Special Collections

Death and Relaxation

"Monsters, gods, and murder... Police Chief Delaney Reed can handle the valkyries, werewolves, gill-men and other paranormal creatures who call the small beach town of Ordinary, Oregon their home. It's the vacationing gods who keep her up at night. With the famous rhubarb festival right around the corner, small-town tensions, tempers, and godly tantrums are at an all-time high. The last thing Delaney needs is her ex-boyfriend reappearing just when she's finally caught the attention of Ryder Bailey, the one man she should never love. No, scratch that. The actual last thing she needs is a dead body washing ashore, especially since the dead body is a god. Catching a murderer, wrestling a god power, and re-scheduling the apocalypse? Just another day on the job in Ordinary. Falling in love with her childhood friend while trying to keep the secrets of her town secret? That's gonna take some work"--

Date Added: 11/09/2020

Trails of Death: The True Story of National Forest Serial Killer Gary Hilton

Overview: Trails of Death is the explosive chronicle of America's only known national parks serial killer, Gary Michael Hilton. Hilton struck in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina before he was finally caught. The author explores the crimes in detail with full cooperation from the victims families and brings readers into what makes a late life serial killer through interviews with those who know him. Readers will also hear from the lead investigator who finally tracked Hilton.

Date Added: 04/14/2020

Telling Yourself the Truth

Most of What Happens in Your Life Happens Because of the Way You Think.

Wrong thinking produces wrong emotions, wrong reactions, wrong behavior--and unhappiness! Learning to deal with your thoughts is the first step on the road to healthy thinking.

How to handle one's thoughts properly is what this book is all about! It explains the life-changing method the authors call Misbelief Therapy, and it can work for you.

Based on the Bible, this book has helped thousands of people for many years, and it can help you!

Telling Yourself the Truth can show you how to identify your own misbeliefs and replace them with the truth.

Date Added: 03/22/2021

Girl On Pointe

Chloe Lukasiak is a big believer that things happen for a reason. She knows that life would be easier without disappointments, bullying, and medical issues-but sometimes it takes challenges to inspire you to achieve big things. From her status as fan favorite on the hit reality television show Dance Moms through her life as a social media star with millions of fans, Chloe has found that self-acceptance and kindness are the key to getting over the rough spots in life and realizing your passions. This full-color, heavily designed book featuring never-before-seen photos, inspirational quotes, and Chloe's own doodles and poetry offers exclusive insight into Chloe's world as well as a message that will inspire all readers to be their very best selves.

Date Added: 07/15/2020

Pack Challenge

What's an Alpha Male to do when he meets the Alpha Female of his dreams? Step one, hide all sharp objects. All Zach Sheridan ever wanted was to become Alpha Male of his Pack and be left alone. What he definitely didn't need in his life was some needy female demanding his attention. What he never saw coming was the vicious, scarred female who not only demanded his attention but knew exactly how to get it. Sara Morrighan knew this was the best she could expect from her life. Good friends. A nice place to live. And a safe job. But when Zach rode into her small Texas town with his motorcycle club, Sara knew she wanted more. She knew she wanted him. But after one sexy encounter with her dream biker, everything is starting to change. Her body. Her strength. That new thing she's doing with the snarling. Even her best friends are starting to wonder what's going on with her. But this is only the beginning. Sara's about to find out her life was meant for so much more. And Zach's about to find true love with the one woman who makes him absolutely insane. Warning, this title contains the following: explicit sex, graphic language, and strong violence.

Date Added: 04/15/2020

One Was A Soldier

The seventh in the New York Times bestselling mystery series for fans of Louise Penny and Elizabeth George. On a warm September evening in the Millers Kill community center, five veterans sit down in rickety chairs to try to make sense of their experiences in Iraq. What they will find is murder, conspiracy, and the unbreakable ties that bind them to one another and their small Adirondack town. But coming home is harder than it looks. One vet will struggle with drugs and alcohol. One will lose his family and friends. One will die. Since their first meeting, Chief of Police Russ Van Alstyne and Rev. Clare Fergusson's bond has been tried, torn, and forged by adversity. But when he rules a veteran's death a suicide, she violently rejects his verdict, drawing the surviving vets into an unorthodox investigation that threatens jobs, relationships, and her own future with Russ. As the days cool and the nights grow longer, they will uncover a trail of deceit that runs from their tiny town to the upper ranks of the U.S. Army, and from the waters of the Millers Kill to the unforgiving streets of Baghdad.

