Central Kansas Library System

The Dahlias become suspicious of the newest visitors to Depression-era Darling, Alabama, rumored to be the Naughty and Nice Sisters from the Ziegfeld Frolic, who specialize in dancing nearly naked, and dig for the truth when one of the pair denies the association.

Like the other kids, Pearl goes to school, plays in the woods, and does her chores. But Mama is gone, and doesn't seem to have a thought for the family she's left behind. Escaping from her worries is part of Pearl's routine, like losing herself in books. Until she discovers swing dancing. The music transports Pearl to a whole other world. Then Mama unexpectedly returns, and it isn't the happy occasion she had imagined.

In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota's Gilead River, the Lincoln Indian Training School is a pitiless place where Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to Odie O'Banion, a lively orphan boy whose exploits constantly earn him the superintendent's wrath. Odie and his brother, Albert, are the only white faces among the hundreds of Native American children at the school. After...

While traveling from London to Kingfisher Hill to discretely investigate murder allegations against a wealthy client's wife, Hercule Poirot swaps seats with a nervous train passenger before a second killing is complicated by a series of impossible confessions. Hercule Poirot is traveling by luxury passenger coach from London to the exclusive Kingfisher Hill estate. Richard Devonport has summoned the renowned detective to prove that his fiancée,...

Former trapeze artist Amalie Vaughn moved to Burning Cove to reinvent herself, but things are not going well. After spending her entire inheritance on a mansion with the intention of turning it into a bed-and-breakfast, she learns too late that the villa is said to be cursed. When the first guest, Dr. Norman Pickwell, is murdered by his robot invention during a sold-out demonstration, rumors circulate that the curse is real. In the chaotic aftermath...

Stories of life in the earlier years of the 20th century in Northwest and North Central Kansas contributed by 354 Kansans. Each tale is written from the viewpoint of those who actually experienced this time in our history. The table of contents includes an alphabetical list of all contributors and two indexes are sorted by hometown and year of birth.

1932. After the Great War took both her beloved brother and her fianc�e, Violet Speedwell has become a "surplus woman," one of a generation doomed to a life of spinsterhood after the war killed so many young men. Yet Violet cannot reconcile herself to a life spent caring for her grieving, embittered mother. After countless meals of boiled eggs and dry toast, she saves enough to move out of her mother's place and into the town of Winchester, home...