Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon awakens in a hospital in the middle of the night. Disoriented and suffering from a head wound, he recalls nothing of the last thirty-six hours, including how he got there, or the origin of the macabre object that his doctors discover hidden in his belongings. Langdon's world soon erupts into chaos, and he finds himself on the run in Florence with a stoic young woman, Sienna Brooks, whose clever manuevering...

One day Milo finds an enormous and mysterious package in his room. A phantom tollbooth, with a map to a weird world beyond! So Milo sets off on a fantastic voyage in which he meets: the not so wicked Witch, Faintly Macabre, Alec Bings who sees through things, and the watchdog, Tock, who ticks.

In the early 1950's, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England, At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table" - - as far from the Captain's Table as can be -- with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Seuz Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like...

For eleven year-old Hugo Ballard, flying on the Hindenburg is a dream come true. Hugo, his parents, and his four-year-old sister Gertie, are making the thrilling four thousand mile journey across the Atlantic in a zeppelin as big as the Titanic. But as the zeppelin gets ready to land, a blast rocks the Hindenburg and fire consumes the ship. The entire disaster lasts a mere thirty-two seconds, but in those few seconds, Hugo finds himself separated...

Young Tristran Thorn, having lost his heart to the lovely but cold Victoria Forester, leaves the safe English town of Wall and sets out into a strange world on a quest to retrieve a fallen star he has promised to his beloved.

In The Gunslinger, King introduces Roland Deschain of Gilead, the Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting, solitary figure at first, on a mysterious quest through a desolate world that eerily mirrors our own. Pursuing the man in black, an evil being who can bring the dead back to life, Roland is a good man who seems to leave nothing but death in his wake.

One ill-fated evening at the Reform Club, Phileas Fogg rashly bets his companions that he can travel around the entire globe in just eighty days -- and he is determined not to lose. Breaking the well-established routine of his daily life, the reserved Englishman immediately sets off for Dover, accompaned by his hot-blooded manservant Passepartout. Traveling by train, steamship, sailboat, sledge, and even elephant, they must overcome storms, kidnappings,...

April 1950: A rusting steam locomotive rises from a Montana lake. Inside are the remains of three men who died forty-four years before. 1906: For two years, the West has suffered a string of bank robberies by a man who then murders any witnesses and vanishes. Fed up with the "Butcher Bandit," the U.S. government brings in Isaac Bell. From Arizona to Colorado to San Francisco during its calamitous earthquake and fire, he pursues what quickly becomes...

The Caribbean, 1665. Pirate captain Charles Hunter, with backing from a powerful ally, assembles a crew of ruffians to take the Spanish galleon, "El Trinidad," guarded by the bloodthirsty Cazalla, a favorite commander of the Spanish king himself.

Photojournalist Bess Grady teams up with a CIA agent to catch germ-warfare terrorists who wiped out a Mexican village in a rehearsal for an attack on the U.S. Bess was vacationing in the village and only escaped because she is immune to anthrax, the bacteria used. By the author of The Ugly Duckling.