Frank Carlson Library

From the snowcapped mountains of Asia to the deceptive glitter of Hollywood to the bloodstained canvas of the boxing ring, these are stories of mystery, romance, crime and punishment.

Follows four generations of the Montrose family, who have been living with a curse that leaves any person they fall in love with dead, stemming back to a Voodoo sorceress in 1950s New Orleans' French Quarter. "Generations of Montrose women--Augusta, Victoria, Willow--have lived together in their quaint two-story bungalow in California for years. They keep to themselves, never venture far from home, and their collection of tinctures and spells is...

"Let us descend,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world.'" --Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver...

""An utterly charming and deeply moving portrait of the joys--and the guilt--of trying to find your own way in life." --Celeste Ng, #1 New York Times bestselling author "Meeting Maame feels like falling in love for the first time: warm, awkward, joyous, a little bit heartbreaking and, most of all, unforgettable." --Xochitl Gonzalez, New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi but in my case, it means...

Discover the debut novel of James Lee Burke, before the creation of his now-famous Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux , as he weaves together the struggles of three very different men.
Toussaint Boudreaux, a black docker in New Orleans, puts up with his co-workers' racism because he has to, and moonlights as a prize-fighter in the hope of a better life-but the only break he gets lands him in penal servitude. J.P. Winfield, a hick with a...

"Two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling...

"A heartfelt and exciting debut...a wise and honest story of how it feels to be a young woman in search of yourself."--Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Timesbestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugoand Malibu Rising The Bookish Life of Nina Hillmeets Youngerin a heartfelt debut following a young woman who discovers she'll have to ditch the "dream job" and write her own story to find her happy ending. Meet Nora Hughes--the overworked, underpaid,...

In this atmospheric debut inspired by true events, Inara Erickson is exploring her deceased aunt's island estate when she finds an elaborately stitched piece of fabric hidden in the house. As she peels back layer upon layer of the secrets it holds, Inara's life becomes interwoven with that of Mei Lien, a young Chinese girl mysteriously driven from her home a century before. Through the stories Mei Lien tells in silk, Inara uncovers a tragic truth...

New York Times best-selling author Christine Feehan pens paranormal romances that get her fans' hearts racing. In Dangerous Tides, Dr. Libby Drake uses her incredible healing powers to help mend the emotionally scarred Ty Derrick. But their burgeoning relationship is threatened by a mysterious man who wants to use Libby's talents for his own dark purposes.

""The Woman in the Window"...opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged...