Leif Enger's rhapsodic novel about a father raising his three children in 1960s Minnesota is a breathtaking celebration of family, faith, and America's pioneering spirit. Through the voice of eleven-year-old Reuben, an asthmatic boy obsessed with cowboy stories, Peace Like a River tells of the Land family's cross-country search for Reuben's outlaw older brother, who has been controversially charged with murder. Sprinkled with playful and warmhearted nods to biblical tales, classic American novels such as Huckleberry Finn, the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Westerns of Zane Grey, Peace Like a River brilliantly incorporates the best elements of all these genres and ultimately earns its own prominent and enduring place on the shelf among them.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780871137951
|
Hardcover
Stillwater
By Helget, Nicole Lea
Clement and Angel are fraternal twins separated at birth; they grow up in the same small, frontier logging town of Stillwater, Minnesota. Clement was left at the orphanage. Angel was adopted by the town's richest couple, but is marked and threatened by her mother's mental illness. They rarely meet, but Clement knows if he is truly in need, Angel will come to save him. Stillwater, near the Mississippi River and Canada, becomes an important stop on the Underground Railroad. As Clement and Angel grow up and the country marches to war, their lives are changed by many battles for freedom and by losses in the struggle for independence, large and small. Stillwater reveals the hardscrabble lives of pioneers, nuns, squaws, fur trappers, loggers, runaway slaves and freedmen, outlaws and people of conscience, all seeking a better, freer, more prosperous future.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780547898209
|
Hardcover
Monkeewrench
By Tracy, P J
A New York Times Bestseller Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace McBride and the oddball crew of her software company create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. Their games become a nightmare
Publisher: n/a
|
399149783
|
Absolute Zero
By Logan, Chuck
In the icy jaws of an early winter, three big-city professionals joined Phil Broker on a canoe trip across Minnesota's remotest lake. Nature's unexpected fury battered and nearly killed them.
But it was Man who left one of them worse than dead . . .
Haunted ex-cop Phil Broker owes Hank Sommer his life -- and now the wealthy writer is in a coma, thanks to a “freak” mishap on a hospital operating table. Broker knows from hard experience that accidents are not always what they appear to be. He suspects foul play, and he's not about to let Sommer fade out of this world so easily. But the trail to answers is twisted and deadly, winding around the comatose man's beautiful wife -- a former exotic dancer -- and the ring of dangerous men still surrounding her. And Broker's determined search for justice and truth is taking him to a dark and terrifying place where he will be forced to fight for his very survival on the coldest night in Minnesota's history .
Publisher: n/a
|
60185724
|
Book
Thief River Falls
By Freeman, Brian
Harrowing loss, psychological trauma, and a deadly mystery test the human will to survive in this electrifying novel from award-winning author Brian Freeman.Lisa Power is a tortured ghost of her former self. The author of a bestselling thriller called Thief River Falls, named after her rural Minnesota hometown, Lisa is secluded in her remote house as she struggles with the loss of her entire family: a series of tragedies she calls the "Dark Star."Then a nameless runaway boy shows up at her door with a terrifying story: he's just escaped death after witnessing a brutal murder - a crime the police want to cover up. Obsessed with the boy's safety, Lisa resolves to expose this crime, but powerful men in Thief River Falls are desperate to get the boy back, and now they want her too.Lisa and her young visitor have nowhere to go as the trap closes around them. Still under the strange, unforgiving threat of the Dark Star, Lisa must find a way to save them both, or they'll become the victims of another shocking tragedy she can't foresee.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781542093361
|
Hardcover
The Road Back to Sweetgrass
By Legarde, Grover, Linda
Set in northern Minnesota, The Road Back to Sweetgrass follows Dale Ann, Theresa, and Margie, a trio of American Indian women, from the 1970s to the present, observing their coming of age and the intersection of their lives as they navigate love, economic hardship, loss, and changing family dynamics on the fictional Mozhay Point reservation. As young women, all three leave their homes. Margie and Theresa go to Duluth for college and work; there Theresa gets to know a handsome Indian boy, Michael Washington, who invites her home to the Sweetgrass land allotment to meet his father, Zho Wash, who lives in the original allotment cabin. When Margie accompanies her, complicated relationships are set into motion, and tensions over “real Indian-ness” emerge.
