Akron Public Library

Alison Read was orphaned as a small child and became the ward of antiques dealer Paul Aylmer. As Alison matured, so did her love for Paul, a man who had never made the slightest romantic overture toward her. How could she get the man who had been a loving father to Alison the girl, to realize that Alison the woman had very grown-up feelings toward him?

"In the early 1980s, farmers were suffering through the worst economic crisis to hit rural America since the Great Depression. Land prices were down, operating costs and interest rates were up, and severe weather devastated crops. Instead of receiving assistance from the government as they had in the 1930s, these hardworking family farmers were threatened with foreclosure by the very agency that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to help them. Desperate,...

"Was Harold Dumphy killed to cover up something at the nuclear power plant where he was the head of security? This is what Harold's widow asks Goff Langdon, private detective, to find out. Langdon is a laid back, slacker detective, happy with his work, friends, and way of life in the town of Brunswick, Maine. To compliment his income in small town Maine's scarce private detective market, Langdon also owns and operates a mystery bookstore named after...

In See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid's first novel in ten years, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters, a mother and father and their two children living in a small village in New England, as they move between the present, the past, and the future.

Because of reports of a potential range war in Peñasco County, U.S. Commissioner Guilford dispatches Deputy U.S. Marshal Ed Church to the area. After arriving in Agua Verde by stagecoach and renting a horse to ride to the troubled area, Church disappears. At the same time, Mike Sternes, foreman of Frank Bishop's Crescent B cattle ranch, is in town to meet Frank's daughter, Cathy, who was traveling on the same stagecoach as Church. Also in town is...

Holidays and holy days overlap as the angels work overtime on the island of Heavenly Daze. Vernie Bidderman, owner of the Mooseleuk Mercantile, is flabbergasted when the phone rings with a message from her husband Stanley, who went bowling twenty years ago and never came home. Seventy-year-old Salt Gribbon, the cantankerous lighthouse keeper, is living with a secret - two of them, in fact: his grandchildren. As December draws to a close, will Vernie...