Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

An account of how the author came to be a writer and selections from his writer's notebook augment stories juxtaposing fantasy and truth, and peopled with outrageous and courageous characters.

After passing a series of mind-bending tests, four children are selected for a secret mission that requires them to go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, where the only rule is that there are no rules.

After the mutant Erasers abduct the youngest member of their group, the "bird kids," who are the result of genetic experimentation, take off in pursuit and find themselves struggling to understand their own origins and purpose.

Martel's novel tells the story of Pi--short for Piscine--an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Life of Pi brings together many themes including...

Four months after the deadliest attack on the American homeland since 9/11, terrorists leave a trail of carnage through London's glittering West End. The attack is a brilliant feat of planning and secrecy, but with one loose thread. The thread leads Gabriel Allon and his team of operatives to the south of France and to the gilded doorstep of Jean-Luc Martel and Olivia Watson. A beautiful former British fashion model, Olivia pretends not to know that...

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...

Stone Barrington and several friends are vacationing in Florida when an extreme weather event puts a damper on their trip. Even worse, the hurricane-force winds blow a powerful, noxious politician straight onto Stone's doorstep. Though they part ways before long, Stone soon learns that he hasn't seen the last of his new acquaintance. It turns out that this official has some shady associates who may have destructive plans afoot, and Stone needs an...

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,...

A little more than a century from now, our world has been utterly transformed. After years of slowly overtaking the continent, rising floodwaters have obliterated America's great coastal cities and then its heartland, leaving nothing but an archipelago of mountaintop colonies surrounded by a deep expanse of open water. Stubbornly independent Myra and her precocious seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, fish from their small boat, the Bird, visiting dry...

Trapped in a world where magic is powerful and dreams are real, Cole Randolph can barely remember what life was like back in Arizona. Now he and his friends are pushed to the limit as they make one final attempt to restore magic to the Outskirts. They must travel to the kingdom of Creon, where time itself can be manipulated and reality can bend and change. It's the last mission-- and the past, present and future are all at stake.