Larry Grieco, Librarian.    Janet Evanovich has long been entertaining discerning readers with her “Stephanie Plum” series. The twenty-first entry in these long-running bounty hunter chronicles is called Top Secret Twenty-One and has the quirky Stephanie looking for Jimmy Poletti, “Trenton, New Jersey’s favorite used-car dealer,” who was caught selling more than used cars. Out on bail, he missed his court date and is nowhere to be found. To make matters worse, all leads are turning into dead ends, or, rather, dead bodies. Trenton’s top cop, Joe Morelli, can’t find him either. Stephanie is forced to protect “general pain in her behind” Randy Briggs, who worked as Poletti’s bookkeeper, and who is now likely to be the next murder victim. Unrelated to finding Poletti, Stephanie is drawn into another situation when Ranger, resident security expert, not to mention her greatest temptation, is the target of a failed assassination plot, and she needs to see that he survives any further attempts on his life. And then there’s Grandma Mazur, and her wild bucket list. Stephanie always has her hands full, and that’s only part of the fun of these amazingly thrilling and yet laugh-out-loud-funny novels. If you have yet to discover Evanovich, and you stumble into this one, you probably won’t stop until you’ve read all twenty that came before.

When it comes to entertaining mystery novels, none are better than the “Bernie Rhodenbarr Mysteries,” penned by the legendary Lawrence Block. There hasn’t been one of these since 2004, but now Bernie is back in The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons. In this, the eleventh installment, the bookseller by day and burglar by night finds himself and his lesbian sidekick Carolyn Kaiser “breaking into houses, apartments, and even a museum, in a madcap adventure replete with American Colonial silver, an F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript, a priceless portrait, and a remarkable array of buttons.” Some of you may be more familiar with Block’s “Matthew Scudder” novels, a little more hard-boiled than the “Bernie” books, but Block is equally skilled in both modes of mystery writing, and has been successful for more than half a century. If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t enjoyed a Lawrence Block mystery, what are you waiting for?

In a slightly more mainstream novel, but not without amateur detectives, Mona Simpson introduces us to a boy sleuth, Miles Adler-Hart, whose investigation into the inner workings of his own family reveal much more than he bargained for. Casebook begins with innocent eavesdropping “to find out what his mother is planning for his life,” but he learns instead that his parents are in fact separating. Miles enlists the aid of his best friend, Hector, and the two embark on a thorough investigation of everything having to do with the family and household. All clues seem to lead to his mother’s bedroom, and they are suddenly on the trail of a mysterious stranger from Washington, D.C. The more they find out, the more the two boys are overwhelmed with knowledge of the existence of evil and they are forced to “concoct modes of revenge on their villains that are both hilarious and naïve.” Mona Simpson has succeeded in giving us a boy hero for our times, “whose story remains with us long after we’ve read the final page.” One of her previous novels, Off Keck Road, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and won the Heartland Prize from the Chicago Tribune. Simpson is on the faculty at UCLA.

The Summer Reading Program for kids is still growing, with 140 kids signed up, and the Artist-in-Residence program is a third over, and by all accounts a great success. You can expect A Midsummer Night’s Poetry Reading soon, and, as always, the best in library services any little county could wish for. Thank you all for your continued support!