New E-Books: Wednesday, July 17

Do you prefer to read books on your Kindle, iPad, tablet, or smartphone? If so, you should know about OWWL2Go. This service offers a digital library of more than 19,000 ebooks, audiobooks, and magazines, including best-sellers, children’s books, business, and romance. This free service requires only a library card—that’s all you need! You can find out more information and directions at the Library’s OWWL2Go digital library page.

Looking for some suggestions for good digital books to read? Here are a few that were recently added to the collection:

Long Island Compromise

In 1983, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives. But forty years later, when Carl’s mother dies and the family comes home to mourn her, it becomes clear that nobody ever really got over anything. Then there’s Carl himself, the prickly, still-terrified father, who has been secretly seeking closure to the matter of his kidnapping for years, and the unthinkable act he commits that will alter the family’s path forever.

The Family Experiment

The world’s population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families, let alone raise them. But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch. To launch this initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality TV show called The Substitute. It will follow ten couples as they raise a virtual child from birth to eighteen in a condensed nine-month time period. The prize: the right to keep their virtual child, or risk it all for the chance of a real baby.

Confessions of the Dead

Hollows Bend, New Hampshire, is a picture-perfect New England town where weekend tourists flock to see fall leaves and eat breakfast at the Stairway Diner. The crime rate—zero—is a point of pride for Sheriff Ellie Pritchett. The day the stranger shows up is when the trouble starts. The sheriff and her deputy investigate the mysterious teenage girl. None of the locals can place her. She can’t—or won’t—answer any questions. She won’t even tell them her name. While the girl is in protective custody, the officers are called to multiple crime scenes leading them closer and closer to a lake outside of town that doesn’t appear on any map.