Ocean State Libraries

With 13 ½, Nevada Barr, New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning Anna Pigeon novels, has written a taut and terrifying psychological thriller. It carries the reader from the horrifying 1970s murder spree of a child— dubbed “Butcher Boy” by a shocked public—in Rochester, Minnesota, to Polly, the abused daughter of Mississippi “trailer trash,” to post-Katrina New Orleans.In Jackson...

When young professor of English Karen Holloway happens on a privately printed volume of verse dating from the early nineteenth century, it's all in a day's work. But when a battered manuscript bearing the same mysterious attribution, "Ismene," turns up, Karen realizes that it is an important discovery that could be the making of her academic career. Karen immerses herself in a headlong search for the true identity of the unknown author, tracking the...

"Under pressure by his family to marry, a playboy baron becomes determined to befriend a no-nonsense, but single professor he met at a wedding, for friendship and distraction."--

"One daring to-do list and a crash course in flirtation turn a Type A overachiever's world upside down. When her flailing department lands on the university's chopping block, Professor Naya Turner's friends convince her to shed her frumpy cardigan for an evening on the town. For one night her focus will stray from her demanding job and she'll tackle a new kind of to-do list. When she meets a charming stranger in town on business, he presents the perfect...

"Laura, a brilliant student and promising scholar, escapes from her small town, working class background to join the ranks of the academic elite on a Weatherfield scholarship to Oxford University. She enthusiastically throws herself into her schoolwork, yet she is never able to escape a feeling of unease and dislocation among the anointed "best and brightest" of her generation. Years later, back in the U.S. with a Ph.D. in Henry James studies, she...

From the critically-acclaimed and award-winning author of The Lake of Dead Languages comes a chilling new psychological thriller about a professor accused of killing her favorite student in a hit-and-run accident.

A fearless portrait of a society on the brink as a mother faces a terrible choice, from an internationally award-winning author On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards...

"A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises--and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself...In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad--long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter--grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching...

"Fans of academic mysteries will savor this one."—Library Journal

Karen Pelletier is about to realize her dream. After six years in the English Department at New England's exclusive Enfield College, she is up for a tenured position. But when her rival for the one available tenured spot is found dead from an overdose of Peyote buttons, Karen is first on the list of suspects. Now a homicide cop with a grudge against Lieutenant

...