Central Kansas Library System

Carly Barton thought moving from Ohio to a small Kansas farm was hard. Then life got much harder. In Kansas, she was raped by escaped convicts who killed her parents. That's when Carly decides to find and kill the murderers. Beautiful, bitter and vengeful, she turns to a gunfighter turned town drunk to learn how to shoot to kill. It's Carly's job, and she's going to do it by herself.

"Fleeing a disastrous and humiliating arrest of her husband-to-be on the eve of their wedding, Celia Kilbride, a gems and jewelry expert, hopes to escape from public attention by lecturing on a brand-new cruise ship the Queen Charlotte. On board she meets eighty-six-year-old Lady Emily Haywood, Lady Em, as she is known throughout the world. Immensely wealthy, Lady Em is the owner of a priceless emerald necklace that she intends to leave to the Smithsonian...

Jeff Kennett and his drovers have brought a herd of 2,000 longhorns all the way from Texas to California, believing there is a fortune to be made by transporting the cattle by river boat to San Francisco. The Gold Rush is on and there is a tremendous demand for beef. Kennett has been referred to Captain Bill Ballinger, headquartered in Sacramento, as the man who can best pilot the cattle downriver. But Colonel Nathaniel Sharpe and his partner, Noah...

"A new novel about an underground food community by the author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore"--!cProvided by publisher. A software engineer at General Dexterity, a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions, Lois Clary codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. When the brothers have Visa issues, they...

"Lower Missouri River, late summer 1835. Two brothers, fur trappers Zebadiah and Jonathan Creed, are bushwhacked. Jonathan is murdered and Zebadiah left for dead. Zeb is found by a Quaker doctor and his daughter, who nurse him back to health and insist he stay with them. But the appeal of a peaceful life cannot quell Zeb's burning desire for revenge and he sets out to find the two men who killed his brother. In recounting his search, Zebadiah Creed...

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George...

"When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family's chic apartment in Paris's upscale tenth arrondissement, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more...

"After the Civil War, bickering brothers Jamey and Jake Galloway set out from Serenity Falls, Texas to seek their fortune at poker tables across the west. Cautious Jamey prefers being a live coward to a dead hero, but brash big brother Jake rarely backs down from a fight. Cheated out of a fortune, they return to Texas to find their hometown threatened by a land-grabbing cattle king and a shady banker. Can Jamey and Jake cook up a scheme to outfox...

"For fans of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, an arresting literary puzzle that introduces an unforgettable young heroine plunged into the twisted world of a secret society occupying the derelict buildings of Philadelphia, which heralds the arrival of an astoundingly imaginative and propulsive new voice in fiction. Lee Cuddy is 17 years old and on the run, alone on the streets of Philadelphia. After taking the fall for a rich friend, Lee reluctantly...

"Bonny Blankenship's most treasured memories are of idyllic summers spent in Watersend, South Carolina, with her best friend Lainey McKay. Amid the sand dunes and oak trees draped with Spanish moss, they swam and wished for happy-ever-afters, then escaped to the local bookshop to read and whisper in the glorious cool silence. Until the night that changed everything, the night that Lainey's mother disappeared. Now, in her early fifties, Bonny is desperate...