Home > Current Students > Library > What's New > Books In The Mill

UNH Manchester Books in the Mill Spring 2008
“Literary Thrillers”

Please join UNH Manchester librarians and book group guest leaders for discussions of the books and (when available) their film adaptations. Discussions will be held in the Library mezzanine conference room at 6:30 pm. For more information please call the library at 603-641-4173.

Thursday, February 7, 2008 - The Book of Air and Shadow by Michael Gruber

The lives of two men are changed forever by William Shakespeare and the letters of Richard Bracegirdle, a 16th-century English spy and soldier. Jake Mishkin, a Manhattan intellectual property attorney and a bit of a rake, goes on the run from Russian gangsters. Albert Crosetti, an aspiring filmmaker working for an antiquarian bookstore, finds that life is more exciting than movies—perhaps too exciting. Together, Mishkin and Crosetti travel to England in search of a previously unknown Shakespeare manuscript mentioned by Bracegirdle.

Thursday, March 6, 2008 - Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott

A Cambridge historian, Elizabeth Vogelsang, is found drowned, clutching a glass prism in her hand. The book she was writing about Isaac Newton’s involvement with alchemy—the culmination of her lifelong obsession with the seventeenth century—remains unfinished. When her son, Cameron, asks his former lover, Lydia Brooke, to ghostwrite the missing final chapters of his mother’s book, Lydia agrees and moves into Elizabeth’s house—a studio in an orchard where the light moves restlessly across the walls. Soon Lydia discovers that the shadow of violence that has fallen across present-day Cambridge, which escalates to a series of murders, may have its origins in the troubling evidence that Elizabeth’s research has unearthed. As Lydia becomes ensnared in a dangerous conspiracy that reawakens ghosts of the past, the seventeenth century slowly seeps into the twenty-first, with the city of Cambridge the bridge between them.

Thursday, April 3, 2008 - The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman

Did Shakespeare pen a series of passionate sonnets, unknown to modern scholarship, ardently praising a mysterious dark-haired beauty? This tantalizing question is raised in a letter to literature professor Rose Asher. But the letter’s author, Rose’s star pupil, is not telling. A troubled, enigmatic young man, he plunged to his death in front of the college’s entire faculty, an apparent suicide. Determined to find the truth, Rose journeys from New York to Italy, back to the magnificent Tuscan villa where as an undergraduate she first fell in love.  Once there Rose finds her first love still in residence. Torn between her mission and her rekindled feelings, Rose becomes enmeshed in a treacherous tangle of secrets and scandal. A folio containing what some believe to be one of Shakespeare’s lost sonnets has vanished, and literary immortality waits whoever finds the manuscript–as do a vast Italian estate and a Hollywood movie deal.

Thursday, May 1, 2008 - The Savage Garden by Mark Mills

A Tuscan Renaissance villa serves as the setting of the most unusual double murder mystery you will ever read. In the summer of 1958, Cambridge art history major Adam Strickland travels to Italy to research a monograph on an elaborate 16th-century garden. Drawn into the garden's intricate designs, grottoes, iconography, and inscriptions, Strickland soon begins to wonder if its elaborate patterns might hold the key to the 1548 death of the estate owner's wife. As he digs deeper, he also detects haunting inconsistencies in accounts of a far more recent murder, which occurred in the villa during the waning days of World War II.

Novel descriptions adapted from Barnes & Noble webpage