WASP Sting


Lee A. Sweetapple - 2016
    As a Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP), Trudy is one of the most knowledgeable flyers of the P-51 Mustang. She is in full command of one of the fastest airplanes ever made, but she is forbidden from going into combat because of her gender. Trudy is shocked when her dream of going to the front lines is fulfilled. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) needs a pilot to sneak into German-occupied Lithuania and rescue a professor whose work could have international implications. But first, Trudy will have to get there. As Trudy crosses the United States and Canada with her handsome traveling partner, Major Rod Jackson, she sees the many different ways Americans and Canadians are helping on the home front. Her new base of operations in Duxford, England, will also give her a front-row seat to the violent, deadly aerial battles of the European theater. Trudy is determined to fight to protect the Allies, but will she make it out of her first operation alive?

The Kid


Ron Hansen - 2016
    He was smart, well-spoken, attractive to both white and Mexican women, a good dancer, and a man with a nose for money, horses, and trouble. His spree of crimes and murders has been immortalized in dime westerns, novels, and movies. But the whole story of his short, epically violent life has never been told as it has been here. “The Kid’s story has been told many times. But not like this” (The New York Times Book Review). In his incredible novel, Ron Hansen showcases his masterful research and inimitable style as he breathes life into history, bringing readers back into the late 1800s and into Billy’s boyhood as a ranch hand just trying to wrest a fortune from an unforgiving landscape. We are with Billy in every gunfight and horse theft and get to know him in full before his grand death in a hail of bullets in 1881 at the age of twenty-one. Original, powerful, and swiftly told, The Kid is an “entertaining and lively…an excellent, transportive read” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

The Year After


Martin Davies - 2011
    At Hannesford Court, it's almost as if nothing has changed.But beneath the surface, nothing is quite the same as the last time they met there. A few faces are missing, and for Tom Allen, only just out of uniform, the desirable daughter of the house suddenly seems within his reach.Then there is the story of the young woman who was found drowned in the swirling waters of the River Hann while Tom was away. Can one unexplained death be significant when so many millions have died in the trenches?

Thirteen Moons


Charles Frazier - 2006
    Will is a bound boy, obliged to run a remote Indian trading post. As he fulfills his lonesome duty, Will finds a father in Bear, a Cherokee chief, and is adopted by him and his people, developing relationships that ultimately forge Will’s character. All the while, his love of Claire, the enigmatic and captivating charge of volatile and powerful Featherstone, will forever rule Will’s heart. In a voice filled with both humor and yearning, Will tells of a lifelong search for home, the hunger for fortune and adventure, the rebuilding of a trampled culture, and above all an enduring pursuit of passion.

Internet Slave Master


John Glatt - 2001
    An entrepreneur and Eagle Scout, he was even honored as 'Man of the Year" at a Kansas City charity. To some of the women he met on the Internet, he was known as Slavemaster--a sexual deviate with a taste for sadomasochistic rituals of extreme domination and torture.Masquerading as a philanthropist, he promised women money and adventure. For fifteen years, he trawled the Web, snaring unsuspecting women. They were never seen again. But in the summer of 2000, the decomposed remains of two women were discovered in barrels on Robinson's farm, and three other bodies were found in storage units. Yet the depths of Robinson's bloodlust didn't end there. For authorities, the unspeakable criminal trail of Slavemaster was just beginning... Internet Slave Master is a true story of sadistic murder in the Heartland, told by true crime master John Glatt.

Ride the Wind


Lucia St. Clair Robson - 1982
    This is the story of how she grew up with them, mastered their ways, married one of their leaders, and became, in every way, a Comanche woman. It is also the story of a proud and innocent people whose lives pulsed with the very heartbeat of the land. It is the story of a way of life that is gone forever....

Broken Ground


Karen Halvorsen Schreck - 2016
    She’s making a home when she learns that her young husband, Charlie, has been killed in an oil rig accident. Ruth is devastated, but then gets a chance for a fresh start: a scholarship from a college in Pasadena, CA. Ruth decides to take a risk and travel west, to pursue her one remaining dream to become a teacher.At college Ruth tries to fit into campus life, but her grief holds her back. When she spends Christmas with some old family friends, she meets the striking and compelling Thomas Everly, whose own losses and struggles have instilled in him a commitment to social justice, and led him to work with Mexican migrant farmworkers in a camp just east of Los Angeles. With Thomas, Ruth sees another side of town, and another side of current events: the forced deportation of Mexican migrant workers due to the Repatriation Act put into place during President Herbert Hoover’s administration.After Ruth is forced to leave school, she goes to visit Thomas and sees that he has cobbled together a night school for the farmworkers’ children. Ruth begins to work with the children, and establishes deep friendships with people in the camp. When the camp is raided and the workers and their families are rounded up and shipped back to Mexico, Ruth and Thomas decide to take a stand for the workers’ rights—all while promising to love and cherish one another.

