Book Chat October 19: Department Stores and Navy Birthday

"From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic, geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034 -- and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration. On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South...

A Royal Navy warship is dispatched to the Pacific to help Chile fight for its independence from Spain. Twentieth volume in a series featuring Captain Jack Aubery and ship's doctor Stephen Maturin.

Brodie McFadden is supposed to be on vacation, getting some sunshine and deciding if he wants to join his brothers and the Krewe of Hunters, a special paranormal investigation unit of the FBI. But a diving excursion with an old navy buddy to a historic shipwreck uncovers a crime scene - and the corpse is new. Museum curator Dakota "Kody" McCoy just wants her Key West culture festival to succeed. She's always had a deep connection to her home, including...

Before everything changed, young Hannah Rosenthal lived a charmed life. But now, in 1939, the streets of Berlin are draped with red, white, and black flags; her family's fine possessions are hauled away; and they are no longer welcome in the places that once felt like home. Hannah and her best friend, Leo Martin, make a pact: whatever the future has in store for them, they'll meet it together. Hope appears in the form of the SS St. Louis , a transatlantic...

Aspiring playwright Kit Zanetti lucks into the story of a lifetime when she accepts an invitation to tea from her elderly upstairs neighbor Aunt Lu and is treated to the tale of Lu's life in Greenwich Village in the 1950s as a beautiful, independent apprentice to an up-and-coming designer at a chic Fifth Avenue department store.

"The long-awaited, daring, and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn...

On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of the slightly disreputable, the temporarily lost, and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the great river's tides. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another in a motley yet kindly society. There is Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by happenstance a receiver of stolen goods, by nature a friend to all. And Richard, a buttoned-up ex-navy man,...

Putting it all on the line to rescue his kidnapped son pits counterspy Alex Hawke against Russian President Vladimir Putin in this action-packed thriller from New York Times bestselling author Ted Bell.

Anne Elliot lives at Kellynch Hall with her family, but when financial struggles set in they decide to move. Then her life is forever changed as she is reunited with Wentworth, a past fiancé who she never married. Through her journey, Anne may find that what she has been looking for was right in front of her the whole time.

Young engineer Marcus Attilius Primus, placed in charge of the Agua Augusta, sets out for Pompeii in an effort to fix the problems that have been plaguing the enormous aqueduct, but he soon learns there are natural and manmade forces working against him.