Staff Picks
Stay in touch with the personal favorites of the KDL Staff. Each title is handpicked.
Susan Wittig Albert
When Mr. Wickstead turns up dead under a tree limb, the villagers of Sawrey become convinced that his suspicious death is due to the treasure he had discovered last spring, while Beatrix Potter, torn between her growing fondness for Mr. Heelis and loyalty to her memories of her fiancé, sets out to unravel the case.
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Will Bowen
Explains what constitutes a complaint, why people complain, how complaining is destructive, and how to get others to stop, in a book written by a pastor who challenged his congregation to go twenty-one consecutive days without complaining.
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Suzanne Collins
Set in the cruel world in the Capital of the nation of Panem, the annual Hunger Games pits young children against one another in a battle to the death on national t.v., so when Katniss is ordered to represent her district, she knows an important decision between survival and the love of another will have to be made when she is called to enter the ring.
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John Green
In three intertwining short stories, several high school couples experience the trials and tribulations along with the joys of romance during a Christmas Eve snowstorm in a small town.
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John Green
Having been in love with Margo forever, Quentin is happy to help her with her strange plots and campaigns for revenge, but when she vanishes one evening without a trace, Quentin finds himself delving into clues in order to resolve many unanswered questions.
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Kerry Greenwood
Vacationing at a Gothic mansion in Australia’s Victorian mountain country, Phryne Fisher becomes embroiled in a mystery involving death threats to her host, the strangling murder of a parlor maid, and the presence of mysterious funerary urns.
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Diane Hammond
Having devotedly cared for a lone elephant at a dilapidated zoo for more than forty years, Samson hopes to be able to retire when he hires promising assistant Neva, who forces Samson to acknowledge that the elephant also needs the company of her own kind.
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Cheryl Jarvis
Describes how thirteen women combined forces and funds to jointly purchase a valuable diamond necklace that they would share, with each woman holding the necklace for twenty-eight days each year, revealing how a simple agreement to share a piece of jewelry became a study in friendship, sharing, adventure, possibility, and the power of giving back.
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Sandra Kring
Growing up in Willowridge, Wisconsin, Earl “Earwig” Gunderman, a simple-minded teenager, has always depended on his older brother, Jimmy, for guidance and protection, but when Jimmy is sent off to war in the Pacific, only to return after three years as a prisoner of war, Earwig is thrust into the unexpected role of protector. A first novel. Reader’s Guide available.
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Justine Larbalestier
Unhappy about being teamed up with the parking fairy, fourteen-year-old Charlie turns to her friend Fiorenza for help, but when Fiorenza’s fairy succeeds in getting the boy Charlie wants to like her, things take an unexpected turn and suddenly ditching her fairy seems the only way to get things back to normal.
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Stieg Larsson
Forty years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family, her octogenarian uncle hires journalist Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander, an unconventional young hacker, to investigate.
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Richard Lemieux
An unstinting account of the author’s descent from his luxurious family life to homelessness describes the events that prompted his estrangement from his family and failed suicide, in a personal tale that recounts his visits to Salvation Army kitchens, relationship with a philosophical fellow homeless person, and run-ins with a local pastor.
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Jeffrey Lent
The reclusive world of Hewitt Pearce, a forty-three-year-old blacksmith who produces custom ironwork, is thrown into turmoil by an encounter with Jessica, a troubled young vagabond he encounters in the woods near his home.
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Gregory Maguire
As civil war looms in Oz, Brrr, once a lion cub rescued by Elphaba, now a spy for the emperor, attempts to get vital information out of the dying oracle Yackle, only to learn important truths about his own mysterious past.
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Melissa Marr
Seventeen-year-old Aislinn, who has the ability to see faeries, is drawn against her will into a centuries-old battle between the Summer King and Winter Queen, and the survival of her life, her love, and summer all hang in the balance.
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Alexander Mccall Smith
Isabel Dalhousie comes to the aid of a renowned, much respected doctor whose reputation is at stake following the death of a patient because of allegations of scientific fraud in respect to a newly marketed drug.
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Patrick Ness
Pursued by power-hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron, young Todd and Viola set out across New World searching for answers about his colony’s true past and seeking a way to warn the ship bringing hopeful settlers from Old World.
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Brad Thor
The latest political thriller by the best-selling author of The First Commandment and State of the Union finds Navy SEAL-turned-covert Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath called into action once again for a War on Terror mission in which the stakes prove higher than ever before.
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Nancy Werlin
Discovering that the women of her family have been cursed for centuries upon her seventeenth birthday, Lucy decides to tackle the impossible by completing the three dangerous tasks necessary to break free from the spell and rid her family of its madness once and for all.
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