​I’ve read a few of Frieda McFadden’s thrillers, and while I always appreciate the wild ride she takes the reader on, I usually find her protagonists a bit exhausting. It's like I'm being held hostage by someone with no chill and a lot of secrets, very superficial, materialistic, and frankly naïve people. That said, The Teacher was a standout for me. Easily my favorite of hers so far.

The pacing was sharp, the tension was just the right amount of unhinged, and the characters were compelling enough that I didn't feel the urge to throw my Kindle across the room (a genuine concern with some of her more frustrating narrators). Best of all were the twists, those classic McFadden whiplash but with extra polish. And that final twist in the last couple of pages? Perfectly nasty. Totally blindsided me in the best way.
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If you’re new to McFadden or looking for a gateway into her particular brand of domestic chaos and psychological suspense, this is the one I’d recommend.

Get the book at the library or download the audiobook with your SPL card.

​Aimee Clark, IT Librarian

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
Harper Collins, released June 17, 2025

What a delight! Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman is a huggable mystery. One of those books where the main character, Muriel Blossom, reminds you of someone you know and love like your mother, grandmother, older neighbor, or yourself.  Muriel, a widower and recent lottery winner, decides to take a bucket list Parision river cruise with her life long friend, Elinor. Possibly because of Muriel’s age (68), plumpness, and overall compassionate demeanor, she becomes a dupe within a crime. But, as the story unfolds, we learn that Muriel is much smarter than anyone thinks.

I had a lot of fun with this book.  Laura Lippman is a seasoned mystery/detective writer with numerous awards and it shows. It is a heist turned into a murder mystery wrapped up in 270 pages. Muriel Blossom proved to be a great travel companion with her warmth, humor and wit. Mrs. Blossom hinted at being bitten by the travel bug. Yes, more Muriel Blossom adventures please. The pacing was great and I often found myself laughing out loud.

This book is a perfect book club read with themes such as aging, identity and second chances. But, this is also a fun cozy read - go ahead, allow yourself the indulgence of traveling with Mrs. Blossom.  I give it five out of five stars.

Thank you Harper Collins for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Robin Munson, Adult Programming & Grant Specialist Librarian

​Download this book with your SPL card on eBook or audiobook.

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I went into All Systems Red by Martha Wells expecting, well, more murder from Murderbot. Instead, what I found was a deeply relatable, socially awkward security unit that mostly wants to be left alone so it can binge-watch its favorite space soap opera, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Murderbot is less about killing sprees and more about navigating human interactions with the enthusiasm of someone stuck at a party they didn’t want to attend. It’s apathetic, snarky, and somehow manages to be endearing while trying (and failing) to stay detached from the humans it’s assigned to protect. Each book is more of a mystery in space rather than a Sci-Fi adventure, although there is some of that.

I’m not usually big on series as tend to lose interest or balk at the commitment of so many books, but I tore through all of the Murderbot Diaries books. They’re fast, fun reads with just enough existential angst to keep things wildly entertaining. And now there’s a TV adaptation on Apple TV, so Murderbot finally gets to be the star of someone else’s screen for a change. I’m curious (and a little nervous) to see how they handle its glorious misanthropy on screen. I've watched the first two episodes and they were delightful, but the season isn't over yet.

Start your Murderbot adventure with the book at the library or use your SPL card to download the eBook or audiobook. 

​Aimee Clark, Library IT

If you're looking for some beautifully written fantasy/worldbuilding with a dash of real world, look no further than Dreamslinger! I loved the descriptions, and the magic system was so well-incorporated into a "real-life" scenario! The added themes are exceedingly relevant today, as well as poignant for the age group. If you like Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle, and enjoy the fights and foibles of Pokemon, then this is the book for you! 

Not to mention: there are dragons. Lots and lots of dragons. 

​Mariah Wills, Library Clerk

Get Dreamslinger at the library.

If you’re looking for a horror novel that genuinely gets under your skin and stays there, This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno might just be the book to ruin your week in the best way possible.

The story follows Thiago, a guy reeling after the sudden death of his wife, Vera. He starts talking to her in the second person, so the whole book feels like a letter to someone who’s gone. And it’s not just sad (though it’s definitely sad). It’s weird, and unsettling, and at times downright terrifying.

At first, the horror starts small. Strange noises, lights flickering, their smart speaker (Itza) acting possessed. You think, "Okay, haunted Alexa, that’s fun." But then it keeps escalating, and it becomes clear this isn’t just a haunted house or glitchy tech. There’s something bigger and stranger going on. Something that doesn't care about logic or closure. It’s like the horror version of grief itself.

