Plum Spooky -- Janet Evanovich

Stephanie Plum is back in this "between-the-Plums" adventure full of bounty-hunting, danger, excitement, laughter, and monkeys... lots of monkeys!

Stephanie finds herself baby-sitting a monkey named Carl who seems to understand her every word and also knows the proper hand gesture to use when he's unhappy with what he's hearing. So Stephanie takes Carl with her while she's searching for her FTAs -- particularly Martin Munch, a geeky genius who stole a magnetometer from his workplace and failed to appear for his court date.

As luck would have it, Munch is working with a shady character who goes by the name of Wulf, who looks like a vampire, and who has scary abilities that lump him in with a group knowns as Unmentionables. Enter Diesel. Diesel is also an Unmentionable -- and Stephanie has a history with him. With Diesel back in her life -- at least temporarily -- Stephanie feels like she is juggling three men: Morelli, Ranger, and Diesel. But it just might take all three of them to keep Stephanie out of trouble!

Stephanie, Diesel, and Carl venture into the Pine Barrens of New Jersey -- a place where the geographical features all look the same, and where the residents all seem a few cards short of a full deck -- to find Munch and Wulf before they succeed in whatever plans require a stolen magnetometer and Munch's former boss to end up dead. And before it's all over, Stephanie will meet the Easter Bunny, deal with several more monkeys, and she will witness an actual fire-farter!

The Rules For Hearts -- Sara Ryan

The summer before her freshman year in college is one of change and maturing for eighteen-year-old Battle Hall Davies. She moves from her minister-father’s household in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Portland, Oregon, where she moves into a house full of strangers, one of whom is her brother, Nick, who ran away from her family four years previously. As Battle adjusts to her new surroundings and new life, she must decipher her romantic feelings for a fellow female housemate, Meryl, and Meryl’s feelings for her. While struggling to keep her contact with her brother a secret from her parents as she reacquaints herself with him, she discovers some truths about her brother that cause her to experience misplaced guilt and force Battle to decide whether loving her brother means bailing him out of his trouble or making him accept responsibility for his own actions.

Using a setting that lacks order, Sara Ryan’s novel adequately exemplifies the confusion that can occur in teens’ lives as they leave the world of their childhood and enter the world of adulthood, where they must make decisions and deal with consequences, often alone. Through effective use of dialogue and description, Ryan creates characters and situations that come alive and are recognizable to the reader, thereby drawing the reader in until the final page.

The Time Traveller's Wife -- Audrey Niffenegger

The first time Clare met Henry DeTamble, she was six and he was forty-two. The first time Henry met Clare, she was eighteen and he was twenty-six. But this is to be expected when one is a time-traveller; and that is precisely what Henry is. He finds himself uncontrollably and unexpectedly hurled back and forth through time, visiting people, places, and events from his past and future - and never able to change what will happen, or rather, what already has. And Clare... Well, Clare waits. Always for Henry. And as she waits, she proves that love can overcome everything - even time.

Paint the Wind -- Pam Munoz Ryan

Maya lives a solitary life with her elderly grandmother who feels most things eleven-year olds like to do are a waste of time. Maya’s one outing, besides school, is her weekly, hour-long, chaperoned visit to the library. Maya is forbidden from even mentioning her own mother’s name because her grandmother blames her mother’s love of horses for the death of both Maya’s mother and father. But when Maya’s grandmother dies unexpectedly, Maya is sent to live with her mother’s family in Wyoming, people she has not seen in six years. As Maya adjusts to her new life and her new freedoms in the open range of Wyoming where her family spends its summers camping and watching wild horses, Maya comes to understand her mother’s love for horses and she is able to identify with the wild horses’ need to be free.

This easy-to-read book is poignant and touching and leaves the reader with an uplifted feeling. Interspersed with chapters seen from one of the wild horse’s perspective, it offers the reader a chance to change perspectives and experiment with seeing situations in a different and completely new way, allowing his or her imagination to run wild.

Unnatural Exposure -- Patricia Cornwell

Dr. Kay Scarpetta is the chief medical examiner of Virginia. In her line of work, she has seen the horrors of what people can do to each other, and nothing seems to surprise her anymore. Nothing, that is, until the torso of a deceased elderly woman that was found in a landfill is determined to have been infected with a smallpox-like disease. When Kay begins receiving mysterious emails from someone who refers to him or herself as “deadoc,” and when those emails contain graphic images of the very torso lying in her morgue, Kay begins to realize she has a dangerous killer on her hands; and this killer is different. This killer has access to a virus with plague-like potential that could affect not just Virginia and the United States, but ultimately, the world.

