January 2014 Book Selection

   

Please join the North Providence Mystery Book Club on Tuesday January 7, 2014 as we discuss Still Life by Louise Penny. This is the first book in the award winning Three Pines mysteries featuring Inspector Armand Gamache.
A summary from the large print edition: "Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team are called to the scene of a suspicious death int he rural village south of Montreal and yet a world away. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, has been found dead on Thanksgiving morning. The locals are certain it's a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smell something foul this holiday season. Louise Penny's award-winning debut novel introduces the engaging Armand Gamache, who commands his forces with integrity, strength, and charm"                                                          

 Here is a link to past Mystery Book Club Selections:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-R7yAlFQXUVNjQ0Z1JUVXZDSzg/edit?usp=sharing

December 2013 Book Selection

Please join the North Providence Mystery Book club on December 3, 2013 at 7:00 pm as we discuss Aunt Dimity's Death by Nancy Atherton. This is the first book in the Aunt Dimity series. 

"When Lori Shepherd was a little girl she used to lie in bed at night with a stuffed rabbit named Reginald and listen to her mother's stories of the indomitable Aunt Dimity, who lived in far-off England. But now Lori is a newly divorced, down-on-her-luck grownup, her mother is dead, and Lori's long since realized that Aunt Dimity was just a character in a comforting bedtime story.

Or was she? One day the bedraggled Lori is summoned from the latest of her dreadful temp jobs to the Dickensian law firm of Willis U Willis. There Willises Junior and Senior inform her that Aunt Dimity was indeed a real person--a very rich real person who's just died and left Lori a respectable bequest. Unfortunately, there's one catch: Lori must visit Aunt Dimity's English cottage and find a secret hidden among the treasure trove of letters written by her mother and Dimity over the four decades of their friendship.

What begins a fairy tale in a improbably cozy setting becomes a mystery--and a ghost story--as Aunt Dimity's gentle spirit leads Lori on an unotherworldly quest that Dimity could not fulfill in her own lifetime. And for Lori, Dimity's bequest is even greater than she dreamed, as she discovers that in this life, true love can conquer all."

November 2013 Book Selection

Join the North Providence Mystery Book Club on Tuesday November 12, 2013 (second Tuesday of the month instead of the first) in the Trustee Conference Room on the Second Floor as we discuss The Black House by Peter May.  This is the first book in the Lewis Trilogy, featuring detective Fin Macleod.

“The Isle of Lewis is the most remote, harshly beautiful place in Scotland, where the difficulty of existence seems outweighed only by people’s fear of God.  But older, pagan values lurk beneath the veneer of faith, the primal yearning for blood and revenge. When a brutal murder on the island bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the investigation also represents a journey home and into his past.  Each year the island’s men perform the hunting of the gugas, a savage custom no longer necessary for survival, but which they cling to even more fiercely in the face of the demands of modern morality.  For Fin the hunt recalls a horrific tragedy, which after all this time may have begun to demand another sacrifice." See you on November 12th.

October 2013 Selection

The next meeting of the North Providence Mystery Book Club will be on Tuesday, October 1, 2013. We will be discussing, Her royal spyness by Rhys Bowen. The summary of the book is: "Her ridiculously long name is Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, daughter to the Duke of Atholt and Rannoch. And she is flat broke. As the thirty-fourth in line for the throne, she has been taught only a few things, among them, the perfect curtsey. But when her brother cuts off her allowance, she leaves Scotland, and her fiance, Fish-Face, for London, where she has: a) worked behind a cosmetics counter and gotten sacked after five hours, b)started to fall for a quite unsuitable minor royal, c) made some money housekeeping (incognita,  of course), and d)been summoned by the Queen to spy on her playboy son. Then an arrogant Frenchman, who wants her family's 800-year old estate for himself, winds up dead in her bathtub. Now her most important job is to clear her very long family name."

