Central Kansas Library System

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet...

"When Jess Harris moved back to her Alabama hometown, she thought she'd left her past behind her. But the blood bath the new Major Crimes deputy chief finds at a murder scene is beyond even the savagery of Eric Spears, the serial killer who now haunts Jess's life with terrifying text messages. Amid eerie echoes of the Charles Manson massacre, Jess investigates the dismemberment of a cop's wife while her baby lay sleeping down the hall. The discovery...

In this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to live with the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at Skully's Landing, the decaying mansion in rural Alabama, his father is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his morose stepmother, Amy, eccentric cousin Randolph, and a defiant little girl named Idabel, who soon offers Joel the love and approval...

Special Agent Jess Harris, head of a major crimes division, finds that her investigation of the case of a missing teenager has led to clashes with town's power elite, while her past history with her boss, Dan Burnett, only makes things more complicated.

San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories...

"From the USA Today bestselling author of Midnight at the Blackbird Cafe comes Heather Webber's next charming novel, In the Middle of Hickory Lane! Emme Wynn has wanted nothing more her whole life than to feel like part of a family. Having grown up on the run with her con artist mother, she's been shuffled from town to town, drawn into bad situations, and has learned some unsavory habits that she's tried hard to overcome. When her estranged grandmother...

Melanie is a successful New York fashion designer who is dating a wealthy socialite. One day he pops the big question and asks Melanie to marry him. Despite her polished uptown image, Melanie grew up poor in the deep South, and as a teenager she married her high school sweetheart. Now Melanie returns to her hometown to tell her parents the news and convince Jake to grant her a divorce. However, the more time she spends with her old flame, the more...

Rachel and Tommy Lee were once high school sweethearts, too young and reckless to handle the consequences of their love. Now, twenty-four years later, Tommy Lee could still excite Rachel like no other man. Maybe this time, they could make it work.