New & Noteworthy @ WHPLibrary

Do you have children in elementary school? Do they come home excited, after learning something new and interesting, curious to know more? Would you like to be able to answer their questions intelligently, but at a level they understand, or to motivate them to be more inquisitive and active about learning? We can help!

Check out our kid-oriented databases for some great information! One of the databases our library provides called Searchasaurus is easy to navigate by either parent or student. It includes maps, photos, books, magazines, encyclopedias, and a dictionary in kid-friendly format!

My own second-grader has been learning about volcanoes and compass points, and I was able to find a great Weekly Reader fact sheet on volcanoes and a hands-on science experiment on how to make your own compass. Try it out yourself and impress your kids, or have them search and learn something new!

This article was written by W.O, Reference Librarian

New books are now available by John Grisham and Danielle Steel.

In "The Litigators", by John Grisham, we are introduced to two middle-aged lawyers just getting by. Oscar Finley and Wally Figg qualify as ambulance chasers, specialists in DUIs, shoplifting defendants, and no-fault divorce cases. Then the arrival of burned out fast-track attorney David Zinc to the firm changes everything. Before long, they are taking on a real legal case, one that involves a $25 billion pharmaceutical corporation and a class action suit with infinite possibilities. What Finley and Figg don't realize is that their road to riches will pit them against a legal team not accustomed to losing.

In "Hotel Vendome", by Danielle Steel, Swiss-born Hugues Martin, a young, ambitious hotelier, buys a run-down hotel in Manhattan and transforms it into one of the world's finest luxury hotels. The Hotel Vendôme is soon renowned for its elegance, its efficiency, its unparalleled service and discretion. When his wife runs off with a rock star, Hugues is suddenly a single parent to four-year-old Heloise. As the years pass, Hugues and the hotel are the center of Heloise's life. She longs to follow in her father's footsteps and one day run the Vendôme with him. New challenges mark her way: an unexpected romance for Hugues and her own journey to hotel school in Switzerland. The lessons she has learned at her father's side will carry her through it all.

You can reserve these or any other books by stopping by or calling the reference desk or by using your online library account.

New books are available by bestselling authors Sue Grafton, David Baldacci and James Patterson.

V is for Vengeance, by Sue Grafton, is the 22nd book in the Kinsey Milhone series. It's 1988 in Kinsey Milhone's hometown, Santa Teresa, CA. Kinsey eyes two women shoplifting at Nordstrom. Store security grabs one of the women, Audrey Vance, and Kinsey chases the other. In the store's parking lot, Kinsey is rammed with a black Mercedes. In jail, Vance panics and agrees to cooperate with the law. As soon as she's out on bail, a local mobster tosses her over a bridge, setting up the scene to look like a suicide. The victim's husband, certain Audrey would never have killed herself, entreats Kinsey to find out what happened.

In Zero Day, by David Baldacci, we meet John Puller, a combat veteran and military investigator in the Army's Criminal Investigative Division. His father was an Army fighting legend, and his brother is serving a life sentence for treason in a federal military prison. Puller is called out on a case in a remote, rural area in West Virginia coal country. Someone has stumbled onto a brutal crime scene, a family slaughtered. The local homicide detective joins forces with Puller in the investigation. As Puller digs through deception after deception, he realizes that nothing he's seen in this small town, and no one in it, are what they seem. Facing a potential conspiracy that reaches far beyond West Virginia, he is one man on the hunt for justice against an overwhelming force.

Kill Alex Cross, by James Patterson, is the 18th book in the Alex Cross series. The President's son and daughter are abducted, and Detective Alex Cross is one of the first on the scene. But someone very high-up is using the FBI, Secret Service, and CIA to keep him off the case and in the dark. A deadly contagion in the water supply cripples half of the capital, and Alex discovers that someone may be about to unleash the most devastating attack the United States has ever experienced. As time is running out to solve the crimes, Alex makes a desperate decision that goes against everything he believes - one that may alter the fate of the entire country.

You can reserve these or any other books by stopping by or calling the reference desk or by using your online library account.

New bestsellers are now available by Michael Crichton and Janet Evanovich.

In Micro, by the late Michael Crichton and Richard Preston, three men are found dead in the locked office of a Honolulu building, with razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up. Nanigen MicroTechnologies dispatches the group to a mysterious lab in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier. But once in the Oahu rain forest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals profound and surprising dangers at every turn. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power.

Explosive 18, by Janet Evanovich, is the 18th book in the Stephanie Plum series. Before Stephanie can even step foot off Flight 127 from Hawaii to Newark, she's knee deep in trouble. Her dream vacation turned into a nightmare. Her seatmate never returned to the plane after the L.A. layover and now he's dead in a garbage can. His killer could be anyone. The FBI, the fake FBI, and guns-for-hire are all looking for a photograph the dead man was supposed to be carrying. Only one other person has seen the missing photograph - Stephanie Plum. Now she's the target, and she doesn't intend to end up in a garbage can. Over at the Bail Bonds Agency it's business as usual until the bonds bus serving as Vinnie's temporary HQ goes up in smoke, Stephanie's wheelman, Lula, falls in love with their 'largest' FTA yet and everyone wants to know what happened in Hawaii?

You can reserve these or other books by stopping by or calling the reference desk or by using your online library account.