Shelfology Book Pairing

A classic crime masterpiece

by Dashiell Hammett

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING meets MONSIEUR SPADE It's 1932, and Nick and Nora Charles, and their pet schnauzer, Asta, are in New York City for the Christmas holidays. With the privilege of wealth, they can enjoy whatever they want - the best food and drink, open-topped rides through the city; speakeasies where the rich rub shoulders with gangsters... Rich they may be, but they are also great fun to be with, kind to those in need, and more than capable of keeping their cool in a fight. So when a friend asks Nick to help him find a killer they accept - and are soon plunged into the world of the eccentric Wynant family, the head of which is an inventor who disappeared ten years before. Nick and Nora have to pick through implausible alibis, false identities, a highly glamorous but dysfunctional family - and the mystery of The Thin Man - in order to find out the truth.

A Novel 11/22/63

by Stephen King

On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if you could change it back? Stephen King's heart-stoppingly dramatic new novel is about a man who travels back in time to prevent the JFK assassination-a thousand page tour de force. Following his massively successful novel Under the Dome, King sweeps readers back in time to another moment-a real life moment-when everything went wrong: the JFK assassination. And he introduces readers to a character who has the power to change the course of history. Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students-a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning's father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a hammer. Harry escaped with a smashed leg, as evidenced by his crooked walk. Not much later, Jake's friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane-and insanely possible-mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake's new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake's life-a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time. A tribute to a simpler era and a devastating exercise in escalating suspense, 11/22/63 is Stephen King at his epic best.