Kiowa County Public Library District

"On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold...

"An annual backpacking trip has deadly consequences in a chilling new novel from the bestselling author of The Lost Night and The Herd. Emily is having the time of her life--she's in the mountains of Chile with her best friend, Kristen, on their annual reunion trip, and the women are feeling closer than ever. But on the last night of their trip, Emily enters their hotel suite to find blood and broken glass on the floor. Kristen says the cute backpacker...

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

"The charges: explosive. Alex Cross has never been on the wrong side of the law -- until now. Charged with gunning down followers of his nemesis Gary Soneji in cold blood, Cross is being turned into the poster child for trigger-happy cops who think they're above the law. Cross knows it was self-defense. But will a jury see it that way? The evidence: shocking. As Cross fights for his professional life and his freedom, his former partner John Sampson...

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more...

One hangover-headache morning, Ig Perrish gropes his forehead and discovers "a pair of knobby, pointed protuberances." As he proceeds to stumble through the day, person after person he encounters, including the nurse and doctor he consults about the horns, tell him things about their desires and intentions that they should keep to themselves, and whenever he touches someone, he instantly knows their darkest secrets. Most disconcerting, he finds out...

Virgil Flowers, 30, a cop with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, had come to Bluestem in search of a killer. There hadn't been a murder in Bluestem in years, but now suddenly there had been three. He thought some of his previous cases had been hard, but they were nothing compared to this one. All he knew for sure was that the three murders were somehow connected and he was determined to discover how, hopefully before he became the next...

"When Detective Sergeant Duncan Hatcher is summoned to the home of Judge Cato Laird in the middle of the night to investigate a fatal shooting, he knows that discretion and kid-glove treatment are the keys to staying in the judge's good graces and keeping his job. At first glance, the case appears open-and-shut: Elise, the judge's trophy wife, interrupted a burglary in progress and killed the intruder in self-defense. But Duncan is immediately suspicious...

"From the New York Times #1 bestselling author comes a riveting true-crime mystery set on a sleepy island in the Pacific Northwest: a man is murdered and the long list of suspects includes an aging beauty queen and her boyfriend. One wintery night on quiet Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington, Russ Douglas spent Christmas with his estranged wife, Brenna. She agreed to let him visit his children even though they were headed for divorce. He left...

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, a lush landscape as deceptively promising as the edifices of the abandoned steel mills, "American Rust" is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation that arises in its absence. Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to...