New Books for June!

New books, new books, new books! We have the perfect way to beat the summer heat, and here are a few of the new books we got in this week. (And I totally didn't mean to rhyme.)


The Believing Brain
Michael Shermer

Nonfiction. Shermer demonstrates how our brains selectively assess data in an attempt to confirm the conclusions (beliefs) we've already reached. Drawing on evolution, cognitive science, and neuroscience, he considers not only supernatural beliefs but political and economic ones as well.


Awaken the Highland Warrior
Anita Clenney

Fiction. Faelan is from an ancient clan of Scottish Highland warriors, charged with shielding humanity from demonic forces. Betrayed and locked in a time vault, he has been sleeping for nearly two centuries when spunky historian Bree Kirkland inadvertently wakes him. She's more fearsome than the demon trying to kill him, and if he's not careful, she'll uncover the secrets his clan has bled and died to protect... When Bree inherits an old treasure map, she discovers a warrior buried in her backyard. But the warrior isn't dead. Bree shocks Faelan with her modern dress and her boldness, and he infuriates Bree every time he tries to protect her. With demons suddenly on the move, Bree discovers that Faelan's duty as protector is in his blood, and that her part in this fight was destined before she was born. But nothing is ever what it seems...


A Deadly Indifference
Marshall Jevons

Fiction. A mystery set in the world of academia in Cambridge, England, starring Henry Spearman, an American professor from Harvard who uses economic theory to solve crime. Here the theory of supply and demand comes in handy to solve two murders.


Changeling Moon
Dani Harper

Fiction. He roams the moonlit wilderness, his every sense and instinct on high alert. Changeling wolf Connor Macleod and his Pack have never feared anything--until the night human Zoey Tyler barely escapes a rogue werewolf's vicious attack. As the full moon approaches, Zoey has no idea of the changes that are coming, and only Connor can show her what she is, and help her master the wildness inside. With her initiation into the Pack just days away and a terrifying predator on the loose, the tentative bonds of trust and tenderness are their only weapons against a force red in tooth, claw...and ultimate evil.

Come on by and check them out. Or you can place them on hold at our website - CCPL.org.

Featured New Books

Looking for something new to read? We got several new books in this week. Here are four of them you might like.


Sideways on a Scooter: Life and Love in India
Miranda Kennedy

Nonfiction. When twentysomething reporter Miranda Kennedy leaves her New York job and travels to India with no employment prospects, she longs to immerse herself in the turmoil and excitement of a rapidly developing country. What she quickly learns in Delhi about renting an apartment as a single woman--it's next to impossible--and the proper way for women in India to ride scooters--perched sideways--are early signs that life here is less Westernized than she'd counted on. Living in Delhi for more than five years, Kennedy experiences friendships, love affairs, and losses that open a window onto the opaque world of Indian politics and culture--and alter her own attitudes about everything. In her effort to understand the hopes and dreams that motivate her new friends, Kennedy peels back India's globalized image as a land of call centers and fast-food chains and finds an ancient place where, in many ways, women's lives have scarcely changed for centuries.--From publisher description.


Sherlock Holmes and the Shakespeare Letter
Barry Grant

Fiction. Holmes displays his usual mental brilliance as he investigates the missing letter and discovers an international plot to arm terrorists. He and his roommate, James Wilson, track the Shakespeare letter and the terrorist arms dealers to a Scottish castle where surprises await ... and where the two companions quickly find they must be bloody, bold, and resolute if they are to survive.


Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders
Gyles Brandreth

Fiction. This book opens in 1890, at a glamorous party hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Albemarle. All of London’s high society—including the Prince of Wales—are in attendance at what promises to be the event of the season. Yet Oscar Wilde is more interested in another party guest, Rex LaSalle, a young actor who claims to be a vampire.

But the entertaining evening ends in tragedy when the duchess is found murdered—with two tiny puncture marks on her throat. Desperate to avoid scandal and panic, the Prince asks Oscar and his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to investigate the crime. What they discover threatens to destroy the very heart of the royal family. Told through diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, and letters, Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders is a richly atmospheric mystery that is sure to captivate and entertain.


To End All Wars
Adam Hochschild

Nonfiction. World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other.

Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the “war to end all wars.” Can we ever avoid repeating history?

You can visit our website to see how many copies we have and to put any one of these titles on hold.

This Week's Featured New Books

Hello, everyone! More new books arrived at the branch this week. Here are a few of them that you might enjoy.


Bad dog : a love story
by Martin Kihn

636.7 KIHN (New Book Area). A true story. Meet Hola. She’s a nightmare, but it’s not her fault if she tackles strangers and chews on furniture, or if she runs after buses and fried chicken containers and drug dealers. No one ever told her not to. Worse yet, she scares her family. Hola may be the most beautiful Bernese mountain dog in the world, but she’s never been trained. At least not by anyone who knew what he was doing.

