Book Picks — July 2023

"After years of working as an FBI agent, Titus Crown returns home to Charon County, land of moonshine and cornbread, fist fights and honeysuckle. Seeing his hometown struggling with a bigoted police force inspires him to run for sheriff. He wins, and becomes the first Black sheriff in the history of the county. Then a year to the day after his election, a young Black man is fatally shot by Titus's deputies. Titus pledges to follow the truth wherever...

"Love Across Borders takes readers through contentious frontiers around the world to reveal the widespread prejudicial laws intent on dividing us. Anna Lekas Miller tells her own gripping story of meeting Salem Rizk in Istanbul, where they were reporting on the Syrian civil war. But when Turkey started cracking down on refugees, Salem, who is Syrian, wasn't allowed to stay there, nor could he safely return to Syria. In this look at the global immigration...

"Seven women, inextricably linked by one man, must figure out which of them killed him in order to protect each other in this electrifying debut thriller. New Year's Eve, 1999. Seven women are gathered in a hotel room at midnight; a man's head sits in the center of the floor. They all had a motive to kill Jamie Spellman. They all swear they didn't. But in order to protect each other, they have to find out who did. The ex, who drowns out her darkest...

"The Helena is an art deco apartment building that has witnessed the changing face of South Miami Beach for seventy years, observing the lives housed within. Among those who have called apartment 2B home across the decades are a Cuban concert pianist who performs in a nursing home; the widow of an intelligence officer raising her young daughter alone; a man waiting on a green card marriage to run its course so that he can divorce his wife and marry...

"In nine lively essays, critc Aisha Harris invites us into the wonderful, maddening process of making sense of the pop culture we consume. Aisha Harris has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for a razor-sharp take on whatever show or movie everyone is talking about. Now, she turns her talents inward, mining the benchmarks of her nineties childhood and beyond to analyze the tropes that are shaping all of us, and our ability to shape...