Date Added: 04/03/2020

Hex Appeal

Fall under the intoxicating spell of their hex appeal... In the magical world that lies hidden beneath our own, witches and conjurers play deadly games. They know just the right spell to kill a man with one kiss—or raise him back again. And they're not afraid to exact sweet revenge on those who dare to cross them. But what if you're the unlucky soul who falls victim to a conjurer's curse? And if you had the power to cast a magic spell of your own, would you use it? In this bewitching collection, nine of today's hottest paranormal authors tell all-new, otherworldly tales. Spellbinding stories featuring bigfoot, albino vampires, professional wizards, resurrected boyfriends and even a sex droid from the twenty- third century named Silicon Lily. But as our conjurers are about to discover, it's all fun and games until someone gets hexed. And sometimes, even the best spun spells can lead to complete and utter mayhem.

Date Added: 10/29/2020

Gracefully Gone

Gracefully Gone is the fusion of two journals: my father, Matthew L Coppola Sr.’s and mine. My father’s journal was written in 1982, two years after his diagnosis and remission with brain cancer. Mine was written in 1990-1991, roughly eight years later, as he began to die. In Gracefully Gone I chronicle my twenty-one year old pursuit of life and all the bitter and amusingly confusing angst that accompanies being twenty-one during the last six months of my father’s struggle towards death.

What I am hoping, what I am counting on, is that my life, my father’s life and our story, might be meaningful to strangers; or perhaps, if not meaningful, then at the very least, identifiable, relatable and at times, humorously understandable. Gracefully Gone is not about death, it is about the journey of a family, specifically, the journey of a young girl trying to find her way in the wake of growing up in the looming shadow of cancer.

Gracefully Gone is written as a prayer for all the families, all the children too young to understand and for all the victims of this all too often insurmountable war to know they are not alone. After all, the sad fact is in the world we live in today there are no strangers to cancer and there are certainly no strangers to struggle and loss.

Even though my mother and brother went through the same experience as I, we experienced it very differently. It was as if my father was the LOVEBOAT and we three were on our own separate lifeboats surrounding him, each of us handling our grief privately. Perhaps, if we’re really lucky, Gracefully Gone might allow someone a little peace and some comfort knowing that even though they are on their own lifeboats they are in an ocean full of them.

Date Added: 04/27/2020

Musings To Meaning

Musings to Meaning is applicable spirituality. It has insightful musings and stories to deepen the relationship with our Divine Self, while charming our human self to prefer inner peace.

Date Added: 04/03/2020

Ready for Air

For Kate Hopper, pregnancy is downright unpleasant. She is tired and heavy and worried, and she wants her wine and caffeine back. But then, at a routine checkup, her doctor frowns at her chart and says, &“I&’m worried about a couple of things&”—and unpleasant suddenly seems like paradise. What follows is a harrowing, poignant, and occasionally hysterical journey through premature motherhood, from the starting point of &“leaking a little protein&” to the early delivery of her tiny daughter because of severe preeclampsia and the beginning of a new chapter of frightful, lifelong love.Half a million babies are born prematurely in the United States every year—almost one every minute—each with a unique story, and Hopper eloquently gives a voice to what their parents share: the shock, the scares, the lonely nights in the neonatal intensive care unit, the fierce attention to detail that makes for sanity and craziness, the light of faith, the warmth of family, and the terrifying attachment. Through it all runs the power of words to connect us to one another, as Hopper draws on her gifts as a writer first to help her navigate this uncertain territory and then to tell her story. With candor, grace, and a healthy dose of humor, she takes us into the final weeks of her pregnancy, the this-was-not-part-of-the-plan first weeks of little Stella&’s life, and the isolated world she and her husband inhabited when they took their daughter home at the onset of a cold Minnesota winter. Finally, frankly, Hopper ventures into the complicated question of whether to have another child. Down-to-earth and honest about the hard realities of having a baby, as well as the true joys, Ready for Air is a testament to the strength of motherhood—and stories—to transform lives.

