Central Kansas Library System

Welcome to Paradise. Epic battles of good and evil are happening all around us. Today that battle comes to town with the sound of lone footsteps clacking down the blacktop on a hot, lazy summer afternoon. The black-cloaked man arrives in the sleepy town of Paradise and manages to become the talk of the town within the hour. Bearing the power to grant any unfulfilled dream, he is irresistible. Seems like bliss . . . but is it? Or is hell...

"Conflating her own childhood experiences with those of a celebrated Wagnerian soprano of her day, Willa Cather here introduces Thea Kronborg, a Scandinavian-American singer who rises from a one-story town in Colorado to the Metropolitan Opera House. Along the way she learns her own capacity for the rigorous demands of artistic excellence, and how few of her colleagues are willing to sacrifice ordinary vanities for exacting professional standards....

It wasn't the welcome Reacher expected. He was just passing through, minding his own business. But within minutes of his arrival a deputy is in the hospital and Reacher is back in Hope, setting up a base of operations against Despair, where a huge, seething walled-off industrial site does something nobody is supposed to see...where a small plane takes off every night and returns seven hours later...where a garrison of well-trained and well-armed military...

Claire Sutherland falls in love and moves to Colorado.

Gangsters threaten to blow up the dam, and Lynn Weston must stop them.

Jack Torrance, his wife Wendy, and their young son Danny move into the Overlook Hotel, where Jack has been hired as the winter caretaker. Cut off from civilization for months, Jack hopes to battle alcoholism and uncontrolled rage while writing a play. Evil forces residing in the Overlook--which has a long and violent history--covet young Danny for his precognitive powers and exploit Jack’s weaknesses to try to claim the boy.

"The town of Whistling Ridge guards its secrets. When seventeen-year-old Abigail goes missing, her best friend Emma, compelled by the guilt of leaving her alone at a party in the woods, sets out to discover the truth about what happened. The police initially believe Abi ran away, but Emma doesn't believe that her friend would leave without her, and when officers find disturbing evidence in the nearby woods, the festering secrets and longstanding resentment...

When Colorado carpenter Gary Adams spots two mysterious creatures in the woods near his house, he calls on his friend, veterinarian Cammy Rivers for advice. But like Gary, Cammy has never seen an animal resembling this beautiful species. But when the Department of Homeland Security puts a call out for Gary and Cammy because of these animals, the two risk everything to protect the innocent creatures.

It was no work for a woman. That's what they told Mary Breydon when she came to manage a rundown stagecoach station on the Cherokee Trail. But Mary had no choice. Her fine Virginia home burned to ashes in the Civil War and her husband was brutally shot down on the way to Colorado. She needed to make a new beginning for herself and her young daughter on the raw frontier. Isolated in an untamed land, their life at the station was achingly hard and they...