National Network for Equitable Library Service

The award-winning account of a critical yet overlooked Civil War campaign from the author of Mountains Touched with Fire: Chattanooga Besieged, 1863. Though he barely escaped expulsion from West Point, John Bell Hood quickly rose through the ranks of the Confederate army. With bold leadership in the battles of Gaines' Mill and Antietam, Hood won favor with Confederate president Jefferson Davis. But his fortunes in war took a tragic turn when he assumed command of the Confederate Army of Tennessee.

New York Times Bestseller: The nightmare odyssey of a charismatic serial killer and a trail of terror stretching halfway around the world. There was no pattern to the murders, no common thread other than the fact that the victims were all vacationers, robbed of their possessions and slain in seemingly random crimes.

Edgar Award Winner: The "gripping" true story of a beautiful Texas socialite, her ambitious husband, and a string of mysterious deaths (Los Angeles Times). Joan Robinson Hill was a world-class equestrian, a glamorous member of Houston high society, and the wife of Dr. John Hill, a handsome and successful plastic surgeon. Her father, Ash Robinson, was a charismatic oil tycoon obsessed with making his daughter's every dream come true. Rich, attractive, and reckless, Joan was one of the most celebrated women in a town infatuated with money, power, and fame.

Pioneer heart surgeons and bitter rivals: The "thoroughly engrossing" true story of doctors Michael DeBakey and Denton Cooley (The New York Times Book Review). By 1970, the Texas Medical Center in Houston was the leading heart institute in the world, home to the field's two most distinguished surgeons: Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey and his young and ambitious disciple, Dr. Denton Arthur Cooley. Their combined mastery in occlusive disease, coronary artery bypass surgery, angioplasty, and heart transplants was unparalleled.

These transcendent, lyrical essays on the West announced Gretel Ehrlich as a major American writer-"Wyoming has found its Whitman" (Annie Dillard). Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make the first in a series of documentaries when her partner died. Ehrlich stayed on and found she couldn't leave. The Solace of Open Spaces is a chronicle of her first years on "the planet of Wyoming," a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life.

Ten essays on nature, ritual, and philosophy "that are so point-blank vital you nearly need to put the book down to settle yourself" (San Francisco Chronicle). Gretel Ehrlich's world is one of solitude and wonder, pain and beauty, and these elements give life to her stunning prose. Ever since her acclaimed debut, The Solace of Open Spaces, she has illuminated the particular qualities of nature and the self with graceful precision. In Islands, the Universe, Home, Ehrlich expands her explorations, traveling to the remote reaches of the earth and deep into her soul.

The true account of the man who murdered his family in their New Jersey mansion-and eluded a nationwide manhunt for eighteen years. Until 1971, life was good for mild-mannered accountant John List. He was vice president of a Jersey City bank and had moved his mother, wife, and three teenage children into a nineteen-room home in Westfield, New Jersey. But all that changed when he lost his job. Raised by his Lutheran father to believe success meant being a good provider, List saw himself as an utter failure.

The horrifying account of the Charles Stuart case, in which ambition drove a man to murder his pregnant wife-and blame a fictitious African-American killer. On October 23, 1989, affluent businessman Charles Stuart made a frantic 911 call from his car to report that he and his seven-months-pregnant wife, Carol, a lawyer, had been robbed and shot by a black male in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston. By the time police arrived, Carol was dead, and the baby was soon lost as well. The attack incited a furor during a time of heightened racial tension in the community.

Edgar Award Finalist: The "sensational" true story of two desperate housewives and the killing that shocked a Texas community (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore had a lot in common: They sang together in the Methodist church choir, their daughters were best friends, and their husbands had good jobs working for technology companies in the north Dallas suburbs known as Silicon Prairie. But beneath the placid surface of their seemingly perfect lives, both women simmered with unspoken frustrations and unanswered desires.

Booker T. Washington's classic memoir of enslavement, emancipation, and community advancement in the Reconstruction Era. Born into slavery on a tobacco farm in nineteenth-century Virginia, Booker T. Washington became one of the most powerful intellectuals of the Reconstruction Era. As president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he advocated for the advancement of African Americans through education and entrepreneurship.