We are home right now, and not doing too much traveling. And probably you, like me, are getting a little restless and ready to go places. So, let’s travel Route 66!
It’s historic. It covers a lot of the country. And there are all kinds of people who want to drive it every year!
We are going to make this trip easier on ourselves – and more library-themed. We are going to read our way across this historic drive.
All the links on these books go to Amazon.com. If you click on one, and then buy anything at all, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits on the sale. It’s anonymous, so we won’t know it’s you – but we will still be grateful!
Let’s go to Missouri and explore with books!
Sharp Objects
by Gillian Flynn
Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.
The Twenty-Seventh City
by Jonathan Franzen
The time is the 1980s. The place is St. Louis, Missouri, once the country’s fourth largest city, now the twenty-seventh: a fading river town whose only current claim to national attention is that it has chosen a young woman from Bombay, India to be its new police chief. No sooner has S. Jammu been installed, however, than the city becomes embroiled in a bizzare and all-pervasive political conspiracy.
Killshot
by Elmore Leonard
Armand Degas is a Mafia hit man the guys call Blackbird. He is cool and composed and knows a good score. So when punk crook Richie Nix tells him about his surefire scheme to extort $10,000 from a middle-of-nowhere Michigan real estate agent, Armand signs on. What the two thugs don’t count on is Carmen Colson and her ironworker husband, Wayne, being in the real estate office when they go in to collect. Now Carmen and Wayne know too much and Armand has no intention of letting them survive to tell about it. But Wayne’s sure the local cops are going to fumble the manhunt, and the best the feds can offer is the Witness Security Program. Now it’s come down to one man, one woman, and two killers . . . and someone’s bound to end up on the wrong end of the gun.
The Weight of Blood
by Laura McHugh
The town of Henbane sits deep in the Ozark Mountains. Folks there still whisper about Lucy Dane’s mother, a bewitching stranger who appeared long enough to marry Carl Dane and then vanished when Lucy was just a child. Now on the brink of adulthood, Lucy experiences another loss when her friend Cheri disappears and is then found murdered, her body placed on display for all to see. Lucy’s family has deep roots in the Ozarks, part of a community that is fiercely protective of its own. Yet despite her close ties to the land, and despite her family’s influence, Lucy—darkly beautiful as her mother was—is always thought of by those around her as her mother’s daughter. When Cheri disappears, Lucy is haunted by the two lost girls—the mother she never knew and the friend she couldn’t save—and sets out with the help of a local boy, Daniel, to uncover the mystery behind Cheri’s death.
Guilty Pleasures: An Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Novel
by Laurell K. Hamilton
Anita Blake is small, dark, and dangerous. Her turf is the city of St. Louis. Her job: re-animating the dead and killing the undead who take things too far. But when the city’s most powerful vampire asks her to solve a series of vicious slayings, Anita must confront her greatest fear—her undeniable attraction to master vampire Jean-Claude, one of the creatures she is sworn to destroy…