September 2013 Book Selection

The next meeting of the North Providence Mystery Book Club will be held on Tuesday, September 3rd at 7:00 pm in the library's first floor conference room. We will be discussing The empty mirror by J. Sydney Jones. This is the first book featuring Karl Werthen, a lawyer, and Dr. Hanns Gross, the real-life father of modern criminology. The synopsis: "the summer of 1898 finds Austria terrorized by a killer who the press calls "Vienna's Jack the Ripper." Four bodies have already been found, but when the painter Gustave Klimt's female model becomes the fifth victim, the police finger him as the culprit. The artist has already scandalized Viennese society with his erotically charged modern paintings. Who better to take the blame for the crimes that have plagued the city? This is, however, far from an open-and-shut case. Klimt's lawyer, Karl Werthen, has an ace up his sleeve. Dr. Hanns Gross, the renowned father of criminology, has agreed to assist him in investigating the murders. Together, Gross and Werthen must not only clear Klimt's name but also follow the trail of a killer that will lead them in the most surprising of directions. By uncovering the cause of the crimes that have shaken the city, the two men may risk damaging Vienna more than the murders did themselves." If you like historical mysteries, join us on September 3rd. (the day after Labor Day).

August Book Selection

The next Mystery Book Club will meet on Tuesday August 6. 2013 at 7:00pm in the first floor conference room. We will be discussing Open Season by C. J. Box. This is the first book featuring Wyoming Game Warden Joe Pickett. From the book jacket: "Joe Pickett is the new game warden in Twelve Sleep, Wyoming, a town where nearly everyone hunts and the game warden--especially one like Joe who won't take bribes or look the other way--is far from popular. When he finds a local hunting outfitter dead, splayed out on the woodpile behind his state-owned home, he takes it personally. There had to be a reason that the outfitter, with whom he's had run-ins before, chose his backyard, his woodpile to die in. Even after the "outfitter murders," as they have been dubbed by the local press after the discovery of the two more bodies, are solved, Joe continues to investigate, uneasy with the easy explanation offered by the local police."
We will not be meeting in July.

June Book Selection

The North Providence Mystery Book Club will meet on Tuesday June 4, 2013 at 7:00 pm in the first floor conference room. We will be discussing, The Winter Queen by Boris Akunin. This is the first in the Erast Fandorin series of mysteries that take place in Russia in the 1870s. The book description states:

Moscow, May 1876. What would cause a talented student from a wealthy family to shoot himself in front of a promenading public? Decadence and boredom, it is presumed. But young sleuth Erast Fandorin is not satisfied with the conclusion that this death is an open-and-shut case, nor with the preliminary detective work the precinct has done–and for good reason: The bizarre and tragic suicide is soon connected to a clear case of murder, witnessed firsthand by Fandorin himself.
Relying on his keen intuition, the eager detective plunges into an investigation that leads him across Europe, landing him at the center of a vast conspiracy with the deadliest of implications."

May Book Selection

Join us on Tuesday May 7 at 7:00pm when we will discuss The Rhetoric of Death by Judith Rock. This is the first book in the Charles du Luc series based in Paris of the 1600s. The summary from the book states: "When The Bishop of Marseilles discovers that his young cousin Charles du Luc, former soldier and half-fledged Jesuit, has been helping heretics escape the king's dragoons, the bishop sends him far away-to Paris, where Charles is assigned to assist in teaching rhetoric and directing dance at the prestigious college of Louis le Grand. Charles quickly embraces his new life and responsibilities. But on his first day, the school's star dancer disappears from rehearsal, and the next day another student is run down in the street. When the dancer's body is found under the worst possible circumstances, Charles is determined to find the killer in spite of being ordered to leave the investigation."

April Book Selection

The North Providence Mystery Book Club will be meeting on Tuesday April 2, 2013 at 7:00 PM. The book we will be discussing is Medicus: a novel of the Roman Empire by Ruth Downie.  The main character is Gaius Petrius Ruso, an army doctor who takes a posting in Roman Britain.  The book's blurb states "Gaius Petrius Ruso is a divorced and down-on his luck army doctor who has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia. His arrival in Deva (more commonly known as Chester, England) does little to improve his mood, and after a straight thirty six hour shift at the army hospital, he succumbs to a moment of weakness and rescues an injured slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner. Now he has a new problem: a slave who won't talk and can't cook, and drags trouble in her wake. Before he knows it, Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. A few years earlier, after he rescued Emperor Trajan from an earthquake in Antioch, Ruso seemed headed for glory: now he's living among heathens in a vermin-infested bachelor pad and must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer who may be after him next. Who are the true barbarians, the conquered or the conquerors? It's up to Ruso--certainly the most likeable sleuth to come out of the Roman Empire--to discover the truth. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own."