As long as there are libraries, you should — and likely will — have access to this book. Required reading for many middle and high school curricula, Agatha Christie’s (1890 – 1976) most famous novel And Then There Were None continues to weather the test of time. Widely considered to be the greatest mystery novel of all time, I’ve now read it three times — most recently as an audiobook narrated perfectly by Hugh Fraser. Fraser’s nuanced acting added many new layers of enjoyment to the story this time around.

Christie’s brilliance rests in offering the reader a perfect balance between revelation and secrecy. Ten seemingly unrelated characters are summoned to a house on a tiny island off the coast of England by a Mr. Owen. Upon arrival, it is discovered that none of the folks actually know Mr. Owen, who has not yet joined the party. Soon, one of them dies, although appearances point to mostly natural causes. An unfortunate beginning, they attempt to conclude. Their faith in such a conclusion is tested, however, when another guest dies under slightly less innocent circumstances…

How can a mystery novel provide the same, if not greater, thrills the third time you’ve read it? Once you know whodunnit, what is left to enjoy? Isn’t solving the crime the point of it all? True, with each chapter you are brought closer and closer to the explanations you long for. Yet, alongside this, through dark sub-plots which surround each character, Christie demands the attention of our consciences as well as our intellects. As the perceived innocence of the ten guests becomes harder to maintain, somehow, so does the reader’s — enough to make you feel like you might be on Indian Island right now…

Dan Curry – Savage Branch

It pleases me greatly when customers recommend books to me. Recently, a customer recommended Sworn to Silence by Linda Castillo, and I am grateful for the suggestion.

Sworn to Silence features protagonist Kate Burkholder, the formerly Amish (having rejected the faith of her family, she is now “shunned,” or avoided, by the Amish community) chief of police for a rural Ohio town. When the body of a murder victim is discovered in a field, the victim having been savagely brutalized, Kate must identify and apprehend the perpetrator, but Kate’s childhood experiences with the Slaughterhouse Killer could compromise the investigation. Further jeopardizing the investigation could be the assistance, perhaps interference, of John Tomasetti, a grieving, alcoholic, rule violating, off-the-rails FBI agent who has also been assigned to the case.

Beginning with the disturbing yet riveting Prologue, continuing in the Amish farm and “English” (non-Amish) small town worlds, delving into the horrific pasts of some of our main characters, and following the actions of a vicious, intelligent killer, Sworn to Silence is a thrilling mystery, with emphasis on the thrilling. If you enjoy Sworn, be sure to check out Pray for Silence, Linda Castillo’s latest book featuring Kate Burkholder.

Beth Haynes – Central Library

Meet Richard Castle (played by Nathan Fillion), a (fictional) popular mystery writer who, having killed off his last beloved character (named Derrick Storm), is following New York Police Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) for inspiration in developing his new character, Nikki Heat. Reluctantly, she agrees to let Castle shadow her. The two previously met when Beckett was investigating a series of murders that were similar to plotlines from Castle’s books. Castle was brought in as a consultant and helped Detective Beckett solve the case.

Fans of the Castle television series will enjoy Heat Wave, the novel that mirrors ABC’s show, and introduces Nikki Heat as she investigates the murder of a real estate tycoon during an oppressive heat wave. As she follows the murder trail, she finds more secrets — secrets to die for. To further complicate her investigation, the commissioner has assigned Jameson Rook, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, to follow her for a story on the NYPD. Can Nikki Heat hide the heat between her and Rook?

The two detectives who help Beckett and Castle in the television series are also characters in the book, which reads as if Richard Castle had actually written it. Adding to the fun, throughout the series, the characters make reference to the book, while actual authors appear on the show. Castle, for example, plays poker with famous writers James Patterson and Stephen J. Cannell. Fillion and Katic have good chemistry as Castle and Beckett — two reluctant partners in crime solving.

If you enjoy audiobooks, Johnny Heller is the reader for the book on CD.

Robert Bates – Glenwood Branch

True Blood may seem like your average girl-meets-vampire-but-is-secretly-loved-by-a-wolf-man story, but it is actually much deeper. In this alternate Louisiana, as in much of the United States, there are vampires that dwell among humans. A company realizes the danger of vampires feasting on humans, and develops a synthetic substitute for human blood: True Blood. 