Dale Ann, Margie, and Theresa find themselves pulled back again and again to the Sweetgrass allotment, a silent but ever-present entity in the book; sweetgrass itself is a plant used in the Ojibwe ceremonial odissimaa bag, containing a newborn baby’s umbilical cord. In a powerful final chapter, Zho Wash tells the story of the first days of the allotment, when the Wazhushkag, or Muskrat, family became transformed into the Washingtons by the pen of a federal Indian agent. This sense of place and home is both tangible and spiritual, and Linda LeGarde Grover skillfully connects it with the experience of Native women who came of age during the days of the federal termination policy and the struggle for tribal self-determination.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780816692699
|
Book
Blood Country
By Logue, Mary
Police officer Clare Watkins moves with her young daughter to Wisconsin to get away from the past and it's bad memories. But Clare doesn't know that her ten-year-old daughter Meg not only witnessed the hit-and-run accident that killed her father, she had also seen the man who who was driving...and had been seen by him.
Publisher: n/a
|
802733395
|
Book
Dark of the Moon
By Sandford, John
Virgil Flowers - tall, lean, late thirties, three times divorced, hair way too long for a cop's - had kicked around a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport had brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He'd been doing the hard stuff for three years now - but never anything like this. In the small town of Bluestem, where everybody knows everybody, a house way up on a ridge explodes into flames, its owner, a man named Judd, trapped inside. There is a lot of reason to hate him, Flowers discovers. Years ago, Judd had perpetrated a scam that'd driven a lot of local farmers out of business, even to suicide. There are also rumors swirling around: of some very dicey activities with other men's wives; of involvement with some nutcase religious guy; of an out-of-wedlock daughter. In fact, Flowers concludes, you'd probably have to dig around to find a person who didn't despise him. And that wasn't even the reason Flowers had come to Bluestem. Three weeks before, there'd been another murder - two, in fact - a doctor and his wife, the doctor found propped up in his backyard, both eyes shot out. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years - and now, suddenly, three? Flowers knows two things: This wasn't a coincidence, and this had to be personal. But just how personal is something even he doesn't realize, and may not find out until too late. Because the next victim... may be himself.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780399154775
|
Hardcover
The Land of Dreams
By Sundst?l, Vidar
Winner of the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel and named by Dagbladet as one of the top twenty-five Norwegian crime novels of all time, The Land of Dreams is the chilling first installment in Vidar Sundstøl’s critically acclaimed Minnesota Trilogy, set on the rugged north shore of Lake Superior and in the region’s small towns and deep forests.The grandson of Norwegian immigrants, Lance Hansen is a U.S. Forest Service officer and has a nearly all-consuming passion for local genealogy and history. But his quiet routines are shattered one morning when he comes upon a Norwegian tourist brutally murdered near a stone cross on the shore of Lake Superior. Another Norwegian man is nearby; covered in blood and staring out across the lake, he can only utter the word kjærlighet.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780816689408
|
Hardcover
The Life We Bury
By Eskens, Allen
College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same.Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran--and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.As Joe writes about Carl's life, especially Carl's valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Joe, along with his skeptical female neighbor, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is hamstrung in his efforts by having to deal with his dangerously dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory. Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl's conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it's too late to escape the fallout?
Publisher: n/a
|
9781616149987
|
Paperback
Triple Play
By Gunn, Elizabeth
Jake Hines is a stubborn detective with a murky past now living outside Minneapolis where the city meets the prairie. He s a little out of place in a place where the winters are long and the men are rugged, but he s got more to worry about than just fitting in. There s a serial killer on the loose leaving behind three murders, two suspects and a lot of unanswered questions. One victim was found laying on Home Plate in a neighborhood softball diamond, another was found disfigured and wearing an old softball uniform. Forced to deal with some high-tech crime busters eager to track down the psycho, and a beautiful crime scene photographer, Jake feels the killer pulling them toward another murder, another suspect, and a very bitter truth....
