Staff Picks
Broader Bookshelf 2024 | Read a book by or about someone that identifies as ability diverse (Mystery & Thriller)
- Sarah C.
- Monday, January 22
Collection
Broaden your reading horizons with the Broader Bookshelf 2024 Reading Challenge! All these titles fulfill the prompt to read a book "by or about someone that identifies as ability diverse."
Dark Eye
Published in 2005
Sometimes her eyes seduce. Sometimes they stare straight at the kind of sights most people turn away from. But in the blazing neon and searing sun of Las Vegas, she can't see the man who is watching her and thinking to himself: She is the one. . . . From the mountain views beyond the Strip to the dingy dens of forbidden pleasure, Susan Pulaski loves Las Vegas. A woman who wears a gun at her side and her heart on a sleeve, Pulaski is the perfect fit for her city and her job: unraveling the minds of deviant personalities. Until a killer begins decorating Sin City with the horribly disfigured bodies of once beautiful young women. . . . and Pulaski's own demons go on a binge. Eight months after her cop husband's death, her life is spinning out of control--just as her detective colleagues start searching for a serial killer who methodically stalks his female victims and plunges them into an orgy of terror. When a violent incident earns Pulaski a pink slip from the LVPD and a trip to detox, she's out of the hunt altogether, so she begins to desperately try to regain her job, her reputation, and custody of the niece she's been raising on her own. It seems hopeless--until Pulaski meets the one person who can lead her into the mind of a madman no one else can understand. Darcy O'Bannon is a twenty-five-year-old autistic savant whose relationship with the world around him is so unusual that it forces Pulaski to view the crimes from a bizarre--but ultimately insightful--perspective. White-knuckling her way to the center of the case, she becomes the key player in a desperate hunt for a killer who believes he has found divine inspiration in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. But even with the assistance of Darcy's astonishing skills, Pulaski is in even more danger than she knows. For the man she seeks is watching her, seduced by her frailties and strengths, her beauty and boldness. To finish his masterwork of horror, he needs her. In a blistering novel that brings together glitz and goth, human weakness and human genius, and a murderous psychopath who is all too chillingly real, master storyteller William Bernhardt has created an unparalleled literary Las Vegas thrill ride that will leave readers breathless until the final, stunning page. From the Hardcover edition.
Strip Search
Published in 2007
She likes the sudden seconds of sheer terror. The neon dreams fit perfectly with the dreams that wake her up at night: about the man she loved and lost, about the constant temptations in her life, and about the odds that inevitably she'll be in the right place at the right time to look naked, human madness in the eye. Welcome to the world of Susan Pulaski, an unconventional and unusually subversive Las Vegas police behaviorist who's already been canned once and has never been needed more. In the Sin City, someone is ritually murdering handpicked victims, each with dirty secrets in their past. The killer's gimmick: Not only does he leave behind parts of the victims' bodies, he also writes obscure mathematical formulas--in their blood. Pulaski doesn't have a clue what the codes mean. But she knows someone who will. Darcy O'Bannon is a twenty-six-year-old whose autistic savant skills are perfect for unraveling such mysteries as how many rivets are in the Eiffel Tower and how many Elvis impersonators there will be in the year 2020. As it turns out, innocent Darcy can also think along the arcane lines of Vegas's most savage serial killer, peering into a numerological mystery that stretches back hundreds of years. With her own life one spark away from going off the rails, her department turned against her, and the lives of those she cares most about in jeopardy, Pulaski hunts for dangerous prey in the shadow of the Strip--with herself as the perfect bait. And the closer she gets, the more terrifying and intriguing the case becomes, for the person she's tracking possesses truly ingenious powers--and a heart full of hate. The incomparable William Bernhardt brings to life America's most fascinating city and the people who police it, while he invites the reader to join one woman's fight to stay sane, stay alive, and keep a killer from making the most shocking score of all. From the Hardcover edition.
You Never Know
A Novel of Domestic Suspense
Published in 2023
Alexis Roberts is asleep one night when someone breaks into her home and tries to assault her. Escaping serious harm, the invasion leaves her scared and shaken. Hearing impaired and unable to find her cochlear implants in the darkness, Alexis could neither see nor hear the intruder. A year ago she had married Marcus-- attentive, charming, fluent in ASL. But after the wedding she discovered the secrets in his life: his first wife is missing, suspected dead. And Marcus disappeared without a trace. Now living in an isolated neighborhood with no family and friends nearby to help, Alexis feels trapped in a home that has become a nightmare, unsure who Marcus really is, what he's capable of doing-- and waiting for the intruder to return. -- adapted from jacket
Silence
Published in 2023
"Deaf since childhood, Silence can read body language like a book. His mentor, Doc, who acted as his voice, taught him to navigate the streets. Silence put those skills together to become the Motor City’s most lethal killer. But now he’s home after twelve years in lockdown—and primed for revenge. His city is crumbling, and Doc has been shot dead, his empire divvied up between Silence’s former friends—and no one is talking. . . Until Silence starts rattling cages, from the town’s hottest strip joints to its icy centers of political power. Under pressure from a ruthless cop, Silence soon finds that the loyalty and friendship he valued, the truths he lived by—even the man he looked up to—might just be deadly illusions. And when someone goes after his adopted family, Silence is on the clock to unravel a lethal conspiracy—and stake his life on one last impossible play . . ."--Amazon.
