Get ready to crack the case with Pink and Detective Briggs! Lacey Pinkerton is busy getting ready for spring at Pink's Flowers and at the same time Port Danby is bustling with activity as it prepares for its annual flea market in the town square. In the midst of it all, a talented group of artists has shown up with their easels to paint pictures of the Pickford Lighthouse. When one of the artists turns up missing and then dead, Lacey works alongside of her favorite detective, James Briggs, to solve the murder. What she doesn't expect is to end up on the murderer's short list of enemies. Book 5 of the Port Danby Cozy Mystery Series. Each book can be read as a standalone but they are best read in order. More in the series: 1. Marigolds and Murder 2. Carnations and Chaos 3. Mistletoe and Mayhem 4. Roses and Revenge 5. Tulips and Trouble 6. Dahlias and Death 7. Peonies and Poison 8. Hyacinths and Homicide 9. Crocuses and Crime 10. Sunflowers and Sabotage 11. Lavender and Lies 12. Freesias and Foul Play 13. Cornflowers and Corpses 14. Jasmine and Jealousy 15. Shamrocks and Shenanigans 16. TBA

Mr. Potter's given us a bold adventurous book with plenty of sharp turns at high speed, with some gestures toward Neruda and Merwin but also "Sk8," a gr8 skateboarding poem, and sonnets, and brave ventures into rhymed verse, poems for friends and relatives, "Stopping By Blogs on a Frosty Evening," and poems of passionate love with angels looking down from above. Plus tulips and Elsie. ---Garrison Keillor

Naomi Shepherd is a prize-winning historian and biographer; here she turns her hand to fiction, revealing a razor-sharp eye, a finely attuned ear, and a keen sense of cultural dissonance. In each of these thirteen stories we see a different facet of a fast-changing country where the clash of cultures and of expectations creates situations rich in humour, poignancy, disappointment, and tragedy. 'The short stories in Naomi Shepherd's collection Ashes are a delight. In them we encounter themes of adultery, love, jealousy, loss, guilt, encroaching age, et cetera, set in an Israel of many modes, and Israel shaped by its heritage, its history, and, above all, its inhabitants, Jew and Arab, all gathered together not so much in a melting pot as in a stew concocted of intractable, discordant elements. We are presented, in short, with an anatomy of Israeli society, a species of social tragic-comedy.' Alan Isler, author of The Prince of West End Avenue

Presents the work of thirty 18th and 19th century female botanical illustrators and writers whose work is rarely seen today. There is a chapter devoted to a biography of each artist, along with a selection of color illustrations, and quotes to bring each figure to life. A prettily-designed book, with nice thick paper and gilt edges. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A family saga that explores the relationship between people and the landscape in which they live, Jeremy Page's atmospheric and lyrical debut novel is revelatory in its use of language and is the work of a significant new writer. Salt tells of a German airman who falls from the sky in 1945 and lands in the middle of a salt marsh in England. Goose, a local woman, digs him up and brings him home. After staying for just nine months, he vanishes in a makeshift boat, leaving Goose behind with a newborn daughter, Lil. Taught to read the clouds by her mother, Lil's childhood is curious and strange, but when she becomes the object of two brothers' desire, her life takes a tragic turn. Fifteen years later, it is Lil's son, Pip, who attempts to make sense of his family's intriguing history. Beguiled by the lovely Elsie who lives nearby, Pip grows up in the marsh like generations before him, but will their unfortunate past repeat itself?