STORY HOUR with MISS JULIE Friday Mornings @ 10 am in the Children's Store

Story Hour is suspended in December...resumes in January 2009

FALL FAMILY STORY HOUR WITH MISS JULIE in the Children's Store

Friday, October 10th at 7 p.m.

Wear your jammies, bring your pillow & snuggle in for family fun!

The Vero Beach Book Center Bookies Bookgroup

Monday, October 13th at 10:30 a.m.

The Vero Beach Book Center Bookies Bookgroup meets in the Second Story Bargain Books to discuss Away by Amy Bloom

JAMES SWAIN presents Night Stalker

Wednesday, October 15th at 7 p.m.

Hard-edged, evocative, brilliantly paced, James Swain’s novels of crime and punishment in South Florida delve into a shadowy realm where criminals, victims, and cops share the same truths, the same lies, and sometimes even the same nightmares.

Abb Grimes is famous. Just ask the ghoulish tourists who flock to his former home to take photographs. Years ago, Grimes killed eighteen women, some never found. As the head of the Broward County Missing Persons Unit, Jack Carpenter was intimately involved in the Grimes case. Now, days away from execution, the notorious serial killer reaches out to ex-cop Carpenter with a surprising request.

Abb Grimes’ grandson was lured from his home. The cops are convinced the boy’s father–Abb’s troubled son, Jed–is behind the boy’s disappearance, but Jack’s not so sure. With a personal connection to the kidnapped child, Carpenter takes the case, and that’s when the situation goes from terrifying to fatal. There’s another gruesome murder, and once again the evidence points straight to Jed. Have the unspeakable sins of his father taken root within this troubled young man?

Carpenter races against time and a police department that wants his help but rejects his aggressive style as he searches through an underworld of predators, assembling the jagged pieces of a depraved puzzle, desperate to put an end to a murderous stalker’s blood-soaked rampage.

JAMES REESE presents The Dracula Dossier

Thursday, October 16th at 7 p.m.

October History Forum w/Dr. Robert Taylor

Saturday, October 18th at 1 p.m.

The Telephone Gambit ~ Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (author Seth Shulman is not scheduled to appear)

While researching Alexander Graham Bell at MIT's Dibner Institute, Seth Shulman scrutinized Bell's journals and within them he found the smoking gun, a hint of deeply buried historical intrigue. Delving further, Shulman unearthed the surprising story behind the invention of the telephone: a tale of romance, corruption, and unchecked ambition.

Bell furtively—and illegally—copied part of Elisha Gray's invention in the race to secure what would become the most valuable U.S. patent ever issued. And afterward, as Bell's device led to the world's largest monopoly, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, he hid his invention's illicit beginnings. In The Telephone Gambit, Shulman challenges the reputation of an icon of invention, rocks the foundation of a corporate behemoth, and offers a probing meditation on how little we know about our own history.

AD HUDLER presents Man of the House

Thursday, October 23rd at 7 p.m.

This breezy follow-up to Househusband follows Linc Menner, a stay-at-home dad whose home renovation project suddenly makes him long for a life less momlike. Linc has always been the full-time dad and felt content driving his Man Van to chauffeur daughter Violet around as his wife, Jo, works demanding hours as a hospital administrator. However, insecurities begin to brew beneath Linc's calm, even-keeled demeanor as Violet enters adolescence, causing Linc to feel less indispensable. Finally, when Linc overhears an obnoxious comment by a subcontractor, he questions his masculinity, leading him on a hell-bent journey from one masculine signifier to another, culminating in some realizations and life lessons, including women are cool—they talk about things that matter. Clunky lines like this, coupled with an awkward narrative that jumps between four first-person points of view detract from what is overall a light diversion that should serve as a welcome treat for devotees of mom lit.

HALLOWEEN PARTY AND MAGIC SHOW in the Children's Store

Friday, October 24th at 7 p.m.

ARNOLD BECKHARDT presents Goering's Gold

Wednesday, October 29th at 7 p.m.

At the end of World War II, a Luftwaffe hero flies a final mission for Reich Marshall Herman Goering. He delivers gold bars to the organizer of an escape route for war criminals from Germany, called the 'rat line'. Roy Neely, retired FBI psychologist, ex Air Force Vietnam fighter-bomber pilot, with a new career as a Flight Instructor, is faced with a real challenge: how, after fifty-two years later, to expose the financing of this activity. Neely enlists friends Eric Holloway from the CIA and Jacob Nervat from the Israeli Mossad to help with the investigation. After many twists and turns this leads to a treasure hunt for Goering's Gold.

SUSAN SAINT SING presents The Wonder Crew ~ The Untold Story of a Coach, Navy Rowing and Olympic Immortality

Thursday, October 30th at 7 p.m.

THE WONDER CREW is the fascinating story of how the salty coach of the Annapolis crew team, Coach Richard Glendon, seized the sport of rowing first from the Ivy League schools and then the imposing British with a new style both uniquely American and very much his own. He took a group of young midshipmen with humble origins and dominated a sport once the domain of the privileged.

After stunning the Ivy Leagues in race after race, the US Naval Academy team won a shot at the Olympics. Their task was nearly impossible: for hundreds of years, the British Navy ruled the world and their supremacy of the seas naturally made them dominant in the sport of rowing. With the hopes of a nation, Navy went into the heart of Europe and in thrilling fashion defeated the heavily favored Brits to win the gold medal in 1920. With Glendon's new American style, the US won Gold for forty straight years, the longest winning streak in any single sport in Olympic history.

