These five offer quick weekend reading

In order to keep up with all the interesting books we suggest you read, you can look up previous library columns on the library’s website at www.marioncountylibrary.org and click on the “What’s New” tab at the top of the page.

The Perfect Poison: an Arcane Society Novel, by Amanda Quick ~ Victorian London holds many secrets, but none are so closely guarded as those of the shadowy Arcane Society. Plagued by rumors that she poisoned her fiancé, Lucinda Bromley manages to live on the fringes of polite society, tending her beloved plants and occasionally consulting on a murder investigation. This notorious botanist possesses a unique talent. She can detect almost any type of poison, especially ones that have their origins in the botanical kingdom. When she is called in to consult on the death of a lord, what she finds has shaken Lucinda to her core. At the murder scene, she picks up traces of a poison containing a very rare species of fern. So rare, in fact, that only one specimen exists in all of England and it was stolen from her conservatory just last month.

Mr. and Miss Anonymous, by Fern Michaels ~ College senior Lily Madison is on her own and desperate to pay for her last semester of school. With nowhere to turn, she makes the difficult decision to donate her eggs to a fertility clinic. Peter Kelly is also a penniless student who supplements his tuition money by visiting a sperm bank. One day, Lily and Peter meet at the clinic, and agree that the clinic gives them an odd feeling, as if all is not as it seems. Despite their obvious attraction, Lily and Sam go their separate ways. Nineteen years pass and Lily often wonders if she has a child somewhere in the world. She also thinks a lot about Sam. Now a wealthy entrepreneur, Sam never forgot Lily either, and when he sees her in an airport one day, he falls for her all over again. But while they enjoy their unlikely reunion, a story on the news has them riveted. Two teenage boys are missing and their disappearance may be linked to the fertility clinic Sam and Lily visited in college. In a shocking twist, one of the boys looks exactly like Sam. Lily and Sam are now determined to find out what really went on at the clinic all those years ago. When the whole story comes out, the truth will be more than they bargained for.

Home Safe: a novel, by Elizabeth Berg ~ Berg is noted for telling stories of the heart and here she tells the story of the recently widowed Helen Ames and of her twenty-seven-year-old daughter Tessa. Helen is shocked to discover that her mild-mannered and loyal husband had been leading a double life. The Ames’s had saved money for a happy retirement, planned in minute detail, but that money has disappeared in several big withdrawals—spent by Helen’s husband before he died. What could he possibly have been doing? What Helen’s husband did with all their money turns out to be provocative, revelatory—and leads Helen and her daughter to embark on new adventures, and change.
Loitering with Intent, by Stuart Woods ~ The newest addition to the series finds Stone Barrington dumped by his glamorous Russian girlfriend during dinner at Elaine’s. Low on cash, he’s having a bad week. So his luck seems to be improving when he’s hired to locate the missing son of a very wealthy man, in the tropical paradise of Key West, no less. But when Stone arrives in the sunny Keys, it appears that someone has been lying in wait. When Stone very nearly loses his life after being blindsided at a local bar, he realizes that the young man he’s been hired to track may have good reason for not wanting to be found. Suddenly Key West is looking less like Margaritaville and more like the mean streets of New York.

First Family, by David Baldacci ~ Sean King and Michelle Maxwell return in another Baldacci thriller which begins with what seemed like an ordinary children's birthday party. Except that it was held at Camp David, and it ended with a daring kidnapping, which immediately turned into a national security nightmare. Even though King and Maxwell, former Secret Service agents turned private investigators, were not looking to become involved, and had no reason to be, they were called in. King had saved the First Lady's husband, then a senator, from political disaster, and he is the one person the First Lady trusts. Pressed into the desperate search to rescue the abducted child, King and Maxwell are pushed to the absolute limit, and the line between friend and foe will become impossible to define, or defend.