National Network for Equitable Library Service

Ron Hansen brings listeners back into the late 1800s and into Billy the Kid's boyhood as a ranch hand trying to wrest a fortune from an unforgiving landscape. We are with Billy in every gunfight and horse theft, and through his grand death in a hail of bullets in 1881.

The last days of the Civil War. With Richmond under siege, Confederate soldier Luke Jensen is assigned the task of smuggling gold out of the city before the Yankees get their hands on it - when he is ambushed and robbed by four deserters, shot in the back, and left for dead. Taken in by a Georgia farmer and his beautiful daughter, Luke is nursed back to health. Though crippled, he hopes to reunite with his long-lost brother Smoke, but a growing romance keeps him on the farm. Then fate takes a tragic turn.

Sheriff Walt Longmire is reading A Christmas Carol in his office on December 24th when he's interrupted by the ghost of Christmas past: a young woman with a hairline scar across her forehead and more than a few questions about Walt's predecessor, Lucian Connally. Walt doesn't recognize the mystery woman, but she seems to know him and claims to have something she must return to Connally. At the Durant Home for Assisted Living Lucian Connally is several tumblers into his Pappy Van Winkle's and swears he's never clapped eyes on the woman before.

Zach Cobb is haunted by bitter Civil War memories, but his fighting experience makes him a formidable Wells Fargo agent. When a series of payroll holdups rocks the Mojave Desert, Zach follows a trail deep into the criminal underworld.

So begins this story of one woman's restoration from personal grief to the meaning of community. Based on the life of German-American Emma Wagner Giesy, the only woman sent to the Oregon Territory in the 1850s to help found a communal society, award-winning author Jane Kirkpatrick shows how landscape, relationships, spirituality and artistry poignantly reflect a woman's desire to weave a unique and meaningful legacy from the threads of an ordinary life.

Emma Giesy is married and the mother of two. She's strong-willed and smart. Despite the odds, she and her husband branch off from a religious community of the 1850s to work and live independently in the remote coastal forest of the Washington Territory, surrounded by her husband's family rather than the influence of the autocratic German leader who has taken the main colony into Oregon. When she finds herself alone she wonders if God has abandoned her.

In 1850s Missouri, the religious Bethel colony is resolved to remain pure in the midst of a tainted and sinful country. However, Emma Wagner, young and independent, is at odds with the community's submissive society. Learning to overcome adversity, Emma discovers that she can use her passion to inspire the other downtrodden townspeople.

In Texas, every man has his price. For a young man of seventeen, Wilkie John Liquorish has lived one sorry life. From his ill-fated stint in the U.S. Army to a back-breaking job as a gravedigger, Wilkie just can't seem to catch a break. His latest gig-working a cattle drive from Mobeetie, Texas, to Fort Worth-is no exception. The food-poisoning death of a chuckwagon cook has everyone spooked, and the fear spreads like a disease. Wilkie barely makes it out alive.

Life for former gunfighter Johnny Fierro has never been straightforward or easy. He and Lady Luck don't always see eye-to-eye. Some days he thinks she likes to turn the cards and stack the deck against him. Although Fierro's returned to the Sinclair ranch, he still feels like an outsider. He doesn't believe this new life can last, or that he's found a place that he can finally call home. And, even as he struggles to settle into a normal life and build relationships with the various members of his once-estranged family, his past comes back to haunt him.

Gunfighter Johnny Fierro is trying to settle into a new life as a rancher in New Mexico's Cimarron Valley, but his past just won't let go. Whether it's gunfighters looking to settle old scores, or bushwhackers aiming a bullet at his back, someone is always out to get Johnny. Neighbors - and maybe his father, too - want him gone or dead, until lawless drifters bering trouble to Caimarron. Then they want to hire him. And when the drifters attack a woman in town, Johnny know he's the only one who can stop them - but at what cost?