Chasing Secrets

Newbery Honor–winning author Gennifer Choldenko deftly combines humor, tragedy, fascinating historical detail, and a medical mystery in this exuberant new novel. San Francisco, 1900. The Gilded Age. A fantastic time to be alive for lots of people . . . but not thirteen-year-old Lizzie Kennedy, stuck at Miss Barstow’s snobby school for girls. Lizzie’s secret passion is science, an unsuitable subject for finishing-school girls. Lizzie lives to go on house calls with her physician father. On those visits to his patients, she discovers a hidden dark side of the city—a side that’s full of secrets, rats, and rumors of the plague. The newspapers, her powerful uncle, and her beloved papa all deny that the plague has reached San Francisco. So why is the heart of the city under quarantine? Why are angry mobs trying to burn Chinatown to the ground? Why is Noah, the Chinese cook’s son, suddenly making Lizzie question everything she has known to be true? Ignoring the rules of race and class, Lizzie and Noah must put the pieces together in a heart-stopping race to save the people they love. Winner of a Los Angeles Public Library FOCAL (Friends of Children and Literature) Award Nominated for: Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards Tennessee Volunteer State Book Award (Middle School division) Missouri Association of School Librarians (MASL) Readers Award California Library Association’s Beatty Award, Eureka List

When a witness becomes a target… Can this K-9 track down the killer? After Karenna Pressley stumbles upon a ruthless drug dealer trying to drown her best friend, she’s on his hit list—and out of places to run. Her ex-boyfriend, K-9 officer Ray Morrow, is determined to keep her safe with his drug-detecting spaniel, Abby. But with danger stalking them, will their reunion be a chance for a fresh start or the end for them both? True Blue K-9 Unit: Brooklyn

UNLAWFULLY WEDDED? Clayton Landry would do whatever it took to prove his innocence—and Victoria DeSimone was the key to clearing his name. Her testimony had sent him to jail for a crime he didn't commit and he could never forget what she had cost him. Clayton had escaped to find justice…but his salvation meant marrying a woman he couldn't trust. Newly wedded to an escaped con and on the run from the law, Victoria didn't think things could get much worse—but she was wrong. When their quest to clear Clayton's name turned deadly, their need to believe in each other was suddenly a matter of life or death.

Elite Guardians bodyguard Haley Callaghan may be in South Carolina, but when a photo leads investigators in West Ireland to open a twenty-five-year-old cold case, her life is suddenly in danger. Haley knows how to take care of herself; after all, she's made a career out of taking care of others. But after an uncomfortably close call, Detective Steven Rothwell takes it upon himself to stay with her--and the young client she has taken under her wing. A protector at heart, he's not about to let Haley fight this battle alone. In a sweeping plot that takes them into long-buried memories--and the depths of the heart--Haley and Steven will have to solve the mystery of Haley's past while dodging bullets, bombs, and bad guys who just won't quit.

For those who know... that something is going on... The witnesses are legion, scattered across the world and dotted through history, people who looked up and saw something impossible lighting up the night sky. What those objects were, where they came from, and who—or what—might be inside them is the subject of fierce debate and equally fierce mockery, so that most who glimpsed them came to wish they hadn’t. Most, but not everyone. Among those who know what they’ve seen, and—like the toll of a bell that can’t be unrung—are forever changed by it, are a pilot, an heiress, a journalist, and a prisoner of war. From the waning days of the 20th century’s final great war to the fraught fields of Afghanistan to the otherworldly secrets hidden amid Nevada’s dusty neverlands—the truth that is out there will propel each of them into a labyrinth of otherworldly technology and the competing aims of those who might seek to prevent—or harness—these beings of unfathomable power. Because, as it turns out, we are not the only ones who can invent and build...and destroy. Featuring actual events and other truths drawn from sources within the military and intelligence community, Tom DeLonge and A.J. Hartley offer a tale at once terrifying, fantastical, and perhaps all too real. Though it is, of course, a work of... fiction?

Secrets have a special home at Mount Selwyn High. For years, students have posted their deepest desires and fears in Locker 62. And then this locker is assigned to new girl Maya. She could use the knowledge to help people. Or she could use it to become popular. Maya, who was bullied, who has never been cool, who will do anything to be popular, is now the most powerful girl at school. What will she choose to do next?

“Intriguing, delightful, and touching.” —School Library Journal (starred review) “Creech’s best yet.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) It started out as an ordinary summer. But the minute thirteen-year-old Zinny discovered the old, overgrown trail that ran through the woods behind her family’s house, she realized that things were about to change. It was her chance to finally make people notice her, and to have a place she could call her very own. But more than that, Zinny knew that the trail somehow held the key to all kinds of questions. And that the only way to understand her family, her Aunt Jessie’s death, and herself, was to find out where it went. From Newbery Medal-winning author Sharon Creech comes a story of love, loss, and understanding, an intricately woven tale of a young girl who sets out in search of her place in the world—and discovers it in her own backyard. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults

A “thrilling adventure story" (San Francisco Chronicle) that brings to life the astronomers who in the 1700s embarked upon a quest to calculate the size of the solar system, and paints a vivid portrait of the collaborations, rivalries, and volatile international politics that hindered them at every turn. • From the author of Magnificent Rebels and New York Times bestseller The Invention of Nature. On June 6, 1761, the world paused to observe a momentous occasion: the first transit of Venus between the Earth and the Sun in more than a century. Through that observation, astronomers could calculate the size of the solar system—but only if they could compile data from many different points of the globe, all recorded during the short period of the transit. Overcoming incredible odds and political strife, astronomers from Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Sweden, and the American colonies set up observatories in the remotest corners of the world, only to be thwarted by unpredictable weather and warring armies. Fortunately, transits of Venus occur in pairs; eight years later, they would have another opportunity to succeed. Thanks to these scientists, neither our conception of the universe nor the nature of scientific research would ever be the same.