meaning of heritage, and the cost of survival.

It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine's Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field--an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen airplanes appeared in the skies over Baghdad. Or, rather, didn't appear. They arrived in the dark, their black outlines cloaking them from sight. More importantly, their odd, angular shapes, which made them look like flying origami, rendered them undetectable to Iraq's formidable air defenses. Stealth technology, developed during the decades before Desert Storm, had arrived. To American strategists at the outset of the Cold War, this seemingly ultimate way to gain ascendance over the USSR was only a question.

Pediatrician Kent Abner received a package--inside was a golden egg that could be opened into two halves. When he pried it apart, highly toxic airborne fumes entered his body--and killed him. After Eve Dallas calls the hazmat team--it's time to look into Dr. Abner's past and relationships. Not every victim Eve encounters is an angel, but it seems that Abner came pretty close--though he did ruffle some feathers over the years by taking stands for the weak and defenseless. While the lab tries to identify the deadly toxin, Eve hunts for the sender.

The simplest beginnings can unravel a life. For Sam Capra, it is the moment a beautiful young woman walks into his San Francisco bar. Sam doesn't want trouble. An ex-CIA agent, his only desire now is to build a quiet, peaceful home for himself and his infant son. But Diana Keene is no ordinary customer. She's pursued by two gunmen, and when she finds Sam, she whispers an urgent, desperate plea: "Help me." And without any warning, Sam is thrust into a fight for his life.

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no? This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat.

In 1953, Dr. Charles Wilson, a government scientist, died when he "jumped or fell" from the ninth floor of a Washington hotel. As his wife and children grieve, the details of the incident remain buried for twenty-two years. With the release of the Rockefeller Commission report on illegal CIA activities in 1975, the Wilson case suddenly becomes news again. Wilson's family and the public are demanding answers, especially as some come to suspect the CIA of foul play, and agents in the CIA, FBI, and White House will do anything to make sure the truth doesn't get out.

Portia Cuthcart never intended to leave Texas. Her dream was to run the Glass Kitchen restaurant her grandmother built decades ago. But after a string of betrayals, Portia starts a new life in Manhattan and promises to never cook again. When she moves into a dilapidated brownstone on the Upper West Side, she meets twelve-year-old Ariel and her widowed father Gabriel, a man trying to raise two daughters on his own. Soon, Portia's back into a world of magical food and swirling emotions, where she must confront everything she has been running from.

In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his estranged father's funeral takes place. On the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family too. Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death. The case calls Matthew back to the people and places of his past, as deadly secrets hidden at their hearts are revealed.

LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis has solved a lot of murder cases. On many of them--the ones he calls "different"--he taps the brain of brilliant psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware. But neither Alex nor Milo are prepared for what they find on an early morning call to a deserted mansion in Bel Air. Four people have been slaughtered and left displayed bizarrely and horrifically in a stretch limousine. As Alex and Milo make their way through blind alleys and mazes baited with misdirection, they encounter a crime so vicious that it stretches the definitions of evil.

Journalist Tatiana Petrovna is on the move. Arkady Renko, iconic Moscow investigator and Tatiana's part-time lover, hasn't seen her since she left on assignment over a month ago. When she doesn't arrive on her scheduled train, he's positive something is wrong. No one else thinks Renko should be worried--Tatiana is known to disappear during deep assignments--but he knows her enemies all too well and the criminal lengths they'll go to keep her quiet. Renko embarks on a dangerous journey to find Tatiana and bring her back.

We Are Water is a disquieting and ultimately uplifting novel about a marriage, a family, and human resilience in the face of tragedy. After 27 years of marriage and three children, Anna Oh--wife, mother, outsider artist--has fallen in love with Viveca, the wealthy Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her success. They plan to wed in the Oh family's hometown of Three Rivers in Connecticut. But the wedding provokes some very mixed reactions and opens a Pandora's Box of toxic secrets--dark and painful truths that have festered below the surface of the Ohs' lives.

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is an outstanding collection of stories about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture. These stories challenge conceptions of Hurston as an author of rural fiction and include gems that flash with her biting, satiric humor, as well as more serious tales reflective of the cultural currents of Hurston's world.

When two sisters discover a shocking secret about their father, Luella, the brazen elder sister, becomes emboldened to do as she pleases. Her rebellion comes with consequences, and one morning Luella is mysteriously gone. Effie suspects her father has sent Luella to the House of Mercy and hatches a plan to get herself committed to save her sister. But she made a miscalculation, and with no one to believe her story, Effie's own escape seems impossible--unless she can trust an enigmatic girl named Mable.

Described only as "a senior official in the Trump administration," the author provides eyewitness insight into White House chaos, administration instability, and the people working to keep Donald Trump's reckless impulses in check. With the 2020 election on the horizon, Anonymous is speaking out once again. In this book, the original author pulls back the curtain even further, offering a first-of-its-kind look at the president and his record -- a must-read before Election Day.

Anna Trent may be a supervisor in a chocolate factory...but that doesn't necessarily mean she knows how to make chocolate. So when a fateful accident gives her the opportunity to work at the most elite chocolatier in Paris--Le Chapeau Chocolat--Anna expects to be outed as a fraud. While she may never match her boss in the kitchen, Anna thinks she might be able to give him a second chance at love.

