Ocean State Libraries

"Growing up, the Anderson sisters could not have been more different. Susie, the wild one, had an adventurous life while Camilla [and] Mills followed a safer path. When Susie suddenly dies, Mills falls apart. Until she receives a bundle of mysterious letters from her estranged sister...Each letter instructs her to visit a place special to Susie, both to spread her ashes but also to uncover some truths Susie has long kept hidden from her family"--

"In Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Creek, a small-town debut mystery described as The Dry meets Everything I Never Told You, a girl goes missing and a community falls apart and comes together. When twelve-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in rural Australia, the community is thrown into a maelstrom of suspicion and grief. As Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels arrives in town during the hottest spring in decades and begins...

"Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I'd killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it's a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let's get started"--...

"Coming home dredges up deeply buried secrets in The Survivors, a thrilling mystery by New York Times bestselling author Jane Harper Kieran Elliott's life changed forever on the day a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home. Kieran's parents are struggling in a town where fortunes are forged by the sea. Between...

"Australia, 1920. Seventeen-year-old Maddie Bright embarks on the voyage of a lifetime when she's chosen to serve on the cross-continent tour of His Royal Highness, the dashing Edward, Prince of Wales. Life on the royal train is luxurious beyond her dreams, and the glamorous, good-hearted friends she makes crack open her world. But glamour often hides all manner of sins. Decades later, Maddie lives alone in Brisbane, whiling away the days. When a...

'If you knew what happens in the hotel every day! Not a day passes but something happens.' With these words the shrewd young proprietress of a modest Swiss hotel opens her account of the remarkable day-to-day events in her establishment. Little escapes here eye, still less her ear; for she is a good listener, and 'people come to confide in you. They tell you things they would not tell their own parents and friends, not even their lawyers and doctors....

"Monk is living in Chinatown with her washed-up painter father when Santa Coy-possible boyfriend, potential accomplice-enters their lives, bringing with him an intoxicating hunger that soon consumes their home. So begins a heady descent into art, casino resorts, drugs, vacant swimming pools, religion, pixelated tutorial videos, and senseless violence. In bursts of fizzing, staccato and claustrophobic prose, this modern Australian take on the classic...

It is the wet season in the Australian outback. Drunk and delirious, an old ex-pilot known as "Pisspot Stevie" lies dying in a remote cabin in the Queensland bush. When a priest named Roger Hargreaves comes upon him, Stevie is smoking opium to relieve the pain of his last moments. The priest listens as Stevie, in an opium-fueled haze, begins to describe a very different life he once lived--not in the past, but decades in the future, as a mixed-race...

Grey's mother dies giving birth to his sister Irene and he prays that she will be returned to him so he might protect her from the world as his father did not. This prayer, Grey believes is answered in his sister Irene. He becomes obsessed with protecting her purity and innocence while befriending the wild boys of the small town of Mary Smokes - horse-handlers and fox hunters and part-time timber workers - members of a small, vanishing tribe who find...