Frank Carlson Library

"Hallie Welch fell hard for Julian Vos at fourteen, after they almost kissed in the dark vineyards of his family's winery. Now the prodigal hottie has returned to Napa Valley, and when Hallie is hired to revamp the gardens on the Vos estate, she wonders if she'll finally get that smooch. But the starchy professor isn't the teenager she remembers and their polar opposite personalities clash spectacularly. One wine-fueled girls' night later, Hallie...

Alice Howland -- Harvard professor, gifted researcher, and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children -- sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's. Alice slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, as told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability...

"For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction...

Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a "wonderful" husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks...

It is a find of inestimable value for Karen Holloway. The battered manuscript she holds in her hand-written in the nineteenth century and bearing the mysterious attribution "Ismene"-could prove a boon to the eager young English professor's career. But Karen's search for the author's true identity is carrying her into the gray shadows of the past, to places fraught with danger and terror. For the deeper she delves into Ismene's strange tale of gothic...

Professor Jeremy Logan is brought onto famed explorer Porter Stone's archaeological team to investigate a series of harrowing and inexplicable occurrences that are causing people on the expedition to fear a centuries-old curse behind Pharoah Narmer's elusive "double" crown of the two Egypts. As paranoia and fear run rampant, Logan must delve into the mysteries of ancient Egyptology and near death experience in order to understand what might be plaguing...

Prof. Brandt Savage--grandson of the legendary action hero--is forced into a top-secret training program where he discovers his true calling...as the perfect assassin. Dr. Brandt Savage is on sabbatical from the University of Chicago. Instead of doing solo fieldwork in anthropology, the gawky, bespectacled PhD finds himself enrolled in a school where he is the sole pupil. His professor, "Meed," is demanding. She's also his captor. Savage emerges...

Young history professor, Jack Turner, takes a retreat at a lakeside cabin just outside of Culpepper, Georgia to work on his doctoral dissertation. The cabin is owned by an ambitious state senator, an inheritance from his father. Inside, everything is exactly the way it was when the old man died ten years ago. While taking a break from his research, Jack snoops through the father's books and finds an old photo album filled with black-and-white pictures...

"Isadora Bentley believes that happiness is something that flat-out doesn't exist in her life -- and never will. As a university researcher, Isadora keeps to herself as much as possible. She avoids the students she's supposed to befriend and mentor. She lives her own quiet, organized life in her own quiet, organized apartment. And she will never get involved in a romantic relationship again -- especially with another academic. It will be just Isadora...

"From a distance, they seem to be sleeping. Three bodies, sitting propped up against the ancient stones of Hadrian's Wall. A closer look reveals the horror of their too-white faces, and the ring of vivid red bruises around each neck. The victims were found by schoolgirl Isla Bell, out on an early morning run along the historic site. That day changed the small, close-knit community of Briganton forever, and it also shaped the course of Isla's life....