Kate Marshall was a promising young police detective when she caught the notorious Nine Elms serial killer. But her greatest victory suddenly turned into a nightmare and Kate could only watch as her career ended in scandal. Fifteen years later, Kate is a lecturer at a small coastal English university where a copycat killer has taken up the Nine Elms mantle. This time there's much more on the line: Kate was the original killer's intended fifth victim...and his successor means to finish the job.

Alexandr, Christine, Zachary, and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine receive a call from a distraught Lydia: Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored and an inconsolable Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find that it warps their relationships, as old grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

Miranda's life and career has been a roller-coaster ride. Her successful rise to the top of the booming lifestyle industry as a social media influencer led to a humiliating fall after a controversial product she endorsed flopped. Desperate to get away from the hate-spewing trolls shaming her on the internet, she receives a mysterious letter from a young cousin in England that plunges her into a dark family mystery.

From Lynn Cullen comes a powerful novel set in the Midwest during the Great Depression, about two sisters bound together by love, duty, and pain. An emotional journey of redemption, inner strength, and the ties that bind families together, for better or worse, The Sisters of Summit Avenue is a heartfelt love letter to mothers, daughters, and sisters everywhere.

Occupied Paris, 1942. Just before he dies, a man being chased by the Gestapo hands off a strange-looking document to the unsuspecting novelist Paul Ricard. It looks like a blueprint of a part for a military weapon, one that might have important information for the Allied forces. Ricard realizes he must try to get the diagram into the hands of members of the resistance network. Ricard finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into anti-Nazi efforts and increasingly dangerous espionage assignments.

A video of Deputy Eve Ronin's arrest of an abusive movie star goes viral, turning her into a popular hero at a time when the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is plagued by scandal. The sheriff, desperate for more positive press, makes Eve the youngest female homicide detective in the department's history. Her first case comes when she is called to the blood-splattered home of a missing single mother and her two kids. The horrific carnage screams multiple murder--but there are no corpses.

Nia, a gifted but desperately lonely hacker, is living in isolation with her strict single dad. Cameron is on a quest for YouTube fame as a vlogger. While recording his latest video, he is knocked out by lightning in a freak storm. When Cameron awakens, he discovers the ability to manipulate computers and electronics with his mind. After a chance meeting online, the two teenagers--one born with extraordinary gifts, one unwillingly transformed--join together to right wrongs in the world.

By age twenty, Alex Stern is the sole survivor of a horrific, unsolved multiple homicide. But at her hospital bed, Alex is offered a second chance: to attend Yale on a full ride. Still searching for answers, Alex arrives in New Haven tasked by her mysterious benefactors with monitoring the activities of Yale's secret societies. But their occult activities are more sinister and extraordinary than any paranoid imagination might conceive. They tamper with forbidden magic. They raise the dead. And, sometimes, they prey on the living.

A year ago, Naomi, the investigator with an uncanny ability for finding missing children, made a promise that she would not take another case until she finds the younger sister who has been missing for years. The search takes her to Portland, Oregon, where scores of homeless children wander the streets. The sharp-eyed investigator soon discovers that young girls have been going missing for months. Though she doesn't want to get involved, Naomi is unable to resist the pull of children in need.

In a sprawling mansion filled with peculiar treasures, January Scaller is a curiosity herself. As the ward of the wealthy Mr. Locke, she feels little different from the artifacts that decorate the halls: carefully maintained, largely ignored, and utterly out of place. Then she finds a strange book. A book that carries the scent of other worlds, and tells a tale of secret doors, of love, adventure and danger.

Paris, 1919. Margot Rosenthal has arrived in France with her father, a German diplomat. As she contemplates returning to Berlin and a life she hardly knows anymore, she decides that being in Paris is not so bad after all. Margot strikes up unlikely alliances: with Krysia, an accomplished musician with radical acquaintances and a secret to protect; and with Georg, a naval officer who gives Margot a job--and a reason to question everything she thought she knew about where her true loyalties should lie.

CeCe D'Aplièse has always felt like an outcast. But following the death of her adoptive father, she finds herself more alone than ever. With nothing left to lose, CeCe delves into the mystery of her familial origins. One hundred years earlier, Kitty McBride abandoned her conservative upbringing to serve as the companion to a wealthy woman traveling to Adelaide. Her ticket to a new land brings the adventure she dreamed of...and a love that she had never imagined.

Chris Offutt's first work of fiction in nearly two decades, Country Dark is a taut, compelling novel set in rural Kentucky from the Korean War to 1970. Tucker, a young veteran, returns from war to work for a bootlegger. He falls in love and starts a family, and while the Tuckers don't have much, they have the love of their home and each other. But when his family is threatened, Tucker is pushed into violence, which changes everything.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs's childhood unfolded in a rapidly changing Silicon Valley. When she was young, Lisa's father was a mythical figure who was rarely present in her life. As she grew older, her father took an interest in her, ushering her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa moved in with her father, hoping he'd become the parent she'd always wanted him to be.