Preview Shelf -- Guess What's Coming Soon!

With our schools back in session, the Crawfordville District Public Library youth services department has finished its extensive summer programs and its back-to-school activities. Its walls are bare right now, as staff and patrons await an exciting new look. Next time you come, look straight north from the entrance to see the mural being created by Michael Bowman. Here's some summer reading you might like to investigate. The novel "Serpent Box" by Vincent Carrella begins by showing unorthodox Appalachian faithful spreading the word of the Gospels by handling deadly serpents and drinking lye. "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris notes, "Every office is a family of sorts", and his plot copes with a business downturn through gossip, elaborate pranks, and frequent coffee breaks. "Dangerous Past" by A. F. Ebbers is an aviation thriller that "rocks" the highest levels of Washington. Kate Christensen's "The Great Man" depicts a New York City artist of the heroic generation of the 40s and 50s, painting one subject, the female nude; he also has a separate secret life, and two rival biographers circle around him as they see him from different points of view. "On Tall Pine Lake" by Dorothy Garlock is her 50th novel about ordinary Americans and their dreams, this time a young woman facing a dangerous future and an unexpected chance at love while managing a fishing camp in the Arkansas woods. "Thigh High" by Christina Dodd involves a string of bank robberies in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Sharon Sala, Emilie Richards and Susan Wiggs offer stories of female courage called "More Than Words". "The Angel of Death" is a forensic mystery by Alane Ferguson; a seventeen-year-old finds herself solving the murder of her English teacher. "Traitor" by Gudrun Pausewang presents a Russian prisoner of war on the run from the Nazis hiding out in a German family's barn. William Sleator's "Hell Phone" tells how a schoolboy finds himself being pulled into a web of crime. Alisa Libby's gothic novel "The Blood Confession" recalls a real-life countess in16th century Hungary which was full of horror, romance, and history. Carol Neggers' "The Angel" deals with the rugged coast of Ireland where a folklorist pursues the mysterious legend of an ancient Celtic stone carving. "Killer View" by Ridley Pearson reports a Sun Valley skier gone missing, and one of the searchers is suddenly dead. "Secrets" by Jude Deveraux involves a fiancee who has broken her engagement because of a man with whom she fell in love at the age of 12. Catherine Coulter's "Tail Spin" is an FBI thriller because a Special Agent tries to protect a renowned psychiatrist's life, which involves fast helicopter rides, sad diagnoses, and hidden facts not revealed until the end. In "Tribute" by Nora Roberts a former child star leaves Hollywood for Virginia's Shenandoah Valley for a quiet life restoring her grandmother's farmhouse, but then she finds disturbing old letters in the attic. "What Never Happens" by Anne Holt reveals horrible murders of celebrities in the cold of an Oslo winter. In "Last Kiss" by Luanne Rice a singer-songwriter must uncover the reason for her 18-year-old son's murder a year after not a single clue has surfaced. Iris and Roy Johansen's "Silent Thunder" is a decommissioned Soviet submarine acquired by a U.S. maritime museum for public exhibition; inspecting the ship they find a mysterious message which triggers a deadly assault.