The Life We Bury
A Novel
Published in 2014
College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson,a dying Vietnam veteran-- and a convicted murderer, medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder. Unable to reconcile Carl's valor in Vietnam with the despicable acts of the convict, Joe throws himself into uncovering the truth.
The Mitford Scandal
Published in 2020
"In the third book in the Mitford Murders series, lady's maid Louisa Cannon accompanies Diana Mitford into a turbulent late 1920s Europe. The year is 1928, and after the death of a maid at a glamorous society party, fortune heir Bryan Guinness seizes life and proposes to eighteen-year-old Diana, most beautiful of the six Mitford sisters. The maid's death is ruled an accident, and the newlyweds put it behind them to begin a whirlwind life zipping between London's Mayfair, chic Paris and hedonistic Berlin. Accompanying Diana as her lady's maid is Louisa Cannon, as well as a coterie of friends, family and hangers on, from Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh. When a second victim is found in Paris in 1931, Louisa begins to see links with the death of the maid two years previously. Now she must convince the Mitford sisters that a murderer could be within their midst . . . all while shadows darken across Europe, and within the heart of Diana Mitford herself"-- Provided by publisher.
The Murder of Mr. Wickham
Published in 2022
"After many years of happy marriage, Emma Knightley and her husband are throwing a house party, bringing together distant relatives and new acquaintances-not all of whom are well known to the Knightleys but are certainly beloved by every Jane Austen fan: Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy, Marianne and Colonel Brandon, Anne and Captain Wentworth, and Fanny and Edmund Bertram. Very much not invited is Mr. Wickham, whose latest financial scheme has netted him newfound wealth-and a broadening array of enemies. With his unexpected arrival, tempers flare and secrets are revealed, making it clear that everyone would be happier if Mr. Wickham got his comeuppance. Yet the Knightleys and their guests are all shocked when Wickham turns up murdered-except, of course, for the killer hidden in their midst. With everyone a suspect, it falls to the house party's two youngest guests to solve the mystery of who finally delivered to Wickham his just deserts: Juliet Tilney, the smart and resourceful daughter of Catherine and Henry Tilney, eager for adventure outside Northanger Abbey; and Jonathan Darcy, Elizabeth and Darcy's eldest son, whose adherence to propriety makes his father seem relaxed. In a tantalizing fusion of Austen and Christie, the unlikely pair must put aside their own poor first impressions-and uncover the guilty party before an innocent person is sentenced to hang"-- Provided by publisher.
Everything to Lose
Published in 2014
While driving along a suburban back road, Hilary Blum, who's just lost her job and whose deadbeat husband has left her alone to care for her son with Asperger's, witnesses a freakish accident. A car ahead of her careens down a hill and slams into a tree. Stopping to help, she discovers the driver dead--and a satchel stuffed with a half a million dollars. That money could prevent her family's ruin and keep her special needs son in school. In an instant, this honest, achieving woman who has always done the responsible thing makes a decision that puts her in the center of maelstrom of dark consequences and life-threatening recriminations--a terrifying scheme involving a twenty-year-old murder, an old woman whose life has been washed out to sea, and a powerful figure bent to keep the secret that can destroy him hidden. With everything to lose, everything she loves, Hilary connects to a determined cop from Staten Island, reeling from the disaster of Sandy, to bring down an enemy who will stop at nothing to keep what that money was meant to silence, still buried.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Published in 2003
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.
The Odor of Violets
Published in 2021
Meet Captain Duncan Maclain. Blinded in the first World War, Maclain made up for his lack of vision by sharpening his other senses and mastering the subtleties often missed by those who see only with their eyes. Aided by his dogs Schnucke and Driest, he made a name for himself as New York City’s most sought-after private detective. Now it’s 1940, there’s a second World War breaking out, and Maclain is pulled into a case unlike any he’s investigated before. The murder of an actor in his Greenwich Village apartment would cause a stir no matter the circumstances but, when the actor happens to possess secret government plans, and when those plans go missing along with the young woman with whom he was last seen, it’s sensational enough to interest not only the local police, but the American government as well. Maclain suspects a German spy plot at work and, in a world where treasonous men and patriots are indistinguishable to the naked eye, it will take his special skills to sniff out the solution.
