Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

A gritty, voice-driven thriller about a former getaway driver who thought he had escaped the criminal life who is pulled back in by race, poverty, and his own former life of crime.
(Description from catalog)

A historical novel based on the life of the National Book Award-winning author’s grandfather traces the experiences of a Chippewa Council night watchman in mid-19th-century rural North Dakota who fights Congress to enforce Native American treaty rights. (Description from NoveList.)

Returning to her hometown after a long absence to investigate the murders of two girls, reporter Camille Preaker is reunited with her neurotic mother and enigmatic half-sister as she works to uncover the truth about the killings. (Description from NoveList)

Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a bucolic Irish village would be the perfect escape. After twenty-five years in the Chicago police force and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens. But when a local kid whose brother has gone missing arm-twists him into investigating, Cal uncovers layers of darkness beneath his picturesque retreat, and starts to realize that even small towns shelter dangerous secrets.
(Description from catalog)

Forced to drop out of school to help support her family, Lena takes a lucrative job as a secret laboratory subject before devastating side effects make her question how much she can sacrifice. (Description from NoveList.)

The rural town of Riversend's dark secrets come to light after a young priest kills five parishioners before being taken down himself. (Description from NoveList)

Sarah Dove is no ordinary bookworm. To her, books have always been more than just objects. When Sarah grows up to become the librarian in her quaint southern town of Dove Pond, North Carolina, her gift helps place every book in the hands of the perfect reader. Recently, however, the books have been whispering about something out of the ordinary: the arrival of a displaced city girl named Grace Wheeler.
(Description from catalog)

Maple Street has a neighborly cul-de-sac, where a terrible secret tears a rift between two misfit moms who were once best friends. When innocent Shelly Schroeder falls down a sinkhole, it's one mom's word against the other's, in a court of public opinion that can end only in blood.
(Description from catalog)

When a conservative Kansas community is labeled the country’s most homophobic town, a task force of queer social activists voluntarily moves into the community for two years in an attempt to broaden minds and hearts, with unexpected results. (Description from NoveList.)

In a rural East Texas town of fewer than 200 people, the body of an African American lawyer from Chicago is found in a bayou, followed several days later by that of a local white woman. What's going on? African American Texas Ranger Darren Mathews hopes to find out, which means talking to relatives of the deceased, including the woman's white supremacist husband -- and Mathews soon discovers things are more complex than they seem. (Description from NoveList)

Struggling to recover after a natural pest invasion devastates the economy of 1924 South Carolina, three fierce Southern women unite against terrible injustices that have overshadowed their small-town community. . (Description from NoveList.)

Jojo and his sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she's high, Mam is dying of cancer, and quiet Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie's children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
(Description from catalog)

Virgil Wounded Horse is the local enforcer on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. When justice is denied by the American legal system or the tribal council, Virgil is hired to deliver his own punishment, the kind that's hard to forget. But when heroin makes its way into the reservation and finds Virgil's nephew, his vigilantism suddenly becomes personal.
(Description from catalog)