Akron Public Library

"[T]hroughout the course of his career, he [Child] published tales about a range of characters on both sides of the law, including assassins, a body guard, CIA and FBI agents, gangsters, and more. Meticulously plotted...a collection of 20 short stories shows the author's mastery of the short form, and they've never been gathered before now. In 'Ten Keys,' a drug-dealing hit man feels that he must unburden his fears and guilt to a stranger. A rookie...

Brilliant and boyishly charming, Emerson Knight likes nothing better than solving an unsolvable, improbable mystery. And finding a missing island is better than Christmas morning in the Knight household. When clues lead to a dark and sinister secret that is being guarded by the National Park Service, Emerson will need to assemble a crack team for help. Since a crack team isn't available, he enlists Riley Moon and his cousin Vernon. Riley Moon has...

Four people in a car, hoping to make Chicago by morning. One man driving, eyes on the road. Another man next to him, telling stories that don't add up. A woman in the back, silent and worried. And next to her, a huge man with a broken nose, hitching a ride east to Virginia. An hour behind them, a man lies stabbed to death in an old pumping station. He was seen going in with two others, but he never came out. He has been executed, the knife work professional,...

A decade after taking a shot at Bonnie and Clyde during one of their notorious armed robberies, a Depression teen-turned-soldier escapes death during the Battle of the Bulge and marries a beautiful young woman with whom he seeks his fortune along the Texas-Louisiana oil coast.

Naomi Bowes lost her innocence the night she followed her father into the woods. In freeing the girl trapped in the root cellar, Naomi revealed the horrible extent of her father's crimes and made him infamous. Now a successful photographer living under the name Naomi Carson, she has found a place that calls to her, thousands of miles away from everything she's ever known. Naomi wants to embrace the solitude, but the residents of Sunrise Cove keep...

In a Spanish convent, seventeen-year-old Marina longs to join forces with her fellow Loriens to prepare for battle with the Mogadorians who destroyed their home planet, while in the United States, John, Six, and Sam elude authorities who think John is a terrorist.

In 1923, when New Orleans native and orphan Bobby Lee Claremont boards a train to Chicago, where he hopes to join the criminal element and make a new life for himself, far away from the heavy-handed salvation of the Sisters of Charitable Mercy, he acquaints himself with a group of intriguing and possibly dangerous passengers who cause Bobby Lee to reconsider his plans.

Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known equally for his brilliant tactics and for taking only "righteous" assignments. But then Paul gets caught. And the arresting officer offers him a stark choice: prison or covert government service. Paul is asked to pose as a journalist covering the summer Olympics taking place in Berlin. He's to hunt down and kill Reinhardt Ernst, the ruthless architect of Hitler's...

This story begins with three terrifying murders in the South. It ends with a relentless and unforgettable manhunt in the North. In between is the riveting story of a chilling assassin, the woman he loves, and the beloved leader he is hired to kill with extreme prejudice.

When Liana Dector, a woman who is possibly a cold-blooded killer wanted by the police, storms into his favorite Boston tavern demanding his help, George Foss, unable to say no to his first love, is drawn into a world of murder, betrayal and secrets from which there is no escape.