MBG 2020 Schedule
Moana - 2nd Monday - 12:00 - 1:30
January 13
Ann Cleeves - Raven Black
February 10
Nick Petrie - Burning Bright
March 9
Chelsea Cain - Kill You Twice
April 13
Charles Todd - A Matter of Justice
May 11
Sujata Massey - The Widows of Malabar Hill
June 8
Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue
July 13
Carolyn Hart - Don’t Go Home
August 10
Arthur Conan Doyle Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
September 14
Mons Kallentoft - Midwinter Blood
October 12
Peter May - The Blackhouse
November 9
Ruth Rendell - Dark Corners
December 14
Michael Connelly - Dark Sacred Night
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Movies
April 13 2:00
Bound
July 13 2:00
In Order of Disappearance
December 14 2:00
Bullitt
———
Ann Cleeves - Raven Black (Shetland Island #1)
Shetland Islands
2 Books, eBook, aBook - cheap/inexpensive
Winner of Britain’s coveted Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award, Ann Cleeves introduces a dazzling new suspense series to mystery readers.
Raven Black begins on New Year’s Eve with a lonely outcast named Magnus Tait, who stays home waiting for visitors who never come. But the next morning the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby, and suspicion falls on Magnus. Inspector Jimmy Perez enters an investigative maze that leads deeper into the past of the Shetland Islands than anyone wants to go.
Nick Petrie - Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)
US
4 Books, eBook, aBook - cheap
In the new novel featuring war veteran Peter Ash, an action hero of the likes of Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne (Lincoln Journal-Star), Ash has a woman's life in his hands and her mystery is stranger than he could ever imagine.
War veteran Peter Ash sought peace and quiet among the towering redwoods of northern California, but the trip isn't quite the balm he'd hoped for. The dense forest and close fog cause his claustrophobia to buzz and spark, and then he stumbles upon a grizzly, long thought to have vanished from this part of the country. In a fight of man against bear, Peter doesn't favor his odds, so he makes a strategic retreat up a nearby sapling.
There, he finds something strange: a climbing rope, affixed to a distant branch above. It leads to another, and another, up through the giant tree canopy, and ending at a hanging platform. On the platform is a woman on the run. From below them come the sounds of men and gunshots.
Just days ago, investigative journalist June Cassidy escaped a kidnapping by the men who are still on her trail. She suspects they re after something belonging to her mother, a prominent software designer who recently died in an accident. June needs time to figure out what is going on and help from someone with Peter's particular set of skills.
Only one step ahead of their pursuers, Peter and June must race to unravel this peculiar mystery. What they find leads them to an eccentric recluse, a shadowy pseudo-military organization, and an extraordinary tool that may change the modern world forever.
Chelsea Cain - Kill You Twice
US
3 Books, CD - cheap
Nothing makes Portland detective Archie Sheridan happier than knowing that Gretchen Lowell—the serial killer whose stunning beauty is belied by the gruesome murders she's committed—is locked away in a psych ward. Archie can finally heal from the near-fatal physical and emotional wounds she's inflicted on him and start moving on with his life.
To this end, Archie throws himself into the latest case to come across his desk: A cyclist has discovered a corpse in Mount Tabor Park on the eastern side of Portland. The man was gagged, skinned, and found hanging by his wrists from a tree. It's the work of a killer bold and clever enough to torture his victim for hours on a sunny summer morning in a big public park and yet leave no trace.
And then Archie gets a message he can't ignore—Gretchen claims to have inside knowledge about this grisly murder. Archie finally agrees to visit Gretchen, because he can't risk losing his only lead in the case. At least, that's what he tells himself . . . but the ties between Archie and Gretchen have always been stronger, deeper, and more complex than he's willing to admit, even to himself. What game is she playing this time? And even more frightening, what long-hidden secrets from Gretchen's past have been dredged up that someone would kill to protect?
At once terrifying and magnetic, "Beauty Killer" Gretchen Lowell returns with a vengeance in Kill You Twice, Chelsea Cain's latest razor-sharp psychological thriller.
Charles Todd - A Matter of Justice
England
3 Books, 2 LPs, eBook, aBook - cheap
At the turn of the century, in a war taking place far from England, two soldiers chance upon an opportunity that will change their lives forever. To take advantage of it, they will be required to do the unthinkable, and then to put the past behind them. But not all memories are so short.