Hola’s supposed master, Marty, is a high-functioning alcoholic. A TV writer turned management consultant, Marty’s in debt and out of shape; he’s about to lose his job, and one day he emerges from a haze of peach-flavored vodka to find he’s on the verge of losing his wife, Gloria, too, if he can’t get his life—and his dog—under control.

Desperately trying to save his marriage, Marty throws himself headlong into the world of competitive dog training. Unfortunately, he knows even less than Hola, the only dog ever to be expelled from her puppy preschool twice. Somehow, together, they need to get through the American Kennel Club’s rigorous Canine Good Citizen test. Of course, Hola first needs to learn how to sit.

It won’t be easy. It certainly won’t be pretty. But maybe, just maybe, there will be cheesecake.
--- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group


The science of kissing : what our lips are telling us
by Sheril Kirshenbaum

394 KIRSHENB (New Book Area). From a noted science journalist comes a wonderfully witty and fascinating exploration of how and why we kiss. Drawing upon classical history, evolutionary biology, psychology, popular culture, and more, Kirshenbaum's winning book will appeal to romantics and armchair scientists alike.


Super species : the creatures that will dominate the planet
by Garry Hamilton

578.62 HAMILTON (New Book Area). A gripping examination of invasive species' impact. Super species are the phenomenally successful invasive life-forms that are dominating ecosystems. These animals, plants and microbes have spread far from their native habitats, most often as a result of human activities. The key to super species' success is their ability to adapt quickly. Super species may be unusually aggressive, difficult to kill, unfazed by the presence and activity of humans, capable of astonishingly rapid rates of growth and reproduction, exceptionally tolerant of pollution or, in many cases, all of the above! Author Garry Hamilton profiles the 20 super species that are having the greatest impact in our world today, including: Feral pigs-- relentless boars that are trampling across Europe, North America and Australia Bullfrogs -- predatory amphibians that are endangering native frog populations Jellyfish -- spineless wonders that are dominating the world's oceans C. difficile -- potentially deadly microbes that flourish in human intestines Brown tree snakes -- unusually vicious reptiles that have overrun Guam and are now infiltrating America Argentine ants -- aggressive insects capable of forming super-colonies spanning thousands of miles Humboldt squid -- gigantic beasts that hunt in packs of several hundreds The author also examines the opposing views of top ecologists who are studying this global phenomenon. While some of these experts view invasive species as a threat to biodiversity that costs humans millions of dollars, others believe these creatures may simply be nature's way of restoring ecological vibrancy in the wake of human-mediated destruction. Whether good or bad, the life-forms in Super Species are the current winners in nature's ruthless process of natural selection. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

This Week's Featured New Books

Sorry. We're running a little behind this week, but we have another batch of new books for you to read! As always, all the summaries are from Goodreads.


What You See in the Dark
Manuel Munoz

Fiction. Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950s is a dusty, quiet town too far from Los Angeles to share that city’s energy yet close enough to Hollywood to fill its citizens with the kinds of dreams they discover in the darkness of the movie theater. For Teresa, a young, aspiring singer who works at a shoe store, dreams lie in the music her mother shared with her, plaintive songs of love and longing. In Dan Watson, the most desirable young man in Bakersfield, she believes she has found someone to help her realize those dreams.

When a famous actress arrives from Hollywood with a great and already legendary director, local gossip about Teresa and Dan gives way to speculation about the celebrated visitors, there to work on what will become an iconic, groundbreaking film of madness and murder at a roadside motel. No one anticipates how the ill-fated love affair between Dan and Teresa will soon rival anything the director could ever put on the screen.


The Baby Planner
Josie Brown

Fiction. Katie Johnson may make her living consulting with new moms on the latest greatest baby gadgets no parent should be without, or which mommy meet-ups are the most socially desirable, or whether melon truly is the new black, but the success of her marriage to her husband, Alex, depends on controlling her own urges toward motherhood.

He's adamant that they stay childless. Sure, Katie understands that he's upset over the fact that his out-of-town ex-wife rarely lets him see their ten-year-old son, Peter. But living vicariously through her anxious clients and her twin sisters' precocious children only makes Katie resent his stance more deeply.

While helping a new client—Seth Harris, a high tech entrepreneur who must raise Sadie, his newborn daughter, as a single parent after the tragic death of his wife in childbirth—maneuver the bittersweet journey from mourning husband and reticent father to loving dad, Katie’s own ideals about love, marriage, and motherhood are put to the test as she learns ones very important lesson about family: How we nurture is the true nature of love.

The Vampire Voss
Colleen Gleason

Fiction. Regency London – a dizzying whirl of balls and young ladies pursued by charming men.

But the Woodmore sisters are hunted by a more sinister breed: Lucifer's own.

