Orhan's Inheritance

When someone mentions the Holocaust, nearly all of us automatically assume it refers to the horrific and systemic persecution and murder of the Jews during World War II. But the Armenian people suffered a similar fate in the early 1900s. On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Empire authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported approximately 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders from Constantinople. This began a period of genocide for minority Armenians living in their historic homeland within Ottoman Turkey as well as those who lived in other parts of the territory that is now the Republic of Turkey. The total number of people killed by the genocide is estimated to be as high as 1.5 million. The genocide, during and after World War I, was carried out in two stages: the wholesale killing or forced labor of the able-bodied male population, and the deportation of women, children, and the sick and elderly on death marches leading to the Syrian desert.

In Aline Ohanesian's wonderful debut novel, Orhan's Inheritance, Orhan, a young Turk living in modern-day Turkey, finds out about his family's dark entanglement with the Armenian people after his grandfather Kemal dies and leaves his family home to an old Armenian woman living in a nursing home in southern California. Orhan decides to travel to the U.S. to meet this stranger, find out how she is connected to his grandfather, and ask her to sign the property back over to his family. His efforts unravel family secrets that have long been buried and reveal a story of love, loss, and survival. With chapters that travel back and forth between the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the early 1990s, we get a personal look at a tragic period in history that has been neglected for far too long.

Eye of Minds by James Dashnner

After reading the popular Maze Runner series by Dashner, I knew I had to read his new series, The Mortality Doctrine. The Eye of Minds is the first book in a trilogy set in a futuristic world that revolves around technology and virtual reality.

Our main character, Michael, is a high-level gamer who spends most of his time outside of school in the VirtNet, which is a virtual world where you can be anyone and have anything you want if you have superior coding skills. A world that revolves around gaming and living in a virtual reality seems like a plausible future that would make many people happy.

With the special skills that he has, Michael is recruited by the government to find a hacker who has been deactivating players and causing them to die or be brain dead in real life. This hacker, Kaine, is extremely dangerous and talented, and has seemingly unlimited resources. Can Michael and his VirtNet friends find and stop a ruthless maniac before he destroys the VirtNet forever and leaves behind a series of innocent victims? Michael goes through many dangerous adventures to try and stop the hacker, which creates a fast-paced adventure that is hard to put down.

Stones for Bread

Liesl McNamara's simple life is no longer simple. An owner of a small bake house (she loves to make bread), her days are always filled with just that. But soon she is thrust into the spotlight as she becomes a feature on a television show.  This leads to a discovery of family secrets from the past. With everything changing around her, Liesl must choose...whether or not to take a leap of faith into something new!  The main message of this book can be life changing..forgiveness is of utmost importance and unforgiveness wrecks havoc in ones life. This book is the May 2015 pick for Faith-Inspired Book Club at the Delphi Public Library.

The Liar

I love a good suspense & Nora Roberts' The Liar is a very good suspense.  Keeps you guessing till the very end.

Shelby returns home to a small town in Tennessee after her husband is missing at sea.  She is left in neck deep debt.  She finds out he was a liar and a cheat during their whole marriage and not at all the man she thought he was.

Shelby has great strength from the start, pulling herself up and doing what needs to be done to make a better life for her daughter.

She becomes her own detective when attempted murders and "murders" begin to happen in her home town.  She will come face to face with a real shocker but she stands on her own.

Midnight Crossroad by Charlaine Harris

When psychic Manfred Bernardo moved to Midnight, Texas, he was expecting to be the eccentric in the sleepy, little town. Little did he know what Midnight had in store for him. Across the street, Fiji Cavanaugh owns a New Age shop and claims to be a witch. The minister has a wedding chapel and a pet cemetery, and the family that owns the convenience store are surely hiding something. Manfred’s landlord, Bobo, owns the local pawn shop (open 24/7) and looks to have secrets of his own. When the town holds a picnic near the river, they discover the body of Bobo’s missing girlfriend, Aubrey. As the investigation into her death begins, life in Midnight gets even weirder: dangerous looking strangers wander the streets, a private detective comes snooping around, and that’s just the beginning.

Charlaine Harris made her name with the Sookie Stackhouse novels, which became the TV show, True Blood. Midnight Crossroad is the first in a new series that looks to have all of the depth of her earlier books along with quite a bit of lighthearted humor. While the characters may seem outrageous, Harris writes them with such uniquely human qualities that it’s easy to see yourself or someone you know in each of them. This is a great book for readers who like a good dose of fun and fantasy along with their mysteries.

The second book in the series, Day Shift, comes out May 5.