Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

In 1971, the state of Minnesota was rocked by the "Butcher Boy" incident, as coverage of a family brutally murdered by one of their own swept across newspapers and television screens nationwide. Now, in present-day New Orleans, Polly Deschamps finds herself at yet another lonely crossroads in her life. No stranger to tragedy, Polly was a runaway at the age of fifteen, escaping a nightmarish Mississippi childhood. Lonely, that is, until she encounters...

Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

One warm night four children stood in front of a bakery. No one knew them. No one knew where they had come from. Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny are orphans.They discover an old red boxcar that provides them shelter from the storm.

"A magnificent novel about four orphans on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression, from the bestselling author of Ordinary Grace. 1932, Minnesota��� the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and...

"From Percival Everett-a recipient of the NBCC Lifetime Achievement Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Booker Prize, and numerous PEN awards-comes James, a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby...

In Michaels's fable-like latest, wicked South Carolina heiress Sarabess Windsor must face the fallout of a decision she made 30 years ago: when her beloved daughter was diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness, doting Sarabess hatched a plan to bear another child solely as a source of bone marrow for little Emily. Donor daughter Trinity, unaware of her parentage, spent her childhood in closely monitored foster care, but forced, like the other children...

Jenny is a successful family doctor, the mother of three great teenagers, married to a celebrated neurosurgeon. But when her youngest child, fifteen-year-old Naomi, doesn't come home after her school play, Jenny's seemingly ideal life begins to crumble. The authorities launch a nationwide search with no success. Naomi has vanished, and her family is broken. As the months pass, the worst-case scenarios kidnapping, murder seem less plausible. The trail...

Oak Grove is a dry, dusty town haunted by memories of a past flood. Everyone dreads the water-except for two brothers, Trevor and Eli McGill. Nicknamed Trout and Eel for their darting quickness and the thin webbing between their fingers and toes, the boys dream of the farthest seas of a mysterious past they barely remember.

Turtle Moon transports the reader to Verity, Florida, a place where anything can happen during the month of May, when migrating sea turtles come to town, mistaking the glow of the streetlights for the moon. A young single mother is murdered in her apartment and her baby is gone. Keith, a 12-year-old boy in the same apartment building, also disappears. In pursuit of the baby, the boy, and the killer, are Keith's divorced mother and a cop who was once...

Ferraris' novel, set in Saudi Arabia, features desert guide Nayir al-Sharqi, who is hired by wealthy friends to find their missing daughter. When the girl turns up dead, apparently drowned in a flash flood in the desert, Nayir suspects that all is not as it seems. And as he looks into her death, he develops an uncomfortable partnership with a female technician at the local coroner's office.