Central Kansas Library System

When an unforeseen asteroid strikes Siberia with the force of a thousand Hiroshimas, it triggers Dead Hand, the ultimate defense mechanism developed by the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. The missiles are pointing at the United States and its European allies, and ultra-nationalist General Likatchev is willing to use them as blackmail to topple the government in Moscow and return Russia to her status as world power. When Russia responds to...

Her beauty saved her - and condemned her. Cilka is just 16-years-old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942, where the commandant immediately notices how beautiful she is. Forcibly separated from the other women prisoners, Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly taken, equals survival. When the war is over and the camp is liberated, freedom is not granted to Cilka: She is charged as a collaborator for sleeping...

After escaping a Soviet prison camp, Lina is pursued by a powerful witch and her shadow wolves in a story that imbues frozen wilderness with fairy-tale magic. All that twelve-year-old Lina knows of the world is the Stalinist labor camp where she was born, a place of hunger, cruelty, and deprivation. After a daring escape into the frigid Siberian wilds with her best friend, Bogdan, Lina vows to reach Moscow and find her long-lost grandmother, whom...

"Journalist Tatiana Petrovna is on the move. Arkady Renko, iconic Moscow investigator and Tatiana's part-time lover, hasn't seen her since she left on assignment over a month ago. When she doesn't arrive on her scheduled train, he's positive something is wrong. No one else thinks Renko should be worried--Tatiana is known to disappear during deep assignments--but he knows her enemies all too well and the criminal lengths they'll go to keep her quiet....

Young Glashka's dream of the singing of whales, accompanied by a special kind of music, leads to the rescue of thousands of whales stranded in a freezing Siberian bay.

Amba, a Siberian tiger cub, is separated from his mother by a forest fire in the Siberian wilderness.

Texas businessman John Mills and his Czech companion, Petr Kovac, travel to the furthest reaches of post-Soviet Russia to acquire vouchers for the country's national oil company, Gazneft, moving town to town with suitcases full of cash, until the Russian mafia and Gazneft catch wind of their successes. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the newly established Russian government privatized its industry by issuing vouchers to all of its citizens,...