Frank Carlson Library

" Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become...

"Even though Torie Bergstrom hasn't been back to Georgia since she was ten, she's happy to arrange a job for her best friend at one of the family properties on Jekyll Island. But when Torie learns that her best friend has drowned, she knows it is more than a tragic accident: Lisbeth was terrified of water and wouldn't have gone swimming by choice. Torie goes to the hotel under an alias, desperate to find answers. When she meets Joe Abbott and his...

Marrying the son of her father's wealthy employer, twenty-eight-year-old gardener's daughter Kay Lansing becomes increasingly disturbed by the suspicion surrounding her husband, Peter, in regard to the mysterious deaths of his first wife and a high-school senior.

Worn out from nursing soldiers at a Milwaukee hospital and struggling to recover from a traumatic love affair, Amanda Starkey returns to her family's rural Wisconsin farm to stay with her beloved sister, Mattie, and a young niece, Ruth. An Oprah Book Club selection and bestseller in hardcover, Drowning Ruth, now in paperback, is a stunning portrait of the ties that bind sisters together and the forces that tear them apart. Schwarz's first novel explores...

Ever since her best friend, Anna, drowned, Evie has been an outcast in her small fishing town. Hiding her talents, mourning her loss, drowning in her guilt. Then a girl with an uncanny resemblance to Anna appears offshore and, though the girl denies it, Evie is convinced that her best friend actually survived. That her own magic wasn't so powerless after all ... The rise of Hans Christian Andersen's iconic villainess is a heart-wrenching story of...

When a young girl's body is pulled out of the harbor in the small Swedish resort town of Fjallbacka, Det. Patrik Hedström becomes the lead investigator as he struggles with lazy and inept colleagues and an even remoter-than-usual boss. It's his grim task to discover who could be behind the murder of the child both he and his partner Erica knew well.

"Just as Ivy's brother Billy is about to get engaged to his beloved, a tragedy interrupts the happy moment. The body of longtime Santa Sofia resident Marisol Ruiz washes up on the beach-and it's even more heartbreaking since Marisol's father also recently died. But Marisol was a strong competitive swimmer. It seems unlikely there's even a grain of truth to the theory that she accidentally drowned. As Ivy gets to work helping her mentor, Olaya Solis,...

Welcome to the coastal village of Green Haven, where someone has gone to sleep with the fishes... Jane Bunker returned to Maine to escape the mean streets of Miami. Surely whatever crimes are committed in this tourist-filled seaside town won't involve anything as dark or seedy as what she saw in the so-called Sunshine State. It's a bit of a shock, then, when Nick Dow, AKA the town drunk, turns up dead--and it's not the simple accident that everyone...

"The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought. And he soon learns that when the going gets tough, a...

Ismay, Heather and their mother still live in the house where her stepfather drowned in the bathtub. They don't discuss his death or the changes made to the house because of it, but secrets hang in the air and truth emerges.