Girl On The Block

Gabrielle Hamilton meets April Bloomfield in a raw and rollicking memoir that pulls back the curtain on life as a female butcher. When 16-year-old Jessica Wragg applied for a job at the local farm shop in her hometown of Chesterfield, England, she never expected to land a position behind the all-male butchery counter. Young and enthusiastic, and fueled by a newfound fascination with the craft, Wragg quickly realized that she was an outcast in a world of middle-aged men who spoke a secret language to fool customers and were reluctant to share the tricks of their trade with a novice. A decade later, against all odds, Wragg is pulling back the curtain on an industry that is still problematically set in its old-school ways. Like her female counterparts in the restaurant world, she has had to fight to establish herself in the meat industry, memorizing muscle and bone and tendon, while battling sexism and ageism. Girl on the Block is a fish-out-of-water story that blends Wragg's personal journey with an exploration of the sanctity of her craft and an honest look at the modern meat industry. A tour through one of the oldest, dirtiest, and most fascinating professions, Girl on the Block is Wragg's tale of returning home with blood on her boots at the end of fourteen-hour days and finding her way in the end.

In this gripping thriller, psychiatrist Zoe Goldman, a "smart, heartbreakingly vulnerable, and laugh-out-loud funny" heroine, rushes to uncover the dark and twisted past of a mysterious young patient who can't even remember her own name (Lisa Scottoline, New York Times bestselling author). In what passes for an ordinary day in a psych ward, Dr. Zoe Goldman is stumped when a highly unusual case arrives. A young African American girl, found wandering the streets of Buffalo in a catatonic state, is brought in by police. No one has come forward to claim her, and all leads have been exhausted, so Zoe's treatment is the last hope to discover the girl's identity. When drugs prove ineffective and medical science seems to be failing, Zoe takes matters into her own hands to track down Jane Doe's family and piece together their checkered history. As she unearths their secrets, she finds that monsters hide where they are least expected. And now she must solve the mystery before it is too late. Because someone wants to make sure this young girl never remembers. The Girl Without a Name is a powerful novel of memory and forgetting, of unexpected friendship and understanding...and of the secrets we protect no matter the consequences./DIV

This fast-paced thriller about a girl who investigates her friend's disappearance during their cruise ship vacation is Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 for teens—and it’s a paperback original! When Izzy meets Jade on a cruise to Bermuda, her new daredevil friend turns Izzy’s boring family vacation into the trip of a lifetime. Until Jade goes missing. The investigators claim Jade fell overboard, but Izzy knows better. Her friend had secrets—secrets that might have gotten her killed. As Izzy digs deeper into Jade’s disappearance, she realizes that someone doesn’t want her to find the truth. And if she’s not careful, Izzy might not get off this ship alive. Underlined is a line of totally addictive romance, thriller, and horror paperback original titles coming to you fast and furious each month. Enjoy everything you want to read the way you want to read it.

A young woman learns the truth about her seemingly perfect sister in this emotionally powerful tale.

Johnny Hayden and his partner had the perfect scam - offer a guy a fraction of what he paid for a piece of worthless Canadian land and make it seem like it's only part of a much bigger parcel being assembled. Then get the mark so curious as to why it's suddenly valuable that he'll pay a fortune to own the whole thing. Tricky, but it had to work...

Lawrence Block has been writing and publishing crime fiction for sixty years. He's received recognition for lifetime achievement in the US and the UK. His books have won awards and occasionally show up on bestseller lists. Several of them have been fimed. DEAD GIRL BLUES is a new novel, available for the first time in 2020.

After twenty years as a foreign correspondent in tumultuous locales, Judith Matloff is ready to return to her native New York City and start a family with her husband, John. Intoxicated by West Harlem’s cultural diversity and, more important, its affordability, Judith impulsively buys a stately fixer-upper brownstone in the neighborhood–only to discover that this dream house was once a crack den and that calling it a “fixer upper” is an understatement. Thus begins the couple’s odyssey to win over brazen drug dealers, delinquent construction workers, and eccentric neighbors in one of the biggest drug zones in the country. It’s a far cry from utopia, but it’s a start, and Judith and John do all they can to carve out a comfortable life–and, over time, come to appreciate the neighborhood’s rough charms. A wry, reflective, and hugely entertaining memoir, Home Girl is for anyone who has longed to go home, however complicated the journey.

In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo—a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century—uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago’s North Kenwood–Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America. There was a time when North Kenwood–Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackle the social problems that had plagued the area for decades. Black on the Block tells the remarkable story of how these residents laid the groundwork for a revitalized and self-consciously black neighborhood that continues to flourish today. But theirs is not a tale of easy consensus and political unity, and here Pattillo teases out the divergent class interests that have come to define black communities like North Kenwood–Oakland. She explores the often heated battles between haves and have-nots, home owners and apartment dwellers, and newcomers and old-timers as they clash over the social implications of gentrification. Along the way, Pattillo highlights the conflicted but crucial role that middle-class blacks play in transforming such districts as they negotiate between established centers of white economic and political power and the needs of their less fortunate black neighbors. “A century from now, when today's sociologists and journalists are dust and their books are too, those who want to understand what the hell happened to Chicago will be finding the answer in this one.”—Chicago Reader “To see how diversity creates strange and sometimes awkward bedfellows . . . turn to Mary Pattillo's Black on the Block.”—Boston Globe