Crowley County Combined Library

"From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a rollicking murder mystery set in Gold Rush California, as two young prostitutes follow a trail of missing girls. Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have:...

It is 1880 and the railroad is coming to town. Former President Ulysses S. Grant arrives along with the train to celebrate the event and look into possible investments. Inez is dealing with the problem of her missing husband while trying to maintain ownership of the saloon. She makes a backroom deal with the local madam, Frisco Flo, hoping to gain some money of her own. When the body of one of Flo?s girls turns up, mud starts flying, accompanied in...

Christine Caine offers life-transforming insights about how not only to overcome the challenges, wrong turns, and often painful circumstances we all experience, but also to actually grow from those experiences and be equipped and empowered to help others. Using her own dramatic life story, Caine shows how God rescued her from a life where she was unnamed, unwanted, and unqualified. She tells how she overcame abuse, abandonment, fears, and other challenges...

THE GREATEST WESTERN WRITER OF THE 21ST CENTURY
 
William Johnstone single-handedly shaped the landscape of frontier fiction with his classic Mountain Man series. Now he returns to the West with a gritty, realistic tale of blood struggles, revenge, and honor—the saga of a man whose legend would spread across a brave new land.
 
Rescue
 
In California, Frank Morgan nearly found a home. But now he's pulled...

When Hector Lewis told his daughter that she had a nothing face, it was just another bit of tossed-off cruelty from a man who specialized in harsh words and harsher deeds. But twenty years later, Heloise considers it a blessing to be a person who knows how to avoid attention. In the comfortable suburb where she lives, she's just a mom, the youngish widow with a forgettable job who somehow never misses a soccer game or a school play. In the state capital,...

The central plot of "Crimson Petal" involves the efforts of a young hooker (Sugar) to escape a horrendous teen life, and then find her way in a more successful metropolitan society. Her benefactor (or more appropiately , "Sugar" daddy) Rackham, has his own baggage (a mentally disturbed wife, an ill child and a very troubled brother), and his bringing Sugar into the mix both complicates and liberates his life. This isn't a happy ending story, however,...

The Centennial State had its share of working girls and madams like Mattie Silks and Jennie Rogers who remain notorious celebrities in the annals of history, but Jan MacKell Collins also includes the stories of lesser-known women whose roles in this illicit trade help shape our understanding of the American West.

The seemingly disparate lives of a DEA agent, a drug lord, a call girl, a hit man, and a priest intertwine around a nexus of the drug trade involving the Latin American drug cartels, the American underworld, and the U.S. government.

In 1838, Arabella Godwin and her brother, Lewis, are orphaned and sent to live on their aunt's desolate farm in upstate New York. Time and again she will be broken and remade. She will bear a gambler's child, build a fortune, commit murder, leave a trail of aliases in her wake and sacrifice almost everything for the man whose love she cannot bear to lose. Her destiny takes her to Gold Rush California... where she disappears.

When Santa Cruz County deputy sheriff Jose Reyes, Ali Reynolds's classmate from the Arizona Police Academy, is gunned down and left to die, he is at first assumed to be an innocent victim of the drug wars escalating across the border. But the crime scene investigation shows there's more to it, and Reyes and his pregnant wife both fall under suspicion of wrongdoing. Ali owes Reyes a debt of gratitude and when she's summoned to his hospital bedside,...