Arcadia Public Library

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend...

FBI Special Agent Pendergast investigates the latest work of a serial killer in a small Kansas town whose inhabitants believe it denotes the return of a legendary curse.

Fending for herself in the wake of a chronically unemployed, dysfunctional mother, ten-year-old Evelyn Bucknow experiences feelings of confinement in their small Midwestern town and suffers the heartache of a first love.

Celia Scott and her family move back to her husband's hometown in Kansas, where his sister died under mysterious circumstances twenty years before, and where Celia and two of her children struggle to adjust--especially when a local girl disappears.

When the farm community of Medicine Creek, Kansas, is terrorized by a series of disturbing murders, FBI agent Pendergast discovers a link between a moonshine operation and an unsolved killing from more than 150 years earlier.

Trying to rebuild her life in Kansas without her fugitive ex-husband, Lily Brown is thrust into a killer's crosshairs when her tween son breaks into a storage unit and finds photos and news clippings about five long-missing girls.

V.I. Warshawski travels to Kansas to investigate the disappearances of a young film student and a faded Hollywood star, but long-simmering racial tensions stir up more mysteries as the body count rises.

Merinac, Kansas. Chicken Mimi's and Chicken Frannie's have spent a century vying to serve up the best friend chicken in the state. The legendary feud between the owners-- the Moores and the Pogociellos-- has caught widow Amanda Moore in the middle. She had worked for her mom at Mimi's before marrying Frank Pogociello and working for Frannie's. When she convinces Food Wars, a reality-TV competition, to cover the feud, Amanda and her sister Mae must...

"It's 1972 and times are changing. In the small farming community of Mason, Kansas. Vera and Kelly Exton are known for their ambitions. Vera is an activist who wants to join her boyfriend in the Peace Corps. But she is doing her duty caring for her widowed mother and younger sister until Kelly is firmly established. Kelly is studying to become a veterinarian. She plans to marry her childhood sweetheart and eventually take over his father's veterinary...