The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek have to scrap for everything - everything except books, that is. Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter. Cussy's not only a book woman, however, she's also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else. Not everyone is keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble.

When Conrad Browning's wife disappears in the untamed frontier, Conrad finds himself assuming the identity of his famous gunslinging father, Frank Morgan, to find her. But his hopes of rescuing Rebel are swiftly shattered - and now he's burning for vengeance, the old-fashioned way. So he fakes his own death and starts calling himself The Loner, becoming the deadliest gunfighter this side of his own father - ready to settle the score in blood and bullets....

When 15-year-old Marigold becomes pregnant amid the Great Depression, she is rejected by her family and forced to fend for herself. And when she loses her baby in the forest, her whole world turns upside down. She’s even more distraught upon discovering she has an inexplicable power that makes her both beautiful and terrifying - and something of a local legend. Meanwhile, migrant workers Vern and Paul discover a violet-eyed baby and take it upon themselves to care for her.

Sadie Grace is wanted for witchcraft, dead (or alive). And every hired gun in Kansas is out to collect the bounty on her head, including bonafide witch hunter Old Tom and his mysterious, mute ward Rabbit. On the road to Burden County, they’re joined by two vagabond cowboys with a strong sense of adventure–but no sense of purpose–and a recently widowed schoolteacher with nothing left to lose. And as their posse grows, so too does the danger.

Union soldier John Chenneville suffered a traumatic head wound in battle. His recovery took the better part of a year as he struggled to regain his senses and mobility. By the time he returned home, the Civil War was over, but tragedy awaited. John’s beloved sister and her family had been brutally murdered. Their killer goes by many names. He fought for the North in the late unpleasantness, and wore a badge in the name of the law. But the man John knows as A. J. Dodd is little more than a rabid animal, slaughtering without reason or remorse, needing to be put down.

Ten years after the collapse, Huxley has built a good life again. He has a loving wife, a farm with fields of golden barley, and a daughter with a strange and wonderful gift. Then the slavers come. Working out in the fields during the attack, Huxley returns too late. His daughter has been taken, and his wife is bleeding out, her last whispered words about a man with a scorpion tattoo on his neck. Where do the slavers go? Huxley has no idea. He knows only that they head east, and so will he, setting out on foot across the desert of the Wastelands.

Thatcher Hutton, a war-weary soldier on the way back to his cowboy life, jumps from a moving freight train to avoid trouble...and lands in more than he bargained for. On the day he arrives in Foley, Texas, a local woman goes missing. Thatcher, the only stranger in town, is suspected of her abduction, and worse. Standing between him and exoneration are a corrupt mayor, a crooked sheriff, a notorious cathouse madam, a sly bootlegger, feuding moonshiners...and a young widow whose soft features conceal an iron will.

Even at the age of 14, folks were calling him the youngest bounty hunter in Texas. His pa said he was more man than most men. But now his pa lay dead in a dusty Lubbock, Texas street, back-shot by a wealthy and powerful New Mexico rancher. Over his father's grave he swore to make things right. Neither his age, impossible odds, nor a thousand miles of unforgiving desert would keep Tad Littlejohn from righting a terrible wrong.

Ex-Confederate officer Vernon Carson has tried his level best to peaceably distance himself from the war. Especially from certain haunting memories. But the horror has found him again and moved in right next door. With clenched jaws and clenched fists, Vern accepts the challenge before him. He knows he must settle the score. He owes it to his slaughtered neighbor. He owes it to his savaged troops. But most of all, he owes it to himself. The dice have been thrown.

It’s 1835 in Utica, New York, and newlywed Helen Galway discovers a secret: Two runaway slaves are hiding in the shack behind her husband’s house. Suddenly, she is at the center of not only the era’s greatest moral dilemma, but her own, as well. Should she be a “good wife” and report the fugitives to her husband? Or will she defy convention and come to their aid? Within her home, Helen is haunted by the previous Mrs. Galway, recently deceased but still an oppressive presence.

When the Magic Wagon comes to town, folks get a genuine medicine show that includes a wrestling ape, fancy shooting, and a peek at the petrified body of Wild Bill Hickok himself. They also get bottles of a whiskey-laced elixir to drown their aches and pains. Old Albert drives the wagon, a raw-boned youngster named Buster Fogg does the odd jobs, and "champion" trick shooter and fast talker Billy Bob Daniels owns the show. Billy Bob claims to be the illegitimate son of Wild Bill himself.

This beautifully constructed family saga spans three generations set all within the macabre world of the civil war era American funeral industry where weepers, warners, death photographers and the new practice of embalming the dead dwelled. For generations, the women of the Fenn family have been traditional “weepers”; paid mourners who attend wakes and weep for the dead. Their counterparts, the men of the True family, are undertakers, or “warners.”

After spending an unknown number of days caged, chained, and tortured by men wearing hoods in the darkness of a root cellar who insist he robbed a bank and killed several women, 25-year-old Ben Hawthorne is rescued by four men. But who are these men and why were they looking for him - the son of Eli and Cora Hawthorne, born on a ranch outside of Nacogdoches, Texas, orphaned at 10 when his parents were killed by Comanches, and then taken by the Comanches who gave him his Indian name, Newcomer?

In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends - mostly poor cotton farmers - form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty.

Nevada, 1869: Beyond the pitiless 40-Mile Desert lies Golgotha, a cattle town that hides unnatural secrets. The sheriff bears the mark of the noose around his neck; some say he is a dead man whose time has not yet come. His half-human deputy is kin to coyotes. The mayor guards a hoard of mythical treasures. A banker's wife belongs to a secret order of assassins. And a shady saloon owner, whose fingers are in everyone's business, may know more about the town's true origins than he's letting on. Meanwhile, in an abandoned silver mine, an ancient evil is spilling into the world....

Two little girls stand with their heads bowed in my living room. I’m told they’re my granddaughters. Daisy is nine, and Alice seven. Daisy is the spitting image of her mother. This is the first time I’ve met them since my daughter and I fell out after she married that waste of space, Vince. They’ve come to live with me because their mother — my daughter — was murdered. In her own home while they slept close by. I think Vince killed her. But the police can’t prove it. I’ve always known he was no good. He treated my daughter like dirt. I said he’d cheat on her — but she wouldn’t listen.

Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.

Lucas knows the perfect night entails just three things: video games, wine, and pad thai. Peanuts are a must! Other people? Not so much. Why complicate things when he’s happy alone? Then one day the apartment board, a vexing trio of authority, rings his doorbell. And Lucas’s solitude takes a startling hike. They demand to see his frying pan. Someone left one next to the recycling room overnight, and instead of removing the errant object, as Lucas suggests, they insist on finding the guilty party. But their plan backfires. Colossally.

It’s 1984, and life has changed beyond recognition. Airstrip One, formerly known as Great Britain, is a place where Big Brother is always watching, and nobody can hide. Except, perhaps, for Winston Smith. Whilst working at the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history, he secretly dreams of freedom. And in a world where love and sex are forbidden, where it’s hard to distinguish between friend and foe, he meets Julia and O’Brien and vows to rebel.

The 13 chapters of The Art of War, each devoted to one aspect of warfare, were compiled by the high-ranking Chinese military general, strategist, and philosopher Sun-Tzu. In spite of its battlefield specificity, The Art of War has found new life in the modern age, with leaders in fields as wide and far-reaching as world politics, human psychology, and corporate strategy finding valuable insight in its timeworn words.