Akron Public Library

Melissa is a nobody. Wilf is a slacker. Bondi is a show-off. At least that's what their middle school teachers think. To everyone's surprise, they are the three students chosen to compete for a ten thousand-dollar scholarship, solving clues that lead them to various locations around Chicago. At first, the three contestants work independently, but it doesn't take long before each begins to wonder whether the competition is a sham. It's only by secretly...

"Now: Sixteen-year-old Alice is spending the summer in Paris ... When her grandmother passed away two months ago, she left Alice an apartment in France that no one knew existed. An apartment that has been locked for more than seventy years. Alice is determined to find out why the apartment was abandoned and why her grandmother never once mentioned the family she left behind when she moved to America after World War II ... However, the more time she...

Anticipating a dreadful summer alone, young Alfie Bloom unexpectedly inherits a castle which conceals a centuries-old, dangerous secret that threatens everyone who lives within one thousand miles.

To claim her inheritance, Helen Vaughan must spend one year in her ancestral home, Harrowstone Hall, and with her life and sanity at stake, she must unravel Harrowstone's secrets, an endeavor that forces her to question everything she knows about her family and herself. Helen Vaughan doesn't know why she and her mother left their ancestral home at Harrowstone Hall, called Harrow, or why they haven't spoken to their extended family since. So when...

"The three secret daughters of the king of Kolonya must compete for their father's throne, all while evading a blackmailer who threatens to reveal their darkest secrets"--

"When a rumor that her uncle is squandering away the family fortune surfaces, Katharine Tulman is sent to his estate to have him committed to an asylum. But instead of a lunatic, Katharine discovers a genius inventor with his own set of childlike rules, who is employing a village of nine hundred people rescued from the workhouses of London. Katharine becomes torn between protecting her own livelihood and preserving the peculiar community she grows...

While doing a favor for her father in Bear Hollow, Indiana, Nancy tries to help a new friend find the reasons someone is trying to ruin her family. A long lost family secret and an inherited fiddle seem to hide clues to a secret fortune.

Left at a New York boarding school by Aunt and Uncle Twice, eleven-year-old Emily finds horrors even greater than those she faced at Sugar Hill Hall, especially after she gets word that her inheritance is lost.

In a witch's house, nothing is as it seems. When a scarecrow climbs over the garden wall, delivering twelve-year-old orphan Zita Brydgeborn a letter saying she has inherited a distant castle, she jumps at the chance of adventure. But little does she know that she is about to be thrust into a centuries-old battle between good and evil. Blackbird Castle was once home to a powerful dynasty of witches, all of them now dead under mysterious circumstances....

Avery's fortune, life, and loves are on the line in the game that everyone will be talking about. To inherit billions, all Avery Kylie Grambs has to do is survive a few more weeks living in Hawthorne House. The paparazzi are dogging her every step. Financial pressures are building. Danger is a fact of life. And the only thing getting Avery through it all is the Hawthorne brothers. Her life is intertwined with theirs. She knows their secrets, and...