Rough Country

by John Sandford. Erica McDill is the newly ascended CEO of one of the Twin Cities' most prominent ad agencies. She's taken a few days out of her schedule to recharge at an exclusive northern Minnesota resort catering primarily to wealthy women who may be looking for a fling in between nature hikes. Whatever her vacation plans, she doesn't anticipate her own death at the hands of a sniper. Her prominence in the community leads the governor to hand the case to Lucas Davenport and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Davenport assigns the job to his best investigator, Virgil Flowers, whose investigatory technique is textbook but who fosters a reputation for eccentricity with surfer-dude hair and a working uniform of cowboy boots, jeans, and rock-band T-shirts. Virgil has a plethora of motives to sift through. Was McDill's murderer a bitter business rival? An anonymous lover at the resort? Her longtime partner? A couple of days into the investigation, Flowers learns that a former guest of the resort was murdered in Iowa two years earlier. Is there a connection? Best-selling author Sandford seems to be having more fun these days with Flowers than Davenport, the protagonist in the long-running Prey series. And why not? Each of Flowers' cases reveals more quirks, more depth, and a wicked sense of the absurd, as well as an investigator who can be as analytical as Nero Wolfe and as tough as everybody's favorite Boston badass, Spenser. Great entertainment. --Booklist (Check Catalog)

Supernatural Saratoga : haunted places and famous ghosts of the spa city

by Mason Winfield. Amid the famous mineral springs and horse races, Saratoga Springs is a hub for the supernatural. Author Mason Winfield, operator of Saratoga's Haunted History Ghost Walks, chronicles the Spa City's spookiest legends, from the Iroquoian zombie-like vampires to Benedict Arnold's Halloween apparitions. The heart of the city brims with lore, as covens work in secret in the Devil's Den and phantoms linger at the Arcade on Broadway. In the shadow of the Adirondacks, spectral lights appear on remote Snake Hill, and the Woman in White haunts Saratoga Spa State Park. Explore the creepiest legends of Saratoga history, where some gamblers never leave and demons lurk in the forests. (Check Catalog)

Half broke horses : a true-life novel

by Jeannette Walls. No one familiar with Walls's affecting memoir, The Glass Castle, will be surprised by her subtitle here: Walls is a careful observer who can give true-life stories the rush and immediacy of the best fiction. Here she novelizes the life of her grandmother, giving herself just the latitude she needs to create a great story. Lily Casey Smith is one astonishing woman, tough enough to trot her pony across several hundred miles of desert to her first job when she's only a teenager. After a brief stint in Chicago and marriage to a flim-flam man, she's back in the West, teaching again and eventually remarrying, helping her fine new husband at the gas station, raising her children, and running hootch if she must to make ends meet during the Depression. Her story is at once simple and utterly remarkable, for this is one remarkable woman-a half-broke horse herself who's clearly passed on her best traits to her granddaughter. Verdict Told in a natural, offhand voice that is utterly enthralling, this is essential reading for anyone who loves good fiction-or any work about the American West. --Library Journal (Check catalog)

Ayn Rand and the world she made

by Anne Conover Heller. There is a scene in Heller's biography where the controversial writer Rand and her husband delight in the fact that they can select from the more expensive items on a cafeteria menu after selling the movie rights of The Fountainhead. The scene illustrates Heller's ability to capture the essence of her subject. Rand, never a fan of the poor masses, was elated to remove herself from the mob. Although Heller was denied access to the Ayn Rand Institute's archives, because she is not an advocate for Rand's ideas, she still performs beautifully. Heller conducted over 50 interviews, including three long interviews with Rand's former lover, Nathaniel Branden. She traces Rand's childhood in Russia; her arrival in America; her unconventional marriage to actor Frank O'Connor; her work as a playwright and novelist; the development of objectivism, Rand's philosophy that embraces capitalist individualism and rejects altruism; and her long-standing extramarital affair. VERDICT An impartial, well-documented, and sweeping biography for fans and scholars of Rand; with a bibliography and 100-plus pages of notes. --Library Journal. (Check Catalog)

The man in the wooden hat

by Jane Gardam. Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth (an acronym for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong"), Gardam's proper lawyer and judge, is back for a second outing (after Old Filth), this time as seen through the eyes of his wife, Betty. Lately returned from her wartime work at Bletchley Park and now a regular among the expat community of Hong Kong, Betty is cocooned in comfortable gentility with Filth, a loving but distant husband largely preoccupied with his legal life. After a childhood spent in a Japanese labor camp, she is now unable to have children and largely unfocused; her brief premarital fling with Filth's arch enemy, Terry Veneering, creates an enduring bond with him and his young son, Harry, who fills a void in her life. Verdict Admirers of Old Filth will be delighted to discover the backstory of his marriage and to renew acquaintances with a dear friend. Those meeting him and Mrs. Feathers for the first time will surely want more. An elegant portrait of an old-world marriage. Highly recommended. --Library Journal. (Check Catalog)

