Take a look at these brand-new eBooks on Libby for June, free to read with your library card! Includes titles by Sunyi Dean, Ben Miller and Marcia Hutchinson.
New to Libby? Find out how to get started or check out our other eLibrary recommendations.
The Mercy Step
Marcia Hutchinson
Set in 1960s Bradford, The Mercy Step follows Mercy, a precocious young child facing a world far too big for her small body. She lives with her Windrush-generation parents in a crowded household where her mother’s attention is stretched between church and family, and her father’s temper is something to be endured or avoided.
Feeling like an outsider within her own home, Mercy retreats into books and the companionship of her beloved doll, Dolly, while learning early how to navigate the flaws and failings of the adults around her.
Yet Mercy is nothing if not resilient. Armed with humour, style and fierce imagination, she quietly begins to plot her escape from a traumatic childhood.
The Girl With a Thousand Faces
Sunyi Dean
Mercy Chan is a triad exorcist with a mysterious past. After washing up on the shores of Hong Kong with no memory during World War II, she found a home in Kowloon Walled City, an infamous, ghost-infested slum full of lost and traumatised civilians.
Since the war ended, Mercy has rebuilt her life and found work as a ghost-talker for the local triad, dealing with the angry and bitter spirits who haunt this place.
But the past she can’t remember won’t let her go. An unusually powerful ghost lurks in Kowloon’s waterways, drowning innocents and threatening the district. Unnervingly, it claims to know Mercy – and her forgotten childhood.
As Mercy is drawn into a deadly cat-and-mouse game with this malignant spirit, she begins to realise that the monster she fights within these walls may well be one of her own making.
Solace House
Will Maclean
In the summer of 1993, broke student Alex Lane joins a team clearing out Solace House, a Victorian mansion bequeathed to the university by a reclusive hoarder called Flayne. The other students are a mixed bunch, but Alex quickly falls into a close friendship with the lively, redheaded Ella.
When the crew begins sorting through piles of junk, they stumble upon Flayne’s journals, in which he details his obsession with his missing mother, his discovery of a place called Bewise, and – most mysteriously – his belief in another realm lying parallel to ours, along with coded instructions as to how it might be reached.
As the students delve deeper into the house’s secrets, one of them becomes obsessed with deciphering Flayne’s strange opus and its promise of another world… and they may be willing to sacrifice everything, and everyone, to get there.
Death at the White Hart
Chris Chibnall
The body is found abandoned on the A35 in Dorset – tied to a chair, stag antlers on his head.
It’s Jim Tiernan, landlord of Fleetcombe’s The White Hart pub – and now a murder victim.
Newly arrived DS Nicola Bridge has her work cut out. Fleetcombe is a picture-postcard village. Murder is the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Except that here Nicola finds whispers, rumours, resentments and lie after lie.
Because the smaller the village, the darker its hidden secrets…
A Very Dangerous Pursuit
Ben Miller
When one Richard Hannay – intrepid, inquisitive, and on the hunt for intrigue – encounters an old acquaintance in Constantinople, he has an inkling that something thrilling is afoot.
Charged with an item of great mystery and import – a washbag, no less! – he soon finds himself in a very dangerous pursuit: from the luxurious confines of the Orient Express to the decks of the Titanic herself, all with the very fate of Europe in his care.
Can he slip the net of Count Schwabing, whose long arm stretches from Berlin to the Bosphorus? And what of Madame Zara, the cabaret enchantress – does she play at affection, deception, or something far more deadly?
In over his head, often a step – or thirty-nine – behind, but absolutely, resolutely determined to save the day, Hannay is about to embark on an escapade that will test his wits, his courage, and his ability to keep hold of a blasted washbag.