New Mysteries at Ukiah Library

The magazine Booklist, beloved of librarians everywhere, recently published the Year's Best Crime Novels.

Although Ukiah Branch of the Mendocino County Library had several of these books, we decided to buy the rest. All of these books are either available in Ukiah Library or you can request them and have them sent to your local branch to pick up.

Top Ten
A click on the title takes you to a page where you can order these items to be held for you.

1. An Ancient Rain by Domenic Stansberry. Series protagonist, Dante Mancuso investigates a 30 year old mystery.

2. Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett. Mystery hero Sonchai Jipleecheep is a police dectective and co-owner (with his mother) of a brothel in Bangkok. Moral ambiguity continues to be a theme.

3. Devil's Peak (pictured) by Deon Meyer. After the death of his son Thobela Mpayipheli turns vigilante and begins killing pedophiles.

4. Down in Darkness (pictured) by David Lawrence. Sleuth Stella Mooney is the focus of a noir series by poet David Lawrence.

5. Good Physician by Kent Harrington. CIA employee transforms into a man of action. The humanity of the terrorist and the inhumanity of their acts is the focus.

6. Heartsick by Chelsea Cain. Portland (Oregon) cop Archie Sheridan seeks the advice of a notorious female sociopath in solving the murders of several high-school students.

7. Redbreast by Jo Nesbo, translated by Don Bartlett. Harry Hole, hard-drinking Oslo policeman runs into the continuing resonances of history.

8. Second Objective by Mark Frost. WWII thriller takes an actual historical Nazi plot and morphs it into an attempt to assassinate Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.

9. Victory Square by Olen Steinhauer. Final installment of the story of Emil Brod, chief of the People's Militia.

10. Zugzwang by Ronan Bennett. An apolitical Jew in 1914 Russia, Otto Spethman becomes involved in a murder plot by major political players of the time.

Have you read any of these? Feel free to comment below!

Holds -- What they are and who's got 'em

I'm always surprised that more people do not know that you can reserve an item that is not on the shelf. They are called holds. Holds allow you to place your name on a waiting list for an item that you want. I use it to get DVDs that would never end up on a library shelf otherwise.

The Librarian in Black has an insightful blog which I've linked here. I'll excerpt this little piece.

What you don't see on the shelves is what people consistently want to be checking out. Our browsing collections, which we become so proud of with all of the face-out shelving and book store-style marketing we've done recently, simply do not include the popular items people want to check out. By the time the holds list has been exhausted, that book won’t even be placed on the new book shelf, even though it is the first time that book has ever been shelved. Why? The in-the-know users placed these items on hold eons ago, so they are all checked out and will continue to be permanently checked out, shuffled from one greedy set of hands to the next, for months.

If you don't know know about holds and want to place one or just get more information, please call or email your local library branch or contact reference at mendoref@co.mendocino.ca.us.