National Network for Equitable Library Service

Piedra Negra is an isolated village that is home to many soldiers who were injured in the revolution and now pass their time drinking firewater so intense that they all hallucinate and most never recover. The firewater distiller's daughter, Elena, longs to be a poet. After a chance encounter with Daniel Arcilla, Cuba's most important poet, she wins a national poetry prize and leaves Piedra Negra behind for Havana. There, she encounters a population adjusting to a new way of life post-revolution: spies with secret meetings and black marketeers dealing with censorship.

Lane Sanders and her fiery boss, Mayor Fiorello "Fio" La Guardia, have managed to contain the explosive underground conspiracies of New York's most sinister schemers. But after a seemingly harmless pinball racket claims the life of a trusted ally, a new ringleader signals the rebirth of an all-too-familiar crime network at home and across the pond. Spurred on by the possibility of a violent syndicate spreading like wildfire through Europe, Lane sets sail for London-the city where her parents began the undercover work that led to their tragic undoing.

New York City, 1936. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Big Apple is defiantly striving toward an era infused with art, architecture, and economic progress under dynamic Mayor La Guardia. It's been six months since Lane Sanders was appointed Mayor Fiorello "Fio" La Guardia's new personal aide, and the twenty-three-year-old is sprinting in her Mary Janes to match her boss's pace. Despite dealing with vitriol from the Tammany Hall political machine and managing endless revitalization efforts, Fio hasn't slowed down a bit during his years in office.

An ambitious novel that spans decades and continents, The Things We Cherished tells the story of Charlotte Gold and Jack Harrington, two fiercely independent attorneys who find themselves slowly falling for one another while working to defend the brother of a Holocaust hero against allegations of World War II-era war crimes. The defendant, wealthy financier Roger Dykmans, mysteriously refuses to help in his own defense, revealing only that proof of his innocence lies within an intricate timepiece last seen in Nazi Germany.

Robinswood, Co Waterford, 1939. The once grand house is home to two very different families. Despite delusions of grandeur, Lord and Lady Kenefick and their adult children live a life of decayed opulence as the money needed to keep such a large house and grounds ever dwindles. Meanwhile, the Murphy family, Dermot, Isabella and their three almost grown-up girls, live and work on the estate and do their best to keep everything running smoothly. Social structure is vital.

May 1565. Suleiman the Magnificent, emperor of the Ottomans, has declared a jihad against the Knights of Saint John the Baptist. The largest armada of all time approaches the Knights' Christian stronghold on the island of Malta. The Turks know the Knights as the "The Hounds of Hell." The Knights call themselves "The Religion." In Messina, Sicily, a French countess, Carla la Penautier, seeks a passage to Malta in a quest to find the son taken from her at his birth twelve years ago.

Charles Todd brings his classic mystery series to a new level of intensity and intrigue. The year is 1919, and Ian Rutledge is a fragile yet courageous former soldier searching for his place in a post-war world. Now a Scotland Yard detective, Rutledge is called upon to probe a murder in the small Norfolk town of Osterley but he soon discovers that the crime may be connected to one of the greatest disasters of all time.

The heir to the magnificent English trading company, the Noble House; the direct descendant of the first Toranaga Shogun, battling to usher his country into the modern age; a beautiful young Frenchwoman forever torn between ambition and desire- their lives intertwine in an exotic land newly open to foreigners, gai-jin, and torn apart by greed, idealism, and terrorism. Their passions mingle with monarchs and diplomats, assassins, courtesans, and spies.

When reclusive war poet Olivia Marlowe and her half brother Nicholas Cheney die together in their ancestral home on the Cornish coast, it looks like suicide. The grieving relatives gather together to discuss the fate of Barcombe Hall, when another shocking death occurs. Inspector Rutledge, who is still shell-shocked from his experiences in the Great War, is sent from Scotland Yard to investigate. Rutledge is soon convinced that the answers to this baffling case lie within the family's secret history.

The remains of Eleanor Gray are found on a Scottish mountainside, and her mother, the Lady Maude Gray, requires delicate treatment. This is a case that will lead Inspector Rutledge to Scotland, where his journey to find the truth will take him back through the fires of his past, into secrets that still have the power to kill.