Pines and Plains Libraries

"We are in an elegant hotel particulier in the center of Paris. Renee, the building's concierge, is short, ugly, and plump. She has bunions on her feet. She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps. Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo. In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood. But Renee has a secret: she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art,...

Natalie Greco loves being a law professor, even though she can't keep her students from cruising sex.com during class. When a colleague talks Nat into teaching a class at a local prison, her comfortable world turns upside. A violent prison riot breaks out, and in the chaos, Nat rushes to help an injured guard. Before he dies, he asks her to deliver a cryptic message. The dying declaration plunges Nat into a nightmare. Suddenly, the girl who has always...

"In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in flesh, he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina,...

Candide is about a man who believes in the philosophy that: "what happens, happens for the best in the end." that was taught to him by his personal philosopher Dr. Panlosss. Candide goes through many, many trials and everyone he meets has had something terrible happen to them. He searches the world over for his love Cundgonde. And in the end finds that the simplest things in life: love, friends, and health are all that matters.

In his final hours in the Oval Office, the outgoing President grants a controversial last-minute pardon to Joel Backman, a notorious Washington power broker who has spent the last six years hidden away in a federal prison. What no one knows is that the President issues the pardon only after receiving enormous pressure from the CIA. It seems Backman, in his power broker heyday, may have obtained secrets that compromise the worlds most sophisticated...

"It's a story tailor-made for the nightly news: Dylan Meserve and Michaela Brand, young lovers and fellow acting students, vanish on the way home from a rehearsal. Three days later, the two of them are found in the remote mountains of Malibu - battered and terrified after a harrowing ordeal at the hands of a sadistic abductor." "The details of the nightmarish event are shocking and brutal: The couple was carjacked at gunpoint by a masked assailant...

Thomas Odd is a fry cook rumored to have the ability to talk to the dead. Odd is pulled inexorably to the sea, to a small California coastal town where nothing is as it seems. Now the forces arrayed against him have both official sanction and an infinitely more sinister authority ... and in this dark night of the soul dawn will come only after the most shattering revelations of all.

Rising out of the stony canyons of Nevada, Utopia is a theme park attracting 65,000 visitors each day, with its dazzling array of robots and futuristic holograms. But ominous mishaps are beginning to disrupt the once flawless technology. A friendly robot goes haywire, causing panic, and a popular roller coaster malfunctions, nearly killing a teenaged rider. Dr. Andrew Warne, the brilliant computer engineer who designed much of the park's robotics,...

These nine-time Grammy-winning artists release their fourth album, with every one of the disc's fourteen songs co-written by the Chicks themselves.

When a simple case turns into a treacherous and politically charged investigation, Spenser faces his most difficult challenge yet - keeping his cool while his beloved Susan Silverman is in danger. Spenser knows something's amiss the moment Dennis Doherty walks into his office. The guy's aggressive yet wary, in the way men frightened for their marriages always are. So when Doherty asks Spenser to investigate his wife Jordan's abnomal behavior, Spenser...