After spending her life with her mentally retarded mother and agoraphobic neighbor, twelve-year-old Heidi sets out from Reno, Nevada, to New York state to find out who she is. With the help of some old photographs she uncovers family secrets. For grades 6-9 and older readers. 2004.

Assigned as lab partners in senior chemistry, well-to-do Brittany Ellis and Latino Blood gang member Alex Fuentes clash in and out of class. As their heated exchanges lead to a forbidden attraction, their lives begin to change. Violence, strong language, and some descriptions of sex. For senior high readers. 2009.

Fifteen-year-old Scarlett Martin helps to run her family's aging Manhattan hotel. When former starlet Mrs. Amberson arrives for the summer and works with Scarlett's brother to stage an amateur play, Scarlett falls in love with one of the actors. For senior high readers. 2008.

Boston-born Nidali, daughter of a Greek Egyptian mother and a Muslim Palestinian father, grows up in Kuwait. When Iraq invades in 1990, Nidali's family flees first to Egypt and later Texas, where--to her parents' dismay--Nidali quickly adapts to teen culture. Strong language and some explicit descriptions of sex. 2008.

Two romantic novels involving competitors. In Partners (1985), rival New Orleans reporters find trouble while investigating a murder. In The Art of Deception (1986), sculptor Kirby Fairchild welcomes painter Adam Haines to her father's estate--but both artists have secrets. Some explicit descriptions of sex. Bestseller. 2009.

Jacob Jankowski says: "I am ninety. Or ninety-three. One or the other." At the beginning of Water for Elephants, he is living out his days in a nursing home, hating every second of it. His life wasn't always like this, however, because Jacob ran away and joined the circus when he was 23. It wasn't a romantic, carefree decision though. His parents were killed in an auto accident one week before he was to sit for his veterinary medicine exams at Cornell. He buried his parents, and then learned that they left him nothing because they had mortgaged everything to pay his tuition. Unable to handle their sudden deaths, he walked out of his final exams and wound up on a circus train. The circus he joins, in Depression-era America, is second-rate at best. With Ringling Brothers as the standard, Benzini Brothers is far down the scale and pale by comparison.

Water for Elephants is the story of Jacob's life with this circus. Sara Gruen spares no detail in chronicling the squalid, filthy, brutish circumstances in which circus workers live. The animals are mangy, underfed or fed rotten food, and abused. Jacob, once it becomes known that he has veterinary skills, is put in charge of the "menagerie" and all its ills. Uncle Al, the circus impresario, is a self-serving, venal creep who slaps people around because he can, and then there is August, the charismatic and twisted animal trainer. When Rosie, a seemingly untrainable elephant was obtained to try to get on a par with Ringling, she became the great gray hope for this third-rate traveling show. There is a bit of romance too as Jacob and Marlena fal in love.

The most interesting aspect of the book is all the circus lore that Gruen has so carefully researched. She has all the right vocabulary: grifters, roustabouts, workers, cooch tent, rubes, First of May, what the band plays when there's trouble, Jamaican ginger paralysis, life on a circus train, set-up and take-down, being run out of town by the "revenooers" or the cops, and losing all your hooch. There is one glorious passage about Marlena and Rosie, the bull elephant, that truly evokes the magic a circus can create. The ending is absolutely far fetched but really quite lovely and the only way this book should end.

Journalist investigates the 1993 Florida slaying of twenty-year-old Bobby Kent at the hands of seven young people. Depicts the suburban middle-class but decadent lifestyle of the victim and his killers and the trial that followed, including an "urban psychosis" defense theory. Explicit descriptions of sex, violence, and strong language. 1997. Journalist

After Rhonda Farr witnesses the kidnapping of a girl by someone wearing a bunny costume, suspicion falls on residents of Rhonda's Vermont town. The crime triggers Rhonda's memories of her childhood friend Lizzy's disappearance and exposes long-kept secrets about adultery, incest, and murder.

A masked gunman kills wealthy Paul Wheeler in the elevator of an Atlanta hotel, with Paul's companion, Julie Rutledge, looking on. Julie suspects Paul's movie-obsessed nephew Creighton is the murderer. Meanwhile Creighton's attorney Derek Mitchell fights his feelings for Julie. Violence, strong language, and explicit descriptions of sex. Bestseller. 2009.

Series: Lincoln Rhyme #9

Lincoln Rhyme is back, on the trail of a killer whose weapon of choice cripples New York City with fear.

The weapon is invisible and omnipresent. Without it, modern society grinds to a halt. It is electricity. The killer harnesses and steers huge arc flashes with voltage so high and heat so searing that steel melts and his victims are set afire.

When the first explosion occurs in broad daylight, reducing a city bus to a pile of molten, shrapnel-riddled metal, officials fear terrorism. Rhyme, a world-class forensic criminologist known for his successful apprehension of the most devious criminals, is immediately tapped for the investigation. Long a quadriplegic, he assembles NYPD detective Amelia Sachs and officer Ron Pulaski as his eyes, ears and legs on crime sites, and FBI agent Fred Dellray as his undercover man on the street. As the attacks continue across the city at a sickening pace, and terrifying demand letters begin appearing, the team works desperately against time and with maddeningly little forensic evidence to try to find the killer. Or is it killers?

Meanwhile, Rhyme is consulting on another high-profile investigation in Mexico with a most coveted quarry in his crosshairs: the hired killer known as the Watchmaker, one of the few criminals to have eluded Rhymes net.

Juggling two massive investigations against a cruel ticking clock takes a toll on Rhymes health. Soon Rhyme is fighting on yet another front -- and his determination to work despite his physical limitations threatens to drive away his closest allies when he needs them most.

You've either done it or know someone who has: the one-night stand, the familiar outcome of a night spent at a bar, sometimes the sole payoff for your friend's irritating wedding, or the only relief from a disastrous vacation. Often embarrassing and uncomfortable, occasionally outlandish, but most times just a necessary and irresistible evil, the one-night stand is a social rite as old as sex itself and as common as a bar stool. Enter Chelsea Handler. Gorgeous, sharp, and anything but shy, Chelsea loves men and lots of them. My Horizontal Life chronicles her romp through the different bedrooms of a variety of suitors, a no-holds-barred account of what can happen between a man and a sometimes very intoxicated, outgoing woman during one night of passion. From her short fling with a Vegas stripper to her even shorter dalliance with a well-endowed little person, from her uncomfortable tryst with a cruise ship performer to her misguided rebound with a man who likes to play leather dress-up, Chelsea recalls the highs and lows of her one-night stands with hilarious honesty. Encouraged by her motley collection of friends (aka: her partners in crime) but challenged by her family members (who at times find themselves a surprise part of the encounter), Chelsea hits bottom and bounces back, unafraid to share the gritty details. My Horizontal Life is one guilty pleasure you won't be ashamed to talk about in the morning.

1890. Matthew Coulter tracks the Sebastian Gang across the West after they murder his wife. When the outlaws kidnap Eden Paxton, half sister of Ace Keegan, from Keegan's Lady (RC 46569), Matthew rescues her and falls in love. Some violence, some strong language, and some explicit descriptions of sex. Bestseller. 2010.