How Hard Can it Be to Find Good Fiction? Check it Out!

How far will you go to "get away from it all?" National Geographic's "How hard can it be?" campaign goes to the extreme by piling on the hot air balloons and lifting a 16'x16' house from the ground, taking the house up, up and away to a destination unknown. Answering the question, "How hard can it be?" can be tricky. In theory, and with a little imagination, (and the help of scientists and other experienced professionals), adventures such as this one undertaken by National Geographic may be a cinch. With a little help from your friends at JCPL, you can answer the "how hard can it be" question easily...with a stack of new fiction titles, just waiting to be checked out for your next great escape! Check out these new books!

When Frank Mackey was nineteen, he and his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, planned to meet at Faithful Place. From there, they were going to run away to London to start their life together. Rosie, however, never showed up for their rendezvous, and Frank never heard from her again. Twenty years later, working as an undercover cop in Dublin, Frank gets a call from his sister, informing him that Rosie's suitcase has turned up, leading Frank on a journey into his past in "Faithful Place," Book 3 of the Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox series by Tana French.

Researching deep in the stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library, Diana Bishop dredges up bewitching information in an old manuscript. Descended from a long line of witches and sorcery, Diana takes a few notes from the manuscript and returns it to the stacks, but has unwittingly scratched the surface of the underworld in the process, drawing forth a horde of centuries old witches and vampires and a coveted treasure in "A Discovery of Witches" by Deborah Harkness.

Deep in the recesses of Pakistan, Sonia Laghari and eight others have been captured by terrorists. Using her psychology background and her religious training, Sonia delves into the kidnappers' psyches to estabish a connection, while her son, Theo, uses military strategies to unhinge the group. Can the agenda of this deadly group of armed terrorists be changed? Find out as Sonia and her son race against time to save each captor in "The Good Son" by Michael Gruber.

Isolated and set in an uninhabited section of the Spanish sierra, the Our Lady of Mercy Convent stands alone with its six women, cut off from the world that they have chosen to leave behind. When an abandoned baby is left on the doorstep of the convent, Mother Superior Maria Ines must face the fact that their quiet, uneventful world has been forever changed, and that her own past must be confronted in "The Convent" by Panos Karnezis.

You don't have to tie thousands of hot air balloons to your house for a great getaway. The best getaway can be found right around the corner at your local branch of JCPL, where the great escape is shelved within the stacks of great, new fiction! After all, when choosing books, with a little help from your friends at JCPL, how hard can it be?