Meet the cast of characters who make up the colorful tapestry in this Southern Gothic romance. In a small rural Louisiana diner, a waitress named Sookie can read people’s minds — except Bill’s, who happens to buy True Blood. Sookie’s best friend is Tara, who is tactless when interacting with others, but tries to be a good daughter to her alcoholic mother. Tara’s cousin is Lafayette, a gay drug dealer who works with Sookie and Tara at the diner. Sookie’s brother Jason loves the ladies, but for some reason the ladies end up dead. And the police think he may be the main suspect…

True Blood is a wildly creative series. Besides telling a supernatural tale sprinkled with romance, it also provides social commentary. Vampires are treated as second-class citizens who must fight for their rights, against those who disagree with the vampire political movement. Meanwhile, some humans hunt the vampires and drain them of their blood for sale as a drug. There are people taking the drug and becoming addicted to it.

The show is based on the Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris. Dead Until Dark is the first novel, and provides the main plot line for the first season. Dead Until Dark is available at the Library in book and playaway form (Playaways self-contained digital audio books). There are currently ten books in the series, along with several short stories. There is also a CD featuring music from the series, with songs that vary as much as the characters on the show — including country, rock, swamp, and blues rock. 

For a creative series with colorful characters, I recommend the addictive True Blood. 

Robert Bates – Glenwood Branch

Fourteen-year-old Lindiwe Bishop is sitting on her family’s veranda reading Sue Barton: Senior Nurse, when she hears a loud commotion next door. There is a fire, and her white neighbor, Mrs. McKenzie, is fatally burned. Lindiwe and her parents live in the middle class neighborhood of Bayview in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe where the McKenzies are one of the few remaining white families.

When the constable arrives at the Bishop household to question her father, Lindiwe does not offer any knowledge of hearing anything out of the ordinary. The sixteen-year-old stepson of Mrs. McKenzie is implicated in her murder. A year later, the charges are dropped, and seventeen-year-old Ian McKenzie returns home. When Lindiwe and Ian meet, there is an instant attraction, although Lindiwe’s mother has warned her to stay away from him. Lindiwe is totally mesmerized by her charming, unpredictable, and troubled neighbor, Ian.

Who is really responsible for the fire and death of Mrs. McKenzie? What is the secret harbored by Lindiwe? The Boy Next Door by Irene Sabatini combines mystery along with a fascinating study of social life during the 1980s in war torn, post-independent Zimbabwe. Sabatini is to be commended for her fully developed characters. 

Elaine Johnson – Central Library

The conventional notion is that you have to die before you can go to Hell. Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim turns that expectation on its head. Sandman Slim is a novel about a living man who has been exiled to Satan’s kingdom for 11 years. Upon his escape, he returns to Earth to take revenge on the people who are responsible for his exile.  

He has a busy time of it, too. While the man does sleep now and then, mostly the hero of this book spends his time stealing cars so that he can hunt somebody down or avoid being hunted himself. He also spends a lot of time fighting old enemies, alienating friends, or making new enemies so that, during quiet interludes, he can fight them too. As you may guess, this book, while not particularly short, moves at a breathtaking pace.  

The book also describes a much more complex afterlife than that which many of us were raised to believe. It’s fairly improbable, but just plausible enough to be quite entertaining. Sandman Slim is also clever and imaginative. Pick it up — if you do, I doubt very much that you will be able to put it down. 

Joe McHugh – Administration Office

While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself stopped writing them back in the 1920s, I doubt that we’ll ever see the last Sherlock Holmes story. For many years since, other authors have been grinding out books about the great "consulting detective" on a pretty regular basis. As near as I can see, there’s no end in sight.

What was the first one though? This is it — A Study in Scarlet. In this 1887 book, an ailing Doctor John Watson, recently returned from military service in Afghanistan (some things never seem to change), takes rooms with a gentleman named Sherlock Holmes, and, for the first time, observes the great fictional detective solve a fictional murder. Oddly enough for a Sherlock Holmes story, about half of this book (the middle half) takes place in the Wild West, with neither Holmes nor Watson making an appearance. Why? Well, that’s where the villains — Mormons — happen to live.

A while back I wrote a review of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. Interestingly, Mormons were the villains in that book, too. Clearly, along with anarchists and a category of people vaguely lumped together under the heading of "foreigners," a hundred years ago Mormons were safe people to beat up on.

As a first effort, A Study in Scarlet is a bit rough around the edges. The segue from London to Utah, in particular, was somewhat jarring. At first, I had the impression that the original story ended and that the wild west section might actually be story number two in an anthology of crime stories. Still, even at the starting gate A Study in Scarlet includes the essentials that we expect in a Sherlock Holmes story. By the end, the action moves back to London and everything is tied together in a proper "Elementary, my dear Watson" ending. By the way, that famous phrase never appears in this or, apparently, in any other Conan Doyle novel.

