Frank Carlson Library

Paper Moon meets the Blitz in this original black comedy, set in World War II England, chronicling an unlikely alliance between a small time con artist and a young orphan evacuee. When Noel Bostock-aged ten, no family-is evacuated from London to escape the Nazi bombardment, he lands in a suburb northwest of the city with Vera Sedge-a thirty-six-year old widow drowning in debts and dependents. Always desperate for money, she's unscrupulous about how...

"Seven years after a financial crisis nearly toppled America, traders chafe at government regulations, racial tensions are rising, gangs roam the streets and corrupt financiers make back-door deals with politicians... 1799 was a hell of a year. Thanks to Alexander Hamilton, America has recovered from the panic on the Devil's Half Mile (aka Wall Street), but the young country is still finding its way. When young lawyer Justy Flanagan returns to solve...

When Trace Riley finds the smoldering ruins of a small wagon train, he recognizes the hand behind the attack as the same group who left him as sole survivor years ago. Living off the wilderness since then, he'd finally carved out a home and started a herd--while serving as a self-appointed guardian of the trail, driving off dangerous men. He'd hoped those days were over, but the latest attack shows he was wrong. Deborah Harkness saved her younger...

A heady historical drama about a British family who open an upper-class hotel on the magical Italian Riviera during the Roaring Twenties Hotel Portofino has only been open a few weeks, but already the problems are mounting for its coproprietor Bella Ainsworth. She is short of staff and ready money. Her high-class guests are demanding and hard to please. And she is being targeted by a scheming and corrupt local politician, who threatens to drag her...

"A girl named Petra Pena, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita. But Petra's world is ending. Earth has been destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children - among them Petra and her family - have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race. Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet - and the discovery that she is the only person...

"Mrs. Laetitia Rodd, aged fifty-two, is the widow of an archdeacon. Living in Hampstead with her confidante and landlady, Mrs. Bentley, who once let rooms to John Keats, Laetitia makes her living as a highly discreet private investigator. Her brother, Frederick Tyson, is a criminal barrister living in the neighboring village of Highgate with his wife and ten children. Frederick finds the cases, and Laetitia solves them using her arch intelligence,...

Ang�elique Latham has grown up at magnificent Belgrave Castle under the loving tutelage of her father, the Duke of Westerfield, after the death of her aristocratic French mother. But when he dies, her half-brothers brutally turn her out, denying her very existence. Ang�elique has a keen mind, remarkable beauty, and an envelope of money her father pressed upon her. To survive, she will need all her resources--and one bold stroke of fortune. Unable...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport,...

It is 1866. Nineteen-year-old Jason Collins is sent from New Orleans to the Colorado Territory with instructions to his father's friend to either make him a man or break him totally. Kidnapped off the stagecoach by highwaymen, abandoned in the middle of the untamed prairie, and alone in a land he doesn't know, Jay must survive buffalo stampedes, Indians, and the Colorado winter. But what is the real reason his father shipped him west? Is it actually...

Set against the turbulent years of The Great War, A Girl Called Rose is a deeply moving story of young love, heroism, human weakness and the enduring strength of family ties. The close, loving family life Rose has known is shattered when the country goes to war. Rose resolves to do her bit so, aged sixteen, she leaves home to train as a nurse in London. There she finds freedom, excitement and a different way of life. A brief encounter with a soldier...