What really stuck with me, though, is how much heart is in this book. Thiago’s grief feels so real and so unfiltered. It’s messy. He’s angry, scared, numb, all of it at once. Moreno also weaves in subtle commentary on immigration, identity, and the alienation that comes with being a person of color in a country that treats you like an outsider even when you’re mourning.

I will say, the book shifts gears pretty hard about two-thirds in. We move from haunted apartment to isolated cabin, and from domestic terror into full cosmic horror. Some people might find that jarring. I didn’t mind it. It felt like falling into the abyss alongside Thiago, but if you're someone who likes a neat resolution or grounded plot, the ending might leave you scratching your head.
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Still, for me, this book worked. It’s creepy. It’s sad. It’s strange in the best way. And it made me feel something deep in my gut. If you liked The Only Good Indians, or you want a horror novel that actually says something about what it means to lose someone, and to lose yourself in the process, pick this one up. Just… maybe don’t read it alone at night with a smart speaker nearby. 

Download the eBook with your SPL card.

​Aimee Clark, IT Librarian

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is less a novel than it is a slow-burning revenge opera stitched together with melodrama, betrayal, and deliciously petty vengeance.

We start with Edmond Dantes, a painfully earnest young man who makes the fatal mistake of trusting people. He's falsely imprisoned, and while rotting away in a dungeon for over a decade, he transforms from wide-eyed sailor to cold-blooded mastermind with unlimited funds and a penchant for disguises. It’s part prison escape story, part philosophical meditation, part soap opera with wigs and duels, and all of it works. Somehow. And it's really good.

The plot is sprawling, with enough twists to make a telenovela blush. Dumas doesn’t write characters so much as he unleashes them. Everyone is dramatically flawed or flamboyantly wicked, and nobody ever just talks when they can monologue. It’s long. It’s extra. It’s deeply satisfying.
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If you’ve ever fantasized about enacting slow, poetic justice on your enemies while dressed like a mysterious aristocrat, this is your book. If not, read it anyway. You might discover you’ve had a Count of Monte Cristo buried inside you all along.

Check out the book at the library, or download the eBook or audiobook with your SPL card.

​Aimee Clark, IT Librarian

​Sadie by Courtney Summers is one of those rare books where the format is just as powerful as the story itself. I tend to bounce between print and audio depending on what I’m doing, but for this one, the audiobook is absolutely the way to go. It uses a full cast and leans hard into the true crime podcast structure, which makes it feel chillingly real.

The novel alternates points of view between Sadie, a girl on a desperate, rage-fueled journey to track down her sister’s killer, and West McCray, a podcast host trying to piece together what happened after Sadie disappears. This shift between her raw, vulnerable narration and his more removed, investigative voice builds a slow-burn tension that’s impossible to shake. It’s like living inside two timelines at once—one spiraling forward with Sadie’s determination, and the other chasing her ghost.
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Both formats—print and audio—are strong, but the audiobook takes it to another level. It’s immersive, unsettling, and emotionally devastating in the best way. If you’re looking for something gripping and unforgettable, Sadie delivers.

The library has the book in print, but I really recommend the audiobook, which you can download with your SPL card. 

​Aimee Clark, IT Librarian

Stephen King’s Never Flinch is like catching up with an old friend who’s tougher now, wearier, but still unmistakably herself. Holly Gibney is back, sharper and more grounded than ever, and the story wastes no time throwing her into the fire.

Detective Izzy Jaynes is chasing a chilling letter promising the deaths of “thirteen innocents and one guilty,” and she brings in Holly to help. At the same time, Holly’s guarding a feminist activist being stalked by a radicalized creep. It starts as two stories, but in true King fashion, the threads tighten into one deadly knot.

Holly shines here, not just as an investigator, but as a person coming fully into her own. She’s still awkward and kind, but there’s more steel in her now, more control. The pacing is sharp, the tension constant, and while some dialogue stumbles (yes, she still says “poopy”), the emotional beats land hard. She's by far my favorite character that Stephen King has dreamed up.
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You could read this as a standalone, but it hits deeper if you’ve walked the whole path with Holly. Never Flinch doesn’t reinvent the genre, it just shows how far a character can go when the writing never lets her flinch.

Check out the book at the library, or download the eBook or audiobook with your SPL card.

