Four Lost Cities A Secret History of the Urban Age, by Annalee Newitz (author), Chloe Cannon (narrator)

Highbridge, February 2021

The allure of "lost cities" is a strong one; many of us love the story of one lost city or another. Annalee Newitz gives us the stories of four of them--Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site in Turkey; Pompeii, on the Italian coast and the slope of Mt. Vesuvius; medieval Angkor in Cambodia; Cahokia, an indigenous North American metropolis at the site that's now East St. Louis.

Newitz looks at each of these cities using new developments and techniques in archaeology to consider the cities and their culture through the lives of the average residents as well as the elites.

Who Rescued Who, by Victoria Schade

Berkley Publishing Group, ISBN 9780593098837, March 2020

Elizabeth Barnes's father, a professor of English, died six months ago, leaving a will that required that his ahses be scattered in a particular river in England. This request was a complete surprise to her and she has no real notion of what to do about it. She was also, until quite recently, very busy, as the Chief Marketing Officer of a video gaming company in San Francisco. Now, though, she's unemployed and her reputation is toast, because she was working for a company that run by a completely unethical woman she used to think of as a friend. No one even wants to interview her for a potential job.

And she gets a call from a complete stranger, who claims to be her uncle, her father's brother, and he says that she has an inheritance, some property in the little English town of Fargrove. Reluctantly, she heads off to England, to meet the uncle her father never told her about, and hopefully sell that property to give herself a cushion while trying to rebuild her life.

She's not prepared to like her English relatives, the little town of Fargrovc, a local brewery owner, or the abandoned puppy she finds.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, by Sy Montgomery (author, narrator)

Highbridge, May 2015

Sy Montgomery is a naturalist who has done quite a bit of field research, but this is about time spent observing and interacting with octopuses, mostly in aquariums.

This isn't a book about the biology of these sea creatures, but about their consciousness and intelligence. Not long ago, no one with scientific training would have said that octopuses, invertebrates with comparatively short life spans. If you're interested in the biology of octopuses, this isn't the book for you. Montgomery makes passing references to her field research from time to time, but that's all they are--passing references.

To Cache a Killer (Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mysteries #5), Karen Musser Nortman (author), Michelle Babb (narrator)

Audible Audio, March 2018 (original publication August 2015)

Frannie Shoemaker and her friends and family are once again at a campground in Iowa, this time practicing the hobby of geocaching. Poking around in the woods looking for hidden caches naturally offers opportunities for Frannie's secondary--or perhaps primary--hobby of finding bodies.

This time she doesn't find a body; just a shoe. Because there's no foot in the shoe, or anywhere nearby, it strikes her and her friends as odd, but completely harmless. Unfortunately, not much later, the police do find a dead body quite nearby. Frannie and Larry tell the police about the shoe, but since the body isn't missing a shoe, and the shoe is gone by the time Frannie tells them about it and they look for it, all this does is call them to the attention of the police.