Central Kansas Library System

The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer's career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track -- until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is one of the "lucky" associates. She's offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she'd get her old job back. In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan...

Combat veteran John Puller, now working as an investigator for the Army's Criminal Investigative Division, tries to solve the murder of an Army man and his Pentagon contractor wife in their isolated rural home.

As a wave of spring tilling and planting sweeps over Crozet, Virginia, Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen is especially excited: this is her first year harvesting grapes to sell. But then a health crisis sends her reeling into the forbidding world of hospitals and doctors, treatments and procedures. Although surviving this journey will be tough, Harry will have lots of support. Others will have worse luck.

"Amid thoughts from visions of the night, when deep sleep falls on men, dread came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones shake. Job 4:13-14. After a brutal incident, Jessica Chamberlain changes jobs, moves, and adopts a rowdy, partially trained German Shepherd, Luke. The two begin training with a Virginia K-9 search-and-rescue group. The group's training director, Nathan Tanner, a former military war dog handler with scars of his own, sees...

Master quilter Sylvia Compson discovers a stash of letters in the attic of Elm Creek Manor and traces a tale back to 1859. An escaped slave, Joanna, spent a brief period at Elm Creek Farm until she was captured and returned to bondage, leaving her son in the care of the Bergstrom family. If Sylvia is to determine the fate of Joanna and her son, she must rely on one important clue-- the meticulous heirloom quilt Joanna stitched and left behind.

1972. While the Vietnam War rages overseas and his beloved Pirates battle back-to-back World Series titles, Matt Plumley's family moves to Dogwood, West Virginia, where he quickly bonds with two unlikely friends for a preacher's kid: Dickie Darrel Lee Hancock, a mixed-race boy, and Jesse Woods, a tough-as-nails Appalachian girl. As the trio traipses the hills and hollers, Matt falls for Jesse, and their promises to each other draw him deeper into...

"Olivia's syndicated advice-column is about solving problems ... not murders. But when she returns to her hometown of Apple Station in Virginia to visit her dad, she has five days to expose a killer or fall prey as the next victim"--

It is 1970 in a small town in California: 'Bean' Holladay is twelve and her sister Liz is fifteen when their artistic mother, Charlotte, takes off to find herself, leaving the girls enough money to last a month or two. When Bean returns from school one day and sees a police car outside the house, she and Liz decide to take the bus to Virginia, where their widowed Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that has been in Charlotte's family for generations....

"Dark clouds and chaos descend lower upon America as the war rages around them -- threatening all they hold dear. Carrie & Robert are once more pulled apart, and Carrie finds herself the target of a hostile group of men determined to stop her from providing medical care to black residents of Richmond. How long can she continue to save other people's lives at the risk of her own? Riots erupt in the North, threatening those she loves, and she is pulled...

"Burdened with the responsibility of running an entire plantation, Carrie Cromwell fights to understand the forces tearing her beloved country apart. As battles rage around her, she watches her life as her life slowly unravels and she discovers truths she would never have imagined. Will her actions and decisions push her even farther from those she loves? When the danger she dreads becomes reality, will she find the courage and strength to escape?"--Author's...