"Name the Fictional Character" Contest Winner! Congratulations to Elizabeth Moye for correctly identifying Kay Scarpetta as the fictional character in our contest. New contest starts in this blog with clue #1.

Art on Display. Local artist Pat Warnke  is displaying 7 of her oil paintings. You are invited to stop by and view her work. Her works include the Morehead City waterfront, children on the beach, Sportsman's Pier, Beaufort waterfront, surfers, and a musical trio.

Summer version of the Adult Book Club plans to meet at 1 pm on Aug. 1 at Shepard's Point Restaurant. "Charlotte's Web" will be discussed.

Popcorn Theater. This is the schedule of movies to be shown every Thursday at 1 pm.
July 14 - Jungle Book      July 21 - Anastasia    July 28 - Mulan   August 4 - Ratatouille   August 11 - Paulie

NEW MATERIALS

Adult

Misery Bay: An Alex McKnight Novel  by Steve Hamilton
Amazon.com Review

ALEX MCKNIGHT IS BACK in the long-awaited return of one of crime fiction's most critically acclaimed series.

On a frozen January night, a young man loops one end of a long rope over the branch of a tree. The other end he ties around his neck. A snowmobiler will find him thirty-six hours later, his lifeless eyes staring out at the endless cold water of Lake Superior. It happens in a lonely corner of the Upper Peninsula, in a place they call Misery Bay.
            Alex McKnight does not know this young man, and he won’t even hear about the suicide until another cold night, two months later and 250 miles away, when the door to the Glasgow Inn opens and the last person Alex would ever expect to see comes walking in to ask for his help.
            What seems like a simple quest to find a few answers will turn into a nightmare of sudden violence and bloody revenge, and a race against time to catch a ruthless killer. McKnight knows all about evil, of course, having faced down a madman who killed his partner and left a bullet next to his heart. Mobsters, drug dealers, hit men—he’s seen them all, and they’ve taken away almost everything he’s ever loved. But none of them could have ever prepared him for the darkness he’s about to face.

The Final Storm  by Jeff Shaara
A Letter from Author Jeff Shaara
Though Hollywood has given us countless ways to dramatize the Second World War in the Pacific, the challenge for me was to bring to the reader a story that isn’t simply a rehash of everything you’ve heard before.

While much of The Final Storm focuses on the great struggle for Okinawa, this story does not end there. One more extraordinary drama must be played out, the story of how the Second World War actually ends: the dropping of the first atomic bombs. Through characters such as Paul Tibbets and General Curtis LeMay, I try to show just how much tension and how much mystery surrounded the bombs themselves. Consider that, to the young crews of the aircrafts that were to carry the bombs over Japan, none had any idea what would happen when the bombs were actually exploded, whether their own planes would disintegrate, along with the targets they were seeking. On the ground, the Japanese civilians had already experienced massive bombing strikes from American planes, and so, on that morning of August 6, 1945, the sight of a single B-29 bomber high in the clouds above causes no real concern. That point of view is here as well, a Japanese doctor who is weary of the war, of what he knows to be the propaganda being fed to the people by their military. And yet, he has his own duty to fulfill.
There are debates ongoing today about whether the United States did the “right thing” by ending the war the way we did. The decisions made by President Harry Truman are controversial even now. My job is not to anguish over morality, or debate what is politically correct. Ultimately I have one goal: to bring you the best and most accurate story I can, as told by those who were there. With so few veterans of World War Two remaining with us, I believe we must be reminded just why we owe them our thanks, and why their legacies must be remembered. I hope you enjoy the story.

The Inspector and Silence  by Hakan Nesser 
Product Description
It’s a sweltering summer in Sweden and Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is long overdue for a holiday when a

secretive and dubious religious sect comes under investigation. One of its members, a girl on the cusp of adolescence, is found dead in the forest near their holiday camp, brutally raped and strangled; the discovery of her body has been phoned in by an anonymous caller.
The members of the sect, the Pure Life, are led by Oscar Yellinek, a charismatic but unnervingly guarded messiah figure. In an act that mystifies and infuriates Van Veeteren and his associates, the members of the Pure Life choose to remain silent about the incident rather than defend themselves. But an unidentified woman is continuing to assist the authorities, and her knowledge suggests she’s more than just a passing Good Samaritan. Her tips become doubly perplexing as a new string of increasingly horrifying crimes defy everything Van Veeteren and his team thought they knew about the case.
A riveting new addition to Håkan Nesser’s acclaimed series, The Inspector and Silence is suspense at its haunting best.