Open : an autobiography

by Andre Agassi. Agassi has always had a tortured look in his eyes on the tennis court. In 1992, when he burst onto the world sports stage by winning the Grand Slam at Wimbledon, he looked like a deer in headlights. Nobody seemed more surprised and upset by his big win that day than he did. For good reason, too. Agassi hated tennis. This is the biggest revelation in his very revealing autobiography. Agassi has hated tennis from early childhood, finding it extremely lonely out on the court. But he didn't have a choice about playing the game because his father drove him to become a champion, like it or not. Mike Agassi, a former Golden Gloves fighter who never made it professionally, decided that his son would become a champion tennis player. In militaristic fashion, Mike pushed seven-year-old Andre to practice relentlessly until the young boy was exhausted and in pain. He also arranged for Andre, age 13, to attend a tennis camp where he was expected to pull weeds and clean toilets. The culmination of all of this parental pushing came when Andre began winning as an adult. But it didn't make him happy. Within this framework, Agassi's other disclosures make sense. He had a troubled marriage to Brooke Shields that didn't last. He developed a drug problem that sabotaged his career. He was insecure about everything. Only when Andre met tennis star Steffi Graf (whom he eventually married) did things begin to change. Readers will definitely cheer when Andre finally makes peace with the game he once hated and learns to enjoy it. --Booklist (Check catalog)

The lost symbol : a novel

by Dan Brown. After scores of Da Vinci Code knockoffs, spinoffs, copies and caricatures, Brown has had the stroke of brilliance to set his breakneck new thriller not in some far-off exotic locale, but right here in our own backyard. Everyone off the bus, and welcome to a Washington, D.C., they never told you about on your school trip when you were a kid, a place steeped in Masonic history that, once revealed, points to a dark, ancient conspiracy that threatens not only America but the world itself. Returning hero Robert Langdon comes to Washington to give a lecture at the behest of his old mentor, Peter Solomon. When he arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his lecture, he finds, instead of an audience, Peter's severed hand mounted on a wooden base, fingers pointing skyward to the Rotunda ceiling fresco of George Washington dressed in white robes, ascending to heaven. Langdon teases out a plethora of clues from the tattooed hand that point toward a secret portal through which an intrepid seeker will find the wisdom known as the Ancient Mysteries, or the lost wisdom of the ages. A villain known as Mal'akh, a steroid-swollen, fantastically tattooed, muscle-bodied madman, wants to locate the wisdom so he can rule the world. Mal'akh has captured Peter and promises to kill him if Langdon doesn't agree to help find the portal. Joining Langdon in his search is Peter's younger sister, Kathleen, who has been conducting experiments in a secret museum. This is just the kickoff for a deadly chase that careens back and forth, across, above and below the nation's capital, darting from revelation to revelation, pausing only to explain some piece of wondrous, historical esoterica. Jealous thriller writers will despair, doubters and nay-sayers will be proved wrong, and readers will rejoice: Dan Brown has done it again. --Publisher's Weekly. (Check Catalog)

People of Albany : the first 200 years +

Peter J. Hess. Did you know that Jamestown, Virginia was the earliest English settlement but Jamestown was abandoned in 1699 making Dutch Albany the oldest continuous European settlement in the original thirteen English colonies? Did you know that Santa Claus may have made his first appearance in the New World in Albany and that Santa Claus has nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas? Read about the earliest Van Rensselaers, Schuylers, Ten Broecks, Yates and Lansings. Learn about: Anneke Jans Bogardus who owned 62 acres of Manhattan Island just north of Wall Street-probably the most valuable land in the United States, Kajingahaga and Agotzagena-the earliest Indian tribes encountered at Albany, the entire male population of Albany marching north to fight at Saratoga, all of the events leading up to the Hamilton-Burr duel that happened in Albany, the Albanian who drafted the document that was the basis for the Bill of Rights, the discovery of the Cohoes Mastodon and Cardiff Giant, and much more. (Check Catalog)

Skeletons at the feast : a novel

by Christopher A. Bohjalian. In his 12th novel, Bohjalian (The Double Bind) paints the brutal landscape of Nazi Germany as German refugees struggle westward ahead of the advancing Russian army. Inspired by the unpublished diary of a Prussian woman who fled west in 1945, the novel exhumes the ruin of spirit, flesh and faith that accompanied thousands of such desperate journeys. Prussian aristocrat Rolf Emmerich and his two elder sons are sent into battle, while his wife flees with their other children and a Scottish POW who has been working on their estate. Before long, they meet up with Uri Singer, a Jewish escapee from an Auschwitz-bound train, who becomes the group's protector. In a parallel story line, hundreds of Jewish women shuffle west on a gruesome death march from a concentration camp. Bohjalian presents the difficulties confronting both sets of travelers with carefully researched detail and an unflinching eye, but he blinks when creating the Emmerichs, painting them as untainted by either their privileged status, their indoctrination by the Nazi Party or their adoration of Hitler. Although most of the characters lack complexity, Bohjalian's well-chosen descriptions capture the anguish of a tragic era and the dehumanizing desolation wrought by war. --Publisher's Weekly. (Check catalog)