Arcadia Public Library

"It's a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die. Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He's found it, more or less: he's built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he's gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places....

Lina is spending the summer in Tuscany, but she isn't in the mood for Italy's famous sunshine and fairy-tale landscape. She's only there because it was her mother's dying wish that she get to know her father. But what kind of father isn't around for sixteen years? All Lina wants to do is get back home. But then Lina is given a journal that her mom had kept when she lived in Italy. Suddenly Lina's uncovering a magical world of secret romances, art,...

Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she's already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. But she's learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don't have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you. Every new scar hardens Charlie's heart just a little more, yet it still hurts so much. It hurts...

Cooper is lost. Ever since his father left their family three years ago, he has become distant from his friends, constantly annoyed by his little sister, Jess, and completely fed up with the pale, creepy rich girl who moved in next door, who won't stop staring at him. So when Cooper learns of an unsolved mystery his sister has discovered online, he welcomes the distraction. It's the tale of a deadly train crash that occurred a hundred years ago in...

Ellie opens the door to a man who is a stranger but instantly recognisable as the father of her housekeeper's brilliant but difficult young son. Mikey had been conceived at a party during which his mother Vera, a schoolgirl, had been drugged and raped. Abdi hadn't wanted anything further to do with her - then. Twelve years later he is a high-flying consultant whose wife cannot have children, and he aims to pay off Vera and adopt Mikey: a suggestion...

Katie and Ana are the kind of friends who share everything with each other. But there are some things you can't even share with your best friend. Katie has always known she was adopted, but recently she's been wondering about her birth parents and her birthplace. She worries that saying this out loud -- even to her best friend -- could mess up the perfect family she has now. Ana's family has been falling apart ever since her dad left, and it's up...

Environmental health officer Danny Skinner embarks on a journey from Edinburgh to San Francisco in search of the father he never knew, and discovers that his identity is entwined with the fate of his despised colleague, Brian Kibby.

The only thing Rosalind Ling Geraghty loves more than watching NASA launches with her dad is building rockets with him. When he dies unexpectedly, all Ro has left of him is an unfinished model rocket they had been working on together. Benjamin Burns doesn't like science, but he can't get enough of Spacebound, a popular comic book series. When he finds a sketch that suggests that his dad created the comics, he's thrilled. Too bad his dad walked out...

Eleven-year-old Maybelle Lane collects sounds. She records the Louisiana crickets chirping, Momma strumming her guitar, their broken trailer door squeaking. But the crown jewel of her collection is a sound she didn't collect herself: an old recording of her daddy's warm-sunshine laugh, saved on an old phone's voicemail. It's the only thing she has of his, and the only thing she knows about him. Until the day she hears that laugh--his laugh--pouring...