Frank Carlson Library

Forging inseparable bonds in childhood that reinforce them throughout their teen years, two girls and three boys go their separate ways as adults and encounter respective tragedies and transformations.

It is New Year's Eve when the storm of the century hits northern California. In a quiet neighborhood in San Francisco, the lives of three strangers are about to collide. For Quinn Thompson, what happens in the storm's wake will bring down a barrier he has built around himself since his wife's death. For neighbor Maggie Dartman, it will spark friendship at a time when she needs it most. And for Jack Adams, a carpenter who will repair Quinn's and Maggie's...

Tallie Jones is happy with life. She's at the top of her career as a hugely successful, renowned movie director, she's in a relationship with a handsome producer and her personal assistant is also her devoted best friend. But Tallie's perfect life comes crumbling down around her when she discovers that her boyfriend's been unfaithful and, worse yet, someone's been stealing from her for years.

Four years ago author Melissa Henderson bought a house in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts-- weather-beaten, shabby and in serious need of repair-- but it was her salvation. When the hundred-year-old Victorian home is threatened by a wildfire and appears on the news, Melissa receives a call from her estranged sister, Hattie. After all these years Hattie, a nun, is on a mission: to track down the child Melissa was forced to give up when she...

Nicolas von Bingen and Alex von Hemmerle, titled members of the German aristocracy, have been best friends since childhood. Both widowers, they are raising their children - Nick's two lively boys and Alex's adored teenage daughter - in peace and luxury on the vast Bavarian estates that have belonged to their families for generations. While Nick indulges in more glamorous pursuits, Alex devotes himself to breeding the renowned white Lipizzaner horses...

Best friends and the most daunting of bachelors, Charlie Harrington, a handsome philanthropist, has such high expectations for his perfect bride that no mortal need apply, Adam Weiss, a forty-something celebrity lawyer, prefers his women very young, very voluptuous, and very short-term, and for Gray Hawk, a gifted artist with a knack for attracting troubled relationships, the idea of family he can't imagine (particularly the family of the woman he's...

"Kezia Cooper Hobson, recently widowed, arrives in New York from San Francisco. Determined to make a fresh start, she has just completed the sale of her Pacific Heights home, not to mention her late husband's venture capital firm, and in doing so is also freed from her responsibility as a board member of the company. Bringing with her only a few personal treasures, she is excited to move into the blank slate of a beautiful midtown penthouse in the...