Have you joined our Best Sellers Club yet? Every quarter, our librarians pick out new books on certain topics: true crime, cookbooks, and biography. Join our Best Sellers Club  and automatically have selected titles put on hold for you. Want the hottest new release from your favorite author? Want to stay current with a celebrity book club? Love nonfiction? We’ve got that too! Choose any author, celebrity pick, and/or nonfiction pick and have us put the latest title on hold for you automatically. Select as many as you want!

Let’s go over the true crime, cookbook, and biography selections for January!

We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence by Becky Cooper has been chosen for the Best Sellers Club January True Crime pick! Librarian Anna has this to say about her latest selection:

I primarily selected this title for the BSC due to its highly anticipated demand, as well as due to the positive and starred reviews it received from acclaimed journals and reader communities upon publication. I was also immediately hooked by the following description of this title from Goodreads: “We Keep the Dead Close is a memoir of mirrors, misogyny, and murder. It is at once a rumination on the violence and oppression that rules our revered institutions, a ghost story reflecting one young woman’s past onto another’s present, and a love story for a girl who was lost to history.”

Want to know more about We Keep the Dead Close ? Check out the following description provided by Anna:

Published in November, this highly anticipated title investigates the 1969 murder of Jane Britton, a 23-year-old anthropology graduate student at Harvard University who was found bludgeoned to death in her apartment. Her body was surrounded by red ochre, a substance often found at ancient burial sites around the world, and appeared to have been killed with a small, sharp weapon, not unlike an archeological tool. At the time of her death and for many years after, rumors circulated that a tenured professor at the university had had an affair with Britton and killed her when she threatened to disclose the nature of their affair. Despite the scale of this scandal and the fact that Britton’s father held a powerful position at Radcliffe College, Harvard’s all-female sister school that was merging with Harvard that very year, this murder was never deeply investigated and faded quietly into the background for nearly half of a century. Forty years later, author Becky Cooper first heard this rumor as a Harvard undergraduate student herself and embarked on what would become a decade-long pursuit to get to the bottom of this mystery, which was just closed in 2018.

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Our January cookbook pick for the Best Sellers Club is Pie Academy by Ken Haedrich.

Want to know more about what Pie Academy is about? Check out the following description provided by the publisher.

Novice and experienced bakers alike will discover the secrets to baking a pie from scratch with recipes, crust savvy, tips and tutorials, advice about tools and ingredients, and more. Foolproof step-by-step photos give you the confidence you need to choose and prepare the best crust for different types of fillings. Learn how to make pie dough using butter, lard, or both; how to work with all-purpose, whole-wheat, or gluten-free flour; how to roll out dough; which pie pan to use; and how to add flawless finishing details like fluting and lattice tops. Next are 255 recipes for every kind and style of pie, from classic apple pie and pumpkin pie to summer berry, fruit, nut, custard, chiffon, and cream pies, freezer pies, slab pies, hand pies, turnovers, and much more. This beast of a collection, with gorgeous color photos throughout, weighs in at nearly four pounds and serves up forty years of pie wisdom in a single, satisfying package.

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The January biography pick for the Best Sellers Club is Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell by Alison M. Parker.

For more information about what Unceasing Militant is about, check out the following description provided by the publisher.

Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) would become one of the most prominent activists of her time, with a career bridging the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Unceasing Militant is the first full-length biography of Terrell, bringing her vibrant voice and personality to life. Though most accounts of Terrell focus almost exclusively on her public activism, Alison M. Parker also looks at the often turbulent, unexplored moments in her life to provide a more complete account of a woman dedicated to changing the culture and institutions that perpetuated inequality throughout the United States.

Drawing on newly discovered letters and diaries, Parker weaves together the joys and struggles of Terrell’s personal, private life with the challenges and achievements of her public, political career, producing a stunning portrait of an often-under recognized political leader.