Publisher: n/a
|
802733077
|
Print book
Bloodline
By Lourey, Jess
In a tale inspired by real events, pregnant journalist Joan Harken is cautiously excited to follow her fianc back to his Minnesota hometown. After spending a childhood on the move and chasing the screams and swirls of news-rich city life, she's eager to settle down. Lilydale's motto, "Come Home Forever," couldn't be more inviting.And yet, something is off in the picture-perfect village.The friendliness borders on intrusive. Joan can't shake the feeling that every move she makes is being tracked. An archaic organization still seems to hold the town in thrall. So does the sinister secret of a little boy who vanished decades ago. And unless Joan is imagining things, a frighteningly familiar figure from her past is on watch in the shadows.Her fianc tells her she's being paranoid.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781542016315
|
Paperback
The Sentence
By Erdrich, Louise
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
Publisher: n/a
|
9780062671127
|
Hardcover
Chronicles of a Radical Hag
By Landvik, Lorna
A bittersweet, seriously funny novel of a life, a small town, and a key to our troubled times traced through a newspaper columnist's half-century of taking in, and taking on, the world The curmudgeon who wrote the column "Ramblin's by Walt" in the Granite Creek Gazette dismissed his successor as "puking on paper." But when Haze Evans first appeared in the small-town newspaper, she earned fans by writing a story about her bachelor uncle who brought a Queen of the Rodeo to Thanksgiving dinner. Now, fifty years later, when the beloved columnist suffers a massive stroke and falls into a coma, publisher Susan McGrath fills the void (temporarily, she hopes) with Haze's past columns, along with the occasional reprinted responses from readers.
Publisher: n/a
|
9781517905996
|
Hardcover
This Tender Land
By Krueger, William Kent
INSTANTNEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER! "If you likedWhere the Crawdads Sing,youll loveThis Tender Land...This story is as big-hearted as they come." - Parade The unforgettable story of four orphans who travel the Mississippi River on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression.. In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesotas Gilead River, Odie OBanion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendents wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother, Albert, their best friend, Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own. Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.
Peace Like a River
By Enger, Leif
Leif Enger's rhapsodic novel about a father raising his three children in 1960s Minnesota is a breathtaking celebration of family, faith, and America's pioneering spirit. Through the voice of eleven-year-old Reuben, an asthmatic boy obsessed with cowboy stories, Peace Like a River tells of the Land family's cross-country search for Reuben's outlaw older brother, who has been controversially charged with murder. Sprinkled with playful and warmhearted nods to biblical tales, classic American novels such as Huckleberry Finn, the adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Westerns of Zane Grey, Peace Like a River brilliantly incorporates the best elements of all these genres and ultimately earns its own prominent and enduring place on the shelf among them.
Stillwater
By Helget, Nicole Lea
Clement and Angel are fraternal twins separated at birth; they grow up in the same small, frontier logging town of Stillwater, Minnesota. Clement was left at the orphanage. Angel was adopted by the town's richest couple, but is marked and threatened by her mother's mental illness. They rarely meet, but Clement knows if he is truly in need, Angel will come to save him. Stillwater, near the Mississippi River and Canada, becomes an important stop on the Underground Railroad. As Clement and Angel grow up and the country marches to war, their lives are changed by many battles for freedom and by losses in the struggle for independence, large and small. Stillwater reveals the hardscrabble lives of pioneers, nuns, squaws, fur trappers, loggers, runaway slaves and freedmen, outlaws and people of conscience, all seeking a better, freer, more prosperous future.
Monkeewrench
By Tracy, P J
A New York Times Bestseller Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace McBride and the oddball crew of her software company create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. Their games become a nightmare
Absolute Zero
By Logan, Chuck
In the icy jaws of an early winter, three big-city professionals joined Phil Broker on a canoe trip across Minnesota's remotest lake. Nature's unexpected fury battered and nearly killed them.
But it was Man who left one of them worse than dead . . .