Voss, also known as Viscount Dewhurst, relishes the sensual pleasures immortality affords. A member the Dracule – a cabal of powerful, secretive noblemen marked with a talisman that reveals their bartered souls – the mercenary Voss has remained carefully neutral ... until Angelica.

Angelica Woodmore possess the Sight, an ability invaluable to both sides of a looming war among the Dracule. Her very scent envelops Voss in a scarlet fog of hunger – for her body and her blood. But he is utterly unprepared for the new desire that overcomes him – to protect her.

Now Voss must battle his very nature to be with Angelica ... but this vampire never backs down from a fight.


The New Southern Garden Cookbook
Sheri Castle

Non-Fiction. This book offers over 300 brightly flavored recipes that will inspire beginning and experienced cooks, southern or otherwise, to take advantage of seasonal delights. Castle has organized the cookbook alphabetically by type of vegetable or fruit, building on the premise that when cooking with fresh produce, the ingredient, not the recipe, is the wiser starting point. While some dishes are inspired by traditional southern recipes, many reveal the goodness of gardens in new, contemporary ways. Peppered with tips, hints, and great stories, these pages make for good food and a good read.


See something you like? Come on into the library, or you can place a hold using the catalog.

Featured New Books

We have another batch of new books for you to read! All the summaries are from Goodreads.


To Kingdom Come: An Epic Saga of Survival in the Air War Over Germany
Robert Mrazek

Non-Fiction. On September 6, 1943, three hundred and thirty-eight B-17 "Flying Fortresses" of the American Eighth Air Force took off from England, bound for Stuttgart, Germany, to bomb Nazi weapons factories.

Dense clouds obscured the targets, and one commander's critical decision to circle three times over the city-and its deadly flak-would prove disastrous. Forty-five planes went down that day, and hundreds of men were lost or missing.

Focusing on first-person accounts of six of the B-17 airmen, award- winning author Robert Mrazek vividly re-creates the fierce air battle- and reveals the astonishing valor of the airmen who survived being shot down, and the tragic fate of those who did not.


Kissing Arizona
Elizabeth Gunn

Fiction. The new ‘Sarah Burke’ mystery from the creator of Jake Hines - As Sarah Burke and her crew of police detectives investigate an apparent murder-suicide in a well-known family of local merchants, their façade of diligent respectability explodes in a burst of violence that rips the cover off long-concealed family secrets. In a second case, Southern Arizona’s diverse population streams collide as border crossers and drug smugglers, federal agents and local cops fight for turf and answers in a beautiful valley that’s been loved and battled over for centuries.


The Four Seasons Book of Cocktails
Fred DuBose, Greg Connolly, Charles Corpion, John Varriano

Non-Fiction. Making even a perfect cocktail is rightly regarded as an enviable achievement, but why not learn how to make dozens? The Four Seasons Book of Cocktails draws on the expertise of the elite restaurant's staff to teach readers how to make more than 1,000 tasty mixed libations. In addition to all these artful concoctions, Greg Connolly, the Four Seasons' head barkeep and an inductee into the Bartender's Hall of Fame, and veteran barman Charles Corpion share tips, techniques, and short cuts that can increase any drink lover's beverage vocabulary.


Chasing the Sun
Richard Cohen

None-Fiction. The sun is one topic we can't ignore. Not only does this blinding bright star provide the heat that sustains us; it is so huge that it accounts for nearly 99.9% of our solar system's mass. Richard Cohen's Chasing the Sun doesn't just stun us with "wow" scientific details; it draws on seven years of research in eighteen countries to explain what we are still learning about this brightest object in the sky. Just as significantly, Cohen demonstrates the sun is virtually omnipresent in the world's mythologies, religions, literature, and art. Highly readable and lavishly illustrated, this book lifts the shadows on an unavoidable subject.

See something you like? Come on into the library, or you can place a hold using the catalog.

This Week's Featured New Books

We have another batch of new books for you to read! All the summaries are from Goodreads.


Sarah's Gift
Marta Perry

Fiction. Amish midwife Sarah Mast moves to Pleasant Valley for a fresh start. But her aging aunt can no longer run the birthing center, leaving most of the responsibility to Sarah. Among those skeptical of Sarah's ability is neighbor Aaron Miller, who seems drawn to Sarah but pulls away when his own sister requests her services. And when a criminal complaint is filed against Sarah, she must pray for strength to defend her practice and win acceptance from the community she loves.


The Sea Captain's Wife
Beth Powning

Fiction. Azuba Galloway, daughter of a shipwright, sees ships leaving for foreign ports from her bustling town on the Bay of Fundy and dreams of seeing the world. When she marries Nathaniel Bradstock, a veteran sea captain, she believes she will sail at his side. But when she becomes pregnant she is forced to stay behind. Her father has built the couple a gabled house overlooking the bay, but the gift cannot shelter her from the loneliness of living without her husband. When Azuba becomes embroiled in scandal, Nathaniel is forced to take her and their daughter, Carrie, aboard his ship. They set sail for London with bitter hearts.