Twenty years later, a successful London businessman is found savagely and bizarrely murdered in a medieval tithe barn on his estate in Somerset. Called upon to investigate, Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge soon discovers that the victim was universally despised. Even the man's wife—who appears to be his wife in name only—and the town's police inspector are suspect. But who, among the many, hated him enough to kill?
Rutledge tenaciously follows a well-concealed trail reaching back to an act so barbarous and with consequences so devastating that even the innocent are enveloped by the murderous tide of events. As he summons all his skills to break through a wall of silence in time to stem this tide, others are eager to twist the truth for their own ends. When justice takes a malevolent turn, can Rutledge's own career survive?
Sujata Massey - The Widows of Malabar Hill (Perveen Mistry #1)
India
6 Books, eBook - inexpensive
Bombay, 1921: Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father's law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes her especially devoted to championing and protecting women's rights.
Mistry Law is handling the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen goes through the papers, she notices something strange: all three have signed over their inheritance to a charity. What will they live on if they forefeit what their husband left them? Perveen is suspicious.
The Farid widows live in purdah: strict seclusion, never leaving the women's quarters or speaking to any men. Are they being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous guardian? Perveen tries to investigate and realizes her instincts about the will were correct when tensions escalate to murder. It's her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that nobody is in further danger.
Philip Kerr - Prussian Blue (Bernie Gunther #12)
Germany
2 Books, eBook, aBook - inexpensive
From New York Times–bestselling author Philip Kerr, the much-anticipated return of Bernie Gunther, our compromised former Berlin bull and unwilling SS officer. With his cover blown, he is waiting for the next move in the cat-and-mouse game that, even a decade after Germany’s defeat, continues to shadow his life.
The French Riviera, 1956: The invitation to dinner was not unexpected, though neither was it welcome. Ernst Mielke, deputy head of the East German Stasi, has turned up in Nice, and he’s not on holiday. An old and dangerous adversary, Mielke is calling in a debt. He intends that Bernie go to London and, with the vial of Thallium he now pushes across the table, poison a female agent they both have had dealings with.
But chance intervenes in the form of Friedrich Korsch, an old Kripo comrade now working for Stasi and probably there to make sure Bernie gets the job done. Bernie bolts for the German border. Traveling by night, holed up during the day, Bernie has plenty of down time to recall the last time Korsch and he worked together.
It was the summer of 1939: At Hitler’s mountaintop retreat in Obersalzberg, the body of a low-level bureaucrat has been found murdered. Bernie and Korsch are selected to run the case. They have one week to solve the murder—Hitler is due back then to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Lucky Bernie: it’s his reward for being Kripo’s best homicide detective. He knows what a box he’s in: millions have been spent to secure Obersalzberg. It would be a disaster if Hitler were to discover a shocking murder had been committed on the terrace of his own home. But the mountaintop is home to an elite Nazi community. It would be an even bigger disaster for Bernie if one of them was the murderer.
1939 and 1956: two different eras, seventeen years apart. And yet, not really apart, as the stunning climax will show when the two converge explosively
Carolyn G. Hart - Don't Go Home
US
4 Books, 2 CDs, eBook - inexpensive
Annie Darling, owner of the Death on Demand mystery bookstore, is hosting a party to celebrate successful Southern literary icon—and former Broward’s Rock resident—Alex Griffith and his bestselling new novel, Don’t Go Home. But after the local paper announces that Griffith aims to reveal the real-life inspirations behind his characters, perhaps the author should take his own advice. Not everyone in town is ready to give him a glowing review.
As Annie attempts damage control, her friend Marian Kenyon gets in a heated argument with Griffith. It’s a fight Annie won’t soon forget—especially after the author turns up dead.
Despite an array of suspects to match Griffith’s cast of characters—and a promise to her husband, Max, to steer clear of sleuthing—Annie’s not about to let the police throw the book at her friend when the real killer remains at large…
Arthur Conan Doyle - A Study in Scarlet
1 Book - CDs - free eBook and aBook
'There's a scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.'
