Richard Osman is an author, a well-known television personality and comedian in the UK. His newest book is The Bullet That Missed  in the popular “Thursday Murder Club” series that has already sold in the millions.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim are adventurous 70somethings who live at the Coopers Chase Retirement Village in rural England and are the crime solvers in these light-hearted, clever mysteries. In the latest installment they solve murders, take on an ex-KGB colonel, and a murderous money launderer. Tv hosts and the local cops show up, too. 

Trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned.  

Patricia Schultz of “1000 Places to See Before You Die” fame has authored a different kind of book this time.

“WHY WE TRAVEL: 100 Reasons to Get Up and Go” pairs beautiful color photos with pearls of wisdom, lists, and essential travel tips and focuses not on where or when to travel, but on how travel enriches us and why we choose to travel.

She told me why packing tips are a whole lot more than what you put in your suitcase, what the first thing is she does when visiting a new city, and why an assignment to cover “The Game of Thrones” in Northern Ireland was so challenging. 

Kimberly Garza’s debut novel, “The Last Karankawas” explores modern, diverse south Texas.  She takes readers to the salty aired streets of Galveston where a tight-knit community of Mexican and Filipino American families live on the Texas coast.

When word spreads of an approaching storm named Hurricane Ike in 2008, each Galveston resident is forced to decide: abandon their hard-won home and flee inland, or board up the windows and hunker down.

Born in Galveston and raised in Uvalde, Kimberly is an assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

An American retired judge of the Superior Court of California, LaDoris Hazzard Cordell was also the first black female judge in the northern part of the state.

Her memoir, "HER HONOR, My Life on the Bench...What Works, What’s Broken, and How to Change It,"  is a robust and colorful collection of stories from 20 years as a judge.

In her courthouse she rotated through various specialties—family and probate courts, criminal jury trials and traffic court, to name just a few.

She uses real cases to highlight how judges make difficult decisions, all the while facing outside pressures from the media, law enforcement, and the friends and families of the people involved.

With INVISIBLE STORM Jason Kander has written the book he himself needed in his darkest moments of PTSD. After Afghanistan, his day job was politics as a rising star in the Democratic party, first in his native Missouri and then running for national office. But that stopped when symptoms became too great.

It’s the best book I’ve read about PTSD—what it is, what it feels like, what to do about it, how it affects families (through the words of his wife Diana), and how it interplays with a life of politics. 

Today, Jason Kander works with national veterans groups.

Ryan Busse, author of “GUNFIGHT. My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America” is a proud gun owner, sportsman, environmentalist, and conservationist and a former firearms executive who’s written an insider’s view of the radicalization of the US gun industry.

Busse explains how and when the US gun culture changed, that culture’s alliance with political factions in the US and abroad, and the most essential thing that we can do to change it.

Today, Busse is a policy advisor for gun control advocate and former Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords who was shot and severely wounded during an assassination attempt.

Colorado-based Mark Lee Gardner’s ninth book, THE EARTH IS ALL THAT LASTS, is a dual biography of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, the two most legendary and consequential American Indian leaders. The author's research features new primary sources, including diaries.

Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and their warriors crushed Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana and led Sioux resistance in the fierce final chapter of the “Indian Wars.”

This 1876 epic battle was the Sioux's greatest victory, but it was also the beginning of the end for their treasured sacred way of life.

David Gergen knows a thing or two about how leaders are made. He's been a White House adviser to four presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan & Clinton) of different parties, CNN senior political analyst, and founder of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In Hearts Touched with Fire. How Great Leaders Are Made he presents his ideas about leadership using numerous examples from the past and present.

He traces the journeys of historic icons like Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as contemporary game changers like Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

It’s time, he says, to pass the torch to younger leaders.

“I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”

Bill McKibben is an educator, environmental activist and author of more than a dozen books.  His newest title is a memoir, “The Flag, The Cross and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What The Hell Happened.” 

He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, which has organized twenty thousand rallies around the world in every country except North Korea. His new project, organizing people over age sixty for progressive change, is called Third Act.

OVERBOARD by crime writer Sara Paretsky is her 21st book in her series about her legendary detective, V.I. Warshawski.

As this book begins V.I. is on her way home from an all-night surveillance job in Chicago and is led by her dogs on a mad chase that ends when they discover a badly injured teen hiding in the rocks along Lake Michigan.

Credited with transforming the mystery category of books with the creation of her female private eye 40 years ago, Paretsky's books featuring V.I. Warshawski are international best sellers in 30 countries. She’s also the founder of Sisters in Crime and recipient of numerous awards around the world.

She’s advocated for women and the underserved for decades and works closely with literacy and reproductive rights groups.