OBD Patron Picks Summer Reading 2025 - Adult

After her third arrest in one year, sixteen-year-old Allie's parents send her to Cimmeria Academy, a boarding school, where she finds herself exposing the dark secrets of the school and her classmates.

Documents the bizarre true story of a millionaire who manipulated his fourteen-year-old daughter into murdering his wife so he could collect insurance and marry his teenage sister-in-law.

In a case that spans 20 years, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photographer during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved. Now Bosch's ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator...

"Mother Teresa was one of the most admired women of the 20th century, and her memory continues to inspire charitable work around the world. She believed the greatest need of a human being is to love and be loved. In 1948, she founded the Missionaries of Charity to work directly with the very poorest of Calcutta. From the efforts of one woman entering the slums of Entally, the Missionaries of Charity grew into an organization operating soup kitchens,...

"The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from...

With Love and Babka is separated into sweet and savory recipes and includes several variations of dough including classic, butter-blocked, chocolate, and gluten-free. Elana shares many variations of the traditionally sweet babka, including Cinnamon Raisin Pecan, Dulce de Leche, Mexican Chocolate Brownie, S'mores Strawberry Shortcake, and more. These confections will bring new babka flavors into your repertoire, with ingredients like oats streusel,...

An award-winning Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford explores the cultural role volcanoes have played in history and how they have shaped our planet and its future.

The story of the man who achieved one of the greatest feats of our era--the mapping of the human genome. After nearly flunking out of high school, Venter went to Vietnam, where the life and death struggles he encountered as a medic piqued his interest in science and medicine. In 1984 he joined the National Institutes of Health, introduced novel techniques for rapid gene discovery, and left in 1991 to form his own nonprofit genomics research center,...

"With a new afterword from Jhumpa Lahiri, a new edition of the contemporary classic. Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. In The Namesake,...

It takes a village to kill a child. The village of Teetarpur outside Delhi, is famous for nothing until one of its children is found dead, hanging from the branch of a Jamun tree. In the largely Hindu village, suspicion quickly falls on an itinerant Muslin man, Mansoor. It's up to the local policeman Sub-Inspector Ombir Singh to get to the truth. With only one officer under him, and only a single working revolver between them, can he bring justice...