Lost in the Stacks

Are you living in an apartment for the first time and wondering what to fix for dinner? Come to the library for cookbooks geared to college students or novice chefs.

Jade Dragon Mountain is a beautifully-written mystery set in 18th century China. Exiled imperial librarian Li Du investigates the murder of a Jesuit astronomer in a city on the border between China and Tibet.

This unusual historical novel tells the story of the 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the first women to have a successful career as an artist. The author intersperses Artemisia's story with her own experiences in Florence during World War II, and creates a dialogue between herself and Artemisia.

In this mystery set in ancient Rome, private informer Flavia Albia is called to the scene when a dead body is found in a chest which is being put up for auction. At the same time, she helps the man she loves, Manlius Faustus, with his friend's political campaign. When a second body turns up in the chest, she realizes there might be a connection between the murders and the election.

In the third of Steven Saylor's series of novels set in the ancient world, Roman detective Gordianus the Finder receives a message saying his former tutor, now living in Ephesus, is in great danger. He travels to Ephesus and discovers a plot by King Mithridates to kill all the Romans in the kingdom. Will Gordianus prevent the massacre from taking place?

Murder in Passy is part of a long-running mystery series set in Paris in the 1990s, featuring private detective Aimée Leduc. When Aimée's mentor becomes the prime suspect in the murder of his Basque girlfriend, her investigation leads her into the world of Basque terrorists and a kidnapped Spanish princess.

26 Songs in 30 Days: Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs and the Planned Promised Land in the Pacific Northwest provides a history of folksinger/songwriter Woody Guthrie's month-long position with the Bonneville Power Administration creating songs about the Columbia River, Grand Coulee Dam and other topics related to the electrification of the Pacific Northwest.

Here Be Dragons is an epic historical novel set in thirteenth-century England and Wales. Llewelyn ab Iorwerth, Prince of North Wales, is married off in a political alliance to Joanna, illegitimate daughter of King John of England. Against all expectations, and in spite of an almost twenty-year difference in their ages, they fall in love. But when Joanna's father decides he wants to make Wales part of his kingdom, Joanna's loyalties are torn between the two men she loves most, her father and her husband. Penman paints a complex picture of both societies, the English (or, rather, the Norman-French) and the Welsh, and she draws you so deeply into her world that you don't want to leave.

In a Dark, Dark Wood, author Ruth Ware's debut novel, is a very suspenseful mystery. Nora, a reclusive writer living in London, reluctantly attends a party to celebrate the marriage of Clare, a friend she hasn't seen for ten years, in a creepy glass house surrounded by woods in the north of England. The party goes disastrously wrong and someone ends up dead. Nora wakes up in a hospital room, with no memory of what happened. Is she a suspect or a victim? Will she regain her memory in time to figure out what happened?

The Murder of Mary Russell is the latest volume in Laurie R. King's long-running series featuring an older Sherlock Holmes and his young wife Mary Russell. This entry in the series focuses on Mrs. Hudson, Holmes' housekeeper, and tells the story of her childhood as a thief and con artist in Victorian London, and of her first meeting with Holmes. I will not give away what the title means.