Aimee Clark, IT Librarian

El Nino by Pam Munoz Ryan Illustrated by Joe Cepeda
Scholastic Press, released May 6, 2025
By Robin Munson

El Nino is a Junior Fiction Fantasy book for ages 8-13. This is a story where reality and myth collide. Where one minute you are an elite swim team is training in the Ocean with your elite swim team off California and the next you, they stumble upon an underwater world with queens, mermalians, and cities of gold.

Kai Sosa is grieving the disappearance of his sister, Cali. Although an elite swimmer, Cali is presumed dead after disappearing in the dense fog while swimming in the ocean leaving behind her family. Kai also ’s excitement of making the elite swim team swim team,  but is overshadowed by his sadness and loss. He struggles with his swim times as he tries to work through his sadness and loss. Kai discovers Cali’s overdue library book, The Elusive Island of California, and reads it to get closer to his sister book about the myth of a sunken and mysterious underwater island. He decides to read the book in hopes to get closer to Cali and maybe figure out what happened to her.

This is where reality and myth collide Throughout the book were the beautiful illustrations of Joe Cepeda’s artwork come alive.  I appreciate the monochromatic blues of the art - how it is soothing even though the story of Kai’s grief is a heavy topic.

This story was a fast read (only around 250 pages) and I found myself needing more. Kai sort of enters the world within the myth although I found this part of the book rushed. I felt the entry into the underwater world was abrupt and brief and it would have been nice for Kai to linger and show us more. That being said, I do understand that this was Kai’s grieving process and he seemed to need that last nudge to leave his sadness behind. The book is well written and worth the read.

I recommend this book to any child interested in swimming, the ocean, or who have experienced a loss in their life. I give it three out of five stars.

Thank you Scholastic Press for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Download the audiobook with your SPL card.

Internment by Samira Ahmed is one of those books that grabs you by the shirt and demands your attention like a warning siren you’d be a fool to ignore. It’s set in a disturbingly plausible near-future America where Muslim citizens are forced into internment camps by a xenophobic government emboldened by fear and nationalism. And yes, it’s fiction, but the kind that makes your stomach drop because you know it’s built on the bones of history and world events.

The story follows Layla Amin, a seventeen-year-old girl who refuses to accept the new regime’s cruelty. She and her family are sent to one of these camps, but Layla isn't going to be kept down. What unfolds is part dystopian rebellion, part raw teenage coming-of-age, and part love letter to resistance itself. Layla is fiery, flawed, and deeply human, and her voice is the driving force of the novel that feels both personal and revolutionary.

Ahmed doesn’t pull punches. The prose is sharp and emotionally charged, and she forces the reader to confront how easily democracies can tip into tyranny when fear is weaponized. The villains in this book aren’t cartoonish, they're blandly bureaucratic, smiling fascists in polos and slacks. 

If you're a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale, 1984, or They Called Us Enemy, this one belongs on your shelf. It’s not comfortable, but it’s necessary. And in a time when book bans and hate speech are on the rise, Internment dares to ask the question: what will you do when it's at your door? Will you know?

​Get the book at the library, or check out the eBook or audiobook.

​Aimee Clark, IT Librarian 

In We Do Not Part, Han Kang, now crowned with the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, continues to unravel the raw sinews of the human spirit with her trademark elegance, restraint, and haunting brutality. If you’ve read The Vegetarian or Human Acts, you already know that she is not here to comfort you. She is here to disarm you, to offer silence as indictment of past sins, and pain as a kind of testimony.

This latest novel is perhaps her most distilled expression of sorrow and connection yet. It is a story soaked in grief, not just personal grief, but historical and national grief, a grief that simmers beneath the skin, unnamed and yet entirely felt. Her language is stripped down to the bone, almost surgical in its precision, leaving vast, aching white space between sentences like unspoken truths hanging in the air.

At its core, We Do Not Part is about the relationship between two friends. But it’s also about war, memory, intimacy, and the ways violence echoes through generations like a haunting melody. The lines between presence and absence, love and loss, flesh and memory blur.

Han Kang does not offer resolution. She never has. But what she does offer is something far more rare: an invitation to sit in discomfort, to witness the beauty in fracture, and to confront the quiet devastation of history without blinking.

It is no surprise that the Nobel committee recognized her. Han writes not with ink but with absence, making you feel the ghosts between the words. We Do Not Part is not just a novel, it is a requiem for everything we cannot hold on to, and a prayer for what lingers anyway.

A devastating, masterful work. Read it, but don’t expect to emerge unchanged. Her books are always a favorite of mine even though they leave me devastated, and this did not disappoint. 

