National Network for Equitable Library Service

The Kings have been in their new home--a creepy old place with doors to other worlds--for only a few days, but they've faced enough terror to last a lifetime. Now Xander, David, and Toria must venture through the gates to save their missing mother.

The Kings are focused on rescuing a lost family member, until a stranger comes to take their bizarre house. What secret is he hiding, as he hides the scars on his body? Can the Kings harness the house's secrets and discover who is watching their every move?

When the Kings move to a secluded small town, fifteen-year-old Xander and his siblings discover portals to far-off places in long-ago times, and Xander wonders if this is a teen's dream come true--or his worst nightmare.

Commissario Guido Brunetti must contend with ingenious corruption, bureaucratic intransigence, and the stifling heat of a Venetian summer. As he plans a trip to the mountains with his family, he learns that cases at the local court are being delayed to the benefit of one of the parties. Just when it looks like he will be able to get away, a shocking, violent crime forces him to stay in Venice.

A young woman and her infant child are ruthlessly gunned down while returning to their car in the garage of a shopping mall. Detective Lindsay Boxer discovers only one shred of evidence: a foreboding and cryptic message written in blood red lipstick on a windshield. The same night, the wife of A-list actor Marcus Dowling walks in on a cat burglar. In just seconds there is an empty safe, a lifeless body, and another mystery that throws San Francisco into hysteria.

A truck crashes and spills its dangerous cargo on a treacherous road in the Italian Dolomite mountains. Meanwhile, in Santa Lucia, a prominent international lawyer is found dead aboard an intercity train. Suspecting a connection between the two tragedies, Brunetti digs deep for an answer, stumbling upon a seedy Venetian bar that holds the key to a crime network that reaches far beyond the laguna. But it will take another violent death in Venice before Brunetti and his colleagues begin to understand what is really going on.

Wayne Castine was found brutally murdered and the murderer remains at large. Castine, a suspected child predator, was involved with a tangled network of an extended family living in a local trailer park. Any member of the clan would have had the opportunity to kill him, and, as he was involved with both the mother and her 12 year old daughter, reason to commit the murder. At the same time, Joe Gunther has learned that his girlfriend Lyn Silva's fisherman father and brother, believed lost at sea off the coast of Maine, might have actually been murdered.

On Lansdown Hill, near Bath, England, a battle between Roundheads and Cavaliers that took place over 350 years ago is annually reenacted. Two of the reenactors discover a skeleton that is female, headless, and only about twenty years old. One of them, a professor who played a Cavalier, is later found murdered. In the course of his investigation, Peter Diamond butts heads with the group of vigilantes who call themselves the Lansdown Society, discovering in the process that his boss Georgina is a member.

Commissario Guido Brunetti's hopes for a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are once again dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in Marghera. Brunetti searches Venice for someone who can identify the corpse but is met with a wall of silence. He then receives a telephone call from a contact who promises some tantalizing information. And before night is out, Brunetti is confronting yet another appalling, and apparently senseless, death.

Nick retired from detecting after his wife inherited a tidy sum, but six years later a pretty blonde spies him at a speakeasy and asks for his help finding her father, an eccentric inventor who was once Nick's client. Nick can no more resist the case than a morning cocktail or a good fight, and soon he and Nora are caught in a complicated web of confused identities and cold-blooded murder.