From the moment Dr John Watson takes lodgings in Baker Street with the consulting detective Sherlock Holmes, he becomes intimately acquainted with the bloody violence and frightening ingenuity of the criminal mind.
In A Study in Scarlet , Holmes and Watson's first mystery, the pair are summoned to a south London house where they find a dead man whose contorted face is a twisted mask of horror. The body is unmarked by violence but on the wall a mysterious word has been written in blood.
The police are baffled by the crime and its circumstances. But when Sherlock Holmes applies his brilliantly logical mind to the problem he uncovers a tragic tale of love and deadly revenge .
Mons Kallentoft - Midwinter Blood
Sweden
3 Books - cheap
Meditative. Dark. Really, really cold. Not quite as strange as Stieg Larsson. This is a worthy successor to Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, probably owing its American publication (it was first published in Sweden in 2007) to Larsson’s success. It’s February in the small Swedish city of Linkoping, a time when even Swedes stay indoors. Heroine Malin Fors, an investigator in Linkoping’s crime unit, forces herself out of bed and into her unresponsive car in a scene that is the print equivalent of the below-zero opening of Fargo. Malin is 34, divorced and still confused, the mother of a teen daughter, going through the inevitable balancing act. What sets Malin and her coworker Zeke Martinsson apart from most people getting up on this cold morning is that they both meditate on the necessity of holding evil at bay in their own lives (Kallentoft gives multiple points of view throughout). And evil does appear, as both Malin and Zeke knew it would, at the crime scene to which they’ve been summoned. A naked man, badly bruised, is hanging from the branches of an oak tree (the dead man’s point of view is given, as well). There are no clues to the man’s identity, which leads to wonderfully spare meditations on identity itself. This first installment in Kallentoft’s crime series is a splendid representative of the Swedish crime novel, in all its elegance and eeriness.
Peter May - The Blackhouse (Lewis Trilogy #1)
Isle of Lewis
2 Books, aBook - cheap
A brutal killing takes place on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland: a land of harsh beauty and inhabitants of deep-rooted faith.
A MURDER
Detective Inspector Fin Macleod is sent from Edinburgh to investigate. For Lewis-born Macleod, the case represents a journey both home and into his past.
A SECRET
Something lurks within the close-knit island community. Something sinister.
A TRAP
As Fin investigates, old skeletons begin to surface, and soon he, the hunter, becomes the hunted.
The first book in an enthralling mystery series from award-winning author Peter May.
Every step toward solving the case brings Scottish detective Fin Macleod closer to a dangerous confrontation with the dark events of the past that shaped--and nearly destroyed--his life.
When a grisly murder occurs on the Isle of Lewis that bears similarities to a brutal killing on mainland Scotland, Edinburgh detective and native of the Isle of Lewis Fin Macleod is dispatched to the Outer Hebrides to investigate, embarking at the same time on a voyage into his own troubled past.
As Fin reconnects with the people and places of his tortured childhood, the desolate but beautiful island and its ancient customs assert their grip on his psyche..
"A WRITER I WOULD FOLLOW TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH." --Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
Ruth Rendell - Dark Corners
England
4 Books, 2 LPs, eBook, aBook - cheap
When his father dies, Carl Martin inherits a house in an increasingly rich and trendy London neighborhood. Carl needs cash, however, so he rents the upstairs room and kitchen to the first person he interviews, Dermot McKinnon. That was colossal mistake number one. Mistake number two was keeping his father's bizarre collection of homeopathic "cures" that he found in the medicine cabinet, including a stash of controversial diet pills. Mistake number three was selling fifty of those diet pills to a friend, who is then found dead.
Michael Connelly - Dark Sacred Night (Renée Ballard #2)
US
9 Books, 11 LP, 4 CDs, eBook, aBook - cheap
LAPD Detective Renée Ballard teams up with Harry Bosch in the new thriller from #1 NYT bestselling author Michael Connelly.
Renée Ballard is working the night beat again, and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find a stranger rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is retired detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard kicks him out, but then checks into the case herself and it brings a deep tug of empathy and anger.
Bosch is investigating the death of fifteen-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway on the streets of Hollywood who was brutally murdered and her body left in a dumpster like so much trash. Now, Ballard joins forces with Bosch to find out what happened to Daisy and finally bring her killer to justice.
