National Network for Equitable Library Service

Cal Claxton's old farmhouse sits high in Oregon's Red Hills, home of scores of wineries and some of the most coveted acreage for growing the pinot noir grape in the world.

Faye Longchamp has lost nearly everything except for her quick mind and a grim determination to hang onto her ancestral home, Joyeuse, a moldering plantation hidden along the Florida coast.

Miss Tither, the village busybody, is not the best-loved resident of Hilary Magna.

1929: Girls are going missing in Melbourne. Little, pretty, golden haired girls. And not just pretty. Three of them are pregnant, poor girls from the harsh confines of the Magdalene Laundry.

Rick van Lam is bui doi, "a child of dust," as the Vietnamese scornfully called a mixed-blood kid whose father was an unknown American GI.

It takes one moment in 2016 for ragtime music expert Alan Chandler to go from sitting in his hotel room in Sedalia, Missouri, to standing beside the King of Ragtime-Scott Joplin-at his upright pian

A man is forbidden to uncover the secret of the tower in a fairy-tale castle by the Rhine. A headless corpse is found in a secret garden in Paris - belonging to the city's chief of police.

The Mamur Zapt, head of Cairo's CID in the heyday of (the indirect) British rule, focused on political, not police, matters.

"Tourists are quite safe provided they don't do anything stupidly reckless," so Captain Owen, the Mamur Zapt, Head of Cairo's Political CID under British Rule, assures the press

While riding home to lunch on his donkey, Fairclough of Customs is rudely unseated by shots fired from behind.

1909 Egypt.

Edwardian Egypt and archaeology go hand in hand, not just for the antiquarian but for the men, whether poor fellahin or rich merchant, who profit from the illegal export of antiquities.

It's 1928 in Melbourne and Phryne is asked to investigate the puzzling death of a famous author and illustrator of fairy stories.

Cairo, 1910. Captain Owen, The Mamur Zapt, is the head of Egypt's Political CID in the heyday of British Rule. He is ultimately responsible for law and order in the Khedive's Cairo.

Someone is running a campaign to discredit Cairo's senior police officials.