When Dr. Scarpetta is called to a local landfill for the collection of a human torso, she knows there is a possibility that the case is connected to a serial killer case in Ireland. But as more examination is done in her lab, she finds too many differences for the torso to be a victim of the serial killer, and she realizes someone else is responsible for this victim’s death. When she receives email through her AOL account that includes a disturbing picture of the very torso – determined to be that of an elderly female -- she has in her lab, she realizes the murderer has a sick agenda. And when Kay is called out to a small island off the coast of Virginia to examine a dead body there, she realizes that both the body on the island and the body in her lab are both infected with a smallpox-type disease, and she comes to the horrible knowledge that the crimes are related, and, worse yet, that she has been exposed to whatever infected these women. Suddenly Kay’s case turns into a national emergency and she finds herself under lockdown in a military facility as she waits to display symptoms of a deadly disease.

After several days of no symptoms, Kay is released and takes samples of the virus from the bodies to the CDC in Atlanta. Upon her return to Virginia, however, Kay begins to get sick. Unsure of what ails her, and terrified of knowing the truth, Kay throws herself into discovering the identity of “deadoc” who continues to communicate with her through chat rooms. The terror that grips the nation as news of a plague-like virus killing people in Virginia escapes creates a need for speed, and when Kay solves the mystery of who would tamper with a disease so deadly and begin to infect people with it, she realizes that not everything, or everyone, is what she thought.

The Keepsake -- Tess Gerritsen

The Crispin Museum, an almost-forgotten museum in Boston, Massachusetts, is the center of much excitement and news coverage when an ancient Egyptian mummy is found stored in the basement. Striving to learn more about the mummy, the museum curator arranges for a CT Scan of the remains at a local hospital. The results, though, are nothing anyone expected. A bullet in one of the legs of the mummy proves that this is no ancient mummy, and the case is turned over to the Medical Examiner's office, where Dr. Maura Isles discovers that the mummy is actually a modern murder victim who has been mummified and made into a keepsake for the killer. Immediately the Crispin Museum, along with its employees, is hurled into a murder investigation, and Detective Jane Rizolli and her partner Barry Frost begin digging around in the museum's basement, searching for clues as to how and when the mummy arrived there. Before long, more modern remains turn up in the museum basement, and clues left with the bodies become quite disturbing for Josephine Pulcillo, the museum's Egyptologist.

Josephine is not disturbed only by the gruesomeness of these acts. She is also disturbed by the coincidental links to her past these clues seem to posses. And when a third victim, also mummified, is found in her car trunk, she becomes sure that the clues are not coincidental. Her past has caught up with her, and now she is faced with the task of staying one step ahead of her hunter. Meanwhile, Detectives Rizolli and Frost follow leads from New Mexico and Texas as they track down the killer, all the while learning that Josephine Pulcillo is not who she claims to be. As they uncover secrets that are 15 years old, the detectives realize they are dealing with an obsessed killer; a killer who has managed to stay hidden for decades. Will they be able to find him and stop him before Josephine becomes his next keepsake?

The Bone Garden -- Tess Gerritsen

When Julia Hamill purchases an old “fixer-upper” house following her divorce, she thinks she is on her way to realizing some of her goals and rediscovering herself. But when, while working in her garden, she uncovers a human skeleton, she finds herself plunged into the history of her new home. As Julia tries to learn the skeleton’s identity and how it came to be buried in her garden, she begins a friendship with a distant relative of the home’s previous owner; a relative who has boxes of information that once belonged to the deceased owner, and which might provide clues to the skeleton’s identity. Julia soon learns that mystery surrounds the female skeleton buried in her garden; a mystery involving grave-diggers, doctors, poverty, and murder in 19th-century Boston.

In nineteenth-century Boston, a sickness was spreading and killing women following childbirth. Most of the women who suffered this painful death were the impoverished Irish immigrants found in the maternity ward of the medical school’s hospital; the only place they could receive medical attention, because it was free. That is where Rose’s sister Aurnia dies mere hours after giving birth. When Aurnia’s husband decides to give the baby up for adoption, telling Rose the baby is not his, Rose steps in, swearing she will do all in her power to keep her niece. But when Rose happens upon the fresh murder scene of one of the nurses who tended her sister, she realizes protecting her niece and herself may not be an easy feat.

Rose finds herself embroiled in a race against time as she tries to discover the truth behind her niece’s paternity while trying to stay hidden in the slums of Boston; for she has seen the nurse’s murderer – a hideous creature with wings, and she knows she is a hunted woman. Norris, a poor medical student, becomes her only ally after he too sees the hideous creature and is accused of a second nurse’s death. Together, Rose and Norris make startling discoveries about their friends, about themselves, and about each other as they try to save their reputations, Rose’s niece, and their own lives.

As Julia delves deeper into the mystery of the skeleton in her garden, she finds herself taken through many twists and turns as she is sucked into the history of Boston. She realizes that not everything and not everyone can be taken at face-value, and she discovers how frightening and surprising the motivations of a killer can be.