The Easter House (Iowa Author)

Originally published in 1974, this gripping novel tells the tale of the Easter family of Ontarion, Iowa. Ansel Easter was a favored minister until he rescued a grotesque creature from a carnival sideshow. His sons, C and Sam, suffer in the shadow of their outcast father until his violent death. C and Sam leave the home their father built for a new beginning, and find fortune building a lucrative business called the Associates — but when a rash of deaths has the townspeople looking at C and Sam as suspects, they find their father's legacy reaches further than they expect. Taut, dark, and engrossing, The Easter House holds up as a brilliant work of fiction some 30 years after its initial publication. -- Publisher description

Click for more by David Rhodes. For more contemporary Iowa authors, click here.

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The Known World

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.


An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present, The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites, and Indians -- and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery. -- Publisher description

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June Bug

June Bug believed everything her daddy told her. That is, until she walked into Wal-Mart and saw her face on a list of missing children. The discovery begins a quest for the truth about her father, the mother he rarely speaks about, and ultimately herself. A modern interpretation of Les Miserables, the story follows a dilapidated RV rambling cross-country with June Bug and her father, a man running from a haunted past. Forces beyond their control draw them back to Dogwood, West Virginia, down a winding path that will change their lives forever. - Publisher description


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Isaac's Storm (AViD Author)

ISAAC'S STORM

At the dawn of the twentieth century, a great confidence suffused America. Isaac Cline was one of the era's new men, a scientist who believed he knew all there was to know about the motion of clouds and the behavior of storms. The idea that a hurricane could damage the city of Galveston, Texas, where he was based, was to him preposterous, "an absurd delusion." It was 1900, a year when America felt bigger and stronger than ever before. Nothing in nature could hobble the gleaming city of Galveston, then a magical place that seemed destined to become the New York of the Gulf.

That August, a strange, prolonged heat wave gripped the nation and killed scores of people in New York and Chicago. Odd things seemed to happen everywhere: A plague of crickets engulfed Waco. The Bering Glacier began to shrink. Rain fell on Galveston with greater intensity than anyone could remember. Far away, in Africa, immense thunderstorms blossomed over the city of Dakar, and great currents of wind converged. A wave of atmospheric turbulence slipped from the coast of western Africa. Most such waves faded quickly. This one did not.

In Cuba, America's overconfidence was made all too obvious by the Weather Bureau's obsession with controlling hurricane forecasts, even though Cuba's indigenous weathermen had pioneered hurricane science. As the bureau's forecasters assured the nation that all was calm in the Caribbean, Cuba's own weathermen fretted about ominous signs in the sky. A curious stillness gripped Antigua. Only a few unlucky sea captains discovered that the storm had achieved an intensity no man alive had ever experienced.

In Galveston, reassured by Cline's belief that no hurricane could seriously damage the city, there was celebration. Children played in the rising water. Hundreds of people gathered at the beach to marvel at the fantastically tall waves and gorgeous pink sky, until the surf began ripping the city's beloved beachfront apart. Within the next few hours Galveston would endure a hurricane that to this day remains the nation's deadliest natural disaster. In Galveston alone at least 6,000 people, possibly as many as 10,000, would lose their lives, a number far greater than the combined death toll of the Johnstown Flood and 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.

And Isaac Cline would experience his own unbearable loss.

Meticulously researched and vividly written, Isaac's Storm is based on Cline's own letters, telegrams, and reports, the testimony of scores of survivors, and our latest understanding of the hows and whys of great storms. Ultimately, however, it is the story of what can happen when human arrogance meets nature's last great uncontrollable force.  As such, Isaac's Storm carries a warning for our time. - Publisher description

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The Slaves War: The Civil War in the Words of Former Slaves

In The Slaves’ War, the acclaimed historian Andrew Ward delivers an unprecedented vision of the nation’s bloodiest conflict. Woven together from hundreds of interviews, diaries, letters, and memoirs, here is a groundbreaking and poignant narrative of the CivilWar as seen from not only battlefields, capitals, and camps, but from slave quarters, kitchens, roadsides, and fields as well. Speaking in a quintessentially American language, body servants, army cooks, runaways, and gravediggers bring the war to life. From slaves’ theories about the causes of the CivilWar to their frank assessments of such major figures as Lincoln, Davis, Lee, and Grant; from their searing memories of the carnage of battle to their often startling attitudes toward masters and liberators alike; and from their initial jubilation at the Yankee invasion of the South to the crushing disappointment of freedom’s promise unfulfilled, The Slaves’ War is a transformative and engrossing chronicle of America’s Second Revolution.