Date Added: 04/08/2020

Beautiful Sacrifice

Falyn Fairchild can walk away from anything. Already leaving behind her car, her education, and even her parents, the daughter of the next governor of Colorado is back in her hometown, broke and waiting tables for the Bucksaw Café. After every shift, Falyn adds to her shoebox of cash, hoping to one day save enough to buy her a plane ticket to the only place she can find forgiveness: Eakins, Illinois.

Date Added: 07/23/2020

The Good Place and Philosophy

The Good Place is a fantasy-comedy TV show about the afterlife. Eleanor dies and finds herself in the Good Place, which she understands must be mistake, since she has been anything but good. In the surprise twist ending to Season One, it is revealed that this is really the Bad Place, but the demon who planned it was frustrated, because the characters didn't torture each other mentally as planned, but managed to learn how to live together.

Date Added: 09/22/2020

The Bathroom

The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and the Body is the first scholarly treatment of the American bathroom--as a space in the house, through nearly two centuries. After a brief nod to precedents set by other countries and to elements of the bathroom that may be placed in different parts of the house, this book traces the development of the bathroom in the American house since the Civil War, when the bathroom began to take shape.

The bathroom is considered in light of many socially relevant themes, such as cleanliness, sanitation, technology, and consumerism. Taken as a whole, the book bridges the gap between the public and private infrastructure of the bathroom and reveals the ways in which the space transforms its occupants into consumers. Its language is jargon-free, making it ideal for students, general readers, and researchers.

Date Added: 03/22/2021

Assassin's Strike

In a Syrian palace, the presidents of Russia and Iran undertake a clandestine meeting. No staff or advisors are permitted in the room. No records are kept. By necessity, however, there are two witnesses: the interpreters. The Russian, Ludmilla Kravchuk, returns to her hotel room burdened by what she has heard. When her Iranian counterpart is murdered before her eyes, Kravchuk fears she is next and goes into hiding in Syria.

The CIA gets word of the defection. Desperate to uncover the purpose of the meeting, they task their newest off-the-books operator—legendary assassin David Slaton—to undertake a daring rescue. Deep inside Syria’s war-torn borders, what Slaton finds is a plot that will tear the Middle East apart. And one that only he can stop.

Date Added: 03/22/2021

Fourth Uncle in the Mountain

Set during the French and American wars, Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is a true story about an orphan, Quang Van Nguyen, who is adopted by a sixty-four year old monk, Thau, who carries great responsibility for his people as a barefoot doctor. Thau manages, against all odds to raise his son to follow in his footsteps and in doing so, saves his son, as well as a part of Vietnam's esoteric knowledge from the Vietnam holocaust.

Thau is wanted by the French regime, and occasionally must flee into the jungle, where he is perfectly at home living among the animals. Thau is not the average monk; he practices an ancient lineage of Chinese medicine and uses magic to protect animals and help people.

As wise and resourceful as Thau is, he meets his match in his mischievous son. Quang is more interested in learning Cambodian sorcery and martial arts than in developing his skills and wisdom according to his father's plan.

Fourth Uncle in the Mountain is an odyssey of a single-father folk hero and his foundling son in a land ravaged by the atrocities of war. It is a classic story, complete with humor, tragedy, and insight from a country where ghosts and magic are real.

Date Added: 03/22/2021

Secret Soldiers

What do set design, sound effects, and showmanship have to do with winning World War II? Meet the Ghost Army that played a surprising role in helping to deceive — and defeat — the Nazis.

