UCR Retirement Center

Coming June 2024

Big-city detective Joe Cashin is shaken by a scrape with death, he's posted away from the Homicide Squad to the quiet town on the South Australian coast where he grew up. Carrying physical scars and more than a little guilt, he spends his time playing the country cop, walking his dogs, and thinking about how it all was before. But when a prominent local is attacked in his own home and left for dead, Cashin is thrust into what becomes a murder investigation. The evidence points to three boys from the nearby aboriginal community—everyone seems to want to blame them. Cashin is unconvinced, and soon begins to see the outlines of something far more terrible than a burglary gone wrong.

Devil's Peak
By Deon Myer

Spring 2024

A young woman makes a terrible confession to a priest. An honorable man takes his own revenge for an unspeakable tragedy. An aging inspector tries to get himself sober while taking on the most difficult case of his career. From this beginning, Deon Meyer weaves a story of astonishing complexity and suspense, as Inspector Benny Griessel faces off against a dangerous vigilante who has everything on his side, including public sympathy.

Spring 2024

Boston girl Molly Sutton moves to a small village in France to lick her wounds after a divorce. Molly's new life is full of contentment, if a bit short on excitement. But then a girl goes missing...and Molly's world gets turned upside down. And when the missing girl's distraught parents come to stay at Molly's bed and breakfast, she is drawn into the case, like it or not.

The Grave Tattoo
By Val McDermid 

Winter 2024

After torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a Lake District hillside, a long-disregarded old wives' tale takes on a chilling new plausibility. For centuries, Lakelanders have whispered that Fletcher Christian, made infamous by Mutiny on the Bounty, staged the massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. And once there, what if he could tell his story to an old friend and schoolmate, William Wordsworth, who turned it into a long narrative poem—a poem that remained hidden lest it expose Wordsworth to the gallows for harboring a fugitive? 

Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham, herself a native of the Lake District, feels compelled to discover once and for all whether the manuscript ever existed—and whether it still exists today. 

Forty Thieves
By Thomas Perry 

Winter 2024

Sid and Ronnie Abel are a first-rate husband-and-wife detective team, both retirees of the LAPD. Ed and Nicole Hoyt are married assassins for hire living in the San Fernando Valley. Except for deadly aim with a handgun, the two couples have little in common - until they are both hired to do damage control on the same murder case. The previous spring, after days of torrential rain, James Ballantine, a middle-aged African American who worked as a research scientist for a prestigious company was recovered from one of the city's overwhelmed storm sewers. Looking like foul play, Ballantine's former employers bring in the Abels to investigate while the Hoyts' mysterious contractors want to make sure that the facts about Ballantine's death stay hidden.

Winter 2024

Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the Dublin Murder Squad—until an urgent telephone call brings her back to an eerie crime scene. The victim looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used as an undercover cop. Suddenly, Cassie is back undercover, to find out not only who killed this young woman, but, more importantly, who she was.

Winter 2024

Sheldon Horowitz leaves New York and moves in with his granddaughter, Rhea, and her new husband, Lars, in Norway. Home alone one morning, Sheldon witnesses a dispute between the woman who lives upstairs and an aggressive stranger. When events turn dire, Sheldon seizes and shields the neighbor’s young son from the violence, and they flee the scene. As Sheldon and the boy look for a safe haven in an alien world, past and present weave together, forcing them ever forward to a wrenching moment of truth.

Spring 2023

Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Department is offered a bit of luxury by friends and supporters within the Party – a week's vacation at a luxurious resort near Lake Tai, a week where he can relax, and recover, undisturbed by outside demands or disruptions. Unfortunately, the once beautiful Lake Tai, renowned for its clear waters, is now covered by fetid algae, its waters polluted by toxic runoff from local manufacturing plants. 

Then the director of one of the manufacturing plants responsible for the pollution is murdered and the leader of the local ecological group is the primary suspect of the local police. Now Inspector Chen must tread carefully if he is to uncover the truth behind the brutal murder and find a measure of justice for both the victim and the accused.

Murder in Chianti 
by Camilla Trinchieri

Spring 2023

Former NYPD homicide detective Nico Doyle who's just looking for space to grieve while mourning the loss of his wife, Rita, moves to her hometown of Gravigna in the wine-soaked region of Chianti. Half Italian and half Irish, Nico finds himself able to get by in the region with the help of Rita’s relatives, but he still feels alone and out of place. He isn’t sure if it’s peace he’s seeking, but it isn’t what he finds. Early one morning, he hears a gunshot and a dog's cries near his cabin and walks out to discover a dead body in the woods, flashily dressed in gold tennis shoes. When the police arrive, Nico hastily adopts the fluffy white dog as his own and wants nothing more to do with the murder. But Salvatore Perillo, the local maresciallo, discovers Nico's professional background and enlists him to help with the case.

Cover Her Face
By P.D. James

Spring 2023

Sally Jupp was a sly and sensuous young woman who used her body and her brains to make her way up the social ladder. Now she lies across her bed with dark bruises from a strangler’s fingers forever marring her lily-white throat. Someone has decided that the wages of sin should be death...and it is up to Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh to find who that someone is.