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A Mercy

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize–winning author of Beloved and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.

Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, “with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady.” Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.

There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who’s spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens’ mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.

A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.

For more African American writings, click here.

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The Red Dahlia

When the body of a young girl is found dumped on the banks of the Thames, even the police are shocked by the brutality of her murder: horrifically mutilated, severed in half, and drained of blood, her corpse is an obvious mirror image of the famous Black Dahlia murder in 1940s Los Angeles.

Now Detective Inspector Anna Travis must race against time to catch this copycat killer. She turns to her mentor, the brilliant and volatile Detective Chief Inspector James Langton, but the frictions of their romantic relationship are complicating the case. And then a second girl is found... - Publisher Description

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Assassin's Honor (Novel of the Order)

A sexy adventure-packed romance with a paranormal twist.

Archeologist Emma Zale sees the past when she touches relics. It's how she uncovered evidence of an ancient order of assassins-the Sicari. When a sinfully dark stranger shows up on her Chicago doorstep demanding an artifact she doesn't have, he drags her into a world where telekinesis and empaths-someone who can sense the emotions of others- are the norm. Now someone wants her dead, and her only hope of survival is an assassin who's every bit as dangerous to her body as he is to her heart. -- Publisher's description

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Red to Black

A veteran MI6 undercover operative stationed in Moscow, Finn has penetrated deep into the dangerous labyrinth that is Putin’s Russia to discover its darkest secrets. The youngest female colonel in the KGB, Anna has been ordered to spy on Finn and discover the identity of his source.

At the dawn of a new millennium, these two adversaries are bound together by an unexpected love that becomes the only truth they can trust. Now they must risk everything to expose a chilling and ingenious plan devised during the Cold War years to control the European continent—a deadly plot in which friend and foe wear the same face. -- Publisher description


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The Amber Room (AViD Author)

Steve Berry will be visiting Des Moines on May 31st as part of our AViD series.  Click here for more information on his visit and make sure to reserve his newest book The Columbus Affair!  For more titles, click here.

The Amber Room

The Amber Room is one of the greatest treasures ever made by man: an entire room forged of exquisite amber, from its four massive walls to its finely crafted furniture. But it is also the subject of one of history’s most intriguing mysteries. Originally commissioned in 1701 by Frederick I of Prussia, the Room was later perfected Tsarskoe Selo, the Russian imperial city. In 1941, German troops invaded the Soviet Union, looting everything in their wake and seizing the Amber Room. When the Allies began the bombing of Germany in August 1944, the Room was hidden. And despite the best efforts of treasure hunters and art collectors from around the world, it has never been seen again.

Now, two powerful men have set their best operatives loose in pursuit, and the hunt has begun once more. . . .

Life is good for Atlanta judge Rachel Cutler. She loves her job, loves her kids, and remains civil to her ex-husband, Paul. But everything changes when her father, a man who survived the horrors of World War II, dies under strange circumstances—and leaves behind clues to a secret he kept his entire life . . . a secret about something called the Amber Room.

Desperate to know the truth about her father’s suspicious dealings, Rachel takes off for Germany, with Paul close behind. Shortly after arriving, they find themselves involved with a cast of shadowy characters who all claim to share their quest. But as they learn more about the history of the treasure they seek, Rachel and Paul realize they’re in way over their heads. Locked in a treacherous game with ruthless professional killers and embroiled in a treasure hunt of epic proportions, Rachel and Paul suddenly find themselves on a collision course with the forces of power, evil, and history itself.