Haunted ex-cop Phil Broker owes Hank Sommer his life -- and now the wealthy writer is in a coma, thanks to a “freak” mishap on a hospital operating table. Broker knows from hard experience that accidents are not always what they appear to be. He suspects foul play, and he's not about to let Sommer fade out of this world so easily. But the trail to answers is twisted and deadly, winding around the comatose man's beautiful wife -- a former exotic dancer -- and the ring of dangerous men still surrounding her. And Broker's determined search for justice and truth is taking him to a dark and terrifying place where he will be forced to fight for his very survival on the coldest night in Minnesota's history .
Thief River Falls
By Freeman, Brian
Harrowing loss, psychological trauma, and a deadly mystery test the human will to survive in this electrifying novel from award-winning author Brian Freeman.Lisa Power is a tortured ghost of her former self. The author of a bestselling thriller called Thief River Falls, named after her rural Minnesota hometown, Lisa is secluded in her remote house as she struggles with the loss of her entire family: a series of tragedies she calls the "Dark Star."Then a nameless runaway boy shows up at her door with a terrifying story: he's just escaped death after witnessing a brutal murder - a crime the police want to cover up. Obsessed with the boy's safety, Lisa resolves to expose this crime, but powerful men in Thief River Falls are desperate to get the boy back, and now they want her too.Lisa and her young visitor have nowhere to go as the trap closes around them. Still under the strange, unforgiving threat of the Dark Star, Lisa must find a way to save them both, or they'll become the victims of another shocking tragedy she can't foresee.
The Road Back to Sweetgrass
By Legarde, Grover, Linda
Set in northern Minnesota, The Road Back to Sweetgrass follows Dale Ann, Theresa, and Margie, a trio of American Indian women, from the 1970s to the present, observing their coming of age and the intersection of their lives as they navigate love, economic hardship, loss, and changing family dynamics on the fictional Mozhay Point reservation. As young women, all three leave their homes. Margie and Theresa go to Duluth for college and work; there Theresa gets to know a handsome Indian boy, Michael Washington, who invites her home to the Sweetgrass land allotment to meet his father, Zho Wash, who lives in the original allotment cabin. When Margie accompanies her, complicated relationships are set into motion, and tensions over “real Indian-ness” emerge.
Dale Ann, Margie, and Theresa find themselves pulled back again and again to the Sweetgrass allotment, a silent but ever-present entity in the book; sweetgrass itself is a plant used in the Ojibwe ceremonial odissimaa bag, containing a newborn baby’s umbilical cord. In a powerful final chapter, Zho Wash tells the story of the first days of the allotment, when the Wazhushkag, or Muskrat, family became transformed into the Washingtons by the pen of a federal Indian agent. This sense of place and home is both tangible and spiritual, and Linda LeGarde Grover skillfully connects it with the experience of Native women who came of age during the days of the federal termination policy and the struggle for tribal self-determination.
Blood Country
By Logue, Mary
Police officer Clare Watkins moves with her young daughter to Wisconsin to get away from the past and it's bad memories. But Clare doesn't know that her ten-year-old daughter Meg not only witnessed the hit-and-run accident that killed her father, she had also seen the man who who was driving...and had been seen by him.
Dark of the Moon
By Sandford, John
Virgil Flowers - tall, lean, late thirties, three times divorced, hair way too long for a cop's - had kicked around a while before joining the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. First it was the army and the military police, then the police in St. Paul, and finally Lucas Davenport had brought him into the BCA, promising him, "We'll only give you the hard stuff." He'd been doing the hard stuff for three years now - but never anything like this. In the small town of Bluestem, where everybody knows everybody, a house way up on a ridge explodes into flames, its owner, a man named Judd, trapped inside. There is a lot of reason to hate him, Flowers discovers. Years ago, Judd had perpetrated a scam that'd driven a lot of local farmers out of business, even to suicide. There are also rumors swirling around: of some very dicey activities with other men's wives; of involvement with some nutcase religious guy; of an out-of-wedlock daughter. In fact, Flowers concludes, you'd probably have to dig around to find a person who didn't despise him. And that wasn't even the reason Flowers had come to Bluestem. Three weeks before, there'd been another murder - two, in fact - a doctor and his wife, the doctor found propped up in his backyard, both eyes shot out. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years - and now, suddenly, three? Flowers knows two things: This wasn't a coincidence, and this had to be personal. But just how personal is something even he doesn't realize, and may not find out until too late. Because the next victim... may be himself.
