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Go to previous Midwest Connection Picks

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August PICKS

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Red Sky in Morning
by Patrick Culhane

Iowa native Ensign Peter Maxwell longs for action after two years of leading the Navy choir after being called up from the reserves following Pearl
Harbor. He gets a new posting on the USS Liberty Hill, stationed at San Francisco’s Port Chicago, but his new captain has no respect for junior officers like Peter and even less for the African-Americans who make up his crew.  Despite tensions between captain and crew, a two-week shakedown cruise goes well.  When the ship returns to San Francisco, however, Port Chicago is blown up and Liberty’s second in command is murdered.  There is an enemy within, and Maxwell will do everything to stop him, including putting himself on the front line of danger.

The Man in the Blizzard
by Bart Schneider

This tongue-in-cheek little crime novel takes place shortly before the Republican National Convention comes to St. Paul. Twin Cities pothead private eye Augie Boyer is out of sorts. He’s been smoking too much Ponchartrain Pootie, expanding his waistline with too much fried food, thinking too much about his ex-wife, suffering from a dismal testosterone level, and grousing about the current Republican governor’s vetoes and blatant right-wing favoritism.  When Augie discovers a plot to kill three abortion doctors in connection with a Neo-Nazi-funded “Labor Day” anti-abortion rally on the state capitol grounds, he rallies his troops – a St. Paul detective who’s a rabid poetry evangelist; a suave black-Irish code master, and Blossom, his spike-haired ex-con assistant.  The plot thickens by the minute, Augie’s radical songwriter/singer daughter arrives for a counter-rally, and danger comes ever closer……

Stalking Susan
by Julie Kramer

Television reporter Riley Spartz is recovering from a heartbreaking, headline-making catastrophe of her own when a longtime police source drops two homicide files in her lap in the back of a dark movie theater. Both cold cases involve women named Susan strangled on the same day, one year apart. Last seen alive in one of Minneapolis’s poorest neighborhoods, their bodies are each dumped in one of the city’s wealthiest areas. Riley senses a pattern between those murders and others pulled from a computer database of old death records. She must broadcast a warning soon, especially to viewers named Susan, because the deadly anniversary is approaching.

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