 In a Dry Season
By Peter Robinson

Winter 2023

An insufferable drought ravages the Yorkshire countryside, depleting the Thornfield Reservoir, revealing the remnants of the flooded town of Hobb's End and the terrible secrets kept safe within its watery tomb. Amongst the ruins, the remains of a woman's body are discovered. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks deduces that the woman was strangled and repeatedly stabbed more than 50 years ago and is there to investigate to solve the crime.

In the Woods
By Tana French

Winter 2023

As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours. Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery.

Winter 2023

Even though she was as healthy as a horse, Aunt Isabel liked nothing better than checking herself into a hospital. Her redheaded niece is just glad that the hospital's murderer prefers blondes.

Fall 2023

On compassionate leave after the murder of his wife, Thomas Lynley is called back to Scotland Yard when the body of a woman is found stabbed and abandoned in an isolated London cemetery. While Lynley works in London, his former colleagues Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata follow the murder trail south to the New Forest—a beautiful and strange place where animals roam free, the long-lost art of thatching is very much alive, and outsiders are suspect. What they don't know is that more than one dark secret lurks within the secluded woodlands, and that their investigation will lead them to an outcome that is both tragic and shocking.

 Becoming Inspector Chen
by Quijano Xiaolong  

Fall 2023

Inspector Chen is excluded from a poetry case as he awaits possible disciplinary action, leaving him to reflect on his career . . . but does his past hold a clue to the poetry case? Wracked with self-doubt and facing an anxious wait to discover the fate of his career, Chen is left to reflect on the events that have led to where he is now - from his amateur investigations as a child during the Cultural Revolution, to his very first case on the Shanghai Police Force.

 Death on the Nile
By Agatha Christie

Fall 2022

Beloved detective Hercule Poirot embarks on a journey to Egypt in one of Agatha Christie’s most famous mysteries. The tranquility of a luxury cruise along the Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through the head. She was young, stylish, and beautiful. A girl who had everything...until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot is onboard to solve the murder.

 Fortune Favors The Dead
By Stephen Spotswood

Spring 2022

It's 1942 and Willowjean "Will" Parker is a scrappy circus runaway whose knife-throwing skills have just saved the life of New York's best, and most unorthodox, private investigator, Lillian Pentecost. Lillian ends up hiring Will to be her right-hand woman. In return, Will is to receive a salary, room and board, and training in Lillian's very particular art of investigation. Three years later, Will and Lillian are on the Collins case: Abigail Collins was found bludgeoned to death with a crystalball following a big, boozy Halloween party at her home—her body slumped in the same chair where her steel magnate husband shot himself the year before.

Still Life
By Louise Penny 

Spring 2022

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it's a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.

 Pietr the Latvian
By Georges Simenon

Spring 2022

Inspector Jules Maigret, a taciturn detective and commissaire of the Paris Brigade Criminelle, receives notice from Interpol that a notorious conman known only as Peitr the Latvian is en route to France. Armed with a broad description and a scant few clues, Maigret plans to intercept him at the train station outside Paris. But when he arrives, he finds that there are several suspects—some living, and some dead—who meet the description uncannily well - Maigret must use his every instinct to unravel the mystery and track down the truth.

March Violets
By Philip Kerr 

Fall 2022

Wisecracking cop turned private investigator Bernie Gunther specializes in missing persons, and as the Third Reich’s power has grown, Bernie has become a very busy man. When private investigator Bernie Gunther agrees to track down some stolen jewels, his search takes him down the dangerous streets of pre-World War 2 Berlin and into the path of the most influential players in Nazi Germany. and Hitler’s most powerful cronies, Bernie finds himself mired in the brutality and corruption of a country on the brink of war.

A Great Deliverance
By Elizabeth George 

Winter 2022

Three hundred years ago, as legend goes, the frightened Yorkshire villagers smothered a crying babe in Keldale Abbey, where they'd hidden to escape the ravages of Cromwell's raiders. 

Now into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. as Lynley and Havers wind their way through Keldale's dark labyrinth of secret scandals and appalling crimes, uncovering a shattering series of revelations that will reverberate through this tranquil English valley - and in their own lives as well.

The Maidens
By Alex Michaelides

Fall 2021

Edward Fosca is a murderer. Of this Mariana is certain. But Fosca is untouchable. A handsome and charismatic Greek tragedy professor at Cambridge University, Fosca is adored by staff and students alike — particularly by the members of a secret society of female students known as The Maidens. But why would the professor target one of his students? And why does he keep returning to the rites of Persephone, the maiden, and her journey to the underworld?

California State Citrus Park 
Winter 2024

CE-CERT’s State-of the-Art Labs and Facilities
Fall 2023

Cheech Center at the Riverside Arts Museum (RAM)
Spring 2023

Tour of UCR Trees
Spring 2022

Citrus Variety Collection Tour
Winter 2021

UCR Botanical Garden Tour
Fall 2021