Children of the Dust


Clancy Carlile - 1995
    Now he's out for blood.Schoolteacher John Maxwell believes that Indians must disavow their heritage and conform to the ways of the white man in order to survive. Then his daughter, Rachel, falls in love with Corby, a Cheyenne boy--forcing Maxwell to confront his convictions in the shadow of their doomed passion.Set during the Oklahoma land rush of the 1880s-- "the damnedest race in history"--CHILDREN OF THE DUST tells the interlocking stories of dispossessed Indians and newly freed blacks as never before. Bold, grand, and timelessly entertaining, this is a novel about an American past that we rarely explore and dare not forget."Gypsy Smith is the archetypal Clint Eastwood hero, except that his heritage is black and Cherokee....[Carlile] leads us down the unfamiliar back roads of his territory."--The New York Times Book Review"An authentic and historically accurate depiction of what was perhaps the most tumultuous and colorful period and place in the history of the Western frontier."--Black Media News

Train Dreams


Denis Johnson - 2002
    It is the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century---an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West, this novella captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.

The School of Night


Louis Bayard - 2010
    Known as the School of Night, they meet in secret to avoid the wrath of Queen Elizabeth. But one of the men, Thomas Harriot, has secrets of his own, secrets he shares with one person only: the servant woman he loves.In modern-day Washington, D.C., disgraced Elizabethan scholar Henry Cavendish has been hired by the ruthless antiquities collector Bernard Styles to find a missing letter. The letter dates from the 1600s and was stolen by Henry's close friend, Alonzo Wax. Now Wax is dead and Styles wants the letter back. But the letter is an object of interest to others, too. It may be the clue to a hidden treasure; it may contain the long-sought formula for alchemy; it most certainly will prove the existence of the group of men whom Shakespeare dubbed the School of Night but about whom little is known. Joining Henry in his search for the letter is Clarissa Dale, a mysterious woman who suffers from visions that only Henry can understand. In short order, Henry finds himself stumbling through a secretive world of ancient perils, caught up in a deadly plot, and ensnared in the tragic legacy of a forgotten genius.

Wild Freedom: Two Classic Westerns


Max Brand - 1922
    The Long, Long Trail (1922)Jess is a gunslinger, an outlaw on the run trying to elude the sheriff. When a woman enters his life, he reconsiders his future.About The AuthorSeattle-born Frederick Schiller Faust (1892 –1944) was a western author who wrote under pen names including Max Brand. He grew up working on a ranch in California's San Joaquin Valley. His books inspired Hollywood films and he created popular characters including Dr. Kildare.

I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War


Jerome Charyn - 2014
    Here in I Am Abraham, Charyn returns with an unforgettable portrait of Lincoln and the Civil War. Narrated boldly in the first person, I Am Abraham effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy, in the process creating an achingly human portrait of our sixteenth President.Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady's dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators, scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores.We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a no-man's-land between North and South; as well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the firing squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard, but who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war.Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical fiction.

The Frontiersmen


Allan W. Eckert - 1967
    Red man's revenge.Driven from their homeland, the Indians fought bitterly to keep a final stronghold east of the Mississippi. Savage cunning, strength, skill and knowledge of the wilderness were their weapons, and the Indians used them mercilessly. But they couldn't foresee the white men who would come later, men who loved the land as much as they did, who wanted it for their own. Men who learned the Indian tricks and matched brutality for brutality.From Eckert's acclaimed The Winning of America series, this book continues the tale of westward expansion, focusing on the history of the Northwest Territories & the Louisiana Purchase & relating the dramatic events of the Black Hawk War of 1832.

Cincinnati's Savage Seamstress: The Shocking Edythe Klumpp Murder Scandal


Richard O. Jones - 2014
    When investigators learned that her estranged husband was living with an older divorcee, Edythe Klumpp, they wasted no time in questioning her. When she failed a lie detector test, Edythe spilled out a confession. Although it did not fit the physical evidence, she was found guilty and sentenced to death in the electric chair. Governor Michael V. DiSalle put his political career on the line to save Edythe from the death penalty, personally interviewing the prisoner while she was under the influence of truth serum." But was it the truth? Richard O Jones separates the facts from the fiction in this comprehensive book about the Klumpp murder."

The Gates of the Alamo


Stephen Harrigan - 2000
    The story unfolds with vivid immediacy and describes the pivotal battle from the perspective of the Mexican attackers as well as the American defenders. Filled with dramatic scenes, and abounding in fictional and historical personalities--among them James Bowie, David Crockett, William Travis, and General Santa Anna--The Gates of the Alamo enfolds us in history and, through its remarkable and passionate storytelling, allows us to participate at last in an American legend.