Lifes dirty little secrets are revealed in this tale of two members of the aristocracy of Kentuckys horse country. This is a story of love, perversion, death and final jubilant redemption.

For fans of Tara Westover’s Educated and Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky comes a memoir about a girl’s isolated ranch childhood—and her adulthood journey to overcome grief and fear and discover the truth about her mother’s mental illness. At the age of eight, Linda Lockwood moves with her family to an isolated ranch in eastern Washington State. Within two years, she’s patrolling the ranch on horseback alongside her border collie—herding sheep, killing rattlesnakes, and defending the ranch’s livestock from coyotes, bears, and even trespassing hunters—and working tirelessly to realize her dream of training horses. But her most daunting challenge is one hard work can’t overcome: her mother is descending into madness. And Linda’s deepest fear is that she might inherit the schizophrenia that threatens to dismantle her family. At age twenty-five, Linda marries, but the joy of her first pregnancy is darkened by her mother’s suicide. Then she endures a painful miscarriage and the death of her beloved grandmother, traumatic events that send her back in time to the births and deaths of animals—domesticated and wild—that she loved in childhood. Eventually, her own family grows, but her happiness is haunted by questions people have tiptoed around all her life. How did her mother become schizophrenic? What did she endure as a patient in 1960s mental hospitals? Might Linda and even her children be next to battle that catastrophic mental disorder? Driven by the courage and will she sharpened as a rancher, Linda vows to find out.

Murder by Drone is the fifth book in the exciting Biddy and Justin Series by Pamela Arnold. This mature but lively pair of Australian espionage agents are embroiled once again with arch ISIS enemy Suzette, who entices Biddy on horseback onto the desirable next-door property … and into a trap of attack by drone. Despite a broken wrist and head scans, Biddy refuses to stay in hospital and enlists the usual intriguing characters for help. They uncover Suzette’s scheme to kill innocent South Australian Anzac Day crowds with drone swarms. The German House described in this story is based on a century-old property that the author owned and took twelve years to restore, but it took only twenty minutes to be razed by the Ash Wednesday fire of 1983. As in the story, the author won both National Trust and State Heritage awards. Antiques were lost, but the horses were saved, as was the family dog. Badly singed, the author says of their dog, “We knew he was ours because he had one blue and one brown eye.”

In West Africa, a small white boy grows up as colonial rule gives way to African independence. Sharply observed, the various themes are shrewdly woven together in an enchanting tapestry of Africa as it was.

Whether the subject is the plants that grow there, the animals that live there, the rivers that run there, or the people he has known there, Paul Lindholdt’s In Earshot of Water illuminates the Pacific Northwest in vivid detail. Lindholdt writes with the precision of a naturalist, the critical eye of an ecologist, the affection of an apologist, and the self-revelation and self-awareness of a personal essayist in the manner of Annie Dillard, Loren Eiseley, Derrick Jensen, John McPhee, Robert Michael Pyle, and Kathleen Dean Moore. Exploring both the literal and literary sense of place, with particular emphasis on environmental issues and politics in the far Northwest, Lindholdt weds passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark, the log of Captain James Cook, the novelized memoir of Theodore Winthrop, and Bureau of Reclamation records growing from the paintings that the agency commissioned to publicize its dams in the 1960s and 1970s, to tell ecological and personal histories of the region he knows and loves. In Lindholdt’s beautiful prose, America’s environmental legacies—those inherited from his blood relatives as well as those from the influences of mass culture—and illuminations of the hazards of neglecting nature’s warning signs blur and merge and reemerge in new forms. Themes of fathers and sons layer the book, as well—the narrator as father and as son—interwoven with a call to responsible social activism with appeals to reason and emotion. Like water itself, In Earshot of Water cascades across boundaries and blends genres, at once learned and literary.