Frank Carlson Library

Nine months after bringing their adopted daughter Angelina home, Jack and Melissa McGuane receive a devastating phone call from the adoption agency: the birth father, a teenager and son of a powerful Denver judge, never signed away his parental rights, and he wants Angelina back.

After her mother dies, college student Christine Bradley learns from her father that she was adopted, sets out to locate her biological family, and, as Christmas nears, is shocked at what she finds.

Still haunted by the death of her only brother, James, in the Great War, Evelyn Gifford is completely unprepared when a young nurse and her six-year-old son appear on the Giffords' doorstep one night. The child, the nurse claims, is James's, conceived in a battlefield hospital. The grief-stricken Giffords take them both in; but Evelyn, a struggling attorney, must now support her entire family-at a time when work for women lawyers is almost nonexistent....

"An explosive and historic book of true crime and an emotionally powerful and revelatory memoir of a man whose ten-year search for his biological father leads to a chilling discovery: His father is one of the most notorious--and still at large--serial killers in America. Soon after his birth mother contacted him for the first time at the age of thirty-nine, adoptee Gary L. Stewart decided to search for his biological father. It was a quest that would...

After learning that she is the daughter of accused serial killers Todd and Pamela Larsen, privileged 24-year-old Olivia Taylor ends up in the small town of Cainsville, Illinois, to prove her birthparents' innocence. But as she and Gabriel, her mother's lawyer, start investigating the case, Olivia finds herself drawing on abilities that have remained hidden since her childhood, gifts that make her both a valuable addition to Cainsville and deeply vulnerable...

It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen years--since the day she gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren't looking, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope.

Brighton. After inheriting her mother's fortune-telling business as a young woman, Imelda Burova has spent her life on the Brighton pier practicing her trade. After a lifetime of keeping other people's secrets, Madam Burova is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do: fulfill a promise made in the 1970s, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, with their whole lives still before them. In London,...

Running the local general store for their small-town South Carolina community, manager Elizabeth enlists her two fellow shopkeepers and a crew of friends to save the store from a rival who would put her out of business.

At sixteen Bridget is pregnant-- and her boyfriend has dumped her for another girl. She's trying to envision an future for her baby. But as she sifts through the many paths and the many people who want to parent her child, she can't help but feel that there is no right decision. Fifteen years later: Ivy knows that she is now the same age Bridget was when she placed Ivy for adoption. She knows that Bridget was the one who named her. When Ivy goes in...

Ten-year-old Solomon Snow, a foundling who was discovered with a distinctive silver spoon in his mouth, sets out to find his parents and receives help along the way from an aspiring writer, a precocious young circus performer, and several orphans.