Miracle Creek
Published in 2019
"A literary courtroom thriller about a mother accused of murdering her eight-year-old autistic son"-- Provided by publisher.
By the Light of the Moon
Published in 2003
Dylan O'Connor is a gifted young artist just trying to do the right thing in life. He's on his way to an arts festival in Santa Fe when he stops to get a room for himself and his twenty-year-old autistic brother, Shep. But in a nightmarish instant, Dylan is attacked by a mysterious "doctor", injected with a strange substance, and told that he is now a carrier of something that will either kill him ... or transform his life in the most remarkable way. Then he is told that he must flee--before the doctor's enemies hunt him down for the secret circulating through his body. No one can help him, the doctor says, not even the police. Stunned, disbelieving, Dylan is turned loose to run for his life ... and straight into an adventure that will turn the next twenty-four hours into an odyssey of terror, mystery--and wondrous discovery.
How Lucky
A Novel
Published in 2021
Unable to speak or move without a wheelchair, Daniel, spending hours observing his neighborhood from his front porch, believes he has witnessed the kidnapping of a young college student and vows to solve this mystery.
Pretty As a Picture
A Novel
Published in 2020
Marissa Dahl, a shy but successful film editor, travels to a small island off the coast of Delaware to work with the legendary--and legendarily demanding--director Tony Rees on a feature film with a familiar logline. Some girl dies. It's not much to go on, but the specifics don't concern Marissa. Whatever the script is, her job is the same. She'll spend her days in the editing room, doing what she does best: turning pictures into stories. But she soon discovers that on this set, nothing is as it's supposed to be--or as it seems. There are rumors of accidents and indiscretions, of burgeoning scandals and perilous schemes. Half the crew has been fired. The other half wants to quit. Even the actors have figured out something is wrong. And no one seems to know what happened to the editor she was hired to replace . . .
Must Read Well
A Novel
Published in 2022
"Narrated by Liz Miller, a penniless Ph.D. candidate desperate to finish her dissertation, the novel begins when Liz's boyfriend abruptly ditches her, rendering Liz homeless and reduced to couch-surfing at best friend Petra's tiny Manhattan studio apartment. Trying to find an affordable living space, she stumbles across a Craigslist posting that will change her life: a room with a view in a pre-war Greenwich Village apartment. The rent is a pittance, but in exchange, the tenant must be willing to read aloud daily to the apartment's sight-impaired landlady. Liz quickly figures out that the sight-impaired landlady is none other than Anne Taussig Weil, author of the 1965 international blockbuster The Vengeance of Catherine Clark and the very woman whose refusal to cooperate for the past four years has held up Liz's dissertation on the feminist works of mid-century women novelists. Access to Weil is the key to completing her doctorate at Columbia and finally getting her academic career back on track. Liz sets scruples aside and presents herself as a quiet young woman still finding her way in life. Once settled in, Liz learns from Weil that her need for a reader stems from a desire to revisit a key episode in her life. That episode, recorded in the scrawled journals Weil kept since she was a young girl, turns out to be the story of her passionate, disastrous, secret love affair with a celebrated pianist--the affair, in fact, which gave rise to the plot of Vengeance"-- Provided by publisher.
Hard Cash Valley
Published in 2020
Return to McFalls County and Bull Mountain in Hard Cash Valley , where Brian Panowich weaves another masterful tale of Southern Noir. Dane Kirby is a broken man and no stranger to tragedy. As a life-long resident and ex-arson investigator for McFalls County, Dane has lived his life in one of the most chaotic and crime-ridden regions of the south. When he gets called in to consult on a brutal murder in a Jacksonville, Florida, motel room, he and his FBI counterpart, Special Agent Roselita Velasquez, begin an investigation that leads them back to the criminal circles of his own backyard. Arnie Blackwell's murder in Jacksonville is only the beginning ? and Dane and Roselita seem to be one step behind. For someone is hacking a bloody trail throughout the Southeast looking for Arnie's younger brother, a boy with Asperger's Syndrome who possesses an unusual skill with numbers that could make a lot of money and that has already gotten a lot of people killed?and has even more of the deadliest people alive willing to do anything it takes to exploit him. As Dane joins in the hunt to find the boy, it swiftly becomes a race against the clock that has Dane entangled in a web of secrets involving everyone from the Filipino Mafia to distrusting federal agents to some of hardest southern outlaws he's ever known.
Dante's Wood
A Mark Angelotti Novel
Published in 2013
Back at work after a devastating illness, Mark believes he has put his past behind him when he is asked to examine Charlie Dickerson, a mentally handicapped teenager whose wealthy mother insists is a victim of sexual abuse. Mark diagnoses a different reason for Charlie's ills, but his prescription turns deadly when a teacher is murdered and Charlie confesses to the police. Volunteering to testify on Charlie's behalf, Mark's worst fears are realized when paternity tests show the victim was pregnant with Charlie's child. Now it's up to Mark to prove Charlie's innocence in a case where nothing is as first meets the eye.