The Land of Dreams
By Sundst?l, Vidar
Winner of the Riverton Prize for best Norwegian crime novel and named by Dagbladet as one of the top twenty-five Norwegian crime novels of all time, The Land of Dreams is the chilling first installment in Vidar Sundstøl’s critically acclaimed Minnesota Trilogy, set on the rugged north shore of Lake Superior and in the region’s small towns and deep forests.The grandson of Norwegian immigrants, Lance Hansen is a U.S. Forest Service officer and has a nearly all-consuming passion for local genealogy and history. But his quiet routines are shattered one morning when he comes upon a Norwegian tourist brutally murdered near a stone cross on the shore of Lake Superior. Another Norwegian man is nearby; covered in blood and staring out across the lake, he can only utter the word kjærlighet.
The Life We Bury
By Eskens, Allen
College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same.Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran--and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.As Joe writes about Carl's life, especially Carl's valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Joe, along with his skeptical female neighbor, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is hamstrung in his efforts by having to deal with his dangerously dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory. Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl's conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it's too late to escape the fallout?
Triple Play
By Gunn, Elizabeth
Jake Hines is a stubborn detective with a murky past now living outside Minneapolis where the city meets the prairie. He s a little out of place in a place where the winters are long and the men are rugged, but he s got more to worry about than just fitting in. There s a serial killer on the loose leaving behind three murders, two suspects and a lot of unanswered questions. One victim was found laying on Home Plate in a neighborhood softball diamond, another was found disfigured and wearing an old softball uniform. Forced to deal with some high-tech crime busters eager to track down the psycho, and a beautiful crime scene photographer, Jake feels the killer pulling them toward another murder, another suspect, and a very bitter truth....
Bloodline
By Lourey, Jess
In a tale inspired by real events, pregnant journalist Joan Harken is cautiously excited to follow her fianc back to his Minnesota hometown. After spending a childhood on the move and chasing the screams and swirls of news-rich city life, she's eager to settle down. Lilydale's motto, "Come Home Forever," couldn't be more inviting.And yet, something is off in the picture-perfect village.The friendliness borders on intrusive. Joan can't shake the feeling that every move she makes is being tracked. An archaic organization still seems to hold the town in thrall. So does the sinister secret of a little boy who vanished decades ago. And unless Joan is imagining things, a frighteningly familiar figure from her past is on watch in the shadows.Her fianc tells her she's being paranoid.
The Sentence
By Erdrich, Louise
In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage, and of a woman's relentless errors.Louise Erdrich's latest novel, The Sentence, asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book. A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.
Chronicles of a Radical Hag
By Landvik, Lorna
A bittersweet, seriously funny novel of a life, a small town, and a key to our troubled times traced through a newspaper columnist's half-century of taking in, and taking on, the world The curmudgeon who wrote the column "Ramblin's by Walt" in the Granite Creek Gazette dismissed his successor as "puking on paper." But when Haze Evans first appeared in the small-town newspaper, she earned fans by writing a story about her bachelor uncle who brought a Queen of the Rodeo to Thanksgiving dinner. Now, fifty years later, when the beloved columnist suffers a massive stroke and falls into a coma, publisher Susan McGrath fills the void (temporarily, she hopes) with Haze's past columns, along with the occasional reprinted responses from readers.
This Tender Land
By Krueger, William Kent
INSTANTNEW YORK TIMESBESTSELLER! "If you likedWhere the Crawdads Sing,youll loveThis Tender Land...This story is as big-hearted as they come." - Parade The unforgettable story of four orphans who travel the Mississippi River on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression.. In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesotas Gilead River, Odie OBanion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendents wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother, Albert, their best friend, Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own. Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.