A brilliant adventure and a scintillating tale of intrigue, deception, art, and murder, The Amber Room is a classic tale of suspense—and the debut of a strong new voice in the world of the international thriller. - Publisher description

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Home Town (AViD Author )

Home Town

In this fascinating book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes us inside the everyday workings of Northampton, Massachusetts — a place that seems to personify the typical American hometown. Kidder unveils the complex drama behind the seemingly ordinary lives of Northampton's residents. And out of these stories he creates a splendid, startling portrait of a town, in a narrative that gracefully travels among past and present, public and private, joy and sorrow.

A host of real people are alive in these pages: a tycoon with a crippling ailment; a criminal whom the place has beguiled, a genial and merciful judge, a single mother struggling to start a new life at Smith College; and, at the center, a policeman who patrols the streets of his beloved hometown with a stern yet endearing brand of morality — and who is about to discover the peril of spending a whole life in one small place. Their stories take us behind the town's facades and reveal how individuals shape the social conscience of a community. Home Town is an unflinching yet lovingly rendered account of how a traditional American town endures and evolves at the turn of the millenniums. -- Publisher description

For more books by Tracy Kidder, click here.

Return to Sullivans Island

It was impossible to remember how gorgeous the Lowcountry was. It never changed and everyone depended on that.

Newly graduated from college, Beth Hayes has worlds to conquer. But her grand ambitions are put on hold when she's elected by the family elders to house-sit the Island Gamble—ghosts and all.

But there is much about life and her family's past that Beth doesn't understand. And her plans to rest and rejuvenate—to bask in memory and the magic of white clapboards and shimmering blue waters—begin dangerously unraveling when she falls in love.

Still, everything here happens for a reason—and disappointment, betrayal, even tragedy are more easily handled when surrounded by beloved family and loyal friends. -- Publisher description


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Father of the Rain

Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Lily King’s masterful third novel received glowing critical praise upon its initial publication.

Gardiner Amory is a New England WASP who’s beginning to feel the cracks in his empire. Nixon is being impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his worldview is rapidly becoming outdated. His daughter, Daley, has spent the first eleven years of her life negotiating her parents’ conflicting worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother and the conservative, decadent, liquor-soaked life of her father. But when they divorce, and Gardiner’s basest impulses are unleashed, the chasm quickly widens and Daley is stretched thinly across it.

As she reaches adulthood, Daley rejects the narrow world that nourished her father’s fears and prejudices, and embarks on her own life—until he hits rock bottom. Lured home by the dream of getting her father sober, Daley risks everything she’s found beyond him, including her new love, Jonathan, in an attempt to repair a trust broken years ago. -- Publisher description

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Duet

Four Hands. Two Hearts. One Song.

When widower Gerrit Appeldoorn takes his granddaughter to piano lessons one day, he finds himself drawn to her music teacher: a woman unlike any he has known. It’s an unlikely attraction. He’s a retired dairyman with mud on his boots; Joan Horton is a world traveler and former piano instructor at New York’s most prestigious academy of music. Not quite “beauty and the beast,” but close.

Even so, Gerrit slowly begins to open his heart: to Joan, to music, to the possibilities that may be found in both. Yet as their relationship deepens, Gerrit faces crises concerning his family and farm, while Joan confronts a dark secret that threatens her future. While coping with these challenges, neither can predict how their duet will sound as they practice the music of renewed hope and second chances. -- Publisher description

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Halfway to the Grave (Night Huntress Novel #1)

Half-vampire Catherine Crawfield is going after the undead with a vengeance, hoping that one of these deadbeats is her father—the one responsible for ruining her mother's life. Then she's captured by Bones, a vampire bounty hunter, and is forced into an unholy partnership.

In exchange for finding her father, Cat agrees to train with the sexy night stalker until her battle reflexes are as sharp as his fangs. She's amazed she doesn't end up as his dinner—are there actually good vampires? Pretty soon Bones will have her convinced that being half-dead doesn't have to be all bad. But before she can enjoy her newfound status as kick-ass demon hunter, Cat and Bones are pursued by a group of killers. Now Cat will have to choose a side . . . and Bones is turning out to be as tempting as any man with a heartbeat. -- Publisher description

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