NBS recommends mysteries and memoirs

My Life In France

By Julia Child

P335

MANILA, Philippines - Julia Child single-handedly awakened America to the pleasures of good cooking with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she didn’t know the first thing about cooking when she landed in France.

Indeed, when she first arrived in 1948 with her husband Paul, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever. Julia’s unforgettable story unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a cook and teacher and writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last 50 years.

Sookie Stackhouse: The Complete Stories, A Touch Of Dead

By Charlaine Harris

P995

Cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse is no typical southern belle. She can read minds. And she’s got a thing for vampires. Which, in a town like Bon Temps, Louisiana, means she’ll have to watch her back — and neck.

New York Times–bestselling author Charlaine Harris has re-imagined the supernatural world with her “spunky” (Tampa Tribune) Southern Vampire novels starring telepathic waitress Sookie Stackhouse. Now, for the first time, here is every Sookie Stackhouse short story ever written — together in one volume.

Stories include “Fairy Dust,” “One Word Answer,” “Dracula Night,” “Lucky” and “Giftwrap.”

True Blue

By David Baldacci

P655

Mason “Mace” Perry was a firebrand cop on the DC police force until she was kidnapped and framed for a crime. She lost everything — her badge, her career, her freedom — and spent two years in prison. Now she’s back on the outside and focused on one mission: to be a cop once more. Her only shot at being a true blue again is to solve a major case on her own, and prove she has the right to wear the uniform. But even with her police chief sister on her side, she has to work in the shadows: A vindictive US attorney is looking for any reason to send Mace back behind bars. Then Roy Kingman enters her life. Soon, what began as a fairly routine homicide takes a terrifying and unexpected turn-into something complex, diabolical, and possibly lethal.

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel

By Jeannette Walls

P985

“Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, in Jeannette Walls’s magnificent, true-life novel based on her no-nonsense, resourceful, hardworking, and spectacularly compelling grandmother. By age six, Lily was helping her father break horses. At fifteen, she left home to teach in a frontier town — riding five hundred miles on her pony, all alone, to get to her job. She learned to drive a car (“I loved cars even more than I loved horses. They didn’t need to be fed if they weren’t working, and they didn’t leave big piles of manure all over the place”) and fly a plane, and, with her husband, ran a vast ranch in Arizona. She raised two children, one of whom is Jeannette’s memorable mother, Rosemary Smith Walls, unforgettably portrayed in The Glass Castle.

Lily survived tornadoes, droughts, floods, the Great Depression, and the most heartbreaking personal tragedy. She bristled at prejudice of all kinds — against women, Native Americans, and anyone else who didn’t fit the mold. Half Broke Horses is Laura Ingalls Wilder for adults, as riveting and dramatic as Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa or Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. It will transfix readers everywhere.

Rough Country

By John Sandford

P1,129

Virgil’s always been known for having a somewhat active, er, social life, but he’s probably not going to be getting too many opportunities for that during his new case. While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only, a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery, commune with nature, and while it didn’t start out to be a place for many with Sapphic inclinations, that’s pretty much what it is today.

Which makes things all the more complicated for Virgil, because as he begins investigating, he finds a web of connections among the people at the resort, the victim, and some local women, notably a talented country singer, and the more he digs, the more he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions, encompassing a multitude of motivations: jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, fear. And then he discovers that this is not the first murder, that there was another, seemingly unrelated one, the year before. And that there’s about to be a third, definitely related one, anytime now. and as the fourth… well, Virgil better hope he can catch the killer before that happens.