to be read

3.5 stars

Called in as a consultant for a possible child-abuse case, child psychologist Alex Delaware begins to suspect that the hospital has come under the sway of Chuck Jones, the financial whiz administrator who seems overly interested in profits.

"A ... visual record of an unprecedented time, following the headlines from the first appearance of the coronavirus to the inauguration of President Joe Biden. Made in real time, Elise Engler's ... immediate images recapture what it was like to live through 2020, bringing texture, feeling, and even charm to what we might not remember and what we will never forget"--

4.3 stars

1945. Marta Nederman has barely survived the brutality of a Nazi concentration camp, where she was imprisoned for her work with the Polish resistance. Lucky to have escaped with her life, she meets Paul, an American soldier, who gives her hope of a happier future. The two make a promise to meet in London, but Paul is in a deadly plane crash and never arrives. Finding herself pregnant and alone in a strange city, Marta finds comfort with a kind British...

3.5 stars

They're out there, under the salt -- the bodies of German seamen who used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for unescorted American tankers sailing from the oil refineries of Baton Rouge out into the Gulf of Mexico. As a child, Dave Robicheaux had been haunted by the sailors' images; then, as a young college student, he'd discovered one of their sunken subs while scuba diving. Years later, in a New Orleans populated by desperate hustlers...

5 stars

February, 1991. A life raft washes ashore in Skåne carrying two dead men in expensive suits, shot gangland-style. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team determine that the men were Eastern European criminals. But what appears in Sweden to be an open-and-shut case soon plunges Wallander into an alien world of police surveillance, thinly veiled threats, and life-endangering lies.
When another murder is committed, Wallander must travel to Riga, Latvia,...

3.3 stars

The good: New York's Lombardo's Steak House is famous for three reasons, the menu, the clientele, and now, the gruesome murder of an infamous mob lawyer. Effortlessly, the assassin slips through the police's fingers, and his absence sparks a blaze of accusations about who ordered the hit. The bad: Seated at a nearby table, reporter Nick Daniels is conducting a once-in-a-lifetime interview with a legendary baseball bad boy. In the chaos, he accidentally...

4 stars

4 stars

Compelled to assist a beautiful woman who whispers a plea for help in his San Francisco bar, former CIA agent Sam Capra is pursued by authorities and a secret network of successful people who owe their wealth and power to a mysterious and dangerous Faustian figure.

5 stars

Major Bing, the nephew of Inspector O and the long-suffering chief of the Chinese Ministry of State Security operations on the border with North Korea is faced with a highly sensitive assignment to bring back from the North a long missing Chinese security official. Inspector O reluctantly helps him navigate an increasingly complex and deadly maze, one that leads down the twisted byways of his homeland.

4 stars

After an old university friend and fellow archeologist's murdered, forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway travels to Lancashire to examine the bones he found, which reveal a shocking fact about King Arthur, and discovers a campus living in fear of a sinister right-wing group called the White Hand.