I don’t know if anyone noticed, but I was out of town last week. The loving husband and I took a brief respite from the rigors of daily living and headed to Flagstaff, Ariz. We took a death-defying hike into the Oak Creek Canyon during which time I had to cross a raging river six times. Not once did I fall into the raging rapids to my death. OK, maybe it was more of a meandering mountain stream where baby ducklings could swim and people could fish for trout. We also hiked the rim of the Grand Canyon, where I fully realized my intense fear of heights. However, a little fear does not keep me from my adventures. Next we moved on to Las Vegas for the loving husband’s business seminar. I was on my own, so I took another daring four-mile hike into all of the casinos. If you try to visit as many casinos as possible, you don’t have time to gamble in any of them. This is my own personal philosophy. I also visited the infamous "Coyote Ugly Bar." Did I participate in fire-dancing on the bar? Maybe, maybe not. On the flight home, I sat across the aisle from a man who had a brand new hardcover book sitting on his snack tray. I wanted to fondle it. I wanted to slap on a barcode and assign a call number to it. I wanted to hold it in my arms and whisper, "I missed you." At that point, I knew it was time to get home and back to work. By the time you read this, I will have fondled several new books and have them on the shelf. You might want to try the new title by John Sandford, "Hidden Prey." Six months ago, Lucas Davenport tackled his first case as a statewide troubleshooter. Now, on the shore of Lake Superior, a man named Vladimir Orslov is found shot dead, and though nobody knows why, everybody — the local cops, the FBI, and the Russians themselves — has a theory. A Russian cop flies in from Moscow, Davenport flies in from Minneapolis, law enforcement and press types swarm the crime scene — and, in the middle of it all, there is another murder. Is there a relationship between the two? What is the Russian cop hiding from Davenport? Is she a cop at all? Why was the man shot with 50-year-old bullets? Before he can find the answers, Davenport will have to follow a trail back to another place, another time, and battle the shadows he discovers there — shadows that turn out to be both very real and very deadly. Also new on the fiction shelf is "Voices Over Water," by Ann Herlong-Bodman. When the Union forces invade the Carolina low country, Sarah Eddings is determined to participate in the war effort. The beautiful, headstrong daughter of a plantation owner, she is asked to serve as a spy for the Confederacy. Living behind enemy lines, she adopts the guise of a teacher setting up schools for the children of the freed slaves. Soon Sarah begins to question the legitimacy of the Southern cause. As she becomes more involved with both her pupils and a handsome Union officer, she must decide whether to cling to the past or carve out a new future for herself.