In his third book about deception during war, Paul B. Janeczko focuses his lens on World War II and the operations carried out by the Twenty-Third Headquarters Special Troops, aka the Ghost Army. This remarkable unit included actors, camouflage experts, sound engineers, painters, and set designers who used their skills to secretly and systematically replace fighting units — fooling the Nazi army into believing what their eyes and ears told them, even though the sights and sounds of tanks and war machines and troops were entirely fabricated. Follow the Twenty-Third into Europe as they play a dangerous game of enticing the German army into making battlefield mistakes by using sonic deceptions, inflatable tanks, pyrotechnics, and camouflage in more than twenty operations. From the Normandy invasion to the crossing of the Rhine River, the men of the Ghost Army — several of whom went on to become famous artists and designers after the war — played an improbable role in the Allied victory.

Date Added: 12/09/2020

The Key To The Map

A squad of terrorists eagerly waits in a small Jerusalem home at midnight. Their mission is to plant a radioactive device under the Temple Mount and cause catastrophic damage to the Dome of the Rock, which will be blamed on the Israelis, igniting the final struggle for dominance and control over the Holy Land.

Across the sea in Rome, Jake Greene, a retired Homeland Security operations executive, and his daughter, Rebecca Gould, an anthropologist, stumble upon an antique map and a strange medallion. They are immediately thrust into a world of ancient secrets, modern warfare, and government conspiracy. As they begin to decipher the mysteries surrounding these objects, they meet and join forces with David Robinson, whose family is sworn to help someone who will one day appear to him holding the medallion. They are caught up in a thrilling search for the lost Ark of the Covenant. They must find a way to foil the terrorists, find the Ark, and conceal it from a world not yet ready for its discovery.

Date Added: 04/08/2020

I Talk Like a River

I wake up each morning with the sounds of words all around me. And I can't say them all . . . When a boy who stutters feels isolated, alone, and incapable of communicating in the way he'd like, it takes a kindly father and a walk by the river to help him find his voice. Compassionate parents everywhere will instantly recognize a father's ability to reconnect a child with the world around him. Poet Jordan Scott writes movingly in this powerful and ultimately uplifting book, based on his own experience, and masterfully illustrated by Greenaway Medalist Sydney Smith. A book for any child who feels lost, lonely, or unable to fit in.

Date Added: 03/22/2021

The Ragged Edge Of Night

Germany, 1942. Franciscan friar Anton Starzmann is stripped of his place in the world when his school is seized by the Nazis. He relocates to a small German hamlet to wed Elisabeth Herter, a widow who seeks a marriage--in name only--to a man who can help raise her three children. Anton seeks something too--atonement for failing to protect his young students from the wrath of the Nazis. But neither he nor Elisabeth expects their lives to be shaken once again by the inescapable rumble of war.

As Anton struggles to adapt to the roles of husband and father, he learns of the Red Orchestra, an underground network of resisters plotting to assassinate Hitler. Despite Elisabeth's reservations, Anton joins this army of shadows. But when the SS discovers his schemes, Anton will embark on a final act of defiance that may cost him his life--even if it means saying goodbye to the family he has come to love more than he ever believed possible.

Date Added: 04/15/2020

Abducted

After solving the mayor’s murder and exposing corruption among the top brass in Las Playas, Carly Edwards is happy to be back on patrol with her partner, Joe, putting bad guys behind bars. For once, everything in life seems to be going right.

But then everything starts going wrong. Slow to recover from an injury, her ex-husband, Nick, begins pulling away just as they were starting to get close again. Meanwhile, when Joe’s wife lands in the hospital with a mysterious illness, their baby is kidnapped. As Carly chases down every lead in a desperate search to find the baby, her newfound faith is pushed to its limits.

Date Added: 03/22/2021

Crimson Letters

Through thirty compelling essays written in the prisoners’ own words, Crimson Letters: Voices from Death Row offers stories of brutal beatings inside juvenile hall, botched suicide attempts, the terror of the first night on Death Row, the pain of goodbye as a friend is led to execution, and the small acts of humanity that keep hope alive for men living in the shadow of death. Each carefully crafted personal essay illuminates the complex stew of choice and circumstance that brought four men to Death Row and the cycle of dehumanization and brutality that continues inside prison. At times the men write with humor, at times with despair, at times with deep sensitivity, but always with keen insight and understanding of the common human experience that binds us.

Date Added: 10/29/2020