National Network for Equitable Library Service

From bestselling, award-winning author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), a gutsy, exciting novel that looks honestly at the erotic impulses of an all-too-typical young man.Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. "Let me put it this way," he says. "Draw a number line, with zero is you never think about sex and ten is, it's all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex." Cole fantasizes about whomever he's looking at.

When long-buried secrets come back to the surface... The bones of seven young girls, picked clean and carefully preserved, discovered years ago...'hat's all Sergeant Ryan DeMarco knows about the unsolved crime he has unwittingly been roped into investigating during what is supposed to be a healing road trip with his new love, Jayme. DeMarco is still reeling from the case that led to death of his best friend months ago and wants nothing more than to lay low.

A bone-chilling novel about a woman found holding a hunting knife, covered in blood that is not her own, who communicates with a single, ominous drawing, and the man who must get inside her head to solve a mystery without a crime. Detective Steven Paul has had the same nightmare for as long as he can remember, a strange symbol figuring prominently into his terror. He decided long ago that the recurring dreams are nothing more than an unfortunate side effect of his often traumatic profession.

"As one for whom certain story lines and characters have become as real as life itself, Crossing the Lines was a pure delight, a swift yet psychologically complex read, cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed." -Dean Koontz, New York Times Bestselling author Sulari Gentill, author of the 1930s Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, jumps to the post-modern in Crossing the Lines. A successful writer, Madeleine, creates a character, Edward, and begins to imagine his life. He, too, is an author.

Listless, bored, alienated, and mistrustful, Trace Patterson has finished his first year of university and is living with a drunken aunt in North Van. He divides his nights between slasher films and high school house parties. When two old buddies resurface, however one in a psych ward, and the other on a paranoia bender. Trace's careless-if-not-carefree existence becomes paralyzed by self-doubt. Does he actually want to help his friends, or is he secretly hoping they'll go over the edge?

Alex Pheby's 'Playthings' is a visceral and darkly comic portrait of severe mental illness based on the true story of nineteenth-century German judge and patient of Freud, Daniel Paul Schreber. While deftly exploring the ideas of madness and sanity, of reality and delusion, Pheby reflects Schreber's disordered mind in vertiginous prose, and compassionately reveals the humanity and tragedy of his psychosis.

Gillian Davies is six years old when her mother sends her to Croessfordd to escape the Blitz. But can she escape her child-molesting cousin Angus? Alternating between WWII Wales and present-day Canada, The Monkey Puzzle Tree is the story of Gillian's struggle to accept her childhood trauma, forgive her mother, and confront Angus - who, it seems, is as dangerous as ever.

Malcolm Firth is an aging hairdresser whose partner, Denis, in the late stages of Alzheimer's, has become inexplicably anti-Semitic. Alison, his young suburban protege, has never heard of the Holocaust. When Alison notices a tattoo on the arm of one of her older clients, and then one of her gay friends is brutally murdered by a group of skinheads, she is soon propelled on a harrowing journey into a world of hate and confusion. Haunted by the death of her friend, she wanders the rings of a psychological and spiritual inferno, bringing the slowly declining Malcolm with her.

First published in 1972, Going Down Slow is an intense and very funny novel about one mans attempt to maintain his sanity, and his sense of humour, in the face of mounting odds. Metcalf's young hero, David Appleby, a young school teacher just over from Britain, is pitted against small-mindedness, prejudice, and temptations that are generations old. The writing is, as one would expect of anything by Metcalf, of the highest order. Going Down Slow is a sharp and biting satire, and an unforgettable novel.

As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet parked across the street from his sister's apartment. An unexpected turn of events causes Sosa to assume the other man's identity. When he becomes the driver of the mysterious yellow Chevrolet, Sosa discovers that it is home to four poisonous snakes. With the snakes as accomplices, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on the city of San Salvador.