Catalog Search Results
1) Home song
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Description
Are the sins of the heart beyond forgiving? The answer is revealed in LaVyrle Spencer's powerful new novel, Home Song. "Every person you meet changes you, every moral dilemma you face shapes your character," muses Tom Gardner, devoted husband, father, and high school principal as he and those dearest to him are struck by a bolt from the blue, which gravely threatens their security and trust. When a new student transfers to his school, Tom needs only...
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Bakery owner Hannah Swensen has a dress to fit into and a date with her sister, Andrea, at Lake Eden's new health club, Heavenly Bodies. Dragging herself out of bed on a frigid Minnesota morning for exercise, of all things, is bad enough. Discovering the body of man-eating bombshell Ronni Ward floating in the gym's jacuzzi? Okay, that's worse. Nor does it help that there's a plate of The Cookie Jar's very own cream puffs garnishing the murder scene....
3) Freedom
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Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul, the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter, environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man she was...
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"While Hannah speeds through a lengthy holiday checklist, drama in town grows like Santa's waistline on Christmas Eve. Her sister Andrea wants to stave off the blues by helping out at The Cookie Jar, Michele's love life is becoming complicated, Lisa needs Hannah's advice, and Delores has a Christmas secret she's not willing to share. But nothing dampens the holiday mood more than the chilling mystery surrounding the man found near death in an abandoned...
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At the local state university, two feuding departments have faced off on the battleground of science and medicine. Each carries their views to extremes that may seem absurd, but highly educated people of sound mind and good intentions can reasonably disagree, right? Then a renowned and confrontational scholar winds up dead, and Virgil Flowers is brought in to investigate . . . and as he probes the recent ideological unrest, he soon comes to realize...
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Pub. Date
[2023]
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Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she's been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel's grandmother embraced the business, seeing it as a saving grace, Florence never took to it. When Mariel inherited the restaurant,...
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Hannah's up to her ears with Easter orders rushing in at The Cookie Jar, plus a festive meal to prepare for a dinner party at her mother's penthouse. But everything comes crashing to a halt when Hannah receives a panicked call from her sister Andrea--Mayor Richard Bascomb has been murdered...and Andrea is the prime suspect. Even with his reputation for being a bully, Mayor Bascomb--or 'Ricky Ticky,' as Hannah's mother likes to call him--had been unusually...
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"The Cookie Jar's busiest time of the year also happens to be the most wonderful time for Christmas cookies, Hannah's own special plum pudding--and romance! She also gets a kick out of "Lunatic Larry Jaeger's Crazy Elf Christmas Tree Lot," a kitschy carnival taking place smack-dab in the middle of the village green. But then Hannah discovers the man himself dead as a doornail in his own office. Now, with so many suspects to investigate and the twelve...
9) Iron Lake
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Appears on list
Description
Cork O'Connor has lost both his wife and his job as sheriff and falls into a profound emotional isolation. As a wild blizzard buries his lakeside town, a despised though influential resident is found dead, and a young Ojibwe Indian boy seems to have left home in a hurry. Cork has never taken Indian legends to heart, but when an old sage warns him that a cruel spirit with a heart of ice is near, all that changes.
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Hannah Swensen, owner of The Cookie Jar bake shop, is surprised by the news that her companion, Norman Rhodes, is buying a house. Soon after Hannah and her mother arrive to clear out the house, they discover the dead body of the former owner, Rhonda Scharf, along with some of Hannah's famous lemon meringue pie. Hannah must switch her baker's hat for her sleuthing cap and get to the bottom of this puzzling mystery.
12) Rough country
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While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, Virgil Flowers gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only, a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery, and commune with nature. Which makes things all the more complicated for Virgil, because as he begins investigating, he finds a web of connections between...
13) Shock wave
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The superstore chain PyeMart has its sights set on a Minnesota river town, but two very angry groups want to stop it: local merchants, fearing for their businesses, and environmentalists, predicting ecological disaster. The protests don't seem to be slowing the project, and someone decides to take matters into his own hands. The first bomb goes off on the top floor of PyeMart's headquarters. The second one explodes at the construction site itself....
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Filled with juicy scandal, delightfully eccentric characters and 21 tempting recipes from Cream Cheese Frosting to Lemon Fluff Jell-O, bestseller Fluke's 10th Hannah Swenson mystery centers on a family reunion that turns deadly. Hannah's friend Marge Beeseman is thrilled when her brother, Gus Klein, who disappeared from Lake Eden, Minn., more than 30 years earlier, unexpectedly arrives. At the big family party, everyone wonders how the elegant, well-dressed...
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"Bakery owner Hannah Swensen is leaving Lake Eden to help a friend in sunny California. But an unexpected phone call swiftly brings her back to a cold Minnesota winter . . . and murder . . . When Hannah learns that her sister Michelle's boyfriend, Detective Lonnie Murphy, is the prime suspect in a murder case, she goes straight from a movie studio sound stage to the Los Angeles airport. Back in frigid Minnesota, she discovers that proving Lonnie's...
16) The current
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In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their car from the icy Black Root River. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene--half frozen but alive. What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community's memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may still live among them. Determined to...
17) A breath of hope
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The Minnesota frontier is nothing like Nilda Carlson imagined. Nilda Carlson and her younger brother Ivar come to America to join her older brother Rune and his family on the Strand farm in Minnesota. Uncle Einar Strand refuses to help Rune build a house for his family and forbids the community to come onto his land. Can the tragedy that reveals Einar's anger and isolation bring the Carlsons and Strands together into a true family?
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In 1910 Minnesota, living near her relatives, Nilda Carlson's life now resembles the images that filled her dreams in Norway. But when she spots the man from her terrifying past in town, her new life and hope for love could come crashing down around her. Did danger follow her across the Atlantic?
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As she sits in her nearly empty bakery on Groundhog Day, Hannah Swensen can only hope that the popularity of the new Magnolia Blossom Bakery is just a passing fad. The southern hospitality of Lake Eden's two Georgia transplants, Shawna Lee and Vanessa Quinn, is grating on Hannah's nerves--and cutting into her profits--at The Cookie Jar. At least Hannah has her business partner Lisa's wedding to look forward to. When Hannah sees lights on at the Magnolia...
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Aurora is a small town nestled in the ancient forest alongside the shores of Minnesota's Iron Lake. In the summer of 1963, it is the whole world to twelve-year-old Cork O'Connor, its rhythms as familiar as his own heartbeat. But when Cork stumbles upon the body of a man he revered hanging from a tree in an abandoned logging camp, it is the first in a series of events that will cause him to question everything he took for granted about his hometown,...