The Delaware County District Library will be spending the week of Oct. 15-21 celebrating its Friends of the Library group as part of the 18th annual celebration of National Friends of Libraries Week.

The Friends of the Delaware County District Library was established in 2007 and has donated over $500,000 in monetary donations and in volunteer hours for the library. Currently, nearly 300 community members contribute annually to the Friends, and more than 70 of these contributors actively volunteer their time to assist the group with fundraising efforts, which include used book and media sales, premiere author visits, and Young Writers Workshops.

The Friends are currently led by president Karen Cowan, who has given nine years of volunteer service to the organization. Karen will finish her term on the board this year, and she will be recognized during the Friends’ annual meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 8, at 6 p.m. in the Delaware Main Library Community Room. The evening will continue with a presentation by Dr. Ric Stranges and Mr. Brent Carson, who will tell stories from their upcoming book “Carried Treasures: Stories of Delaware County, Ohio.”

This week, you can find and thank the Friends of the Delaware County District Library on Saturday, Oct. 21, during its Bargain Book Sale at the Delaware Main Library in the rear garage from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. and in the front Community Room from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Please visit www.delawarelibraryfriends.org to learn more about the Friends, and to find out how to become a member of the Friends and to see the upcoming calendar of events.

National Friends of Libraries Week is coordinated by United for Libraries, a division of the American Library Association with approximately 4,000 personal and group members representing hundreds of thousands of library supporters. United for Libraries supports those who govern, promote, advocate, and fundraise for libraries, and brings together library trustees, advocates, friends, and foundations into a partnership that creates a powerful force for libraries in the 21st century. For more information, visit www.ala.org/united.

We’ve got lots of new titles on our shelves this month in the thrillers and suspense genre. Each of these titles has immediate availability if you request them now, but they’ll disappear about as fast as their characters do!

• “Chameleon” by Remi Adeleke. Nigerian American secret agent Kali Kent, a member of an extra-classified CIA branch known as Black Box, is dispatched to South Africa in pursuit of a suspiciously organized group of kidnappers who are taking high-profile hostages in order to influence international affairs and stock prices. Chameleon is the first in a planned trilogy by former Navy SEAL Remi Adeleke.

• “What Never Happened” by Rachel Howzell Hall. After the end of her marriage, obituary writer Coco Weber moves from Los Angeles to the Catalina Island home where her parents and brother were killed years ago. Waiting for her are her prickly aunt Gwen, who believes the house should be hers, and an unusually high number of local widows dying off in a pattern that suggests they’re being targeted for their valuable real estate.

• “Small Town Sins” by Ken Jaworowski. Suspense and moral complexity abound in this story of a small, economically depressed Pennsylvania town, where a volunteer firefighter decides to keep the $2 million of drug money he finds in a burning house, a nurse decides to skirt the law to make a dying patient’s wish come true, and a recovering heroin addict turns vigilante to take down a child predator.

• “The Trade Off” by Sandie Jones. Novice reporter Jess Townsend lands her dream job at British tabloid The Globe, hired by an editor who makes promises about helping the paper shed its sleazy reputation. But taking anyone in the office at their word will have dire consequences for both Jess and the celebrities whose private lives the paper goes to such great lengths to pry into.

• “The Centre” by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi. Anisa Ellahi works subtitling Bollywood movies while she dreams of someday becoming a literary translator. Then her new boyfriend Adam, a polyglot, refers her to an exclusive, expensive language school called The Centre. Once enrolled however, Anisa will learn a dark, horrifying truth about the school’s strict, too-good-to-be-true methodology.

• “I’m Not Done With You Yet” by Jesse Q. Sutanto. Underachieving writer Jane Morgan is in for two big surprises at once. First, her estranged friend Thalia Ashcroft has just hit the bestseller list. Second, Thalia’s book is directly inspired by their complex, intense friendship, which began at Oxford’s MFA writing program and ended in an unspecified traumatic event.

If you have a question that you would like to see answered in this column, mail it to Nicole Fowles, Delaware County District Library, 84 E. Winter St., Delaware, OH 43015, or call us at 740-362-3861. You can also email your questions by visiting the library’s web site at www.delawarelibrary.org or directly to Nicole at [email protected]. No matter how you contact us, we’re always glad you asked!