Persons Unknown
A Novel
Published in 2017
"Detective Manon Bradshaw is five months pregnant and has officially given up on finding romantic love. Instead, she is in hot-pursuit of the work-life balance and parked in a cold case corridor--the price she's had to pay for a transfer back to Cambridgeshire. This is fine, she tells herself. She can devote herself to bringing up her motley collection of children--the new baby, and her adopted 12-year-old son Fly Dent. He needed a fresh start--he was being forever stopped and searched in London by officers who couldn't see past the color of his skin. Manon feared Fly, increasingly sullen and adolescent, was getting in with the wrong crowd at school, or possibly that he was the wrong crowd. Yes, children, home-cooked food, home by five. This is what I need, she tells herself. Yet when a well-to-do victim is found stabbed close to police HQ, she can't help but sidle in on the briefing. It emerges he is a banker from London, worth millions, called Jon-Oliver Ross. More dramatically, Ross was Manon's sister Ellie's ex, and the father of her toddler son, Solomon. The investigation swirls with greater and greater urgency, and as it begins to circle in on Manon's home and her family, she finds herself pitted against the former colleagues she once held dear--Davy Walker and Harriet Harper. Can Manon separate what she knows about the people she loves, from the suspicion hanging over them? Can she interrogate the evidence, just as she would with any other case? And when Manon instructs defense lawyer Mark Talbot to work alongside her, can she refrain from throwing herself at him in a manner unbecoming to a woman at an advanced stage of pregnancy? Manon must fight to find the truth with every fiber of her being, and this might just finish her"-- Provided by publisher.
Remain Silent
Published in 2020
"Newly married and navigating life with a toddler as well as her adopted adolescent son, Fly Dent, Manon Bradshaw is happy to be working part-time in the cold cases department of the Cambridgeshire police force, a job which allows her to "potter in, coffee in hand and log on for a spot of internet shopping--precisely what she had in mind when she thought of work-life balance." But beneath the surface Manon is struggling with the day-to-day realities of what she assumed would be domestic bliss: fights about whose turn it is to clean the kitchen, the bewildering fatigue of having a young child in her forties, and the fact that she is going to couple's counseling alone because her husband feels it would just be her complaining. But when Manon is on a walk with her two-year-old son, Teddy, in a peaceful suburban neighborhood and discovers the body of a Lithuanian immigrant hanging from a tree with a mysterious note attached, she knows her life is about to change. She is suddenly back on the job, full-force, trying to solve the suicide - or is it a murder - in what may be her most dangerous and demanding case yet"-- Provided by publisher.
The Right Kind of Fool
Published in 2020
"Thirteen-year-old Loyal Raines is supposed to stay close to home on a hot summer day in 1934. When he slips away for a quick swim in the river and finds a dead body, the ripples caused by his discovery will impact the town in ways no one could have imagined"-- Provided by publisher.
And Fire Came Down
Published in 2018
A woman accosts Caleb in the street, asking for help. Minutes later, she's dead. The search for her killer will take Caleb back to his hometown of Resurrection Bay, where all it takes is a single spark to ignite an inferno of violence.
Resurrection Bay
Published in 2017
Caleb Zelic, profoundly deaf since early childhood, has always lived on the outside - watching, picking up telltale signs people hide in a smile, a cough, a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt for the killer. But he can't do it alone. Caleb and his troubled friend Frankie, an ex-cop, start with one clue: Scott, the last word the murder victim texted to Caleb. But Scott is always one step ahead.This gripping, original and fast-paced crime thriller is set between a big city and a small coastal town, Resurrection Bay, where Caleb is forced to confront painful memories. Caleb is a memorable protagonist who refuses to let his deafness limit his opportunities, or his participation in the investigation. But does his persistence border on stubbornness? And at what cost? As he delves deeper into the investigation Caleb uncovers unwelcome truths about his murdered friend and himself.
Those Who Perish
Published in 2022
Reluctantly leaving his pregnant wife to track down his addict brother Anton, Caleb Zelic encounters a secretive community on an isolated island that is under threat from a sniper, and must hunt for the sniper to save his brother.
American Girl
Novel
Published in 2023
"Charlie Hudson, an autistic 17-year-old, is determined to leave Sawyer, PA as soon as she graduates high school -- in the meantime, she works as many hours as she can at a sandwich shop called The Triple S to save money for college. But when shop owner Clay Cooper -- a man who is both respected and feared by many in this economically depressed community -- is found dead, each member of his staff becomes a suspect in the perplexing case. Charlie must work to protect herself and her friends, and uncover the danger that may still be at large in their tightknit community. Based on the #1 bestselling audio, American Girl is a riveting thriller told through the eyes of an unforgettable protagonist." -- Jacket flap.