Akron Public Library

When a finely wrought silver sleigh figurine turns up in her thrift shop, Lori Shepherd recognizes it instantly. It was the object that mesmerized the sweet but very poor nine-year-old Daisy Pickering at Sproggton Manor, the bizarre Jacobean house-turned-museum Lori recently visited with her twin sons. Hoping to avoid any real commotion, Lori decides to speak with the museum curator, who turns out to be oddly uninterested in the theft. But there's...

Unhappy with her looks, her life, and her empty marriage, Louise Canova needs help-and she finds it in a secondhand bookstore. A forty-year-old encyclopedia of style titled Elegance, this slim volume by formidable French fashion expert Madame Dariaux promises to transform even the plainest of women into creatures of poise and grace.

"Britt Hanson embarks on a competitive scavenger hunt in England that takes her to the locations of classic British novels--and along the way, she meets a bookish British boy who is not allowed to help her with the clues but might make the trip take some unexpected turns".

"Michael Shaeffer is a retired American businessman, living peacefully in England with his aristocratic wife. But her annual summer party brings strangers to their house, and with them, an attempt on Michael's life. He is immediately thrust into action, luring his lethal pursuers to Australia before venturing into the lion's den--the States--to figure out why the mafia is after him--again--and how to stop them. Eddie's Boy jumps between Michael's...

When Dorothy Martin and her husband, retired Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, are invited to a country house weekend at a lovingly restored old mansion, they expect nothing more explosive than the Guy Fawkes fireworks. Having read every Agatha Christie ever written, Dorothy should have known better, but even she could not have anticipated the terror that is unleashed by an epic storm and the discovery of a body among the roots of a fallen oak tree. Rendered...

In early 1960s London, American Honey Flood uses all her charms to reach the top of the social scene.

This irresistible literary thriller set in early 1800s England involves a young Edgar Allan Poe and his schoolmaster, who must solve two murders, in settings ranging from the coal-cloaked urban jungle of London to the stark landscapes of rural Gloucestershire.

For Hannah Shapiro, a beautiful young American student, this particular nightmare began eight years ago in Los Angeles, when Jack Morgan, owner of Private--the world's most exclusive detective agency--saved her from a horrific death. She has fled her country, but can't flee her past. The terror has followed her to London, and now it is down to former Royal Military Police Sergeant Dan Carter, head of Private London, to save her all over again. In...

"Writer-in-residence Penelope Parish will need to use every trick in her quaint British bookshop to unravel a murderous plot that threatens to ruin a ducal wedding. The wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Upper Chumley-on Stoke has all the makings of a fairy tale, complete with a glowing bride and horse-drawn carriage. But it wouldn't be much of a story without a villain, and as American Gothic novelist Penelope Parish is coming to learn, happy-ever-afters...