New Book Club Kits - April 13, 2018

When Joel, whose then-7-year-old brother was kidnapped in a Stockholm subway station in 1970, suddenly goes missing, his wife reaches out to an old friend for help. Danny Katz, a brilliant computer programmer and recovering heroin addict, as well as a divorced father of two young girls, begins to dig behind the digital veil in search of Joel, even though the investigation quickly interferes with his duties as a parent. As Katz begins to uncover upsetting secrets about the wealthy and powerful family at the heart of the investigation and the case takes a violent turn, he also finds a disorienting connection to his own past. 

One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, The Leavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been taken away--and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.

In August 1863, during Kit Carson's roundup of the Navajo, Santa Fe's Provost Marshal, Major Joseph Cummings, is found dead in an arroyo near what is now the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona. The murder, as well as the roughly million of today's dollars in cash and belongings in his saddlebags, is historically factual. Carson's explanation that he was shot by a lone Indian, which, even today, can be found in the U.S. Army Archives, is implausible. Who did kill Carson's ''brave and lamented'' Major? The answer may be revealed in this Western murder mystery based in history about a group of con artists operating in 1861-1863 in the New Mexico and Arizona Territories. 

The drowning pool at Beckford had been a spot where accused witches were ‘tried’—drowned to prove their innocence.  Lately the pool has claimed more women, ostensibly from suicide.  But when women of the town and relatives of the dead women begin to suspect a more sinister motive behind the deaths, they reveal deceptions and betrayals at the core of their small town.  

This novel, first published in Latin America in 1967 and written in the style of magical realism, tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo, Colombia, and the family that founded it.