Check it out at the library.

Aimee Clark, IT Librarian

​Let me start with a confession: I usually avoid series. The thought of investing in six, seven, or OMG ten volumes of anything makes me feel like I'm being roped into a cult. So when I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl, I wasn’t expecting to get hooked. I was expecting a few laughs, maybe some dumb fun. What I got was an obsessive, page-devouring spiral of pure joy, horror, and unhinged delight.

This book, this series, is absurd, brilliant, and bananas in all the best ways. Imagine if The Hunger Games got drunk with The Running Man, invited a sentient cat with a gambling addiction, and then all of them were thrown into a sadistic alien reality show dungeon designed by someone who clearly has beef with humanity. That’s the vibe.

Carl is our reluctant hero, snatched from a crumbling Earth in his boxers and thrust into a dungeon where survival is livestreamed for galactic entertainment. His companion, Princess Donut, a bedazzled, talking Persian cat with the charisma of a diva and the bloodlust of a warlord, might just be one of the best-written characters in genre fiction, full stop. The tone whiplashes between comedy, gore, heart, and sheer insanity in a way that somehow works. Dinniman writes like he’s in on the joke but still deeply committed to telling a real story underneath the chaos. And, he does.

The world-building is endlessly creative and unrelenting. There’s no time to catch your breath, just as you're getting used to one deranged monster or trap, the next level hits harder. It’s funny, horrifying, emotionally sincere, and yes, addictive. I devoured these books. Plural. Me. The stand-alone-book-preferring heathen.

If you’re tired of Sci-fi/Fantasy/Dystopia that takes itself too seriously, or if you want to read something where the stakes are real, the satire is sharp, and the cat has better dialogue than most human protagonists, start crawling. Just don’t expect to stop. Oh, and sadness. Book Eight isn't out until this fall.

Get Dungeon Crawler Carl at the library.

​Aimee Clark, IT Librarian

​The Devil in the White City surprised me in the best way. I picked it up for the serial killer. Let’s be real here: H.H. Holmes is what drew me in. The whole idea of a charming murderer building a hotel of horrors during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair? Creepy and fascinating. I was ready for the true crime vibes.

But then, unexpectedly, I got completely sucked into the other half of the book—the part about the actual building of the fair. I didn’t think I’d care much about architecture or city planning or a bunch of guys arguing over blueprints, but Erik Larson somehow made it all feel epic. The stakes were weirdly high, and you start rooting for these stressed-out designers like they're action heroes in a race against time.

The pacing flips between Holmes’s sinister antics and the overwhelming, awe-inspiring task of creating the fair from scratch and the contrast makes both parts even better. By the end, I was just as obsessed with the Ferris wheel as I was with the murder castle. Who knew?

Definitely recommend it if you like your history with a side of murder and unexpected emotional investment in urban landscaping.

Erik Larson has this wild talent for taking what should be a dry history lesson and turning it into something you tear through like a thriller. The Devil in the White City isn’t just a book about a fair and a murderer, it’s a masterclass in how to make nonfiction feel downright cinematic. When is Leo's movie coming? Never? Argh!!!

Larson doesn’t just dump facts on you, he builds them, scene by scene, with so much tension and atmosphere that you forget you’re technically learning. He writes like a novelist but sticks to the historical record, which somehow makes it even more gripping. He’ll set a scene with the creak of wood, the stink of mud, the overwhelming pressure of deadlines, and then cut to Holmes luring another victim with eerie calm. The contrast is genius. One side is a mad dash to build a utopia; the other is slow, calculated evil unfolding behind closed doors.

What makes it obscenely entertaining is how he casts real people like characters in a prestige drama. Daniel Burnham, the architect trying to hold the fair together, becomes this tortured, ambitious protagonist. Holmes, of course, is chilling, but never a cartoonish villain. Larson lets the creepiness unfold subtly, which makes it even worse (in a good way). Even side characters feel alive and distinct. It’s like history woke up, got dressed, and said, “Let me tell you a wild story.” This was easily as entertaining as any crime novel.

Give his books a try, this is a great one to start with. Larson doesn’t just recount events, he resurrects them. And somehow, he makes the bureaucratic nightmare of planning a world’s fair feel just as suspenseful as tracking a serial killer. That’s a magic trick not many writers can pull off.

Check the book out at the library, or we have the audiobook on CDs. You can also download the eBook or audiobook directly to your device with the Libby app with your SPL card.

Aimee Clark, IT Librarian