Rich in history, with brave characters, American ingenuity, and dramatic training and competition, THE WONDER CREW is the first comprehensive account of the 1920 Olympic Navy crew team and their inspirational coach who forged the dramatic story of their quest for Olympic gold.

MARTHA POWERS presents Conspiracy of Silence

Saturday, November 1st at 3 p.m.

On a sunny day in July, Clare Prentice arrives in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. Although she is on assignment to interview the town's notoriously reclusive novelist, Nate Hanssen, Clare is really in search of a different story - her story.

Just months before, Clare was a bride-to-be, living in Chicago, and looking to the future, until the day she learned her entire life had been a lie. Not only was Clare adopted, but there is no record that she or her adoptive mother ever existed. The only clue is a class ring from Grand Rapids Senior High School. Unable to get on with her future until she reconciles her past, Clare breaks off her engagement.

Unraveling the mystery is like trying to sculpt fog, until the first piece of the puzzle unexpectedly drops into place: Clare's birth mother, Lily Gundersen, was murdered in Grand Rapids. Lily's murder was one of the most talked about events in the town's history, but no one is talking now. This silence isn't just deafening, it's dangerous. Clare hasn't learned the whole story, and someone intends to keep it that way.

FALL FAMILY STORY HOUR WITH MISS JULIE in the Children's Store

Friday, November 7th at 7 p.m.

Wear your jammies, bring your pillow & snuggle in for family fun!

DEBORAH SHARP presents Mama Does Time

Saturday, November 8th at 3 p.m.

Meet Mama: a true Southern woman with impeccable manners, sherbet-colored pantsuits, and four prior husbands, able to serve sweet tea and sidestep alligator attacks with equal aplomb. Mama's antics — especially her penchant for finding trouble — drive her daughters Mace, Maddie, and Marty to distraction.

One night, while settling in to look for ex-beaus on COPS, Mace gets a frantic call from her mother. This time, the trouble is real: Mama found a body in the trunk of her turquoise convertible and the police think she's the killer. It doesn't help that the handsome detective assigned to the case seems determined to prove Mama's guilt or that the cowboy who broke Mace's heart shows up at the local Booze ‘n' Breeze in the midst of the investigation. Before their mama lands in prison — just like an embarrassing lyric from a country-western song — Mace and her sisters must find the real culprit.

The Vero Beach Book Center Bookies Bookgroup

Monday, November 10th at 10:30 a.m.

The Vero Beach Book Center Bookies Bookgroup meets in the Second Story Bargain Books to discuss A LONG WAY GONE by Ishmael Beah

KARL LENKER presents Final Trumpet ~ A Novel of Rescue, Romance & Revenge

Thursday, November 13th at 7 p.m.

November History Forum w/Dr. Robert Taylor

Saturday, November 15th at 1 p.m.

Panama Fever ~ The Epic Story of One of the Greatest Human Achievements of All Time - The Building of the Panama Canal (author Matthew Parker is not scheduled to appear)

The Panama Canal was the costliest undertaking in human history. It literally required moving mountains, breaking the back of the great range that connects North and South America. Begun by the French in 1880, its successful completion in 1914 by the Americans marked the end of the Victorian Age and the beginning of the “American Century.”

The building of the Panama Canal was a project whose gestation spanned hundreds of years. Columbus himself searched for a way to get to the Pacific across the narrow isthmus of Central America. For centuries, monarchs, presidents, businessmen, and explorers all struggled to find such a passage, knowing that whoever controlled it would exert unsurpassed control over global trade, and therefore the fate of nations.

The first history of this mighty achievement in nearly thirty years, Panama Fever draws on diaries, memoirs, letters, and other contemporary accounts, bringing the experience of those who built the canal vividly to life. The massive project riveted public attention: “Panama Fever” spread throughout the Western world. Politicians and businessmen engaged in high-stakes international diplomacy in order to influence its location, path, ownership, and construction. Meanwhile, ditch-diggers, machinists, drivers, engineers, and foremen from all over the world rushed to take advantage of high wages and the chance to be a part of history.

But the grim reality of Panama – searing heat, torrential rains, fatal mud slides, and malarial mosquitoes – soon caught up with them. More than 25,000 of those who enthusiastically signed on as workers succumbed to dysentery, yellow fever, and malaria, giving a fatal twist to the meaning of “Panama Fever.” The truly horrific toll unleashed a second race to find a cure so the canal could be completed. The discoveries of the heroic doctors who battled these diseases would lead to a sea change in the way infectious diseases were treated, thus paving the way for the tremendous medical advances of the twentieth century.

Filled with remarkable characters, including Teddy Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, and Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French genius who built the Suez Canal and almost snatched Panama out from under American control, Panama Fever is an epic historical adventure that shows how a small but fiercely contested strip of land in a largely unknown Central American nation suddenly made the world a smaller place and launched the era of American global dominance.

DICK YEMM presents THE STORIES: Real-life, Spellbinding Stories of Business Failures and Successes in the Face of Calamitous Events

Tuesday, November 18th at 7 p.m.

CHRIS SANTELLA presents Fifty Places to Dive Before You Die ~ Diving Experts Share the World's Greatest Destinations

Tuesday, November 25th between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.

HOLIDAY OPEN HOUSE WITH SANTA CLAUS in the Children's Store

Saturday, November 29th from 11 a.m. until 1 p.m.

A Holiday History Forum w/Dr. Robert Taylor featuring author Les Standiford

Saturday, December 13th at 1 p.m.

The Man Who Invented Christmas ~ How Charles Dickens' A CHRISTMAS CAROL Rescued His Career & Revived Our Holiday Spirits