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THE WOLVES ARE WATCHING

After Dr. John McKenzie destroys the equipment of a fellow member, the wolf-watching group to which he and his long-suffering wife belong are glad to see him go, tired of his tirades. Then Lew Ferris, sheriff of the Loon Lake area of northern Wisconsin, gets a call about a couple of missing wolf watchers—the McKenzies—whom […]

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THE GREAT NORTHERN EXPEDITION

In 1725, Captain Vitus Bering, under orders from Peter the Great, embarked on an expedition to find a link between America and Asia. The mission failed, but Bering was unwilling to give up, and so in 1733 began the Great Northern Expedition, charting Russia’s northern shoreline and parts of Alaska and Japan. Told from the […]

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MILKSHAKE THE DISAPPEARING MILK SNAKE

Carter Rogers is on the case. His specialty? Looking into deceased and missing class pets. After his class pet, a naked mole-rat named Mr. Pebbles, mysteriously died, Carter teamed up with the snarky rodent’s disembodied spirit to find out why. Now Carter must track down a reptile gone rogue. A milk snake named Milkshake, Carter’s […]

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CELESTIAL LIGHTS

“Earth is now a pale blue smudge,” writes Commander Oliver Ines from aboard the Talos. Growing up in a small English village, where he had celestial wallpaper in his bedroom, Ollie had no idea he would grow up to become one of the most famous astronauts of all time. As he floats through space with […]

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THE PERFECT CIRCLE

Irene Sartori sells foreclosed houses—from a palazzo in smoldering Rome to an expensive property in sinking Venice—to wealthy foreigners impervious to the dystopian climate catastrophe befalling Europe. Renowned in her field, Irene gets a mysterious call beckoning her to help sell an “unsellable” property in her hometown of Milan. The enchanting yet haunting spot, known […]

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MEADOWS OF THE SEA

“Underwater pastures, / ancient as dinosaurs, / vital as trees, / filled with wonders,” Schaub writes as she tantalizingly beckons young audiences to join the racially diverse set of young snorkelers and beachcombers in Le’s flowing marine scenes. Slipping in explanatory notes between lines of sonorous free verse, the author begins by differentiating seagrass—flowering plants […]

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I THINK OF YOU CONSTANTLY WITH LOVE

This extraordinary volume of letters offers an intimate portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein, not as the granite logician of legend, but as a man unguarded, needy, joyful, and often undone by love. Written between 1946 and his death in 1951, the correspondence with Ben Richards, a medical student 35 years his junior, documents what Wittgenstein called […]

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A VERY VEXING MURDER

Readers familiar with Harriet Smith as Emma Woodhouse’s mousy, unmarriageable protégé will be surprised to learn that Harriet (not her real name, by the way) is already at age 18 an accomplished con artist, trained by the father she turned on and fled, who’s hired by Mrs. Lavinia Churchill to recover some prized jewelry Jane […]

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OUR MINDS WERE ALWAYS FREE

Davis writes early in her book, “America has a long and sordid history of mining the value of the art and inventions of Black people for its own benefit and erasing evidence of Black authorship to prop up the myth of white superiority.” It’s impossible to argue with that, as she demonstrates in this well-researched […]

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BLUNT INSTRUMENT

This winning first mystery from novelist and memoirist Bloom features an English professor turned private eye with the perfectly hard-boiled name of Dell Chandler and a charming, ironic, super cool narrative voice to match. She’s hired to investigate an untimely death at Cromwell University, a private college in a snooty area of Connecticut: A professor […]