TBR Saturday

So we often have friends releasing new books. And we love to recommend them. Here’s our book recommendations. We try to get it done every Saturday but we are busy so we may have missed a few.

THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF TAKADA, JR. by Hovav Heth Martin is a team leader at Rome Bank, the largest financial institution in the prole world. Like the billions of other proles crammed into the huge metropolis they can never leave, he leads a harsh life: one meal a day consumed at the workplace, no days off, and the constant threat of death from an accident or illness. One day, two thousand and seven hundred dollars go missing from the till of one of the tellers on his team.
His superiors call in the Bureau of Security, infamous for its barbarity. Will Martin survive the investigation?

Takada Jr. is a party member, the son of the powerful Senator Takada. The five-million Party members live in the lap of luxury, with no worries to concern them. But Takada Jr. finds the system unacceptable and wants to help the wretched proles. Then three of his father’s employees are murdered, a rare event in the world of the Party members, where crime is almost unheard of, and soon afterwards, Takada Jr. disappears. Is his disappearance connected to the murders? And will he succeed in his plan to reform the perverted social order?

The Disappearance of Takada Jr. is a thrilling dystopian mystery, full of twists and secrets
The Hidden Cipher: A Knights Templar Conspiracy Thriller (The Templars Legacy Trilogy Book 1) by Rich Petrelli “Gripping”—and Rich Petrelli’s The Hidden Cipher is exactly that… a relentless chase through ancient secrets, modern power, and the shadows between.

Inspired by real historical mysteries, The Hidden Cipher is a work of fiction. It is not a historical account, and while it uses real locations and historical references as atmospheric backdrops, the narrative itself is entirely imagined.

When a forbidden Templar manuscript resurfaces after seven centuries, cryptologist Dr. Elena Voss is the first to recognize the symbols etched inside—and the deadly warning buried beneath them. What begins as a routine analysis pulls her into a conspiracy protected by silence, blood, and a hidden order determined to reclaim the cipher at any cost.

Readers of Dan Brown, Steve Berry, James Rollins, Simon Toyne, and Raymond Khoury will feel instantly at home in this pulse-pounding thriller that blends historical mystery with relentless modern danger. The Hidden Cipher explodes out of the gate with breakneck pacing, international intrigue, and a mystery carved into the bones of history.

Joined by covert operative Antoine Rousseau and researcher Liam Hayes, Elena follows a hidden lattice of encrypted symbols across Europe—through echoing cathedrals, forgotten monasteries, restricted archives, and the sealed chambers of Templar strongholds. Each revelation pulls them deeper into a silent war that has smoldered for centuries… and every step forward stirs enemies who have killed to keep this truth buried.

Because the cipher doesn’t just rewrite history—
it reveals a truth powerful enough to end the human race.

In this electrifying, globe-spanning thriller, descend into a world of forgotten orders, encrypted manuscripts, and conspiracies guarded for seven hundred years.
Until now…
The Silent Survivor: An EMP Post Apocalypse Prepper Survival Thriller by Robert J Walker The lights vanish. The cities fall.

Alone on their ranch, a family must battle hunger, violence, and the enemy sweeping through the countryside. The lights died in seconds. Now the rules are gone. On an isolated ranch, one family faces starvation, raiders, and the end of everything they knew.
Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop: The Team That Changed Children’s Television by Nat Segaloff (Author), Mallory Lewis (Author), David Copperfield (Foreword) For almost half a century, celebrated ventriloquist and entertainer Shari Lewis (1933–1998) delighted generations of children and adults with the help of her trusted sock puppet sidekick, Lamb Chop. For decades, the beloved pair were synonymous with children’s television, educating and entrancing their young audience with their symbiotic personalities and their proclivity for song, dance, and the joy of silliness.

But as iconic as their television personas are, relatively little inside knowledge has been revealed about Lewis herself and the life-changing moments that led her to the entertainment industry, and perhaps most importantly, to Lamb Chop.

Renowned as a performer, Lewis was equally accomplished in business. Operating in an era when women were largely left out of the conversation, she was one of the few women to run her own television production company. Whether it was singing, dancing, conducting, writing, drawing, or ventriloquism—a skill in which she was virtually unmatched—Lewis spent the entirety of her sixty-five years in pursuit of performative perfection. Constantly innovating and adapting to the needs of her audience and the market, Lewis extended the longevity of her career decade after decade. Her contributions—particularly the creation of Lamb Chop and her puppet pals—forever changed the history of children’s television.

Now, long after Lewis and Lamb Chop graced television with their final performance, Lewis’s daughter, Mallory, and author Nat Segaloff have set the record straight about the iconic pair in Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop: The Team That Changed Children’s Television. In this seminal biography, the authors pull the veritable wool from the eyes of audiences who adore the legendary entertainer to examine the joys, sorrows, triumphs, and sheer hard work that gave Lewis and Lamb Chop their enduring star power.
Random by Penn Jillette From Penn Jillette of the legendary magic duo Penn & Teller: a rollicking crime caper that will bend your mind like a spoon.

“Penn Jillette is an atheist, triple-goddamned lunatic, and his book is a glorious Las Vegas lunatic paean to chance and adventure—a page-turning, scabrous, hilarious ride into randomness.” —Neil Gaiman

“Jillette’s latest novel, Random, is about a young man who inherits his father’s crushing debt to a loan shark and turns to dice—and other dangerous measures—to dig himself out. That the dice bring him luck sends him a new philosophy of leaving decisions both big and small up to chance.” —New York Times

Two weeks before his twenty-first birthday, Las Vegas native Bobby Ingersoll finds out he’s inherited a crushing gambling debt from his scumbag father. The debt is owed to an even scummier bag named Fraser Ruphart who oversees his bottom-rung criminal empire from the classy-adjacent Trump International Hotel. Bobby’s prospects of paying off the note, which comes due the day he turns twenty-one, are about as dim as the sign on the hotel’s facade.

The two weeks pass in the blink of a (snake) eye, but before Bobby’s luck runs out, he stumbles upon enough cash to pay off Ruphart and change his family’s fortune. More importantly, he finds himself with a new, for lack of a better word, faith.

Bobby does not consign his big break to a “higher power”—what Penn Jillette hero ever could? Instead, he devises and devotes himself to Random, a philosophy where his life choices are based entirely on the roll of his “lucky” dice. What follows is a rollicking exploration into not so much what defines us as what divines us when we give over every decision—from what to eat to whom to marry to how or when to die—to the random fall of two numbered cubes.

Random combines the intellectual curiosity of Richard Dawkins with the humor and grit of an Elmore Leonard antihero. Jillette’s up-on-his-luck Ingersoll is the character we need to help us navigate the chaos of the post-truth era.