Their voyage is ill-fated, beset with ferocious storms and unforeseen obstacles that test Azuba's compassion, courage, and love. Alone in a male world, surrounded by the splendour and the terror of the open seas, she must face her fears and fight to keep her family together.


Rodin's Debutante
Ward Just

Fiction. Tommy Ogden, a Gatsbyesque character living in a mansion outside robber-baron-era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Rodin and announces instead his intention to endow a boys’ school. Ogden’s decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just’s emotionally potent new novel.


One of Our Thursdays is Missing
Jasper Fforde

Fiction. All-out Genre war is rumbling, and the BookWorld desperately needs a heroine like Thursday Next. But with the real Thursday apparently retired to the Realworld, the Council of Genres turns to the written Thursday.

The Council wants her to pretend to be the real Thursday and travel as a peacekeeping emissary to the warring factions. A trip up the mighty Metaphoric River beckons-a trip that will reveal a fiendish plot that threatens the very fabric of the BookWorld itself.


365 Ways to Drive a Liberal Crazy
James Delingpole

Non-Fiction. Are Liberals Annoying the Heck Out of You? Well now you can fight back—every single day—with James Delingpole’s handy new guide of jokes, facts, arguments, and even outrageous rumors to spread that will have your liberal acquaintances recoiling in horror—and maybe even just possibly reconsidering their opinions. Need something to brighten your day and darken a liberal’s? Look no further. This is the book for you!

As always, if you see something you like, simply reserve it using our catalog.

Weekly New Books

We have another batch of new books for you to read! This week, we got mostly fiction, so maybe there will be something you like. All the summaries are from Goodreads.


One Night in Scotland
Karen Hawkins

A mysterious abductor . . . Someone is holding her brother prisoner in exchange for a gold-and-onyx box covered in mysterious runes, so Mary Hurst boldly sets out from the family vicarage to find the priceless artifact. But the man who possesses it, Angus Hay, the Earl of Erroll, is less than sympathetic to her plight.

A forbidding stranger . . . Himself a prisoner of his dark past, Angus refuses to yield the box—or allow Mary to leave! Suspicious of the alluring lass’s mission, he vows to wrest a confession from her, but unearths a fiery temper and a will as strong as his own.

An unbreakable curse . . . Passion flares between them, but now there is more at stake: an unknown enemy is hunting down the precious box, and will stop at nothing. Risking all for love, Angus must solve the mystery behind the runes . . . and trust the only woman who can awaken his forgotten heart.


Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry: Stories
Christine Sneed

Stories that explore the tragicomic aspects of romantic love.


The Underbelly
Gary Phillips

Providing insight on homelessness, political corruption, and the potential effects of gentrification, this urban noir tells the tough story of Magrady, a semi-homeless Vietnam veteran in Los Angeles. As he searches for a friend who has gone missing from Skid Row and who may be involved in a dangerous scheme, Magrady must deal with take-no-prisoners community organizers, an unflinching cop from his past, frequent flashbacks of war, an elderly sexpot, the drug culture, and the perils of chili cheese fries at midnight. A rollicking interview with the author wherein he discusses ghetto literature, politics, noir and the proletariat, and the unknown future of books, is also included.


Shadow Pass
Sam Eastland

He operates in the shadows of one of history’s most notorious regimes. He seeks the truth in a nation where finding it can mean death—or worse. His name his Inspector Pekkala, and this time he’s taking on a case with implications far deadlier than anything he can imagine: a shattering revelation that was never meant to be unearthed.

Its official name is T-34, and this massive and mysterious new weapon is being developed in total secrecy in the Russian countryside, a thirty-ton killing machine. Its inventor, Colonel Rolan Nagorski, is a rogue genius whose macabre death is considered an accident only by the innocent.

And Josef Stalin is no innocent. Suspecting assassins everywhere, he brings in his best—if least obedient—detective to solve a murder that’s tantamount to treason. Answerable to no one, Pekkala has the dictator’s permission to go anywhere and interrogate anyone. But in Soviet Russia that’s easily a death sentence. The closer Pekkala gets to the answers, the more questions he uncovers—first and foremost, why is the state’s most dreaded female operative, Commissar Major Lysenkova, investigating the case when she’s only assigned to internal affairs?

Pekkala is on a collision course not only with the Soviet secret police but the USSR’s deepest military secrets. For what he is about to learn could put Stalin and his Communist state under for good—and bury Pekkala with them.

If you'd like to put any of these titles on hold, just go to our catalog.