Larry Grieco, Librarian.  Catherine Coulter continues her “FBI Series” with Power Play, featuring Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock, as well as Special Agent Davis Sullivan.

In the first of two storylines, Natalie Black, the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, seems to be the target of someone who has tried twice to kill her—the first time forcing her off the road outside London, and then almost running her over as she is jogging in Maryland. The rumors are swirling that she was the cause of her fiancé’s apparent suicide after she broke their engagement, and maybe someone is seeking revenge on her. Special Agent Sullivan of the FBI is the only one who seems to believe her.

In the other storyline, Agent Lacey Sherlock is being stalked and shot at, and receives word that “cunning psychopath” Blessed Backman has escaped from a mental hospital in Atlanta. She knows that Backman is out for revenge against her and her partner, Agent Savich, for destroying his mother’s cult. The FBI must act fast to apprehend whoever is after the ambassador and to catch up with Backman before he succeeds in killing Sherlock.

Publishers Weekly: “Captivating….Coulter expertly jacks up the suspense as she alternates between the two plotlines.”

Meanwhile, James Rollins, collaborating with Grant Blackwood, gives us a spin-off from Rollins’s Sigma Force series, with Tucker Wayne teaming with Kane, an apparent wonder-dog “outfitted with the latest high-tech gadgetry,” to save the world in their most inimitable way.

In The Kill Switch, Tucker and Kane are given the assignment to “extract a pharmaceutical magnate from Russian soil,” and they find themselves going up against a “cadre of deadly assassins.” With a biological threat hanging in the balance, the team of man and beast cross the frozen steppes of Russia, then the “sun-blasted savannahs of South Africa,” before heading to the war-torn mountains of Namibia and finally the snowy Great Lakes of the United States.

Publishers Weekly: “Exceptional….A spin-off from bestseller Rollins’s Sigma Force series introduces U.S. Army Ranger Tucker Wayne and his four-footed partner, a small Belgian shepherd named Kane….The action careens across Russia and into South Africa, where Tucker and Kane must go underground to find a deadly life form. Rollins and Blackwood succeed brilliantly.”

For a detective mystery in a different setting, you would do well to discover Donna Leon, an American author who has lived in Italy for more than thirty years. She has written a series called “Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries.” It is the charm of the main character as he goes about the business of solving crimes that makes this series come alive for the reader. Look for “the beauty of its setting, the humanity of its characters, and its fearlessness in exploring politics, morality, and contemporary Italian culture.”

In By Its Cover, Brunetti gets a call from a prestigious Venetian library.  It seems someone has stolen pages out of several rare travel books. The suspect is an American professor visiting from Kansas, but after checking his credentials with the university in America, it becomes clear that he’s not who he claimed to be. The plot thickens nicely, with many suspects arising during the course of the investigation, until a “seemingly harmless” character turns up brutally murdered.

The New York Times Book Review: “It is as a man of sensibility that this endearing detective most engages us. On his slow walks through Venice, he will go out of his way to exchange greetings with a mynah in a pet shop or admire a woman’s legs in a coffee bar—quietly celebrating the way life goes on, even in an unjust world.”

Philadelphia Inquirer: “Brunetti is the most humane sleuth since Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret….A decent man [who achieves] a quiet heroism.”

On Saturday, August 9, we’ll be hosting our annual ice cream party for all the participants in the Summer Reading Program. There will be grand prize drawings, as usual, for those present, and all the ice cream you can eat (with parent’s permission, of course.) We start at 10:00 a.m. and go until noon, with the drawings beginning at about 10:45.

Come join us for the Gilpin County Library Party of the Year!