Summertime Reads

It's a wet start to the summer in Oklahoma - time to break out the canoes and a good book. We've brought in a stock of magazines for light reading, everything from Cars to Cooking! New books from Dean Koontz and Danielle Steele have already sold out in their first stocking. Featured books include WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (currently available in used hardback and new trade paper) by Sara Gruen, is a thrilling story set in a traveling circus during the 1930's, and enough plot to fill the big top! The book has been on the independent bookseller's recommended books lists for quite some time and continues to be a popular read.

Broken Arrow's Will Thomas has a new offering and Publishers Weekly says: At the start of Thomas's well-crafted fourth Barker and Llewelyn mystery to feature a London detective duo clearly modeled on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (after 2006's The Limehouse Text), a distraught guardsman, Major DeVere, consults Cyrus Barker, a smugly intellectual private enquiry agent, and his young apprentice, ex-con Thomas Llewelyn. The major's 12-year-old daughter has disappeared, and DeVere fears she has fallen victim to white slavers, though the sleuths suspect a serial killer may be at work. The plot thickens when Barker receives a taunting letter in rhyme signed Mr. Miacca, a child-eating bogeyman from a bedtime story. Scotland Yard hampers the investigation in a possible coverup of some upper-class depravities.

RARE FIND! Just who was G. Ranger Wormser? We've come across a 1911 copy of THE SCARECROW AND OTHER STORIES (Dutton & Co.) and although the book is listed in at least one American universities list of Rare holdings, there is little to be found on the author. Research uncovered the fact that the -G- stands for Gwendolyn, making this collection of horror and supernatural stories all the more unusual, but as far as her biography there is not much else to be known. The book was reprinted in a limited edition some years back, intended (according to the publisher) to raise her from obscurity, but apparently she lingers there. No other copies of this book in this First Edition printing are listed for sale anywhere in the world.