Central Kansas Library System

"Helen Street spent every summer of her childhood at her family's cedar-shake cottage on Long Island Sound. The youngest of four, she shared her mother Claire's athletic genes and relished the orchestrated games and competitions that filled those warm, endless days. Unlike her older siblings--fiery Charlotte, ambitious Thomas, middle-child Pammy--Helen rarely felt the pressure of her mother's high expectations. Thirty years later, with her brother...

Determined to leave a mark on the world even though they are in the hospital and their days are dwindling, unlikely friends, seventeen-year-old Lenni and eighty-three-year-old Margot, devise a plan to create one hundred paintings showcasing the stories of the century they have lived. Seventeen-year-old Lenni Pettersson has been told she's dying, but still has plenty of living to do. She lives on the Terminal Ward at the Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital....

The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is now staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he only has a year or two left, and he's busy as hell keeping the news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years ... the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends. Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was...

Ruth Ritchie elopes with a stereo salesman, thinking that she has found her ticket out of Summerville, Tennessee where her future means selling pies at Durwood's Hardware. But Chuck "gets religion," and Ruth, who cherishes her freedom more than safety, buys a used car and heads north. When Ruth faints from hunger at a North Carolina five-and-dime, Rose, a feisty elderly reporter, rescues her. A friendship stronger than family ties blossoms; for all...

"The Hope Chest is a deeply emotional novel about three people who have seemingly lost all hope until one woman's heirloom hope chest is rediscovered in the attic, along with its contents and secrets. Mattie is a fiercely independent woman battling ALS; Don, her deeply devoted husband is facing a future without his one true love; and Rose, their struggling caregiver, is a young, single mother who feels trapped in her life. With each item that is discovered--including...

"When Miss Norma was diagnosed with uterine cancer, she was advised to undergo surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But instead of confining herself to a hospital bed for what could be her last stay, Norma--newly widowed after nearly seven decades of marriage--rose to her full height of five feet and told her doctor, 'I'm ninety years old. I'm hitting the road.' Packing what she needed, Norma took off on an unforgettable cross-country journey with...

"Aidyn Kelley is talented, ambitious, and ready for a more serious assignment than the fluff pieces she's been getting as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star. In her eagerness, she pushes too hard, earning herself the menial task of writing an obituary for an unremarkable woman who's just entered hospice care. But there's more to Clara Kip than meets the eye. The spirited septuagenarian may be dying, but she's not quite ready to cash it in yet....

With his bestselling blend of nail-biting intensity, daring artistry, and storytelling magic, Dean Koontz returns with an emotional roller coaster of a tale filled with enough twists, turns, shocks, and surprises for ten ordinary novels. Here is the story of five days in the life of an ordinary man born to an extraordinary legacy--a story that will challenge the way you look at good and evil, life and death, and everything in between ... From cover....

Effective Engineering Solutions has been inexplicably shut down and the head of the company, Eli Glinn, has all but vanished. Fresh off a diagnosis that gives him only months to live, Gideon Crew is contacted by one of his coworkers at EES, Manuel Garza, who tells him the two have mere hours to collect their belongings before the office closes forever. After years of dedicated service and several high-risk missions, theirs seems like the most ignoble...