It’s fascinating to observe the debut of the one of the great characters of detective fiction — a character who, judging by recent box office numbers, is still astoundingly popular. Despite its rough spots, 123 years after it’s first appearance, A Study in Scarlet is still a very good read.

Joe McHugh – Administration Office

Adam Strickland, an architecture undergrad at Cambridge University, is having a hard time focusing on his art history thesis. Over the summer, his professor assigns a project to write a scholarly monograph about a famous garden, which he describes as “an impressive, if somewhat pedestrian example of High Renaissance Tuscan vernacular.” The 400-year-old Docci garden is set in the Tuscan hills. This is an assignment that many of us would dream about, but it turns out to be a bit more bizarre than Adam realizes.

As Adam studies the intricacies of the garden with “statues, grottoes, meandering rills and classical inscriptions,” he discovers clues leading to a centuries-old murder in the garden’s mysterious iconography. The murder is of 25-year-old Flora, the wife of Federico Docci who built the memorial garden in the 1500s. The allegorical text of Dante’s Inferno leads Adam to the answer of not one murder, but two.

In The Savage Garden, author/screenwriter Mark Mills keeps the pages turning through the knowledge of hidden secrets slowly unfolding. This is not a typical crime novel. It reads at a leisurely pace, with both a strong sense of place and characters. The stroll through this beautiful garden is alone worth the read. Mills’ first novel, Amagansett, (originally published as The Whaleboat House) claimed the 2004 John Creasey Memorial Dagger – a Crime Writers’ Association award given to the best crime novel by a debut author.

Eve Olsen – Central Library

It’s 1830’s West Point. Cadet Leroy Fry is dead, found swinging from a branch. His heart raggedly cut from his body. The Academy’s Colonel Thayer calls upon the expertise of former New York constable Gus Lander to solve what is reportedly a suicide…and make sense of the subsequent heinous transgression on the victim’s body. From Lander’s perspective, the slim evidence points not to suicide, but murder…and possibly Satanism.

Delving into the case, Lander wonders if the murderer could be a member of West Point? Against his better judgment, Captain Hitchcock allows Lander to recruit Fourth Classman Edgar Allan Poe to clandestinely be his eyes and ears among Poe’s fellow cadets. (The author’s development of Poe as a significant character is a stroke of pure genius.) The partnership between the two transforms into a mutual lifeline. Yet through this bond, does Lander come to lose his perspective?

As a library employee I read a plethora of books, but find few that I love. The Pale Blue Eye represents that rare species marrying exquisite language with a "can’t put it down" plot. Bayard writes, "The clouds were frayed like collars, and the sun had laid down an aisle of glitter along the Hudson, and flaws of wind shuddered down from the gullies, stamping pinwheels on the water’s belly." Combine Bayard’s silver tongue with a pulsing story and a healthy dose of humor; throw in Baltimore’s sweetheart E. A. Poe — the result is a deeply textured, multi-dimensional novel.

Although you will wrestle with "who dun it," everything becomes crystal clear…by the last page. I promise.

Fritzi Newton – Miller Branch

Teens getting killed. They have been making movies with that very premise for over 30 years. A main character (a female, usually being played by that actress you kind of recognize) and her group of friends (a jock, a nerd, a cheerleader, etc.) are picked off one at a time by a killer in a costume or mask who will reveal his or her identity and motive during the last 20 minutes of the film.

In all honesty, Scream’s plot really isn’t much different than all slasher film plots. The heroine this time is the damaged Sidney Prescot, played by Neve Campbell, whose mother was murdered one year prior to when the movie begins. And while she and her friends fit the typical slasher film archetypes, there is one difference between them and virtually every other character who has ever been written into a horror movie: they have seen horror movies. They know the cliches; they know what not to do; they know the "rules one must abide by in order to successfully survive a scary movie." Screenwriter Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven cram so much wit, humor, and blood into this simple story that you are guaranteed to have a blast.

Scream was one of the defining movies of the 90s. It was a phenomenon reinventing a genre that hadn’t been marketable since the mid-80s. It spawned two sequels and endless rip-offs. An intelligent spoof on horror movies that is still extremely scary, Scream is one of my all time favorites.

Mike Dwyre – East Columbia Branch