A Perfect Plethora of Printed Books, Presented by JCPL

I hate making mistakes, and what I hate even more is having to admit to making them. “Nobody is perfect,” “To err is human,” and to quote the famous Benjamin Franklin, “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” Everyone has bad days, and makes boo boos from time to time. This correction in the Arizona Republican verifies that: “The Jumble puzzle which appeared on page D1 of Thursday’s edition actually was the puzzle scheduled to appear today. The Jumble originally scheduled to appear Thursday, as well as the answers to Wednesday’s puzzle are on page E1 today. The answers to the puzzle published today appeared Thursday and the answers to the puzzle published Thursday will appear Saturday.” Published puzzles seem to be puzzling even to the publishers of the printed puzzles, don’t you think? Maybe the puzzle publisher who printed the puzzles could have used a guardian angel to help them avoid such puzzlement. Don’t you wonder sometimes what a guardian angel would have to say if they recorded their thoughts in a journal every day? “The Guardian Angel’s Journal” by Carolyn Jess-Cooke tells the tale of a Margot Delacroix, a woman who has returned to earth as a guardian angel named Ruth. Sent back to life as her very own guardian angel, Ruth follows herself throughout her life, from birth through a troubled childhood, and all of the events of her adult life, as sort of a second chance to re-experience the biggest mistakes that led to her deepest regrets, eventually learning to love herself as unconditionally as she should have the first time around.

This new fiction title is just one in a long line of books, new to the Jasper County Public Library. Read on for more!

If you love Robin Cook, Michael Palmer and Patricia Cornwell and the pageturning medical drama that they bring to their novels, “Public Anatomy” by A. Scott Pearson, with its intriguing characters and high octane medical drama will be just what the doctor ordered. In this medical thriller, you’ll meet Doctor Eli Branch, a surgeon with a hand injury who is approached by two FBI agents investigating the subsequent deaths of two people who have undergone routine, but robotic, surgeries. Plot twist after plot twist lead Branch on a kaleidoscope of adventures as he seeks the truth, enlisting the help of forensic pathologist, Meg Daily in this thought-provoking novel.

Case closed turns out NOT to be the case for Nina Reilly in “Dreams of the Dead” by Perri O’Shaughnessy. The setting is South Lake Tahoe, California and the characters range from adventurers to criminals to lawyers. When disaster walks into a Lake Tahoe Ski Resort in the form of Jim Strong, a sociopath who Nina defended two years before against murder charges, Nina must expose the secrets of someone very close to her to prove that the dead cannot destroy the living. Written with a breakneck pace and plenty of twists and turns, this novel outlines human drama, establishing its right at the top of legal thriller genre.

Crime solving, 1970’s style, laced with a plucky police detective named Monika Paniatowski, offers readers pageturning police procedural drama when a murder case is reopened after the deathbed confession of the convicted killer of a thirteen year old girl becomes a declaration of his innocence for the crime. The last confession of accused rapist and killer, Fred Howard, is one that declares his innocence to the Priest performing the last rites for the convicted killer just before his death. Enter Detective Chief Inspector Tom Hall and Chief Constable George Baxter, along with Monika, the complex details begin to unravel as cobwebs of clue after clue build to a satisfying conclusion.

Are you puzzled? Well, from my “experience,” being puzzled is not so bad if you have a good distraction, so postpone your puzzle on purpose and pore over the plethora of pristine printed books in the Jasper County Public Library within your proximity; you’ll be pleased, we promise!